Blogrolling In Our Time

I keep peeking guiltily over at the Noble Eightfold Path over in the right rail of my blog. Spurred by the melancholy whistling of the wind and the gentle sway of the cobwebs, I have donned the yellow rubber gloves, dug out the bucket and Spic-and-Span from under the kitchen sink, and set to with a will. Some additions, a couple of discreet deletions.

Say Howzies to the elegant and hellacious mordant Julia at Sisyphus Shrugged, lazies and gennelmuns! I guest-blogged for her a couple-few weeks ago, and completely failed to destroy her reputation with my weeklong goofy-footed Jonathan Sebaceous Bark routine, which tells me that reputation musta been pretty tight to begin with.

Res and the gang down at Republic of Dogs have been amusing me no end. And for some reason, whenever I'm faced with Res's Comments interface, the wackiest stuff springs to mind. Wish I could summon up some of the same funny shit over here. Good on yer, kids!

Once years ago I participated in an XTC tribute compilation, put together by the contributors of Chalkhills, the XTC Online Digest. (Have I mentioned I'm a bit of a fan?) Of the many well-done contributions, my absolute favorite was submitted by Simon Knight, an astonishingly inventive mashup called "Summer Grass," which managed -- long before it was fashionable to do so, and on 4-track cassette, so take that you GarageBand weenies -- to overlap the melodies of the first two tracks on Skylarking. A dirty deed damned deftly done. Now Simon's hit Bloggoland with Homefront Radio, in which he muses on songcraft and its relationship to Life Its Own Self.

Matt at the The Tattered Coat has impressed the hell out of me with his passion and insightfulness. Most recently, a piece on Cognitive Dissonance climaxed with this graf...

President Bush finds it hard to meet with Cindy Sheehan because he knows that the eyes that will meet his gaze have been emptied of sympathy, emptied of friendship, emptied of lies. In the face of her painful truth, Bush withers and runs like a creature whose ugliness is revealed in the bright light of day.

...And I was smitten.

Neil Shakespeare makes Photoshop collages that are simultaneously brilliantly mordant and flawlessly executed. Believe me, I work with that damned app every day. I know what a slog it is to mask a complex object, and Neil's got the touch, baby. Check this one out: Fear of Christians.

And Pharyngula, well, needs no introduction. And, no doubt, PZ's traffic is gonna prolly, like, quintuple when this righteous link hits the street. Just like mine did when he linked to my Al Swearengen post last week.