The changes in, and problems with, Blogger have caused my pleasure in blogging to completely die. Maybe part of it is that it's summer, I'm spending more time outdoors and away from the computer, and I've been busy at work. But the main thing is that my "Blog This!" bookmarklet no longer works (does not work on Macs), so in order to post something I have to open another browser window, go to the blogger site, sign in, pick a blog, start typing a post, and hope I remember what I wanted to say. There's really nothing lately that I want to say that badly. So, who knows? I may be back, I probably will be back, but at this point this site isn't making me happy in any way. And since it generates no income, if it's not making me happy, well, frankly, why bother?

I'm not normally one to toot my own horn, but Tish said something today that made me so proud:

Whenever I read about A-list bloggers, or Technorati, or whateverfuckingthing we're horking up this week to try and validate why we do this, I go read Willa and Justin. They just do it. They just write their lives and share some links and it's just so good.

Thanks, Tish.

Fatshadow

Nice article from David Knopfler about The Singer Songwriter:

Think of the dissident poets of an earlier century like Shelley and Keats making their way to Italy where they hoped to shake down the stars with just parchment and quills - then contemporise them with electricity and mass communication, and you have the singer songwriter.

Fun kitty videos: my cat annie - zefrank.com

I saw in my search statistics that someone was looking for Moodswings Mail. I kind of forgot about it, but it looks like it still works . . .

Scholastic.com

His dream was to become a writer, and a particular kind of writer. "I don't care how long it takes me," he said. "I will work for years, all my life if necessary, to write my one book. I can live on my pension until I have finished. But in the end I hope to make a name for myself, in my one small field."

"And what is that?" I asked.

"He hesitated for a moment; then he replied, "Myself. It's a small enough field when you think of the millions of human beings on earth. But looked at in another way, how vast it is, if I can really learn to explore it. It's never been done, this kind of research; I mean, not honestly done. There is a glorious old Montaigne, of course: his essays were all in the field of self-exploration, but my approach will be from a different angle. The others who have tried it, Rousseau among them, were charlatans. They thought too much of themselves to understand themselves. I think nothing of myself; that's why I hope to succeed."

Ch. 6 - Frisbie of Danger Island - James Normal Hall

Link from The Island Chronicles, which I'm finding fascinating. I read the Message Board the other night, which seems pretty equally divided between, "Oh, cool! Have a wonderful time, what a terrific thing, how fun" (which is the camp I fall into) and "Easy for you to do, you're obviously wealthy, how exploitative, once you can't get to a Starbucks you'll be back soon enough, you're an idiot, etc., etc., etc."

Except for a rare few, I almost always regret reading message boards. It seems that too many people feel that it's their obligation and responsibility to bring everyone else down, and to make everyone else as bitter as they obviously are.

I've always thought it would be wonderful to offload all of my baggage and take off for a tropical island. Hasn't almost everyone? How wonderful that someone actually gets to have that experience. It's not me, but that's the way it goes. I don't resent them for it, I admire them. And I'm going along for the (virtual) ride.

After I found the Richard Thompson downloads, I sent them to a friend, which prompted an email conversation about music. We were each recommending music to the other, and it led to my mentioning that I'd been listening to Dave Alvin, who had opened for RT the last time I saw him in concert, and didn't he (Alvin) used to be with X, and speaking of X, did he know that Exene Cervenka used to be married to Viggo Mortensen, Aragorn from Lord of the Rings? I believe his head exploded at that point, due to an overload of weird names.

Oh, and the best one he recommended to me was Wendy Lands, who doesn't have a weird name at all.

There are some great free downloads of Richard Thompson music here: Beesweb Audio Downloads, including "Vincent Black Lightning 1952," one of my favorite songs of his.

I can't really wrap my brain around this:

Is there a copy of you reading this article? A person who is not you but who lives on a planet called Earth, with misty mountains, fertile fields and sprawling cities, in a solar system with eight other planets? The life of this person has been identical to yours in every respect. But perhaps he or she now decides to put down this article without finishing it, while you read on.

The idea of such an alter ego seems strange and implausible, but it looks as if we will just have to live with it, because it is supported by astronomical observations.

In fact, I don't even think I can read the whole article without my head exploding.

As strange as this may sound, the exact same situation occurs even in the Level I multiverse. You have evidently decided to keep on reading the article, but one of your alter egos in a distant galaxy put down the magazine after the first paragraph. The only difference between Level I and Level III is where your doppelgängers reside. In Level I they live elsewhere in good old three-dimensional space. In Level III they live on another quantum branch in infinite-dimensional Hilbert space.

Scientific American: Parallel Universes

Brain-expanding link from mimi smartypants