* Listen close to everybody's heart and hear that breaking sound.... I had heard it was good, but only got a chance to watch it recently. If you like Joss Whedon and haven't watched Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog yet, you have to do so.
* Irish Calvinist recently had a fun and interesting post on Pollyanna Theology (ht). You really do have to watch the video clip.
* John Wilkins has a fascinating post on the first tentative steps of taxonomy in early modern biology.
* Nancy Pelosi, if you haven't heard, has jumped into boiling water recently; she is, of course, a Catholic and recently made remarks about Catholic doctrine on abortion that led to a rather vigorous response, to say the least, then a fighting response from Pelosi's office, which touched off its own vigorous response. American Papist has a timeline of the major events in the early part of the flare up.
* One small symptom of the cleverness of the Palin pick is that it has actually pushed me to talk politics this election cycle; up to this point nothing really caught my attention except Chuck Norris and Paris Hilton, and, very, very briefly, the calls for a science debate among the candidates. That's not very promising. It's true, a few things have come close here and there, but they were mostly cancelled out by something else that turned my interest off; I liked certain aspects of Obama's early start, for instance, but I don't like FoGBoM politicking at all, and you just can't pay attention to the man without getting it in large doses, so I mostly don't. And McCain is not of much interest to me, either. And in either case, it would take something so utterly unexpected to make me vote for either the Travesty Party or the Absurdity Party that I just can't expect it. But this caught my interest for a bit. In any case, there is a great deal of junk and nonsense being thrown around, because, it would seem, political faction is the enemy of all rationality; so I thought I'd point readers to the post at Historiann as one of the best things I've come across so far on the subject of the pick of Sarah Palin. See also her links to discussion in the feminist history blogosphere, where most of the more thoughtful reaction in the blogosphere is happening. Tenured Radical also has a thoughtful post that attempts to separate out several distinct issues with regard to Palin. Cobb also has some good discussion of how this shapes the race to the finish.
