Esquire writer Chris Jones has killed his blog. This was the last straw for him: a Tumblr post by Deadspin writer Jack Dickey, who put side-by-side excerpts of pieces on Robert Caro by Jones and by Charles McGrath — with the headline “Guess Which One Of These Guys Was Pissy About Not Winning A National Magazine Award?” Last straws are funny things.

“Of course, it’s a jab at the post I wrote here about my disappointment about not getting nominated for an Ellie for my Roger Ebert profile. Of everything I’ve written here, nothing has haunted me more. It’s been more than a year, and someone still makes a reference to it at least once a week,” Jones writes. “I was honest about my disappointment, because every writer I know suffers disappointments, and we’re supposed to be honest, and we’re all in this together.” This is true! He was honest about his disappointment. That honesty, and its expression, was off-putting. “I’ve always kept score,” he wrote back then. Does anyone like a person who’s told you that he’s keeping score?

The thing that’s frustrating about Jones is that he’s a universalizer; he doesn’t understand that some of us think it’s actually bad to keep score. (His recent terribly offputting thing about how women didn’t sex him right was another example of how the internal monologue sometimes doesn’t express well publicly. It was gross and crude and unlikeable. It was another way in which Chris Jones smells like a bully — even though he hasn’t even done any actual bullying! Except… when he has.)

So once you tell everyone that you’re keeping score, that you’re in this as a competition, well, then we all know that you’re on your own side, and many of us then have no interest in extending any camaraderie to you. You’re just another Tracy Flick, at best. You’re out for you.

That he wrote about taking “a rapid-fire bolt through the stages of grief” over not being nominated for an award is, in a way, an admirable thing to admit. It’s a good thing for us to know about you. It’s also an overt declaration that we’re not on the same team. Shutting down a blog is also another specific kind of personality expression. “It’s just not worth it” is the explanation of a child who feels he’s been misunderstood. That seems like the summation of a failure of the use of words.

Thousands of writers blog without feeling they had to take down everything they’ve written. But some do have to. So goodbye, Chris Jones’ blog. You were a venue that allowed Chris Jones to do a disservice to himself, and so it’s time for you to go.

Update: He’s since deleted his farewell post; it can be found here and here in two screenshotted parts.

“If you do go to the hospital on your own, be sure you announce, ‘I think I’m having a heart attack!’ for immediate attention.”
 — This is advice about what to do if you’re having a heart attack, but it seems pretty sound no matter what the occasion.

You wouldn’t like the New York Post when it’s angry: “Surprise, surprise: The Associated Press yesterday picked up a Pulitzer for its year-long, non-stop hit-job on the NYPD’s counterterrorism efforts. The series was a naked bid to appeal to the judges’ PC sensibilities.” YOU TELL ’EM, CRAZIES.

Here you will find a fish that resembles Adolf Hitler. [Previously in “things that look like Adolf Hitler”]

Former Onion writer Andy Selsberg recently released a book with the lovely title You Are Good at Things. It has an attractive cover, too, and I’m interested in reading it. The excellent young rapper Denmark Vessey is releasing a video every week in a series he’s calling “Leakly Weeks.” And he is good at dropping beer bottles and then catching them in midair. “I caught the shit out of this beer,” he said on Twitter.

Paying taxes “makes you feel good,” apparently. How good do YOU feel today?

“He called it the Bored At Work Network. All across the world, he believed, men and women sat at their desks, staring at computer screens, bored senseless. How better to provide a momentary relief from the tedium than to disseminate something so engagingly simple that recipients would take a moment to forward it to friends….What was forwarded, of course, reflected something about the sender, which, as Watts pointed out, was why few ever send pornography — not cool. And while a good deal of these bits of content had all the permanence of footprints in sand, every so often the Bored At Work Network would light up, and weak links were instantly transformed into strong ones. A vast network sprang to life.”
 — Just Insta-ReadItLater-Whatever this behemoth history of the Huffington Post. (Oh wait I guess “Read It Later” is now called “Pocket.” Please make a note of it.)

Previously: Pinterest And The Perfect Picture

Jon Methven is the author of This Is Your Captain Speaking, due out in 2012 by Simon & Schuster. He can be reached here, or follow him on Twitter @jonmethven.

“Brian Williams’ daughter throws a dinner party, like a grown-up. Someone brings opium tea. The guy who brought the opium tea listens to Laurie Simmons’ daughter complaining about not having a job and says, ‘I’m sorry but watching this is like watching Clueless,’ which is a thing someone must have actually said to Judd Apatow at some point.”
 — If you can handle reading one more thing about ‘Girls,’ make it this recap. Oh, right, also this, but I assume you’ve read it already.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPKz6svoing

“Mr. Goldstein, the son of a tailor, was born on Sept. 8, 1921, in a small town outside Warsaw. The family immigrated when he was 5 and settled in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn. He was a basketball standout at Eastern District High School in Brooklyn and Long Island University. When the Catskill hotels started basketball tournaments to entertain guests, Grossinger’s recruited him. And when he proved adept at other forms of entertainment, the hotel signed him up as its tummler.”
 — Original hipster Lou Goldstein died at the age of 90 on April 2 of complications of Parkinson’s Disease. The longtime Grossinger’s resort tummler is acknowledged as the greatest Simon Says player of all time. “Tummler” is a Yiddish word meaning “someone who stirs up tumult or excitement.” So, like Pharoahe Monch.