Sentential Links #19

A roundup of good stuff from Blogistan. Click for context:

:: I finished "The Unbearable Lightness of Being" last night. And cried like a little baby. (Hmmm...been a while since I found a book that made me cry. Maybe I should look this one up.)

:: Let me tell you about my history with Tommy. (That is, Tommy of Tommy, the album by The Who. Which I've never heard. Is it true that if you play it with a candle burning, you will see your future? And I should have voted for Almost Famous, which I just freaking adore.)

:: Times change, people change, literature and popular culture change. But it's always struck me as strange that in such a Bible-thumping, God-bothering country as this one, so many of us never learn who Ahab was, the original Ahab, who did more to provoke the LORD God of Israel to anger than all the kings before him, until we first sit down with a copy of Moby Dick or hear the story of Absolam, Amnon, and Tamar until we read Faulkner.

:: The difference being that the US is no longer looking to annex Canada by force (if at all). (Well, shit. Here's me, thinking that being a launching point for our invasion of Canada will finally be the silver bullet that the Buffalo economy's been looking for, lo these many years! Just found this blog last week, by the way.)

:: And by the way, we rented The Iron Giant to watch Saturday night. Never seen it before. I'm not giving anything away, but at the end, when the IG is flying and says, "I'm Superman..." I totally had to increase my rate of blinking by at least a factor of ten, lest my wife see an unwonted emotional outpouring. (Oh, screw that! Cry openly! The wimmen-folk love a guy who cries. I think I read that somewhere, anyway. Oh, and congrats on one year blogging.)

:: I think there’s something to this, and I also think that blogging has had the effect of liberating thousands of talented amateur writers whose particular gifts may not necessarily fit neatly into the pigeonholes of professional publication. (I think it's amazing how nearly every time the thought crosses my mind that maybe I'm just wasting my time here, Terry Teachout posts something like this.)

:: There is, needless to say, quite a bit about the Bomb on the Internet. (No, really? But seriously, Mr. Ross has a collection of fascinating photos he took while touring the Trinity site, where the first atomic bomb was exploded. Fascinating stuff.)

:: You know, there is very little in the world that makes me more objectively terrified than the idea of George Bush and his den of incompetent hacks fiddling with the Posse Comitatus Act. Indeed, if you were to ask me what one thing would get me marching in the streets, this would be it. I'm entirely serious. (Actually, this is the entire post. I hope Mr. Scalzi doesn't mind.)

:: Plus, I'm teaching myself to play the piano--the fruits of which are certainly worth a blog entry or two--plus I've been doing lots of reading, but haven't had the energy to write much about it. (Well, crud. But hey, along the lines of self-taught pianists, perhaps I could send a book recommendation Will's way, as opposed to the other way around.)

Enough for this week. Enjoy, and I'll try to have this feature back on Sundays now, although, to be honest, I may keep it on Mondays, since I'm finding a heavy dose of blog-surfing nice and relaxing after a Monday at The Store.