Has The Corner lost that first, fine, careless rapture? Are we no longer blithe spirits? One reader thinks so. This follows my referring to NRO as “an essentially political website” in an earlier post. We are essentially political, of course, but the devil is in the word “essentially.” My reader:

Mr. Derbyshire — I am a long time, formerly enthusiastic reader of The Corner … Recently I have become quite disenchanted with its content and have found myself longing for something like the good old days of a few years back. In general it feels like The Corner has gotten more political and less interesting in recent months. The tone tends to be angrier, substantive disagreement followed by civil debate less common, and (one of my favorite aspects of the Corner past) entirely apolitical asides practically historical.
In the past I thought of The Corner as the best available evidence for the proposition that conservatives tend to be more interesting than liberals by virture of their ability to care about things besides politics, important though it be; in its recent state it feels more like evidence for a view of politics as a relentless acid eating away all other topics of public conversation.
Anyway, I know it is true that The Corner is a political blog, but for the reasons above I was dismayed to see you say it. And I think at least part of its political job (manifesting the best and most entertaining of conservative thought in the otherwise bleak sea of internet political writing) is hindered by focusing too closely on it. So, if the Secular Right blog is one more topic lost to future consideration on the Corner, I’m more likely to become one less reader stopping by each day …
P.S. The Corner of old would never have let this much time pass without discussing, say, the quality and politics and implications for British/Western cultural identity of the latest Bond movie. That sums it up to me.

I’m just going to leave this out there for readers and colleagues to chew on, satisfied that I, at least, did my bit yesterday to dilute the political content of The Corner by posting that Bruce Lee clip. (Which turns out to have been faked, grrrrr. Though it is a measure of Lee’s physical genius that, having seen him in action close up — his foot passed about an eighth of an inch in front of my nose — I was willing to believe he could play ping-pong with nunchucks. Heck, I bet he could have.)

And to further boost the apolitical entertainment value of The Corner, here is one of the worst time-wasters I have encountered in several decades of time-wasting.