Blogging is a lot of fun – but it’s hard to keep it going for a long time.

One of the problems is that it can be a very solitary thing; it’s hard to keep up the output one needs to get established over a long, long time, all by oneself.

Back in 2004, there was a huge surge in blogs and blogging around the Twin Cities.  And over the course of the next year or two, many of those blogs gave it up.  And more than a few of them, thankfully, shut down their own blog and joined up with one of the other, larger group blogs that started springing up or, in some cases, coalescing from groups of people who liked blogging, but couldn’t quite justify the time it took to do it every single day.

I joked at the time that eventually the Twin Cities would their A-listers – Power Line, Captains Quarters – a few solitary holdouts (this was long before I’d entertained the notion of making Shot In The Dark a group effort), and several big group blogs that aggregated large groups of talented writers that wanted to blog, but couldn’t devote the time it took to get established on their own.

Even at the time, I joked that Freedom Dogs would eventually have 75 writers and an output rivaling Hot Air.

And I wasn’t far off!

The Dogs – led by Derek “Chief” Brigham – do the Twin Cities blogging community a great service by keeping a lot of good bloggers writing.

And there’s a lot of good writing . “Lassie” writes in re an Obama For America (OFA) email that didn’t pass the stink test:

Do we know that the OFA supporter would have survived even if she had “quality insurance,” or was her cancer too pervasive to defeat? As an ovarian cancer survivor, I dare say my insurance would not have saved me had I been one stage deeper with my spreading tumor. My chance for survival was just over 50%. We all have family and friends who lost their battles, despite being covered. Would government-run healthcare have saved her? Remember John Edwards’ claim that electing John Kerry as President would have made people like Christopher Reeve walk?

There’s no question that health care reform is needed. But to blame ObamaCare opponents for this poor woman’s loss to cancer is beyond belief. Tell OFA that if government takes over our care, that cancer patients will be waiting months to get seen and diagnosed – let alone getting treatment (if the panels have a say). Don’t believe me? Check out the survival stats for Canadians and Europeans under socialized medicine. Government doesn’t produce, and it certainly doesn’t heal.

Granted, it’s hard to pass the stink test against a dog.

Anyway – read the Dogs!

Today, the Northern Alliance Radio Network brings you the best in Minnesota conservatism from 9AM-3PM.

• Volume I “The First Team” –  Brian and John or some combination thereof kick off from 11-1.
• Volume II “The Headliner” – Ed and I are up from 1-3.  So much to talk about; session, Caucuses, the Tea Party Convention, Mr. Brown goes to Washington, the disintegration of Global Warming, unemployment, and so much more.
• The King Banaian Show! – King is on from 9-11 on AM1570, Business Radio for the Twin Cities!  We’re broadening the franchise; two stations, now!

(All times Central)

So tune in to all six hours of the Northern Alliance Radio Network, the Twin Cities’ media’s sole guardians of sanity. You have so many options:

• AM1280 in the Metro
• streaming at AM1280’s Website,
• On Twitter (the Volume 2 show will use hashtag #narn2)
• UStream video and chat (at HotAir.com or at UStream).
• Podcast at Townhall, usually by Monday
• Good ol’ telephone – 651-289-4488!
• And make sure you fan us on Facebook!

Join us!

One of blogs’ mai purposes is to give people a place to just plain vent.  Some do it well.  Some find something in it that works for them for a long, long time.

Scud, from Flyoverguy, is one of them.

Flyoverguy started, like a lot of MOB blogs, back in 2004.  And Scud’s been writing ever since, although a little less frequently lately.   Maybe there’s less to vent about?

I don’t know.  But he shares a lot of venting material with an awful lot of people these days:

In short, I don’t root against President Obama because I hate America. I root against President Obama because I hate his vision for America. It is those like President Obama who see America as a dark and dangerous place that requires earth-shaking change along European lines. It is those like President Obama who feel that Americans are nothing special — and that America is nothing special. As Obama himself put it: “I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.” In other words, America is not exceptional — it’s just because we live here that we feel it is. And the American people are not exceptional — they are merely Greeks or Brits or Russians or Chinese or Frenchmen born within our borders, with values no better or worse than their foreign compatriots. Obama’s belief in America’s unexceptionalism — his view that America’s government, not her people, is the formative force in her values; his view that the American people bear the stain of racial, sexual and military guilt; his view that America must abandon her scrupulous adherence to equality of opportunity in favor of equality of result, traditional morals in favor of alternative ethics, and liberty of enterprise in favor of redistributionism — that set of beliefs is antithetical to what makes America great.

