Dan Drezner makes his pitch why his corner of the Blogosphere should be “Your #1 International Relations Blog” — at least if those international relations involve a then-underaged Russian media darling's since-terminated marriage to a former Red Army hockey player.

Shrewd work as always by Prof. Drezner. This blog's best search hits by far are on the phrase “Jennifer Garner lingerie,” so the, er, jiggle factor definitely seems to drive traffic. Nevertheless, there are some serious questions to be asked:

1. I wonder why I never heard that Ms. Kournikova was in Memphis? Surely it wasn't to play tennis...

2. Ashley Judd is probably a better conversationalist than Ms. Kournikova. Then again, my pet rock probably is too.

3. Even if Den Beste did have this news, wouldn't it take you more than an hour to read through his post on it? Perhaps, but I'm sure Lake Placid and containment would have been discussed at length, and Martina Hingis and Mary Pierce would have been properly chastised for their political failings, so at the very least (a) the post wouldn't really be about Sergei and Anna's hanky-panky, but rather most instructive in the current workings of the International System from a neorealist perspective, and (b) there would have been some creative new insults flung at the Franco-German axis. (Of course, then there would be the inevitable series of posts from hawkish lefty bloggers insisting that while they approved of the Federov-Kournikova relationship, he really should have waited until her 18th birthday, which quickly would have degenerated into name-calling and discussions of which cities should be attacked by WMDs. So perhaps it's better this way...)

In any event, my predilictions lean more in the Jennifer Capriati direction: you could still take her to meet your parents, but it's a safe bet she'd go to second base on a first date. Win-win all around.

Of course, this last paragraph is a joke.

Josh Chafetz at OxBlog has taken up the gauntlet thrown down by Dan Drezner. I think everyone's trying to drive up their Ecosystem ratings.

Anyway, you won't see shameless pandering like that here. Which is probably why blog.lordsutch.com doesn't rank very highly...