I’m changing some things around on the sidebar a bit. My list under the “Bull and Scones”, a sort of unofficial listing of blogs I find interesting enough to high-light, grew a bit stale. The “Memory Blog”, the blog auxiliary of the Memory Hole collection of documents, was never updated. The Reverend Moon Watch declared itself over, meaning I now dump it over to “Documents” section. I do ask that if he’s no longer watching the whereabouts of Reverend Moon, who is?

So I added a few things to this section. The cadre of Clyde Lewis listeners. For good or ill. Hey! Look! I’m at the bottom of the list. I haven’t heard too much Clyde Lewis, ever since corporate X decided to rip apart the radio station he was on in favour of a generic pod-shuffle stimulation, but he’s bopping around on Internet-streams. “Clyde Lewis makes Art Bell look like Larry King.”

Crooks and Liars is a great blog full of video-tapes from the talking head programs and C-SPAN. A member of Duran Duran helped found this blog. I don’t know what that means, the Duran Duran connection, but it’s a strange bit of trivia that I feel the need to pass on.

Josh Reads, your source for musings on the sex life of Hi and Lois. (And what’s with the shape of Luann’s new cat?)

I quietly enter Jim McCranium, a Democratic blogger from … roughly my old stomping grounds… though he’s from the Land of the Radio-Active Tumbleweeds, or Rick Emerson Country if you will, and I’m from “Mad Cow Country” (or, to spell that out, a town neighboring Mabton, Washington.) This explains the blog’s appeal. It may be affirmative action in giving him the award, as spelled out with “outside of these two urban centers” (Seattle and Portland), but geographic diversity is important. As for the points of comment on his blog: My mother wanted me to register to vote in 1999 or 2000 to defeat a Tim Eyman initiative (she saw the damage it could do to extra-curricular public education services). But Oregon has its own version of Tim Eyman in (name escapes me at the moment), and had a Lon Mabon religious nut to boot, so there’s trouble everywhere.

I’m trying to figure out how to change the stale list of books. To that end, step one is found with this page. Some thoughts on the list of books: #1: Matt Taibbi is a poor man’s Hunter S Thompson for the twenty-first century. The Adams vs. Jefferson is not a particularly good book. #2: The “federalist bloggers” mistake is endemic of the type of problems that confront the book. I imagine that mistake made as the author types out his first draft for the book, and finds this line funny. In re-reading it, he knows the right thing to do is to drop the phrase, but he can’t… let… go. In the parlance of high school essays, when I left in these jokes, the teacher may or may not grade me down, but s/he’d always leave a comment next to my little joke. I suspect that the book that sits next to this one in the library, which I think is entitled “Jefferson vs. Adams”, is a better book that covers the same material. #3: John Dean’s biography of Warren Harding leaves a lot to be desired (it brushes aside the scandals that defined his presidency). I find it amusing that more or less no current listing of presidencies in terms of “greatness” has him last (Buchanan gets the honor these days), but historically Harding had been listed last. Harding’s stock has, evidentally, risen ever-so-slightly. Anyway, Dean’s book on Harding is as haliographic as Harding is ever going to recieve. #4: My “1984” selection, Walter Karp’s somewhat hysterical book on the Reagan administration, mentions Walter Mondale maybe … twice. That seems appropriate for a book on the 1984 presidential election. Actually, for a more traditional slant on the election, Time Magazine (or was it Newsweek) did their every-four years book on the election, where we learned that Reagan’s advisor announced the election over as soon as Mondale selected his running mate. #5: Anyone have suggestions, particularly for years that I do not have here? 1860 seems important to read up on.

Step number 2 is going to be a listing of various other books, with its cover published here (and it’ll be hot links to the image from Amazon). I have a number of items in mind. I know you’re sitting at the edge of your seat, excited by the prospects of seeing them.

Anyway.

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