Keep it going, Scud!  I’m with ya!

Next stop on the MOB tour: Forrest Chad Wilkinson.

I’ve never met Wilkinson (that I know of), but I feel like I read him a lot anyway; he’s fairly prolific on Facebook.  But his blog is fairly new by MOB standards; it started last year.

Wilkinson reads like a classic tea party libertarian/conservative.  He’s a Navy veteran – a sonarman, who seems to have that “sonarman” personality in his writing (and if you know enough “bubbleheads”, you know what I mean).  But he’s also a stable hand for a living, a line of work I hadn’t encountered since I left North Dakota.

And I liked this “day in the life of a stable hand” piece, from which I’ll excerpt a bit:

Some, when taken together go at such different paces that you are nearly pulled in two between the slow poke and the “I want my hay” quick-stepper. Lots of pulling in both directions can leave you very frustrated, especially when your trying to shut a paddock gate snaphook and chain. Ahggg!

Sheesh, lets get these animals out of the barn and get some peace and quiet so we can get the stalls cleaned.

Some, like Sulivan, are such a pacing bother that they go out early and, being part of a set of four, he can go out with Max right now. Then I can get Dancer out on the return and start to take advantage of the back and forth pattern as I enter and leave one end of the barn, then the other, leading horses out to paddocks and their morning hay.

It’s kinda like being a bartender at an unruly road house, or a manager at a hotel with very noisy and demanding customers.

You can’t lead these two together but you can those two, but one has to have his halter removed at the paddock gate, he has a sore that is healing on the nose.

And on and on it goes, every day at many horse barns throughout Minnesota, as it has for decades, centuries…

And this barn eventually returns to a relatively normal routine as the horses go out into this winter wonder-land, snorting and stomping into paddocks, jumping and kicking…and rolling, lots and lots of rolling and then getting up and shaking and settling into some nice hay.

Now to clean the stalls.

It is kind of fun in its own annoying way.

So check out Forrest Chad Wilkinson!

I’ve been trying to figure out what to write about Dan Lacey’s blog/cartoon/orthodox-Catholic-outsider-art-fest/huh-wha, Faithmouse, ever since I started writing this series.

Laceys’ a local cartoonist and artist who’d been getting some international play (he’s being published in a UK magazine, now; he’s gotten his stuff in the NYTimes).  A few years back, when the City Pages still openly recognized conservative blogs, Faithmouse won the rag’s “Best Conservative Blog” contest…

…which set a lot of conservative bloggers to wondering.  Lacey is orthodox Catholic and very very pro-life; he also admits to “wandering toward the center” in one long discussion forum thread, which to the City Pages is probably all the same.  It’d be a stretch to call him a “conservative blogger”.

What his stuff – the Faithmouse cartoon and his other art – is, is edgy, thought-provoking, genre-bending, maddeningly elliptical, uncompromising, sometimes inscrutable, sometimes looking like the downstream side of a fever dream or paint-huffing acid-dropping Hunter S. Thompson bender rendered in ink or acrylic, the kind of thing that’s prompted some of his critics to hop up and down like poo-flinging monkeys and call him a “pornographer”.

He’s also by a long stretch the best cartoonist within a day’s drive of the Twin Cities’ blogosphere.

I particularly liked this piece; God and Michael Jackson:

It’s not all safe for work.  But then not all art should be.

Kevin Ecker is not one of the more obscure MOB bloggers.  Everyone knows Kevin.  An unapologetic paleocon, one of the founding junta at True North, Kevin is also the foremost Second Amendment blogger in the Twin Cities (although Carnivore at TvM gives us all a run for our money).  And he’s been doing Eckernet for a long, long time – actually going back to February 10 of 2002, which was five days after I got started.

Did I say unrepentant paleo?  Yep.  Kevin’s never been shy about mixing it up with the GOP establishment, even in his capacity as an activist:

The conservative agenda is clearly popular right now, it’s a gimme for the Republicans right?? Wrong.  Polls show conservatives simply don’t trust Republican legislators, and they have a lot of reason to.

