I don’t know. The Marmot has a unique knack for objectively presenting an issue and cutting to the heart of it. He’s been very lazy about that lately, and his guest bloggers aren’t adequate fill-in.

And without his occasional chiming in in the whine cellar comments section, that place gets out of hand quickly. It’s a veritable Lord of the Flies scenario.

Oh, and by “unique” I mean the Korean usage of the word: Not the only one, but one just a few.

I’m giving Robert a pass for the way he runs The Hole, basically because he and his buds still pull up a lot of useful stuff, and he’s doubtless super-busy working on Seoul Magazine…meanwhile, I think some of the other K-blogs (korea beat, brian, rok drop and a few others) more than pick up the slack.

At the point there had been an exchange involving King Baeksu, things apparently got out of hand (I don’t know in what way because King Baeksu’s comments and the follow-ups were removed, so it’s difficult to see if KB was the instigator or the victim or both), and comments were closed.

By the way, I think it’s intellectual laziness to just rely on the Korea Blog List to see what’s out there in the Korean blogs. For ideological reasons, I refuse to have mine listed there.

(My thoughts on Marmot’s Hole in a nutshell: Marmot has relied lately too much on guest bloggers who are just not up to his standard of quality, but he lately has seemed to recognize this. Shelton was the worst example, but some of the others seem to put up a lot of below-par stuff. I do like Wangkon and Sonagi’s stuff, though. It appears to be Marmot-quality.)

if Korea’s a big multi-section newspaper, Marmot and ROK Drop are the Front Page section; Brian and Korea Beat are the Breaking News wire, and I like to think of The Hub Of Sparkle as the “culture and life” section, –commentary, culture, lifestyles, food, art, pop, events– so if it would fit in the “culture and life” section of a newspaper, there’s a chance it’ll end up here (if I have the free time to write it up.)

But thanks, Brian.