Pen-Elayne on the Web

Liberal Coalition Top Ten
Week of 11/4/06 thru 11/11/06

I've now installed the Performancing add-on to my Firefox browser both at home and at work, making it a heck of a lot easier to compose most posts (complete with HTML coding) before opening my Blogger edit window, thus enabling me to save anything link-rich if Blogger suddenly gets a bit bloggered. Highly recommended. I won't do it with photo-rich stuff (which I can still write in Blogger and save it in Performancing before posting, as Blogger will have already uploaded the photos) and I've already tried but failed to post directly from Performancing without going through the Blogger edit window, but opening a new tab isn't really a big deal for it, it was losing posts that bothered me. Anyway, my weekly Liberal Coalition blogaround posts are a must for this method, as the Performancing window appears on the bottom half of my screen (with a "hide" option) and I can see Bloglines simultaneously on the top half, so it's pretty darn convenient. Let's take a look:

• A number of LC'ers celebrated blogiversaries this past week, including Andante, Echidne and Mustang Bobby. Election time seems to have precipitated a flurry of new blogs in the past few years.

• Guy from Rook's Rant has been having trouble posting. For my part, I didn't even know Guy was still blogging, as he's apparently a member of the Liberal Coalition (he's using the LC blog for his posting at present) but doesn't have my blog or many other LC blogs on his blogroll, which listing is one of the two "requirements" for being an LC member (the other being occasional blogarounds). Maybe once his server problems are fixed he can update said blogroll?

• Bora links to some exquisite paper cutouts and reviews a Ken Miller lecture.

• Bryant, for one, welcomes our Daily Show overlords. Y'all saw the Rolling Stone interview (edited version online), right?

• Chris has opened nominations for the Second Annual Brownies Award. If his comments section worked for me, I'd ask him if he could make the comic book-related ones a bit less "guy"-centric and a bit more gynocentric, as right now the wording seems to discourage any votes for female creators.

• Speaking of the uphill battle against sexism, Echidne notes the speed at which the Washington Post greeted the first female Speaker of the House by discussing her wardrobe.

• Tena at First Draft calls upon the Schadenfreude Fairy.

• Jeff gets a kick out of conspiracy theories.

• Moi passes along a gorgeous photo of the Orion nebula.

• A couple days ago I was looking for a good map of how the '06 Congressional election makes the country look now. NTodd found a nice one.

• Steve G celebrates the possible end of the "Southern strategy" road to power (okay, the essay's from today rather than this past week but I like it because it's all-original-content), takes Mayor Bloomberg to task, and reminds black conservatives of the shame they've brought on others. Oh, and he doesn't seem to like Greg Palast very much.

Just a couple non-LC links then I'm done here:

• Natasha has a terrific Natasha's terrific "happy post-election weekend" blog review of most of the stuff I've enjoyed these past few days.

• And Glenn Greenwald has a nice love letter to Russ Feingold. While I can't be bothered to care about an election that's two years away when we've just been through one - I mean, can't we give it a rest for, you know, at least a couple months? The money quote:

The Beltway pundit class and the premises which generate conventional Washington wisdom are corrupt to their core and always wrong. And this Feingold announcement illustrates a major reason why that it so. They operate from a set of completely unexamined, empty premises that reflect their own character and belief system, but nobody else's. They have no core convictions and no passion and think that those attributes are the marks of sober, responsible people.

We've seen this projection time and again from the people who've been in power these last half dozen years - they always accuse their opponents of being something that their own behavior embodies, because they believe everyone else out there thinks as warped and sleazily as they do (so naturally, if their actions are treasonous the Democrats must be the traitors, if they think fear-and-smear the Democrats are the ones politicizing 9-11, etc. etc.).

Now that I'm caught up on blogs again, it's once more time to tackle the comics box - a few indies, a few DC Universe books (I go through those alphabetically and I'm now up to "S") and the rest Vertigo and Wildstorm. Should be doable in a couple hours at most, then perhaps I'll crack open Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. Yes, I've known who dies and who kills him for some time now, but when one decides one will wait for the UK children's paperback edition of each book, one can't help but come across spoilers from everyone else who reads the US hardcovers as soon as they're published...