But Tea Party activists have to eventually side with Republicans don’t they?? No, not at all, and Scott Brown’s election proved it.  Scott Brown got his volunteers from the Tea Party movement.  He raised over a million dollars a day via the internet.  His campaign existed largely outside the Republican Party structure.  Republicans always promise lower spending and smaller government, but when they get to Washington they feed the government hog instead.  When Scott Brown promised the same, the public, especially the Tea Party activists responded with great enthusiasm.  The Scott Brown campaign didn’t just exist outside the Republican Party structure…..it THRIVED.

The Tea Party is the most popular movement in the country, far outpacing both the Democrats and Republicans.  And now they’ve proven they can do more than just stand around and make noise in town halls and in web forums on the internet.  They can make or break an election, even in hostile territory.  The Republican Party hasn’t yet figured out that they need the Tea Party, but the Tea Party movement is slowly waking up to the fact that they don’t need the Republican Party.

If you’re not reading Eckernet – well, your mission is clear.

Our next stop on our tour around the Minnesota Organization of Bloggers is Downing World.

One of the fun things about the MOB is realizing that there’s this huge undercurrent of smart, motivated, boundlessly interesting people out there, all over the place.  And you never know when you’re going to smack into one of them.

If only rhetorically.

David Downing lives in Saint Paul, has a diverse bunch of interests, and has been blogging pretty steadily for almost six years now.

Given my interest in schools, this post caught my attention:

Orphanages, though, are passe. They’re considered old-fashioned. Inhumane. Draconian. Mckenzie writes:

When Newt Gingrich suggested in 1994 that many welfare kids would be better off in orphanages, Hillary Clinton declared the proposal “unbelievable and absurd.” Conventional child-welfare wisdom hasn’t changed much since.

Families — blood or foster — should raise children, the modern, progressive, liberal mindset says. Not government. Not institutions.

They conveniently ignore the 800-lb. irony in the room. I’m surprised that I hadn’t caught it until now.

The same modern, progressive, liberal types who find institutional child-rearing so offensive tend to be the same people who want the public schools to take over more and more of what used to be the responsibilities of parents. After all, the government and professional educators know best. They’ll feed the kids breakfast. Teach them about sex and drugs. Teach them values (whose, exactly?). Provide after-school care. Provide summer programs. They want the schools to take over as many parental responsibilities as possible, even when kids have parents!

So, they hold both of these ideas at the same time: 1) An institution called an orphanage couldn’t possibly raise children as well as substitute parents. 2) An institution called a public school can raise children better than their actual parents.

Read the whole thing (from mid-January).

Downing cranks out something a couple of times a week, and everything I saw looked like good stuff.

Check out a new MOB blog every day.  I mean, I am, so why not?

Today, the Northern Alliance Radio Network brings you the best in Minnesota conservatism from 9AM-3PM.

• Volume I “The First Team” –  Brian and John or some combination thereof kick off from 11-1.
• Volume II “The Headliner” – Ed and I are up from 1-3.  In addition to the usual “week in review” stuff, we’ll be talking with comedian Kevin Jackson from Blacksphere.
• The King Banaian Show! – King is on from 9-11 on AM1570, Business Radio for the Twin Cities!  We’re broadening the franchise; two stations, now!

(All times Central)

So tune in to all six hours of the Northern Alliance Radio Network, the Twin Cities’ media’s sole guardians of sanity. You have so many options:

• AM1280 in the Metro
• streaming at AM1280’s Website,
• On Twitter (the Volume 2 show will use hashtag #narn2)
• UStream video and chat (at HotAir.com or at UStream).
• Podcast at Townhall, usually by Monday
• Good ol’ telephone – 651-289-4488!
• And make sure you fan us on Facebook!

Join us!

In all of the Minnesota Organization of Bloggers, there may be no blogger more persistent than Doug Bass of Crossword Bebop. Doug subtitles CBbop “Perhaps the first Anglospheric crossword blog”, and to my knowledge he’s exactly coirrect.

Eclectic? Heck yeah; you think posts about Sodoku written with archaic Cypriot syllabic alphabets grow on trees?

The Cypriot syllabary is a syllabic script used in Iron Age Cyprus, from ca. the 11th to the 4th centuries BCE, when it was replaced by the Greek alphabet. But it seems to have enough interest to have its own Unicode chart

And that, indeed, is what blogging’s supposed to be about; people writing about what grabs ’em in the liver!

So check out Doug at Crossword Bebop . Learn things you never knew you needed to know, and be glad you did!

