Around the blogroll and elsewhere

It's been a while since I did one of these. I desperately need a weekend, having plunged right from my Great Skybus Adventure into a Day o'Laundry and then back to work.

But this week we have nine (count 'em) nine glorious hours of Marc Maron subbing for Mike Malloy on NovaM/KPHX Phoenix, which when combined with Sam Seder subbing for the still-banished Randi Rhodes, makes progressive talk radio almost worth listening to again. It's amazing how Maron can be away from radio for six months and still get back into a studio, bereft of all of his old Morning Sedition sidekicks, and just start riffing as if he'd never left. And when old Seditionisti like Gypsy and Kristapea and Brian from Everett call in, it's enough to make one grab a Kleenex for what once was and will never be again.

So my lovely new HP Pavilion tx2000, the one with the tablet conversion that I got for $500 off and is pretty much loaded to the gills and has an 8-cell battery for hours and hours of blogging in a hotel lobby in Austin, Texas this summer without feeling like a Luddite compared to the awesome gadgetry that Melina ports around, arrived this week, and THEN I find out about this.

But there are still blogs to read, and alas I've fallen down on the job of reading many of my favorites, so let's catch up on a few of them (along with some ephemera), shall we?

The funniest post you will read today has got to be this one, in which ModFab meets Paolo Szot, currently starring in South Pacific in the current revival -- and his life is forever changed.

Skippy has a tale of yet another wingnut with a fake sense of victimization who, when she wasn't persecuted the way she'd expected to, simply made shit up. The kicker? She's only 13. Learned well, young Skywalker has.

From the Fish Rots From The Head Department: Michael Stickings on a devastating ABC News report revealing that torture as an interrogation method in violation of the Geneva Conventions was approved at the very top levels of the Bush Administration.

Sara Robinson has an advance copy of Cliff Schecter's new book on John McCain, and projects how McCain's squishiness on race is likely to prevent him from doing anything about the dogs of race war that are going to be unleashed (this was only the beginning) when Barack Obama wraps up this Democratic nomination.

Cernig asks the obvious question: If the surge is such a success, why not continue the drawdown?
If you aren't at home to watch Senate hearings, or if you get zero radio reception like I do, you simply must check out Joe Biden's masterful smackdown of General Petoady and Ambassador Ryan Crockoshit.

Dancing about architecture: PhysioProf has some things to say about MIT's Stata Center -- Frank Gehry's latest effort to prove that art really IS whatever you can get away with.

I wonder how Tata, a woman so effortlessly fabulous that she can carry a Hello Kitty lunchbox as a handbag and get away with it, has a friend who's a George W. Bush fan?

Kevin Hayden has found a way out of the Gordian knot of "Which is worse: sexism or racism?".

Joe Sudbay admonishes Barack Obama to NOT make ANY kind of deal with a campaign finance criminal like John McCain.

And finally, if you've never been to Shea Stadium, and you never plan on going, Metsgrrl captures the magic that is Flushing's Church of Our Lady of Perpetual Dump.