No, that's not really true. I read blogs because I'm endlessly fascinated by the serendipitous finds that crop up when you read a LOT of blogs by people who read a LOT of news, blogs, etc. Usually it's the sort of thing that newspapers may use as fillers on a slow news days, but gets a lot of read anyway because it's ... interesting. At other times, it's an opportunity to get a fresh slant on a situation or event that has been endlessly reported, but an iconoclastic mind asks questions that you wish you would have thought of.
So for a change of pace, here is a sampling of my web surfing for Thursday, August 2, 2007:
England Invaded by Evil Guns! Armed Bobbies Stand Guard!
Apparently I'm not the only one who feels a rant coming on every time the Brits do another Something Stupid regarding gun-control and/or treating their citizenry as untrustworthy subjects.
Alphecca writes about a decision to 'temporarily' allow members of the British Shooting Team to actually use guns while practicing for the Olympics. But they require that armed policemen stand guard in case something-or-other bad happens. (Why don't they do this in subways -- uh, 'the underground'? Well, there was this thing with a Brazilian running to catch a train last year and that turned out badly, so ....) Read the comments. All of them.
Hat tip to The Truth Laid Bear.
I'm a BA-A-A-A-D Geek
Traction Control was fooling around with XHTML Validation Software, and just for fun decided to run it against his Blog Roll.
This is a 'program' that evaluates the entire (?) body of posts on a blog, searching for errors in HTML code. In the approximately 110 blogs in his blog roll, this blog ends up 18th from the end with 456 errors. That puts me somewhere between The Other Side of Kim (437) and The Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler (523).
I'm not only okay with that, I'm fairly well satisfied. My primary purpose here is, and has always been, to write about things that interest me. That's usually IPSC/USPSA competition, then about RKBA issues, and then about things that are of general interest. Sometimes, I just can't get to sleep until I WRITE something. I assume that you notice that from time to time.
A beneficial side-effect is that I've learned some HTML coding techniques in the process. That all goes straight to hell when I try to copy a body of text from a MSM article and it's so imbedded with ads, fonts, tables, etc. that I get tired of trying to strip out the excess HTML and say "anything that doesn't show up in the readable text ... ignore it!". I suspect that this is often the case with some other bloggers, too.
When you're more interested in context than HTML code, you either hire someone else to build and run your blogsite or you just let your attitude run the show.That's acceptable in Blogging.
If you try the same attitude in, say, Politics, you end up looking something like this:
Of course, I don't write nearly as well as the above-cited blogs, but I try to compensate by avoiding F-bombs.
Don't Take Your Gun To Town, Allison
Also thanks to Traction Control, I found this article on TownHall by a young woman who is described as " ... a junior political science and English major at Virginia Tech and a Summer 2007 intern at the Young America’s Foundation headquarters in her hometown, Herndon, Virginia.
Yes, that Virginia Tech. She talks about being twenty-something, female, and walking to her car in a remote D.C. parking lot late at night armed with nothing more effective than a purse-sized Pepper Spray. Especially frustrating when she has a perfectly good .357 sitting at home, and the only place she can use her Concealed Carry license is at the family cabin in the mountains.
Michael Yon: Read this guy instead of Al Qaeda dispatches
Actually, the AL Qaeda dispatches seem to be the primary news source for the American Press. I don't know why the MSM are more eager to accept the AQ version of events than that of American sources (U.S. Army, Michael Yon, etc.) but I guess that's just part of the fun for Liberal American Press. Hey, if it makes "That Clown" GW Bush look bad, no other reason is necessary for them.
But Michael Yon ... is an incredible reporter. He not only tells the story as he sees it, he is there 'even when there is no fighting going on' and reports the hearts-and-minds part of American involvement in Iraq.
Look at the Bread and a Circus, Part I of II article he posted on July 31. Read the whole thing, look at all the pictures, and pay especial attention to his actual Fisking of an Al Qaeda-related 'insurgent' news release.
It's so important that I've moved Michael Yon's website to "I Read Every Day". He doesn't publish every day, but when he does it's something that you don't want to delay reading.
And HEY! Go spend a tenner on his paypal box. I did.
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