In my trip around the MOB, I’ve been delighted to find a few blogs that I’d overlooked over the years, that I realize I’m going to have to check out much more regularly, or even devote a coveted spot on my feed reader to.

One of those would be Conrad Zero. He’s an enigmatic anonyblogger with a taste for writing depthy analytical pieces about eclectic topics; he doesn’t blog often, per se, but he writes interesting stuff.

Yes, interesting:

A leisurely stroll through the fiction section of your local bookstore will reveal a surprising number of book covers that are… ass.

Literally.

Primarily female ass.

I’m going to be the very, very, very last person in the world to complain if people want to put any portion of the female anatomy on book covers.  So blame my Inner Philosopher for asking “Why?”

The simple answer is that ’sex sells.’ But for the sake of a blog post, I’m going to pretend there’s more to it than that.

It’s a longish post, like most of Zero’s output.  And, like most of Zero’s output, it’s an interesting read.

So I’ll be checking back more often.

That may be the downside of taking this tour of the MOB; my daily reading load keeps rising.

One of the minor bummers of the hectic slam-bang that this last few years have been is that my blog-reading has fallen way off.  I keep a few of the day-to-day essentials on my Google RSS Reader, but there’s just no time, usually, to randomly surf through blogs at the moment.

Which is, of course, one of the reasons I’m doing this series.  Because I know that the Minnesota Organization of Bloggers has a slew of fascinating productions that I want to reconnect with – and, more importantly, connect to new audiences.

With that in mind, the next stop on our trip around the MOB:  Crazy But Able

CbA has turned into a bit of a group blog – but it’s always been John Wilson’s blog.  And John (and crew) has been plugging away for quite some time now.  John and his wife Peggy are also neighbors of mine (more or less; I run into them periodically around the Midway).

And if there’s a blogger that’s almost eclectic enough to give our own Bogus Doug a run for his money, it’d be Wilson.  Music?  Electronics?  Language?

I liked this post:

We won a turkey in a random drawing in our apartment complex. All residents were entered. Makes me wonder how many random drawings and contests we’ve lost.

Also of note: What English sounds like to foreigners:

See more funny videos and Music Videos at Today’s Big Thing.

From the original website: “An Italian singer wrote this song with gibberish to sound like English. If you’ve ever wondered what other people think Americans sound like, this is it.”

Next step: getting Bob Dylan to make a cover of this.

I’d love to see a Bob Dylan/Michael Stipe duet.

Anyway – that’s Crazy But Able. Read ’em!

I was driving through my neighborhood the other day, and I came up to one of those stupid traffic roundabouts that appeared at intersections near key community activists’ houses over the past few years.  Not just any activists, mind you – the ones that yap and howl the hardest over “traffic calming”.  These are the people behind the latest plague of city-funded weirdness in the Midway; the enigmatic, oblique (“confusing”) signs, the placards begging people to drive slow, and finally, the stupid roundy-rounds.

Now, this has been one of the worst winters on record for streets in Saint Paul.  And I don’t know that anyone figured on that when they designed the stupid roundabouts; they’re very difficult for city plow trucks to plow around.  So the roadway around the stupid roundabout is an impassible mass of rutted ice ridges radiating away from the stupid round-about; if you’re not bouncing around like a four-year-old that snuck some Red Bull, you’re sliding down the ice sideways directly at oncoming traffic.

Suffice to say, I was not “calmed”.

It was shortly after this incident that I checked out Conservative Cravings.

We first met “Family of Five”, author of  Conservative Cravings, at last summer’s MOB party.  He debuted the blog right around that time.

And I’m happy to see Fo5 has been working away in the meantime.  I liked this one:

Traffic calming is just another way of saying, quit driving through MY neighborhood.

70th St in Edina has been there a long, long time. It’s main function is connect Hwy 100 to the Southdale Mall business district and then onto York Avenue. Since Hwy 100 is one of the oldest freeways in the metro area and Southdale Mall was the first indoor mall in the United States, I would venture to guess that the connection between these two points dates back before any of the current residents on 70th St. That would mean that when they purchased their home, they would have been aware of the purpose of the road, it’s speed limit (currently 30 mph) and all the surrounding development. Why buy a house on a street that does not fit your lifestyle and then try to get the city to work around your desires?

So why has the use of 70th St been OK for the last say 40 years and now it needs changing? Squeaky wheels get the grease

Conservative Cravings.  Not just a MOB member, but very timely.

Check him out!

