John Quiggin calls the modern world out for its being so traditional.

Following fouralarmfire’s lead, here’s my “It’s only rock” post, as started by Kermit Is My Copilot. Kinda slow tempo Americana stuff. It’ll probably be different by summer.

Seven of my favorite albums Click to continue reading “I know its only rock n roll”

The new search engine Kosmix lets you filter your news searches by political ideology. (Article here.) But only three ideologies to choose from? (Liberal, conservative and libertarian.) Why not fascist and socialist for starters? Then break up the big tent categories of liberal and conservative into their constituent parts. We Americans have such a depraved political imagination. (Hat tip to Tommy Tanaka.)

I have a nifty little OPML file from my Google Reader subscriptions, which I’ve edited down to the root directories of all the blogs I read. The plan is to get this OPML file into my del.icio.us account, so that there will be a blogasm on my links page here. But this tool isn’t working for me (though it uploaded a Firefox bookmarks export just fine). Anybody know a way to get the links from an OPML file into a del.icio.us account? Google and Yahoo just aren’t being helpful…

The third essay in Healing Hagar’s recovering from fundamentalism series is up and at ’em. Feel free to leave comments over here. (Working on adding comment functionality to essay pages for Healing Hagar.)

I want to give a special thanks to Missing the Flock, whose Salon.com letter gave me the umph I needed to get started, and to all the commenters at Healing Hagar who have been pushing me to talk more about what recovery looks like.

(FYI, the “cross cringing” and “dry fundamentalist” essays will probably be folded into each other, which means the series is now halfway done!)

From scary theocrat generals to satirist Terry Pratchett, John Cullinan asks if your gods are big enough. Because small gods demand lots of attention but don’t put out. Five out of five stars. I’d only add that you can, if you pay close enough attention, know who someone’s gods are, small or otherwise.