Eavesdropping

[posted by Callimachus]

Since it's likely to be more interesting than anything I have to say right now, here's a selective look at what some of our blogfriends have been up to. Please don't be offended if you're not included.

• If you want to get a visceral sense of the disaffection of traditional Republican base voters with the party as it is today, don't take the MSM's word for it: Go read this blistering post at Three Rounds Brisk.
  
  
• The Beiderbecke Affair continues a theme that seems to be a bee in the bonnet of the bloggers Reader favors: How popular songs take on new meaning when performed by singers of the opposite gender from the author.
  
  In this case, "Landslide," which I used to perform as a duet with a girl I knew in high school. She sang, I played the guitar, and it was one of my favorites to finger-pick because there was one chord you could pick without a hand on the fret board. I always made a point of doing something obvious with the free hand, like scratching my head or drinking a glass of water at that point in the song. See? I have nothing to say today.
  
  The written-by-a-woman song I'd really like to see done by a man? Jill Sobule's "I Kissed a Girl."
  
  
• Via "Isaac Schrodinger", we learn fanatics in the Islamic world are still burning, looting, and killing over cartoons that may or may not have been meant to offend them.
  
  
• Icepick is picking on the poor defenseless AP.
  
  
• Maggies Farm reminds us Erich Fromm remains relevant. Yes, on freedom, but I still can't forgive him his attempt to scientifically define "love."
  
  
• Sideways has memories of Lobster Boy. You'll never guess what it reminds him of.
  
  
• Amba offers up a macabre image from nature as a metaphor for human obsession. That one is going to stick, I'm afraid. That spider-wasp relationship is so nasty it almost serves as a single-point argument against a nature created by a just and loving god.
  
  And she also explores the ugliness of the atheist auto-da-fe:
  

  
  [W]hen something becomes a movement, it becomes a blunt instrument, gaining power at the expense of truth. People seek the power of unanimity and begin to purge those heretics who might deflect or slow the momentum of the rolling, growing snowball. But after a while, a human snowball either becomes destructive or stops growing, because precisely the people of reason want only to get out of its way.
  

  
  
• Gaius is braver than I am and charges into the Frost family/SCHIP pyre. Me, I had the Admiral Akbar reaction to all that: "It's a trap!"
  
  But I'm just going to every time I want to advocate something dicey and controversial run a picture of a basket of kittens with the post, and relate the idea to the health of kittens, and if anyone criticizes me, say "you just like to stomp on kittens."
  
  
• Pastor Jeff has some worthy reflections inspired by Columbus Day:
  

  
  America gets trashed regularly by all kinds of people because it's our culture that has survived and is currently at the top of the heap. If I were a Native American, I'd probably hate Columbus Day, too. But building your identity around an attitude of perpetually outraged victimhood doesn't change history, doesn't help anyone, and keeps you stuck in the past. It's a sad way to live, and a sorry way to remember history -- both the good and bad.
  

  
  Of all the holidays on the secular calendar, little-noted Columbus Day seems to be the favorite target for mugging by the virulent America-blamer contingent.
  
  
• Dyre Portents looks at Ron Paul on his own terms, which is refreshing, and concludes, "Politics is about doing the possible rather than the ideal and that truth will prove to be Mr. Paul's unmaking." Americans like to think of themselves as libertarians. They like to talk like libertarians. Occasionally, 20 percent or so will even vote that way. But in daily operation we're no more a libertarian nation than we are a Christian one.