I’ll cop to it.  I don’t know much about Cold Hearted Truth.

I try to know most of the people involved in MOB blogs; I can usually name at least someone on the staff of many of the MOB blogs, and I often as not recognize them at the parties.

I can not place Cold Hearted Truth.  And they are pretty skimpy on the details on their blog; no bios, no chronology (I have no idea when they started), not a lot of clues about the people behind the blog.

But they are conscientious, writing lots and lots of good stuff.  They are  certainly conservatives, lest there be any doubt:

Certainly skewed by the one GOP commissioned poll that shows Brown up double digits, but perhaps that offsets two seperate polls that were commissioned by the Democrats.

Interestingly, it is being reported by insiders that Coakley’s own internal polling has shown her down in the three to five percent area, so maybe the average showing Brown up two points is fairly accurate?

Perhaps this can be a learning experience!

Anyway – Cold Hearted Truth, an excellent way point on a journey around the MOB.

Today’s stop on the Minnesota Organization of Bloggers tour is the Chisago County GOP blog.

Now, my policy in compiling this list is to focus on blogs that have been updated in the past month.  CCGOP hasn’t had anything since September.

But since this is the sort of blog that’s been the kind of thing the MOB was set up to encourage – small-group activism – and it was once a very active blog, I’m going to send ’em a link just to either encourage ’em to shake things up in time for caucuses, or re-form themselves, or…

…well, something!

Hang in there, guys!

A few years back, incontinent shriekblogger Karl Bremer jumped up and down and shot steam out his nostrils and bellowed that the Minnesota Organization of Bloggers was a conservative organization.  To be fair, Bremer always jumps up and down and squirts steam out his ears, so it’s not that big a distinction…

…but the main point is that the MOB is, and has always been, intended to be utterly non-partisan.  That it is largely conservative could be chalked up to any number of reasons – I suspect it’s that way too many liberals really really can’t tolerate cognitive dissonance – but the proof is in the pudding; our seminnual MOB parties have welcomed people of every political stripe, from Swiftee to Eva Young to Eric Black.

At any rate, Flash from Centrisity is one of the MOB’s charter members.  He’s a center-lefty, and so is his blog.

But just as Flash and I go way back beyond blogging and politics (we’ve been friends and neighbors since long before either of us thought “blog” was anything other than a post-drunken-burrito-frenzy kind of bodily noise), his blog often enough focuses on the sorts of things that should unite us all; family (including his years-long narratives about his songs, including Sergeant Tom, who just got out of the Marines), community, and most importantly, beer:

Yes folks, Global Climate Change has been officially confirmed.

Today, January 15, 2010 at 4:22 PM, Spring arrived in the Midway. On tap, Natural Ice! I need the 5.9% alcohols to keep the lines clear LOL

Flash’s kegerator has long been not only the social center of the central Midway for almost a generation – but its’ first tapping of the season is always the great harbinger of spring in this part of Saint Paul.  The ceremonial first tapping is usually a sign that winter is over.

(But…January 15?  The phrase “Beerational Exuberance” springs to mind.   I’ll discuss it at the garage sometime this next weekend).

Up next on my tour of the Minnesota Organization of Bloggers – Casual Sundays with Mr. Curry.

I always urge everyone to read every MOB blog – but Casual Sundays… has always been one of my favorites.  It’s one of the better blogs you may not be reading.

Casual Sundays…is not your one-stop shop for political head-banging.  It’s a wry look at family life from someone who’s had a family for a while, now.

Of course, that family started back in Jamestown, North Dakota – back when I was in college, where her husband Jay was the basketball coach.  Their oldest was born there, which was a subject of one of the long list of my favorite posts from the blog:

Somewhere in the middle of it all, Jay decided that that was it; he could never put me through such an ordeal again. Yeah, that worked out. Have you met our three other kids?

Having babies is amazing. When you are in the thick of it, you swear nothing could possibly be worth the trouble. Then, at the height of the awful, they hand you the most wonderful, awesome, fascinating and beautiful thing you’ve ever seen, felt or imagined; your own child.

The world literally changes.

Okay, the world doesn’t change, the world doesn’t even notice. Here’s what’s important; You change.

She’s also the sister of Katie McCollow, of the late and much-lamented Yucky Salad With Bones.  So the knack must run in the family

She’s been writing the blog pretty consistently since 2006.

Stop by and say Hi!

