Blegfluenza

Do you want to engage Blogoverlords in wonkywanky debates (in which your voice will not be heard - Mr Comment 245 - frist!) on mass-transit proposals to improve your Blogoverlords' commute from Upper Condostan to downtown think tanks? I don't.

Heh, meh, feh, and gah. I try to make a point on every blog I frequent regularly to ping a site on that blog's blogroll to see if I can find something to make me giggle and/or think, and the number of sites I've tried recently that looked live and thriving in October but gone comatose or died in November is astonishing.

While your Blogoverlords consolidate their power (and if you want an object lesson in how power - cold, indifferent, Mississippi River 500-year flood power - works, watch Blogoverlords consolidate their power) now's a chance for us shetty bleggers, re-awakened rudely to our rubity by bleg-fatigue, bleg-hangover, bleg-inadequacy, blegmeh, to rededicate our individual brands, because what the fuck, now nobody is really reading us.

Me and mine, mofos. You and yours.

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• Cricket diplomacy, by Elric.
• Long article on Naomi Klein, Superstar.
• OBAMYFUCKINGGOD! The Pastor has an orgasm and wants you to eat his splooge AND PRAISE HIM FOR ITS TASTE.
• I claim outrage fatigue at this Greenwaldian duh.
• A moment of wild surmise.
• Party of the People, or Armpits.
• Rituals for Post-Consumer America.
• Holiday cheer - read the last paragraph at least for the best comment on the Wal-Mart* trampling.
• Fifteen maxims.
• Zizek is a fraud. Terrifically entertaining, but a fraud. Maybe somewhere I haven't seen he admits he's a fraud, but I'm sure he'd write an essay on fraud x fraud x fraud performativity in late decadent market wankery, to great mwahing in graduate English departments everywhere.
• While the post itself is worth reading, worth noting is the post uses a silly-ass Star Trek allusion to an episode whose bad guy some (once-upon-a-time) blogger took for a name.

Who the hell posts silly-ass Star Trek allusions anyway.

Oh.

• Robert Pollard writing soundtrack to Cleopatra musical?
• Best book covers of 2008 (h/t Ed - who also discusses the Naomi Klein article linked above) by people who call themselves BDR.
• New Pynchon details.
• Holyfuck, the lead singer of The Walkman recommends Anthony Hecht?
• Sylvia Plath/Anne Sexton sit-com vehicle!

I think of Plath's

METAPHORS

I'm a riddle in nine syllables,
An elephant, a ponderous house,
A melon strolling on two tendrils.
O red fruit, ivory, fine timbers!
This loaf's big with its yeasty rising.
Money's new-minted in this fat purse.
I'm a means, a stage, a cow in calf.
I've eaten a bag of green apples,
Boarded the train there's no getting off.

every time I see a pregnant woman. I never think of Anne Sexton poems other than when I hear a particular Gabriel song

There was a time when I first started reading poetry I liked Sexton's poetry far more than Plath's, though I haven't read either in decades.

I have first editions of Sexton's moldering in my basement.

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For the two of you who asked, Feral Update!

The planned de-balling and/or ovary-extractions didn't happen the weekend before Thanksgiving because the guy from west of Baltimore got squirrelly on us, changing plans, umming and ohhing, babbling about prices in an ever-increasingly expensive ways. I finally told him we'd make plans elsewhere.

This weekend, if all goes as planned, the three kittens plus mom will be trapped Saturday morning, chopped and/or scooped Sunday morning (with small notches snipped in their ears in case they're caught later and face a now unnecessary and futile re-operation), and released to our backyard Monday.

Nap we want to keep, and if possible we're going to introduce him into the house (he knocks on the door asking to come in when he sees us), and the others are welcome to stay. We know Nap is a boy; the other two we're not sure, but I've got permission to name one, if a boy, Frankie, Frankie Feral, for reasons only two of you out there will understand.