It occurs to me that I ought to be logging not only the good stuff I find for the first time but also the sites to which I return periodically. So. Sites of the last few days. (Most of these are serials, and my bookmarks point to a specific date in the archives; for you I stripped the link down to a front page.)

Steve Jackson Games Illuminated Site of the Week. Some are satirical, some are genuinely loony. Warp 9 to Hell, a tasteless comic strip. Snail Dust, an introvert’s college strip, named for a shape-changing character that grew from the dust behind a computer. Science News (the magazine, which I also get in hardcopy). Bizarro, the surreal newspaper toon; painfully slow loading. Zortic, a silly space adventure strip. Alice, a strip about a middle-school girl with Calvin’s imagination. The Straight Dope. Astronomy Picture of the Day. The Periodic Table: Michael Swanwick (author of Vacuum Flowers, which I loved, and The Iron Dragon’s Daughter, which I did not love) is writing a short-short story for each element, in order. No Outlet, a deadpan philosophical college roommates strip. The Geometry Junkyard: Recent Additions. Plokta fannish news. How Stuff Works: Articles of the Day. Dirty Old Men’s Association International. White House in Orbit, a retro-scifi secret agent strip. Ron Paul’s weekly column.

Bon mot from newcomer Bruce Baugh (whom I’ve sorta known for yonks):

I was doing my usual Heisenberg-like walk through blog links (I either know whose page I’m on or what topic I’m following) . . .

Steven Den Beste attempts a taxonomy of weblogs.

Oops, I have not publicly thanked Steve Neal for hosting Bayside Blogger Bash II this weekend.

It was smaller (and therefore more comfortable for this introvert) than the previous edition, ably hosted by Peter Přibík and Christina Tosti who very kindly listened to my blitherings about polyhedra.

I showed up too late to be in John Weidner’s photo gallery. Man of mystery, that’s me.

Hey, a blog by a law professor.
I refer of course to Eugene Volokh, who last week hung up a joint shingle with his brother Sasha, a student at Harvard. (Sasha recently made the news by organizing a gun club there, and folks said hm, is he related to Eugene? Now we know.)
I’ll be watching, just as if it did not already take me six weeks to cycle my “sites to watch” list.

E.V.’s remarks on the “I don’t know any people like that” phenomenon remind me of something that happened to me.
On a Sunday in 1996, as I blasted away at a defenseless paper target with my Ruger KP90D, a shell bounced off the wall and was caught behind my glasses, burning off a bit of skin. Next day, of course, a coworker asked what happened; once word got around, another said “I didn’t know they scatter shells about”; another asked what caliber; and yet another said, “I’m thinking of trading in my rifle; what caliber do you think I should use for elk?” —
Five years later, getting ready for a trip to Front Sight, it was the elk guy that I asked to sign for my good moral character.

And of course E.V. says exactly the right thing about nail-clippers on airplanes.

Angela Vierling is a grad student, studying algebraic geometry; and she has a blog. Sadly, it’s not very active.
August 2003: It’s a lot more active than it was.
October 2004: it’s gone, but she saved some archives.

Way the heck back in November one Jim Henley, of whose blog I have just now become aware, made a very interesting point about foreign intervention:

And out of the preceding ingredients the final, general case against “humanitarian intervention” arises like a word appearing in a bowl of alphabet soup — it’s a cruelty to the people you profess to want to help. . . . As soon as the Hutu government inaugurated its slaughter of the Tutsis, Belgium pulled the troops out, so they wouldn’t get hurt. Belgian lives were more important to the Belgian government and people than Tutsi lives. The preference was forgiveable. The pretense that things were otherwise, which was what the deployment of “peacekeepers” constituted, was not. How many Tutsis died because of the false security Belgium’s pantomime of concern engendered? Absent Belgium’s “humanitarian” intervention, the Tutsi would have known ahead of time what was true anyway: they were on their own and needed to look to their own defense.

Awfully decent of Mr Henley to provide a ‘best of’ menu.