Tag I'm It

I've been tagged by Tata, with a meme that actually requires some thought.

These are the rules:

1. If, and only if, you get tagged, write a post with links to 5 blogs that make you think,
2. Link to this post so that people can easily find the exact origin of the meme,
3. Optional: Proudly display the ‘Thinking Blogger Award’ with a link to the post that you wrote.

As the number of blogs I try to read daily increases, it gets more and more difficult to focus on things like housework and yoga and the obligatory "weight-bearing exercise" required for Women of a Certain Age. Of course things like the Paid Job take priority, but everything else falls down prostrate before the Altar of the Almighty Blog.

For some reason, blog readers just don't work for me. It's the difference between reading a book online, and opening the box from Amazon.com, holding a new book in your hands, feeling its weight, marveling at a paper book jacket with no 1/8" tears in it, then opening it for the first time and hearing the slight =crack= of a new bookbinding. Blog reading requires the ambiance of custom banners, comments, and the other things that make a blog a community, interactive experience.

So here are Five Blogs that Make Me Think:

Newshoggers: It was perfectly fine when it was just Cernig, digging around the international press to find the stores that even other blogs, let alone the MSM, don't cover. But now it's a group blog, with Libby, Shamanic, and Fester providing insightful commentary on the news you need to know and didn't know you needed. If you've fallen into the trap of visiting the Great Orange Satan first thing in the morning, try these folks instead.

Shapely Prose: The newest addition to the Shakesville crew, Kate Harding blogs exclusively on weight issues and about living in our society when one is not a size 2. Not since Susie Orbach wrote Fat is a Feminist Issue has a writer managed to explode all the myths surrounding weight and put them in context of our fear and loathing society. No matter how many times we read about studies showing that diets don't work, we keep trying them. Kate looks at why we keep falling for this crap and how we can learn to love ourselves and be healthy at any size.

Candide's Notebooks: I don't know how the hell he does it, but Pierre Tristam's blog is sort of what would happen if one person decided to publish a newspaper the size of the New York Times. Today's front page is representative of what you can find on a daily basis: blog entries on the Library of America, on Art Tatum, on the Libby Pardon, and on Jackson Pollock's One.

Welcome to Pottersville: While I don't need jurassicpork's transcripts of Frank Rich's columns because I'm a New York Times subscriber, I do need his perspective on the the hell that is life in the Bush years.

Driftglass: You have to even ask?

Tagging:

Lynn
ModFab
Spiiderweb
Bob
Melina