Around the Blogroll and Elsewhere: Is there ANY good news ANYWHERE?

Sorry about no good pearls of widsom from me this week, just crazy busy with work and too dispirited to come up with anything readable. So you might as well catch up on those who have been able to at least catch their breath. I have a day off tomorrow, only part of which will be spent working, so I'll try to catch up then.

Meanwhile, not all of this is from bloggers, but worth reading just the same.

Gaius Publius on the wholesale turning over of entire towns to corporations.

Gail Collins on Texas: Ground Zero for the Work Force of Tomorrow. (God help us. And by the way, why is Texas Governor Rick Perry, who wanted to secede, now looking for FEMA help when they hate the federal government? Fucking parasite.)

Mike Stark on Alaska Sen. Don Young actively participating in a rally supporting right wing militia leader Schaeffer Cox, who was arrested on March 10, 2011 for plotting to kill state police and a federal judge, and for possession of illegal weapons.

Rick Ungar is keeping an eye on Scott Walker, who hasn't actually DENIED that he's planning the kind of "financial martial law" that's taking place in Michigan.

I knew what I was doing when I added Tom Degan to the blogroll. Enjoy his look at the late, great Ernie Kovacs.

And finally....Roger Ebert reviews At Last, Drugged, a.k.a. P0rn for Paul Ryan.

I'm going to try to pull some thoughts together about the senseless and pointless death of Restrepo director Tim Hetherington.

OMG, I've helped to create a monster

I Write Like... has gone viral.

And here I thought I wrote like Dorothy Parker

This is a fun exercise, try it.

My results:

I write like
Stephen King

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

I'm jealous of Tata, because I popped in this post and got:

I write like
James Joyce

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

Then I felt better, because I plugged in the prologue of my Unfinished Novel of Female Torment and found out that...

I write like
David Foster Wallace

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

...only without the suicide.

I plugged in a half-dozen writing samples and could NOT get Dorothy Parker. I did get David Foster Wallace four of the six times, so I guess I write like David Foster Wallace. I guess I could do worse.

How cool is this?

People who know me well know that there is an unfinished sweeping family epic of eternal feminine torment sitting around here waiting for me to have time to finish it. I've found when I write fiction that I tend to think cinematically and "cast the movie" in order to get a character's "voice". But while I've had the cheeky idea of throwing in a one-shot bit extra character named "Declan McManus" just because it's Elvis Costello's real name, I've never even considered doing this:

readers of this space will know that we are fans of the mystery/thriller genre of popular literature (our email correspondence w/sara paretsky, author of the v.i. washawski novels, is one of the high-lites of our blogging career). so it was nothing untoward for us to pick up a book by a previously-unread author, which promised to be "an exciting, believable and well-writtern thriller" (sez ridley pearson, author of killer view).

fault line, by barry eisler, showed good, pulpy spy-vs.-spy promise in the early pages: a lawyer who specialized in computer software patents has a client, who is murdered on the first page (hell, in the first sentence! always a good sign when a book starts out fast and violent). the lawyer is subsequently attacked himself, so he contacts his estranged brother, who is a black ops/military spy, for help.

so far, so good. but why we mention it to you, our dear readers, is that we began to notice some not-so-subtle hints that the author, barry eisler, must be a big fan of blogtopia, and yes, we coined that phrase. so much so, that he actually used names of bloggers as character names in his tome.

the afore-mentioned first sentence should have been a dead (pun intended) give away:

the last thing richard hilzoy thought before the bullet entered his brain was, things are really looking up.

now, we admit, no alarms went off @ the mention of the name hilzoy. after all, it's not that impossible that someone else besides the blogger who used to work @ obsidian wings & washmonthly could be called that. and the first name 'richard' also disguised its use. we would have been more on alert had the sentence talked about 'richard fafnir' or 'richard t. bogg,' but no.

however, a bit later in the early chapters, one of the characters muses about blogs:

the one thing that really intersted her was politics. she read everything, across the political spectrum - newspapers, magazines, books. blogs especially. there were some great ones out there, and with their diversity and spontaneity she trusted them much more than she did the mainstream media, which was controlled by corporations or driven only by a hunger for access to whoever was in power, or both.

this statement about the media sounds like it could have come from any number of writers in blogtopia (y!wctp!), so we simply assumed that mr. eisler, the author, was a fan of blogs.

we weren't even totally convinced that these mentions were something more than coincidence when we came across this familiar name on the very next page:

that kernel of resentment led to her first real act of rebellion - an american-as-apple-pie boyfriend named josh marshall...to whom she lost her virginity.

wow! josh marshall? and he's a playah? (that dog!!) who knew??

still, we said, the names "josh" and "marshall" aren't all that uncommon...and mr. eisler didn't call that minor character josh michah marshall, after all.

but then, the girl who lost her virginity to josh, dumped him on the very next page, and you'll never guess the name of her next boyfriend:

she'd been at the law school less than a month when she got involved with a second-year, another anglo-american, this one named john cole.

john cole??? not the ex-goper, now sane proprietor of balloon juice! couldn't be! hilzoy, josh marshall, john cole, mainstream corporate media rants...this all just has to be coincidence!

More excitement over at Casa la Skippy.