Blog Review Meme

Amy tagged me with this. It's a nice meme that can get you reading new blogs you may have overlooked.

1. Once tagged, write up short review for 5 blogs that you read regularly, including the blog of the person that tagged you.

2. Leave a comment tagging the blogs you've reviewed, telling them to continue the meme.

3. If someone writes a review of your blog, you must respond by writing a review of their blog (unless you've already written one).

4. After a few days, write a post compiling what all the other bloggers say about you, good or bad, true or untrue.

And my reviews:

First Radioactive Quill, who tagged me. Amy blogs regularly but infrequently, comments on the media, loves Stephen Colbert beyond all reason, is funny and snarky, and I really like reading her. I also love the clean white blog layout, so easy on my old watery eyes. The only thing I don't like about RQ is the lack of comments. I wish she had them. Blogs are at their most fun, in my opinion, when they're interactive.

The Wild Hunt is king of the Pagan blogging hill. Jason Pitzl-Waters does a superb job of combining news about, and of interest to, Pagans, with a strong voice. He's opinionated, but he makes sure each entry reports as well as opines. He has been a gathering place for some interesting controversies, where hundreds of comments slammed a few select posts; most posts have few or no comments.

Pandora's Bazaar is a smaller and more personal Pagan blog. Cosette is thoughtful and serious. She reads and reviews books, wonders about issues of theology, discusses her explorations on the path, personalizes the transcendant, and in general is very readable.

Girls Read Comics (And They're Pissed) is more or less what it sounds like. Author Karen Healy is a feminist comics fan. I don't read a lot of comics, but I'm extremely interested in the interface between feminism and pop culture. Karen is really smart and really funny and there are pictures.

Rich Sommer: The Blog is just so cute. Rich Sommer plays Harry Crane on Mad Men, which is the best show on TV. He's not a star, and he's sweet and he has a new baby and he's kind of geeky, and the blog is mostly, new baby, lovely wife, ohmigodz my show is a hit and I'm going to the SAG Awards, some gaming, look! Baby pictures! And like that. Just sweet and charming and a pleasure to read.

(Cross-posted at Property of a Lady, which I guess at least one person reads.)

Chez Ahab

You knew it was coming, so here it is: my bloggingspace. This is where the magic happens for ahab. I spend about 75% of my waking, home hours here in this room, the smallest in our house. We call it the Study. After reading Bleak House a few years ago, I tried to change it to the Growlery, but that never stuck.

Despite the "partner's" desk at its center, this is very much my room. Mary controls maybe one fifth of it. Her side of the desk is usually neat as a pin and mine's a jumble, but I cleaned mine up for this photo and lobbed some things she gave me to read back over onto her side. She'll be enraged when she comes home and sees that.

That's Mary's Christmas cactus over by the window. I hadn't realized that it is in bloom until I noticed it in this photo. That area is in her fifth. The forlorn creature in the left foreground is Eli, aka Chauncy and Pudgy J. Mewler and any number of other names. He is constantly failing to live up to his predecessor as my desk cat, the legendary Tony, Greatest Cat Ever.

Oh, and that's a small Iranian rug hanging on the wall. I rely upon its exotic power to multiculturally pervert my mind. It also reduces echo.

My Blogspace (even messier than Tom's)

Apparently, today is Show Us Your Blogspace Day, and even though PSoTD didn't challenge me personally, I thought it looked both fun and humiliating. Plus, I cross-post at If I Ran the Zoo, and PSoTD did challenge IIRtZ. So there.

The blog shown on my monitor is, in fact, Tom's IIRtZ post of his blogspace.



Featured in this hideous mess; my Cow Parade "Udderly Wicked" cow, a Kali figure, my James Bond Movie Poster calendar (still on November, but November is You Only Live Twice, and December is Die Another Day), a fairy, a Lego witch set, Arthur's iPod shuffle case, the camera case, a framed Playbill from The Fantasticks 25th anniversary (I also have the 35th somewhere), my Beanie Baby dogs (I have to keep them separate from the other Beanie Babies; they're troublemakers) and I dunno what all else.

(cross-posted around here somewhere)

Show Your Blogspace Day

So today is Show Your Blogspace Day, according to PSotD...and who am I to say differently?

I blog both from home and at the office, but my home workspace is more cluttered, so office it is. The pictures on the wall are 8.5 x 11 prints of photos I've taken in the Sierra. On-screen is, of course, the PSotD post asking us all to do this. If you click through on the photo, there are more annotations at Flickr.

Google Meme

Via Shakespeare's Sister (and originally from the World's Fair), it's the Google Meme: try to come up with five words or phrases that, when you search Google for them, will give your blog as the first result.

I'm going to skip the really obvious ones (Sunday Sierrablogging, Random Flickr-Blogging) and see what I can come up with otherwise:

1. libertarian technowanks
2. anti-abortion concern troll
3. you forgot Albania
4. Abramukkah
5. Sandra Crandall

And a bonus: Kosamageddon.

See what you can come up with for yours...

Little Known Favorites

Evil Mommy (aka Karen M and Spyderkl) taged me with the 'little known favorites' meme: "List and describe three of your favorite books that other people might not be familiar with. Then tag five people."

Okay...this takes some thought...

The first one is easy: High Albania, by Mary Edith Durham. Durham was an Englishwoman suffering from depression who, on her doctor's advice, traveled to the Balkans and wound up devoting her life to the region. This book is the account of a 1910 trip through the highlands of Albania, an ethnographic travelogue of the most remote backwater in Europe. Durham has a sharp eye for detail, an engaging sense of humor, and (apparently) absolutely no fear.

This one is fairly obscure here, but very well known in Brazil: Rebellion in the Backlands, by Euclides da Cunha. This is a contemporaneous history of the Canudos campaign in the 1870s, in which the Brazilian army besieged and eventually (after several attempts) exterminated a millenarian religious community led by a messianic prophet. This story was the basis for Vargas Llosa's War of the End of the World; despite my general preference for fiction, I like da Cunha's version better.

Finally, one that isn't obscure exactly but isn't as well known as it should be: The Charwoman's Shadow, by Lord Dunsany. Dunsany sort of invented the fantasy genre, but more importantly he's a storyteller with an extraordinarily vivid imagination, a musical prose style, and a sly sense of humor. His short stories are probably his best work, but this is my favorite of his novels.

I'm not up to the challenge of figuring out whom to tag...so if you're reading this, consider yourself tagged. (If, that is, you want to be.) Post a link to yours in the comment thread, and I'll tag you retroactively.