sotto voce USA

Blog Links

(This post has been adapted from an AOL Weekend Assignment.) In my never-ending quest to bring you the best and the brightest from the web, here's a list of blogs that I've really been getting interested in lately. All are worth checking out...

AlterNet's blog, Peek: The Blog of Blogs, does a great job of scanning the liberal blogosphere and coming up with the unusual story that the mainstream media missed or the unusual angle on the big story. They look at it all to bring you the best of the best. It's a great place for liberal political and news junkies to start the day.

The American Progress Action Fund's blog, Think Progress, is also a great resource for the liberal news/political junkie. They post a lot of entries per day, but they're simple, bite-sized, easy to digest chunks of information that cut right through the right-wing smokescreen.

Today in Iraq is a blog that gathers up all of the latest information about Bush's War. It has links to news stories, editorials, analysis, etc. The entries usually run a little long, but there are few of them since they all pull together a lot of information. A very useful site for the kind of stuff you won't see on Fox News or CNN.

As Monty Python would say, "And now for something completely different..." For the wacky, the offbeat, the unusual, the hilarious, and the gross, you can't go wrong with Dave Barry's Blog. The Miami Herald (and nationally syndicated) columnist, author, and lead guitarist and vocalist of the Rock Bottom Remainders, puts together this blog that's a great pick-me-up after reading the depressing news from the other blogs. My favorite entries here are the plot summaries of the idiotic TV show, "24." Here's the latest.

And finally, I should have made a whole separate entry on this, but...I once heard the term "fritterware" to describe software that's designed to just fritter away your time while accomplishing almost nothing. Google has designed the ultimate fritterware by putting those satellite images on Google Maps. I couldn't begin to tell you how many hours I've wasted on this...
Here's my hometown of Chattanooga, Tennessee.
I can see my house from here.
This is the National Military Cemetary in Chattanooga. The small oval in the lower right contains the graves of Andrews Raiders of Great Train Robbery fame.
Here's the four downtown Chattanooga bridges. From left to right, they are the Olgiati Bridge (U.S. 27), the Market Street Bridge, the Walnut Street Bridge and the Veterans' Bridge. In the lower left corner is BellSouth Park, home of the Chattanooga Lookouts, the AA farm club of the Cincinnati Reds.
Here's a neat Atlanta satellite image. This is Turner Field, home of the Atlanta Braves. Above Turner Field, you can see the outline of the old Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium marked out in a parking lot.
Here's Six Flags over Georgia on the outskirts of Atlanta.
Here's the Magic Kingdom at Walt Disney World.
Here's the censored White House and other government buildings.
The Washington Monument.
More censored government buildings, including the U. S. Capitol Building.

Well, you get the idea. Once you figure out what you're looking at, the Google Satellite Maps are pretty cool. You can start close to home, follow roads out by clicking and dragging on the maps, zoom in and zoom out, check out where you've been before, check out places you'd like to go and basically just waste hours playing around here.

Which brings us to the fifth blog on this list. If you don't have time to spend hours playing around with Google Maps, go to Google Sightseeing for the best of the best. Everyday, they bring you several entries of places to go and things to see from your computer screen. One of the neatest posts they've done is a "planes in flight megapost."

Also, check out Whatever, where John Scalzi's been "taunting the tauntable since 1998," World O' Crap, Overspun and the Whiskey Bar, where more taunting of the tauntable takes place, Daily Kos, American Street, Political Animal and Oliver Willis for more than you ever wanted to know about politics, Media Matters, TVNewser, the Daily Howler, and Eric Alterman's Altercation for news about what a wonderful job our news media are doing, and check out Boing Boing just for the weird crap they come up with everyday. Finally, three old AOL pals have drifted over into Blogspot with excellent blogs that are worth reading - they are what's the hubbub...?, Wonky Muse, and A Stop at Willoughby.

What are your favorite blogs?

posted by fdtate @ 12:15 PM