Hi ladies and germs. Last night I just got back from a lovely vacation visiting family and friends in Paris and Maastricht. Since I had only a few minutes of Internet here and there the whole time, naturally the Outer Blogness folder of my personal reader was overflowing with several hundred posts upon my return, which I am skimming this morning. I’ve found some interesting things:
Jonathan Blake wrote some fascinating new articles about the history of time, and followed up with an amusing quote for those of us who keep getting older every year.
Jana just had an article published in an American Historical Association publication! Also MoJo has published her novel The Proviso, and is offering a sizeable excerpt as a free download so you can read the beginning and see if you’d like to buy the rest. In other publishing news, Andee is working on a movie of her exit story. (She’s also written a short piece on The 19th Wife, which looks like a very interesting book.)
Here’s a little fun: we’ve got news from one of our Australian correspondents about the latest beach toplessness laws. And, as much as I’m not big on posting hate mail myself, this one is kind of amusing, and gives an important lesson in why you shouldn’t bother to write hate mail to bloggers, no matter how much you think they need to be told off in the harshest possible terms. Seriously, you’re not doing yourself a favor. And Sabayon has an important message on the true recipe for a martini. I’m totally in agreement with her on this (the vodka martini people had got me almost believing that a vodka martini might really be a martini, but gin is the only true martini, and I’ll admit that my husband got me some lovely gin and vermouth for Christmas which we opened last night to have martinis as our first post-vacation cocktails).
In more serious topics, Steampunk and Synthesizers offers some interesting alternative ideas to replace the economic bailout. Ima reports that the new year’s racial profiling is already taking off. And Jim Downey offers some more backing for the theory that T.V. makes you stupid.
And let’s wrap up with the Mormon news: Joel McDonald resigned from the church, partially over discrimination issues (I hope he also wrote to Signing for Something). And Andrew has quite a bit of amusing commentary on Bloggernacle topics, as always. If I had to pick just one, I’d say perhaps the piece on guilt and repentance.
Happy New Year, all!
Thanks for the shout-out, chanson!
No problem. It looks like you’ve done a really professional job with it — I hope people will go have a look.
p.s. to all: MoJo’s novel is this week’s “not exactly Outer Blogness” entry — I like to try to include one each time, for fun. The Proviso fits into the category of LDS-interest literature, but it’s written from a faithful/believing perspective; it’s not exmo lit. That said, it’s far enough to the fringe that it would probably fit in better here than it would at Deseret Book…