The wildly popular blogger S.D. Smith has a list of blogging fears which land close to home. “#7 That I’ll get too big for my britches because I do a weblog which any ten-year old could do.”

S.D., that’s why you need insightful linkage and essaying like what you find here. What is this bit of silliness? Fake book covers? Funny, but what if I decide to read those books? I could be led astray by The Shaq, and would you want that on your conscience? I hear that book has heresy in it.

The Drexel Publishing Group has a new blog in which students will be contributing. Prof Stein has the details.

Today’s post from Jen Fromal is interesting. She talks about Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love, and the idea that every city has a word that defines it.

Rome’s word is “sex” and Naples’ word is “fight.” Gilbert’s Swedish friend says that Stockholm’s word is “conform,” and Gilbert concludes that New York City’s word is “achieve” (as opposed to Los Angeles’ word of “succeed.”)

What do you think of this? I wonder if Washington D.C.’s word is “control.”

Have you seen the websites on which you have type out the misshapen letters in a little box before you leave a comment? In that moment, you are doing the work of translation.

In fact, your brain has deciphered words that had baffled the scanning software used for an enormous project to digitize every public domain book in the world.

“We can coordinate literally millions of people on the Internet to work together to do something that computers cannot do,” says Luis von Ahn, an assistant professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.

… Some 200 million of these words, dubbed “Captchas” for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart, are typed every day by people around the world.

Should you be wondering, you are not reading one of the 100 best blogs as listed by the incredibly talented and a truly decent man of the 21st century, Bryan Appleyard. No doubt, BwB would have made the top 200–maybe top 1000–list, but that’s no reflection on the generosity, the heart-felt love, and profound goodness of Mr. Appleyard, who set about the task at hand with expertity. He calls them as he sees them. He is a blessing to the blogscape (his word to replace “blogosphere”),even if someone killed himself on his blog the other week, which could happen to anyone. (via Books, Inq.)

Thanks to Sally over at Fine Old Famly, who has (if I follow how it works, something I’m not entirely certain of) awarded us a Premio Dardo Award. It’s a sort of chain award, requiring you to pass it on to 15 other bloggers, with the ultimate Ponzi-like result that eventually everyone will have one and it will mean nothing.

Still and all, she says nice things about us, and that doesn’t happen often (at least to me). So thank you Sally.

I’ll have to think about whom to share it with. I should probably let Phil select some of the recipients. Or all of them, if he’s in the mood.



Update: There’s actually only a few literary blogs I read with any regularity. So they get the prize for my part.

1. Kevin Holstberry’s Collected Miscellany. Kevin has wide-ranging interests, and the books he reviews are pretty eclectic (or so they seem to me. I suppose everyone considers anyone else’s reading idiosyncratic).

2. The View From the Foothills. A very good Christianity/Books blog I’ve been following for years.

3. Roy Jacobsen’s Writing, Clear and Simple. Great advice from a good writer, when he bothers to blog. Which he’s been doing more often lately. Maybe this’ll encourage him.

4.I Saw Lighting Fall, the blog of our commenter and friend Loren Eaten. Like all excellent literary blogs (such as this one), he casts a wide lariat and talks about a range of subjects.

5. The Maple Mountain Story Club, domain of another of our commenters, S. D. Smith. He deals with books and writing, and also shares bits of his own work.

6. I think Patrick O’Hannigan’s The Paragraph Farmer can also be called a literary blog, though that’s only one of many subjects covered. Patrick is, as I used to be, a regular contributor to The American Spectator.

Phil’s additions:

7. Frank Wilson’s blog, Books, Inq., is invaluable to me, so I should honor him first. He does blog with a team, but he’s the leading man.

8. Jimmy Davis does good work on and off the screen. He blogs at The Cruciform Life.

9. The Thinklings don’t need an award. They are just about awesome without one. Still, I offer this to them.

10. I doubt the guys at The Rabbit Room need an award either. They actually have albums, books, etc. to fool with, but they have a strong blog. Bravo.

I’ll stop there. I’m listening to Phil Vischer speaking at Moody’s Founder’s Week right now. It’s stirring. He said if we’re focused on being in the middle of God’s will today, then where we’ll be in five years (our ministry or personal vision) is none of our business.

Personal blogging has been declared dead. I should post my random musings on that sometime.

Thanks to Will Duquette over at The View From the Foothills, for tipping me off to Dr. Boli’s Celebrated Magazine.

The discovery of this blog raises two questions in my mind:

a) Why didn’t I know about this before? and

b) How can I go on blogging, knowing the competition is doing stuff this brilliant?

What’s it like? Sort of like one of those Monty Python animations, only you read it.