Because I'm a hopeless slave to shtick, I generally avoid anything even mildly respectable for Net Insanity's Monday feature. It's both easier and, well... I suppose the only real reason is that it's easier, to pick out patently stupid or clearly unwell websites to analyze and mock here than it is to try to juggle the flaws and merits of something less overtly ridiculous. This in mind, I've generally avoided picking on other blogs unless they're absurd or awful. This tack has kept me away from the wide, weird world of weblogging, likely to Net Insanity's detriment. I don't regret my refusal to enter into that aging miasma of stupid that is Livejournal, though there are some free-floating, non-social-networking blogs that deserve a little contemplation. Thus today's first (and likely last) foray into the stream of consciousness that is Fish in the Winter.

I found FitW in a rather inexplicable way. If you readers will recall when we looked into Moscow, Russia's craigslist site, I mentioned that it had an unusual tendency to be a depository for a variety of website advertisements that had next to nothing to do with Russia, craigslist or anything otherwise associated with the sections in which they were posted. FitW was one such ad, a blog randomly seeded in the Community section of Eastern Europe's most active craigslist page. Why? While it'd be a bit inaccurate to say that reading FitW makes it more clear, doing so at least provides some hints.

Fish in the Winter is the creation of a person who signs his posts with the moniker EEH. At first I didn't know if these are his initials or the sound of someone being both dismissive and uneasy about posting his name on the Internet, i.e. "Eeh, I don't think so." In later posts he refers to himself as "Eddy", so that clears it up (as clear as anything can be in FitW). EEH has been posting to FitW for a few months now, stretching back to May 2010. He was fairly prolific in those long-ago days of the blog's giddy debut, though the daily posting has since been reduced to a couple times a week and things got a little hairy back in July when computer trouble put EEH out of commission for a while. According to his story, EEH's laptop got fried by an unfortunate incident involving a horny friend, a bathtub and a microwave. The twist is that the story is almost certainly at least partly fictional and the friend in question may be opaque, long-dead Irish writer James Joyce.

That's pretty much the game on Fish in the Winter. EEH posts Modernist ramblings full of references to writers and literature, and also chock full of sex and body fluids. This isn't necessarily a problem. The truth is, EEH isn't a half bad writer and I don't hate FitW. I'm not about to subscribe and bask in what believes itself to be lurid and amusing (and sometimes actually is), but I'll accept Fish in the Winter as a worthwhile hobby blog. At worst, it's the chronicle of a university student who actually pays attention in his literature courses and deserves more play than he gets.

Amount of Time Likely to be Wasted: EEH posts entries that are several hundred words long, so if you like his style you might spend a couple hours catching up on his meandering meta-narrative. If you think his work is pretentious garbage, you'll click away in less than a minute.

Likelihood to Result in Arrest in Real Life: Low. All the stuff EEH robs is in the public domain and he doesn't seem like a standard Internet idiot. He'll function in society.

MCDR: Hidden within FitW is a decent reading list. Pick up a book, or a Kindle, or something.

Internet Depth by Preposition: In. While there's something uniquely Internet-y about a guy posting idiosyncratic quasi-fiction to a free blog, Fish in the Winter is aware of the outside world.