Howard Sherman of the Nuggets Weblog could have won my heart with nothing more than the John Updike quote he keeps posted near the bottom of his right rail:

“The true New Yorker secretly believes that people living anywhere else have to be, in some sense, kidding.”

I guess that makes us both true New Yorkers, and the reality is that Nuggets is informative, charming, a whole lot of fun and it is just what the title says it is – nuggets of Howard’s thoughts about anything that strikes his fancy. And since his fancy is a close match to mine, Nuggets has become a favorite.

Howard says he a “keen observer of popular culture” and he seems to be particularly struck by oddities going on in the world, the Web and New York. Also, for anyone who immediately buys into that Updike quote, Howard has a sensational collection of New York City links, some of which I knew and some which are new to me. A small sampling:

• Forgotten New York
• Gothamist
• NYC Eats

And in the small world department, he’s even got my friend Laura Holder linked.

It’s always an interesting exercise to check out bloggers’ earliest posts. Howard started simply on 3 December 2002:

“burrrr. Pretty chilly today in NYC. The kind of cold that cuts right through you.”

I like that. No meandering around about starting a Weblog and wondering where it’s going and blah, blah, blah. Just the weather report.

In his second post, the next day, he made one of those dead-on associations of the James Burke/Connections type between The Osbournes, who were fairly new to television then, and The Loud Family from the 1970s on PBS. You need to be of certain age to remember the Louds, so if you don’t know and are curious, there is some information at The Louds Website.

Nuggets is a tidy site that is easy on the eyes. The tag line in his top banner is “Howard Sherman’s Random Thoughts on Technology and Life in New York City (as if you care).”

You can lose the parenthetical, Howard. You post a lot of good reasons to care.