If you thought the blogosphere could compete with the MSM . . .

Ponder the following chunks of juvenilia currently available on the web from theatre bloggers:

You're a whore and that's OK. Own that shit, wilya? Nothing wrong with being a prostitute but a self loathing working girl - one who wants the money from blow-jobs in the alley but also wants folks to consider her a lady - is just kind of pathetic. You don't get to be both. Ladies don't charge $125 for that Jeff Daniels starring pile of pig shit "Turd of the Century." Ladies don't eschew all concepts of risk in order to dress up a sad, underdeveloped staged version of a kind of crappy Patrick Swayze movie.

In the theatre, the spoken word and the body are the agents of repudiation, and as it repudiates the desiccated phenomenal consciousness it welcomes a new consciousness through ecstasy and the recognition of mortality. Hence the erotic, the internal knowledge of the body's decay, the dead. If repudiation is in the service of this new knowledge, the word and the body conduct this repudiation in transgression and new experience, ever at risk of loss. "If I am asked where the most immediate knowledge of that inner essence of the world, of that thing in itself which I have called the will to live, is to be found, or where that essence enters most clearly into our consciousness, or where it achieves the purest revelation of itself, then I must point to ecstasy in the act of copulation. That is it! That is the true essence and core of all things, the aim and purpose of all existence."

What a delightful surprise, then, to find that this New Brunswick-based trio has actually come up with something as zany as "The Toxic Avenger Musical." While it's not nearly as polished in its performances, the group numbers like "What Are We Going to Do (With All These Dead Prostitutes?)" are ebullient, and some of the actors have terrific belting voices . . . A little can-do can go a long way, and most of the cast acquits itself well by just powering through.

It doesn't really matter who wrote the posts quoted above - because at least they all somehow deal with the supposed topic of the blog, the theatre. Many, many more posts on "theatre" blogs are political screeds (and many of these actually don't make much internal sense). And many more are simply personal - they're advertisements for the writer's new show (or praise from critics whom the writer himself has praised). Or complaints that the writer isn't being paid enough. Or that his or her minority group (never anybody else's) isn't being represented enough onstage.

But you get the idea. The blogosphere is only a few years old, and already it's a vast wasteland. It almost makes me nostalgic for the Boston Globe . . .