Saturday 19 July 2003

Links

Part of this blog was supposed to be about Interesting URLs that I've come across. And there will be more about this in later posts. But first, an explanation of the categories that should appear to the left of these words.
politics

Rather than give a long list of blogs I regularly visit, just have a look at Little Green Footballs Anti-Idiotarians. Because that's what I do. The weblog itself is shrill in its pro-Semitism (the opposite of anti-Semitism). Sometimes it finds a lot of smoke without actual combustion, but all too often it drags out yet another Mad Mullah calling for the death of all Jews and other Infidel Dogs. Some of the commentary can be hateful at times, but the website itself is not, and I've always been treated with politeness by commenters there, even when I've expressed some very minority views.

But getting back to compulsory-reading that you'll find via the LGF list, just a few examples that stand out : Instapundit of course. The Original Blog. And I'm not just saying that because Glen Reynolds quoted admiringly some words of mine from The Command Post. Then there's James Lileks, who I first got introduced to via his Gallery of Regrettable Food many moons ago, before the word Weblog was coined. And,as they say, a thousand others. As Hugh Hewitt in the Weekly Standard says,
James Lileks, columnist for Newhouse News Service and the Minneapolis Star Tribune, and quite possibly the funniest guy you have never heard of.
At least we hope you've never heard of him, or his blog, The Bleat, because otherwise you have no excuse for having denied him to your readers while peddling Ellen Goodman or some other old-as-the-planets and dull as dirt culture-war left-over. Lileks is quite obviously the best generally unknown columnist in America, and among the top two in North America when you add in Canadian Mark Steyn.


Salem Pax "The Blogger From Baghdad" I corresponded with before he became if not Rich, then Famous. I tried to give him what advice I could regarding staying safe in the coming war. As my good mate Spider Robinson once said, "God is an Iron", and I ended up referring Salem Pax to an Israeli blog that managed to get him information on civil defence in Arabic. Thereby proving that common human decency can transcend such ephemera as states of war and national borders. Funnily enough, I used the same techniques against gas attack during our bushfires (see below ) when the smoke got too thick.

Letter from America is an antedeluvian primaeval proto-blog. Alistair Cooke has been giving weekly radio broadcasts trying to explain America to the British - and to the Americans - since 1948. He represents the best of what the BBC used to stand for, before the Pod People took it over. His weekly broadcasts have been available on-line for some years now, and are a Blog in all but name.

And I think I'll leave the rest till another post. Especially the intriguingly-named "space (alt)".

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