Five On Five.(The Talk of the Town)(Mitt Romney's sons; blogs)

Fraternal pride has led to the establishment of many an enterprise: ask the Lehmans, the Warners, the Marxes, or the Jonases. Several months after Mitt Romney announced his intention to run for President, his sons--Tagg (thirty-seven), Matt (thirty-six), Josh (thirty-two), Ben (twenty-nine), and Craig (twenty-six)--decided to start a blog. Called Five Brothers, and illustrated with a picture of the toothy, block-jawed boys with their arms slung, Rockette style, around each other's shoulders, it is meant to serve as a public extension of the five-man e-mail distribution list through which they have long kept in touch. Tagg's two favorite moments so far: (1) when a reader wrote to say that Tagg looked like Tom Cruise and Josh wrote back, "No, it's Booger, from 'Revenge of the Nerds,' " and (2) when Tagg posted a home movie of the Romney summer vacation at New Hampshire's Lake Winnipesaukee. "It's not anything a campaign would do, but it's a very real look at who my dad is," Tagg said recently, of the video, which chronicles a day in the life of the clan, from volleyball to s'mores to fireworks (lots of "holy crap!"s) to Ann and Mitt slow-dancing while someone plays "Moon River" on the piano. "There's a funny part where we're setting off fireworks and he's yelling at Craig to 'stop being a moron!' "

Ragging on each other, wholesomely, is a key Five Brothers pastime, and, given the absence of alcohol or girlfriends as fodder, the Romneys (they're all married teetotallers) get in some good digs. "Don't feel bad about thinking dad was a 'supernerd' when you were a teenager, Tagg," Josh writes. "We pretty much thought you were a dork, too. Turns out those clamdigger Jams weren't as cool as you thought they were after all (ha ha--just kidding)." Matt, in turn, tells a story about Craig getting hungry during a bike ride in Iowa: "The madder he got, the harder we laughed. But we finally found a farm that was selling homemade cookies, pies, and ice cream. . . . Craig got the strawberry rhubarb, Josh and I got the cherry." When Josh confesses to having recently short-sheeted his parents' bed, you can practically hear the gang cracking up as they jostle for the milk carton around the family fridge. Corny pranks aside, the Romney boys can be genuinely funny. "Here I am on the Extra Terrestrial Highway," Josh writes home, from Nevada. "I think we saw Dennis Kucinich driving the other direction."