Hello, everybody. You know, weblogs did exist before the whole political weblog thing exploded, vomited, and landed all over our laps. I remember the days when Kottke.org was the one to emulate — these days it’s (would you have thought of any other) Glenn Reynolds. I know two people in real life (other than I) who know who the Instapundit is (Glenn is forever guilty for inspiring others, who are clearly not more or less pundit-like than you or I, into affixing the word ‘-pundit’ to weblog names). More surprisingly, I have met them in China. Less surprisingly, because Glenn is super-famous and all that among the keyboard warrior set, they all ask me how I managed to catch the prolific professor’s attention.

I did not, okay, okay okay?! He caught my attention when I was still using Blogger on Geocities. He was Instapundit then, but he wasn’t the Instapundit you hit (‘refresh’) on, with many thousands of readers, a more-than-respectable second income through Blogads, ‘Instalanches’, and fawning fans. Look up 20 August 2001, and there it is:

On the ‘must (er, should) read’ list today:
InstaPundit.Com. I don’t agree with everything he says, but it’s still good.

(I can’t link to the individual post because I can’t actually access Geocities directly, thanks to the Great Firewall of China. I’ve also whinged about being ignored as a Singapore blogger recently. Being really stressed out and busy, I’m all about the complaining at the moment — more so than usual, anyway.)

Please ignore any references I made to a boyfriend at that time. He was a prick. Also, I find the stuff I wrote about back then kind of cringingly embarrassing now.