Aaron Swartz lists the blogs he wished existed, and includes this:
Evisceration Quarterly: A daily selection of the finest in insults, takedowns, and general argumentative evisceration. The motto: teaching you how to think by showing you how not to. And, to not be entirely negative, the occasional model of clarity. With special blogging consultant, Brad DeLong.
I agree this would be a hilarious and perhaps educational read. Someone should take up the task. We can't, for example, let gems from Lee Siegel fade into the abyss.
Eviscerating a writer who’s committed some crime against the language is much like disemboweling a wild hog. You can’t just crudely chop off his head and leave it at that.
The sincere chef will want to butcher the boar himself. He should know something about the psychology of a pig if he wants to respect the still-warm corpus and its recent occupant, who did have a personality, after all, and who has so graciously donated his body to gustatory science for our enjoyment.
It is certainly possible that our porcine benefactor had a more active mental life than many of the proud cannibals who will eat his tender flesh (imagine his regret– his nuts hadn’t even dropped!), so you really shouldn’t butcher him in his own home or in front of his friends.
Of course you have to flay the poor bastard first. As any good cook or surgeon knows, you need a very sharp knife to do this, and you must focus all your attention on the line where you separate his skin from the flesh.
Then you have to wield that knife with a very steady hand when you make your primary incision on his belly, careful not to cut too deep. It’s paramount not to slice his intestines so that all the foulness spills out. This is where good whiskey comes in for the faint-hearted– them chitlins stink.
The beauty of it, though, is that once you’ve cleanly drawn him like the king’s executioner doing his business on Guy Fawkes’ body, gravity will do the rest, and a massive pile of guts will plop summarily into your well-stationed wash tub.
After that, it’s a few short steps to some very fine barbecue and my spicy chorizo.;-)
H.L. Mencken was the master of this.