The Boston Globe's Alex Beam dismisses the blogosphere with typical liberal hauteur: Welcome to Blogistan, the Internet-based journalistic medium where no thought goes unpublished, no long-out-of-print book goes unhawked, and no fellow 'blogger,' no matter how outré, goes unpraised.

And they almost always gave good scritches, so they couldn't be bad people, could they? Did bad people scritch right?

Toward the end of the war, Benoit was sent off on his own with forged papers; he wound up working as a horse groom at a chalet in the Loire valley. Mandelbrot describes this harrowing youth with great sangfroid.

Accusations of abuse were pure extortive calumny in a malicious bid to make money.