When the guys on the Northern Alliance Radio Network originally started the MOB, we had a few clear missions

1. Build a social organization!:  Social media are the most fun when they’re social.  And for a mostly-solitary hobby like blogging, getting out and meeting people could be a huge boost.
2. Give the mass of smaller Twin Cities blogs an instant audience.  When blogs like Fraters, Powerline and I got started in 2002, it was hard to find any other bloggers in your area; I blogged for probably ten months before I encountered the guys from Fraters.
3. Give activists an outlet.

That last has been interesting, and in some ways controversial.  We wanted to give smaller political groups – district and BPOU committees, smaller interest groups – a way to get around the various party bureaucracies to get the word out, whatever “the word” is to them.  And the MOB (and the overtly partisan spin-off True North) drew quite a few of these smaller bodies; their motivations are different than many of us amateur pundits, but the goal is still the same; communicate with people, change things.

Carver County GOP has been one of those blogs for almost four years now. They’ve been an active, useful blog – part party information, part polemics, and all exactly what we had in mind when we got the MOB going.

GOP activists – check them out.  And think to yourselves; could my BPOU use something like this?

Although it’s more or less dead and gone (unlike, thankfully, its author), I’m going to give a shout-out to Cake Eater Chronicles. The longtime MOB stalwart Cathy the Cakeeater was one of the most sparklingly original writers on the Twin Cities blog circuit.

And then, a few years back, she came down with ovarian cancer, which both led to some of the most gripping blog writing – writing, really – anywhere.

And, unfortunately, and indirectly to the end of the blog.

Oh, the spirit was sure willing:

Yes, that’s right: I made good on my threats to leave the state entirely, and am pleased to say that once I’ve registered to vote in my new homeland, I will be represented in the Senate by people who are not a. Stuart Smalley or b. Amy “I’m a publicity seeking whore” Klobuchar.  Their names rhyme with Fay Gaily Mutchison and Fawn Smornyn.

But it’s not always about spirit:

It’s somewhat of a longish story that I will endeavor to simplify: the chemo-induced nerve damage in zee hands and feet was deemed permanent in August, and since I have a weird desire to be productive in the winters (never mind to go out of doors on occasion) the husband and I, at the end of October, packed up our belongings and moved south to observe and record the wild ways of the Texas hippies of Austin.  After some interesting stops and starts along the way, we’re finally moved into our new place, the husband will be opening his new store tomorrow, and I can finally sit down and get some work done.  I’m more grateful than I can say because the husband decided to upend his business and to, essentially, start over so that I can be as pain-free as I can get.  He’s a good guy and I am not worthy of him.

Enh.  I’ve met ’em both.  They both deserve the best, and I think they got it.

This post, in particular is one that grabbed my attention – indeed, was where this “around the MOB” series started in the first place.  Breast Cancer has, apparently, the best PR agents in the world – because an alien coming to earth and reading indicators in our society might think that only breasts and lungs ever get the disease.

Cathy’s had enough of it too:

It’s the fifth of October, and I’ve officially had it with the color pink.

Pink, in case you’re an Eskimo and don’t have either a tee vee or the ability to whip down to the grocery store to purchase some seal steaks, is the color of Breast Cancer Awareness.  October is, officially, Breast Cancer Awareness month.  Yesterday, we tuned in to watch the Bears beat the snot out of Detroit, and what were the husband and I treated to?  Pink gloves on the big, badass players, pink ribbons on their helmets, pink towels on the sidelines, pink bills on ball caps, etc.  The other day, while in Austin, I was asked at the checkout line (mind you this was also on the 29th of September.  Not October 1st.) at the grocery store if I wanted to donate money to breast cancer research.  When I went to my usual coffee date at the local Bou with Mr. H. yesterday, the entire store looked like a Pepto Bismol addict had puked all over.  The employees asked me if I wanted to buy a pound of “Amy’s Blend,” part of the proceeds of which would go to breast cancer research, and then they asked me if I would like to donate a pound to a woman who was going through treatment.  I politely said, ‘no, thank you,’ and then walked away.  One of the employees, who has been there a while and knew me when I was bald, shot a very understanding glance in my direction and shrugged.

All of it makes me wonder if anyone cares if I, as an ovarian cancer survivor, live or die because I didn’t get the trendy cancer.

The “good” news is, if you want to catch up with the whole oeuvre, there’s a finite amount.

Anyway – all the best, Cathy, and thanks for a great run!

