THIS AND THAT

I should explain that I am currently in a holding pattern [which, I am afraid, suggests that I am going around in circles.]  There is a meeting scheduled for next Friday at which the gig I have been hinting about will formally be launched.  Once that happens, I will tell you all about it, but for the time being, I am simply idling along, unable really to do more than think obsessively about what I am planning to do and hoping to accomplish. 
What blogs does a blogger read?

I check in every day [actually several times a day] with four blogs:  Andrew Sullivan's Daily Dish, Markos Moulitsas' The Daily Kos, Josh Marshall's TPM, and Ariana Huffington's the Huffington Post.  Sullivan is an English gay journalist and activist [now an American citizen, I believe] who describes himself as a conservative but is an Obama supporter.  His blog is, among other things, a very useful way to keep abreast of what the right is saying.  The Daily Kos is a blog located politically on the left wing of the Democratic Party whose focus is on the nitty-gritty of electoral politics.  Moulitsas keeps track of every House and Senate race in the nation, and a great many state and local races as well.  I learn more about what is happening politically in my corner of North Carolina from him than I can from the local newspaper.  He has all the latest details on redistricting struggles in states across the country  TPM is a progressive reporting-based rather than opinion-based blog that draws on and thus keeps me in touch with a wide range of national and international reporting, and also does some original reporting itself.  The Huffington Post, which is the biggest and glitziest of these blogs, features a good deal of opinion [my son, Tobias, has appeared on it several times] and national and international raportage, along with pop cultural news and all manner of other things.  I also check in, from time to time, with Brian Leiter's blog, which is a clearinghouse for news in the academic philosophical world.  Leiter is a fulltime distinguished professor of Law at Chicago, and I do not have the foggiest idea how he manages to put as much as he does on his blog while also pursuing a very successful academic career.  He must not sleep.

All of these blogs rely heavily on materials originated elsewhere and simply reproduced or linked to.  Sullivan is a serious, albeit dissenting, Catholic, so there is a huge amount of material on his blog about faith, spirituality, atheism, prayer, and such like matters.  He also has an obsession with beards [he has one] and a rather magpie tendency to pick up and reproduce anything at all interesting on a wide range of topics.  All four blogs have staffs of people who write, collect, link, and otherwise produce the flood of material that appears on them.  And all four of them have a readership and daily visitorship [if I may put it that way] that is many orders of magnitude greater than the readership of this little blog.  On the very rare occasions when one or another of them mentions me, my viewer counter blips up like a blood pressure spike before settling back down.

I even read the NY TIMES online, although I also subscribe to the paper copy [for my wife, and for the crossword puzzle, which does not appear online -- they are not total fools.]  Since the new day's copy is posted not long after midnight, I read it when I get up [as I always do] in the middle of the night.  I also watch Rachel Maddow online, since her show airs at 9 p.m., which is after my bedtime.

II.