Roll out the Blogroll

I generally stay caught up with roughly 40 blogs each day. Some are pretty busy, some not so. But each has stuff that's interesting or engaging in some way (to me at least) on a regular basis. I've been meaning to start my Blog roll for a while, but I have to enter each URL, save, then go get each new URL. I don't remember URLs very well; I just have a lot of "favorites" files. It would be so much easier if I could just copy and paste that list, but c'est la vie.

So I'm going to try just doing five or so at a time. That will also mean that it's practical to give a short description and/or mention why I like the blog as I list them. Generally speaking they will be added in roughly the order I added them to my favorites, because that's the way they are listed on my laptop.

Electronic Cerebrectomy- like my blog, an eclectic mixture of stuff from all over the map: movies, a big fan of animation, pretty (sometimes stunning) women, teaching (elementary level), some politics, a little bit of science, and reaction to pop culture. I'm not a big fan of pop culture, but this guy has some pretty insightful responses to it- falls into the category of "he pays attention so I don't have to." Probably a lot of stuff I'm not recalling at this moment, but you get the idea.

Crooks and Liars: Left Blogostan News, Politics and Opinion. I'll warn you that before I'm done there will be an awful lot of these. I tend to start at the top and work down. C&L is often the place I hear about something first, simply because that's where I go first. This is one of those team sites, with a bunch 0f people all contributing: quite a bit of reading gets posted here every day. I started reading the internets in the mid 90's. C&L was one of the first blogs I started reading (I think around '02 or '03). I was offline for several years, but it was one of the first blogs I went back to when I got back onto the information superhighway.

Zaius Nation- Such a great sense of humor! Zauis made his first appearance in Planet of the Apes. He is somehow blogging 1700 years or so before his birth- I'm not too worried about the technology there. Film clips, visual gags, satire, some politics. I haven't really figured out who or what Germaine Gregarious is yet, but I think they were running against Dr. Monkerstein (of monkeymucker.com, to be rolled out later) for president. Not sure if it was bias from MSM or if there's a constitutional basis for orangutans and monkeys to barred from those offices, but I don't think they're running anymore (Though we have a simian and a crocodilian holding prez and VP now). I dunno... it's all so very confusing.

DistributorcapNY (AKA dCap)- History, economics, news, politics, opinion, personal anecdotes, etc. His cat George had to move along a few days back. Having just brought a cat into my life a couple of months ago, I'm feeling pretty bad for dCap right now. I left a pretty long comment on one of his posts last week, and he had the kindness to come read some of my stuff and leave a couple of nice comments. This is one of the people whose blogs really start to give you a sense of kinship, closeness and friendship. He is an antidote to much of the depersonalization culture I fear a little in netspace.

Happy Jihad's House of Pancakes- wonderfully foul-mouthed humor, criticism and commentary. I'm inferring from many of his posts that he's recently finished a graduate degree in language arts or literature, and is looking for a job at the college/university level. So a number of his posts poke fun at the useless verbosity of rejection letters. Other recurrent themes are atheism, pin-headed, hypocritical, sanctimonious religious righters, and evolution vs. anti-evolutionists and intelligent creationists, etc. There are a large number of people like this out there and they often get tedious. For example, anybody who uses the words "proof" or "proved" to defend or reinforce the scientific point of view understands neither the strengths nor weaknesses of science, and does not understand the hubris (nor how to avoid said hubris) that leads the fundies to make such collective asses of themselves on a daily basis. However, HJ's wit and unflinching willingness to type what is on his mind makes him a particularly entertaining member of this group.

So that's five for today. I look forward to the next group- this was kind of fun. As a concluding note, I've been meaning to comment for some time how difficult I find it to balance my consumption of news and blogs with composing and posting my own stuff. If you choose to read some of the blogs I have listed (and will list) here, you will see the issue: There's so much great stuff out there, it seems a waste to spend time and effort with my own.