It’s the fifth of October, and I’ve officially had it with the color pink.

Pink, in case you’re an Eskimo and don’t have either a tee vee or the ability to whip down to the grocery store to purchase some seal steaks, is the color of Breast Cancer Awareness.  October is, officially, Breast Cancer Awareness month.  Yesterday, we tuned in to watch the Bears beat the snot out of Detroit, and what were the husband and I treated to?  Pink gloves on the big, badass players, pink ribbons on their helmets, pink towels on the sidelines, pink bills on ball caps, etc.  The other day, while in Austin, I was asked at the checkout line (mind you this was also on the 29th of September.  Not October 1st.) at the grocery store if I wanted to donate money to breast cancer research.  When I went to my usual coffee date at the local Bou with Mr. H. yesterday, the entire store looked like a Pepto Bismol addict had puked all over.  The employees asked me if I wanted to buy a pound of “Amy’s Blend,” part of the proceeds of which would go to breast cancer research, and then they asked me if I would like to donate a pound to a woman who was going through treatment.  I politely said, ‘no, thank you,’ and then walked away.  One of the employees, who has been there a while and knew me when I was bald, shot a very understanding glance in my direction and shrugged.

All of it makes me wonder if anyone cares if I, as an ovarian cancer survivor, live or die because I didn’t get the trendy cancer.

Buddhapatriot is another of the “Class of ’04” blogs.  Things’ve been a little slow, but he’s always worth a read.

Like this post, near and dear to my heart, on living on the fringes of the big conservative tent:

I was thinking again this afternoon, after hearing Hugh Hewitt hawk “Intelligent Design” on his radio show, about how weird it is for me to have become this “right-wing” Republican five years ago.

How can I hang out with conservatives if I’m anti-death penalty, anti-tort reform, anti “Marriage Amendment”, against “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”, and for open border immigration?

Well, in case you hadn’t read my previous post on the subject, it’s because many leftists are just thoroughly icky people.

Support your local MOB blog!

Next up on  our trip around the MOB is Brad Carlson, one of the longer-running blogs in the MOB.

Brad always surprises you.  The first time you meet him, you think he’s one of those mild-mannered, workadaddy/hugamommy conservatives from Ramsey…

…well, OK, he is that.  But he was also one of the mainstays of the Twin Cities’ late, lamented “Protest Warrior” chapter – sharp, funny, friendly.  And he writes a darn good blog.

I liked this piece from last month, about Tiger Woods’ fall from “grace”:

But then I quickly asked myself why I was so taken aback. I mean, I didn’t know Tiger personally. I merely saw the utter phenom who did things on a golf course that had literally never been seen. So from that, how is it I could draw the conclusion that he was a man of integrity, a model citizen if you will? It’s not unlike how I felt when I learned of the secret life of Kirby Puckett. I saw a gifted, jovial athlete on the baseball field but knew of literally nothing that took place in Puckett’s personal life. And that is a life lesson that I have learned the hard way. No matter how genuine and polished a person may appear, we never know what goes on behind closed doors.

Support your local MOB blog.  You never know what you’ll be running into!

Boots On, by one “John Galt”, has been around for a while.  It’s not the highest-profile MOB blog, but it’s mighty good – hard-right, unapologetic, consisten and articulate.

Galt attended a Ramsey County “Truth In Taxation” meeting a few weeks back.  And he didn’t like what he saw:

Last but not least, don’t forget the 25% pay raise the County Commissioners voted themselves about 18 months ago. I just checked–the pay for the regular comm’rs is $82,400, and the chair takes home just shy of $85k. Someone who recently ran for comm’r told me this is supposed to be a part-time job. I’m betting when you have to dole out money to golf-course developers, developmentally-disabled helpers, oversee library additions, consider the needs of “corrections nurseries,” on top of your compost and mulch production and whatnot, it’s more than a part-time job.

But this is precisely the point. They’ve MADE it a big job. They’ve usurped authority and responsibility that properly belongs to families and churches and universities and non-sectarian NGOs and on and on, and then they want to don a halo and call themselves brilliant for a property tax levy that will continue to increase 2.7% per year for the next two years, while unemployment is pushing 10% and landlords can’t raise rents.

