Vanity Fair

I'm calling it six degrees of Clint Van Zandt.

On Saturday, I noticed the PU got 1,218 hits in under 20 minutes -- which is about 1,213 more than a typical day. At first, I was bewildered but quickly became giddy: A few vanity Googles revealed that James Wolcott had linked to the PU on his Vanity Fair blog in a post entitled "Blip on Radar Blocks Out the Sun." That's right. JAMES FREAKIN' WOLCOTT. I read his book "Attack Poodles," I read his blog frequently. He writes for Vanity Fair and the New Yorker!

How did this come to be? As usual, the hook up transpired in the most random of ways.

Over the past few year's, Wolcott's had a beef with the absurdity of news coverage -- especially cable news coverage that spends more time covering Paris Hilton than the war in Iraq. He's written about how the 24-hour news cycle has given rise to a whole new breed of media whores a.k.a "analysts" and "experts" who hang around on hooks at the studios, waiting to be called on. This Saturday, because of the missing pregnant woman case, our man, "Former FBI profiler Clint Van Zandt" -- as he is always introduced -- was getting a load of face time on MSNBC. So, in a sarcastic post about the incessant coverage, Wolcott linked to my April PU post musing about how Clint spends his days. Even though it's a tenuous and random link -- a goofy post about CVZ -- I couldn't help but take some pride in it. James Wolcott gets me. The PU is still getting slammed and I'm still giddy.