I love Ron Rosenbaum’s takedown of Billy Joel; you really have to dislike someone to go to the lengths taken by Rosenbaum to document, distill, and identify what makes them so bad.

My favorite part, though, is Rosenbaum’s side-snipe at Jeff Jarvis:

Besides, some people still take Billy seriously. Just the other day I was reading my old friend Jeff Jarvis’ BuzzMachine blog, and Jarvis (the Billy Joel of blog theorists) was attacking the Times’ David Carr. (Talk about an uneven fight.) Carr was speculating about whether newspapers could survive if they adopted the economic model of iTunes. Attempting a snotty put-down of this idea, Jarvis let slip that he’s a Joel fan: As an example somehow of his iTunes counter-theory, he wrote: “If I can’t get Allentown, the original, I’m not likely to settle for a cover.” Only the hard-core B.J. for Jeff! (“Allentown” is a particularly shameless selection on Jarvis’ part, since it’s one of B.J.’s “concern” songs, featuring the plight of laid-off workers, and Jarvis virtually does a sack dance of self-congratulatory joy every time he reports on print-media workers getting the ax.)

See, this is the thing: there’s a weird way in which the entire attack on Billy Joel just allegorizes Rosenbaum’s frustration with Jarvis. Read RR’s December article, “Is Jeff Jarvis Gloating Too Much About the Death of Print?” if you’re not convinced.