AND they want to whine. When an elderly lady got up to complain about the sky-high salaries the comm’rs pay themselves while failing to get the hedgerows cut back along the road, I happened to be in the front row and heard Tony Bennett mutter, “that was three years ago.” I’m sorry, Mr. Bennett–relevance? What if it was 3 years ago, would it be right for you to scowl and mutter under your breath at an elderly constituent? Mr. Bennett clearly fails to appreciate the phrase “public servant,” or realize it applies to him.

Check it out!

It’s high time we threw a MOB Winter Party.

The MOB has always thrown its parties at Keegans, largely because the group really was born at Keegans; Terry Keegan has always shown bloggers (and, let’s be honest, the Northern Alliance) a lot of love, and it’s only right to show it right back  What kind of person doesn’t take care of his/her friends, especially friends who’ve been under attack by people as venal and stupid as Minneapolis’ city government?

And rest assured, this coming summer at Keegans, with the cigar patio open, will be fantastic, and I’m looking forward to throwing a MOB event and more than a few Blogger Trivia Nights at the Northeast Minneapolis hangout.

But given that it’s the dead of winter, and MOB parties tend to draw so well, it’s time to expand the horizons just a little.  We have another establishment that’s on the plate here that not is not only run by one of the good guys, and not only faces a dismal, short-sighted, nanny-statist city government, but has a good-sized indoor party room that’s gonna be nice for a big, indoor party.  They have no cigar patio – but face it, in this weather only North Dakotans sit on patios to smoke cigars.

More details later.  But suffice to say, a MOB part is in the works, very very presently.

Stay tuned.

I’ve had people ask me “why didn’t  you write about [a blog] as part of your “Around the MOB” series?  Is there some sort of implied slam against [the blog I didn’t write about]?”

Of course not.

The point of the series is to bring a little exposure to some of the blogs in the MOB that might get a little less traffic.  Blogging can be a very lonely hobby; it’s one of the reasons we started the MOB in the first place, to bring a little social life to a monastically-introverted pastime; we are not a political organization, but rather a purely social one.

Of course, some of the MOB blogs get all the recognition they need, and need no introduction.  So I skipped (to pick the first example) Anti-Strib because, let’s face it, they’re big.  Everyone in the Twin Cities who reads blogs knows about Anti-Strib.  They need no introduction.

So if you’re looking for pithy little insights on Powerline, Lileks, Fraters Libertas or for that matter Anti-Strib, you’ll be waiting a bit.  Most of you read them all already – indeed, my referral logs show that a lot of people stop by Shot In The Dark after reading one or the other of them.

So write your own pithy insights about them!

As much as I personally have always eschewed bloggy neoblogisms based on the word “blog” to describe blogging, I always thought Blogizdat was one of the more clever blog names in the Minnesota Organization of Bloggers.

Blogizdat is part of the epic “Class of 2004” – the mass of blogs that started way back then.  And like a lot of them, the blogging has been put back into persepctive in the various bloggers’ lives; Muzzy – whom I’ve met, if memory serves, at two MOB parties – hasn’t updated the blog a whole lot in the past few months.  And he’s always been one of those bloggers given to short, pithy observations.

And even though it’s been four years, I still laugh at this one:

Your Moment Of Zen

Don’t Blame The Messenger, Ladies

Blogizdat – undead, or on hiatus?  Dunno – but keep watching!

Our next stop is BikeBubba’s Bits, produced by Robert Perry.  Bubba is also a regular commenter on Shot In The Dark, so I’ll have to restrain my effusion.

Bubba offers one of the things the Twin Cities’ blogosphere is rich with; a perspective on the issues that you don’t see everywhere.

On the practical history of the real-world application of the Geneva Convention:

The author’s poignant example is of his father’s unit finding that 100 American POWs had been massacred by the SS, and the response was to not take prisoners for the next two weeks–in other words, to kill those who tried to surrender. It sounds brutal, and it was–until you realize that had they not done this, what would the fate of further American POWs have been?

In the same way, what message was sent to genocidal maniacs when an Army unit opened fire on SS guards at Dachau? Violation of the Geneva Convention? Absolutely. Reminder that barbaric cruelty to the defenseless will be returned to the offender? Priceless.

Oh, yeah.  And he’s a biker.  Which does, in fact, make him a better conservative than most.

And, oddly, he must have some pretty righteous traffic; he’s about 13th on my referrers list, behind the likes of Hot Air, Powerline, Instapundit and Hugh Hewitt.  The next “smallest” blog higher on the list is Fraters Libertas.  Bubba’s doing something right!

Support your local MOB blog!