Arts and Letters

WEBSITE

For all you literati and inquisitive types, that webpage has links to a wide variety of interesting places. I suggest you visit and click to somewhere you've never been or read someone you've never read. It's how I happened to go to the Moscow Times early Sunday morning and learn about Russian dogs. I also learned about the banning of images of the wildly popular Winnie the Pooh over there. Before you get too upset, it's only images of Winnie that for some reason include a swastika that are forbidden. Even the word swastika is rough and mean and wrong. Anyway, they're trying to maintain Pooh bear's innocence at the expense of some neo-Nazi propagandist free-speech, so I guess I'm OK with that. Even they should know to leave Pooh alone.

Arts and Letters Daily is not exhaustive in its linkdom, but there is a good variety from which to choose. I don't know about you, (seriously, I don't know about you) but we all pile into group-think pretty firmly and need to shake it loose every now and then. When a left-leaning forum has something decidedly centrist or even with a nod of conservatism, I take notice... and the other way around, too. Like a bit in the Sierra Club magazine that is critical of the Kyoto agreement or something in the Economist that sways against free market capitalism or something in the Onion that's not at all funny or clever. It happens. We should be open enough to listen to anything and come up with our own conclusions. If we only look to the same sources we get more and more narrow. If we don't challenge ourselves at all we miss big pictures left and right, to and fro, all the live long day. Everyone needs a little change of scenery, even if it is on their laptop.

After reading my blog, I think you'd agree that I have most of the answers, so you should do what I say. Yup. Anyway, check out that link for hours of internet fun.