Around the Blogosphere

One of the hallmarks of my business is that I spend an enormous amount of time waiting. As I sit in my office all day long, I don't really do all that much work, but the work I do is in five minute increments here and there. I print up docs and fax them off, then I have to wait for someone to fill them out and fax them back. I fax off a client's loan application and credit report to a lender, then I have to wait for them to send back a pre-approval. I go online and submit a loan, get it approved, call the client to let them know, then I have to wait for them to send me income documents. I have to wait for the appraiser to get the home appraised, wait for inspectors to do their jobs, wait for title companies to complete their title search, and so forth. The upshot of this is that I have a lot of time to kill, and I generally kill it by writing here or by surfing the blogosphere, seeking out interesting blogs to read. So here are a few that I've come across lately that I think both of my regular readers might enjoy.

Reverend Spork's Divine Church of the Curmudgeon. Anyone who knows me will tell you that I was born a curmudgeon. My first spoken words were "goddamn kids these days". I inherited this trait from my father, who enjoys his curmudgeonliness so much he married a fundamentalist pentecostal to give him something to be cynical about in perpetuity. I had to laugh at this post, about his girlfriend dragging him to see a clown perform (Bill Irwin, who is actually a really brilliant performer):

And the Girlfriend was no fun whatsoever. She actually refused to go along with my idea of standing up and singing the chorus to "Voices Carry" while I did my best horrified boyfriend expression. Can you imagine? She used some lame excuses like the audience paid a lot of money to see the show, and they wouldn't be happy to have it interrupted, and how in the hell was she supposed to get her hair done like Aimee Mann on such short notice and blah blah blah blah blah. This, this is why theater is dead.

Overall, the Girlfriend had a good time, and that's what counts to me. However, she wants more. Glowing from her success of dragging me to two theater productions in less than a year, she wants to expand her Girlfriend Entertainment Empire to musicals, a field for which my undisguised loathing has thwarted previous girlfriends' attempts to win me over.

To say that I can relate is to understate the situation. I loathe musicals. I am of the opinion that there will be no peace on this earth until Andew Lloyd Webber is strangled with the entrails of Stephen Sondheim. But the world clearly needs more writing like this from the good Reverend Spork. Brilliant stuff.

Eric Scheie's Classical Values. I don't agree with him all the time (does anyone ever agree with anyone all the time? I shudder at the thought). I especially disagree with his latest post about Reagan trying to protect "the right to be left alone". His fraudulent war on pornography and vastly increased war on drugs put the lie to that claim. But all in all, Eric is a good writer and his blog is well done. Like me, he is a somewhat-squishy libertarian - one can be a libertarian, after all, without swallowing the entire pitcher of Ayn Rand Koolaid.

Patterico's Pontifications is written by an LA County Prosecutor. He's a good deal more conservative than I am, but a very good writer. I like it when someone can surprise you, when you think you've got them pegged politically and find out that they think something quite different on some issue than you expect. And he has exquisite taste in blogs, having been probably more glowing in his review of my work than is warranted.

Shut Up Already is a very funny blog. The writing reminds me very much of Fran Lebowitz, whose work I love dearly. It combines self-deprecation with just the right amount of bitterness. Example #1:

To date, I also haven't written the great American novel (and by "great American" I mean published.) Or any novel, as far as that goes. I did have a brilliant flash of insight as to what my novel should be about yesterday though; a waitress, who works in an Irish bar, and drinks a little too much and makes a few, ah, poor choices when drunk but in the end finds true love and a rewarding, socially responsible career. (I know that ending sounds a little pat, but I've explored the alternate ending "...but in the end gets a job pushing paper, moves in with her sister and starts spending her Friday nights watching TV" and believe me, it doesn't have the necessary drama). Only problem is, when I started thinking about my peripheral characters, I realized that thinly disguising embarrassing stories about people at bars I still frequent is no way to garner free drinks, and free drinks are essential to the lifestyle I'm trying to maintain. The novel's on the back shelf for a while.

Or read this one about making Grandma cry. Really good writing.

The Church of Critical Thinking. The name says it all.

Brett Rasmussen's Unscrewing the Inscrutable. Brett has had me on his blogroll for quite some time and I seem to get a lot of visitors by way of his blog. He describes himself as "a second shift assistant supervisor in the Puppy Grinding division of the Evil Atheist Conspiracy." It was through his blog that I found Scott Thomas, my first nominee for June's Idiot of the Month Award. And he even exchanged some e-mail with a couple of the nutballs who wants to have South Carolina secede and become a "Christian republic".

Check out all these blogs, you won't regret it.