Lex Anteinternet: De mortuis nihil nisi bonum. M'eh. Ross Douthart of the New York Times says what I did, more bluntly.

It's not everyday that I beat Ross Douthat of the New York Times to the punch, or press, or whatever the proper phrase would be, but with this entry below:

Lex Anteinternet: De mortuis nihil nisi bonum. M'eh:   Yes, this is the third time I've run this photo.  I just like it.  Two young couples.  Migrant farm workers in Louisiana and thei...

I did.

Indeed, the title of my entry, one of the original Latin versions of the phrase counseling that a person not speak ill of the dead (literally, "of the dead not ill, only good") was informed from the same phrase that Douthat's is, which was Speaking Ill of Hugh Hefner.

I beat Douthat by only one day, I'll note, and while I thought my entry risked being too blunt, I can't hold a candle to Douthat in those regards.  He noted:

Hugh Hefner, gone to his reward at the age of 91, was a pornographer and chauvinist who got rich on masturbation, consumerism and the exploitation of women, aged into a leering grotesque in a captain’s hat, and died a pack rat in a decaying manse where porn blared during his pathetic orgies.

Hef was the grinning pimp of the sexual revolution, with quaaludes for the ladies and Viagra for himself — a father of smut addictions and eating disorders, abortions and divorce and syphilis, a pretentious huckster who published Updike stories no one read while doing flesh procurement for celebrities, a revolutionary whose revolution chiefly benefited men much like himself.

Right on Ross!