This is my next-to-last opportunity to convince y’all to check out TexasBlogfest 2005, which starts Friday night in Addison. I’m really obligated to do this as I posted the wrong week a few days ago.
If you’re a Texas blogger, especially in the DFW area, go check it out now. Hey, Friday night is your chance to share a brew with me.
As if that’s not enough, major gun play is in the works for Sunday morning.
I recently created the “My Blogroll” category as a place to announce additions to my blogroll (now nearing 100 strong) and as a place to occasionally honor the blogs I read. I plan, on a fairly regular basis, to list favorite blogs based on some particular attribute, such as appearance, best essays, favorite MilBloggers, funniest, etc.
For my first installment, I thought it only appropriate to list the five blogs that inspired me to blog and helped me realize there was actually somebody reading, some reason to keep blogging.
Obviously two legends in the game, these are the first two blogs I began frequently reading.
The blog that actually inspired Target Centermass. Bill Whittle and Stephen den Beste are legends in the blogosphere, but elgato at the Swanky Conservative was just a regular guy who posted at an Aggie-related forum I frequent. After repeatedly visiting his fine blog, I realized I had some things to say and could actually say them, though not as well as he.
The first to link to Target Centermass. Beginning blogging can be a very lonely endeavour, not knowing if anybody is reading. Sometimes it seems one can actually hear the echoes of the key-clicks. After all, not everybody can get an Instalanche in their first week (I’m looking at you, Eric … with envy). Checking on my blog in a hotel while visiting my ailing father, Lo! I suddenly see traffic when John Little named my little project as his Site of the Week.
Phil was the first to blogroll and link to me before I’d found him. Ah, redemption — a link that was obviously not just reciprocity or pity. Maybe, just maybe, I can do this blogging thing.
Thanks very much to all of y’all. You’re why Target Centermass began and continued.
This is the second lengthy outtage in recent days.
Not that it matters much to me, just a poor schmuck trying to reach 10K hits in my meager aims for ego-stroking. Unfortunately for others, the Blogrolling service can actually have an economic impact.
That, and it hampers my ability to read my blogroll. I may have to reconsider my means of listing those sites I enjoy reading.
Perhaps Blogrolling.com has too much of a sway over the current make-up of the blogosphere. Hmmm…
Greyhawk, founder of the MilBlogs, has hit the twenty-year milestone in his service to our country. Blackfive covers it well (hat tip to Grim’s Hall).
Thank you, Greyhawk. Thank you very much for your service and sacrifice.
I’d like to take a moment to thank those who’ve recently blogrolled or linked to Target Centermass.
First, thanks to the following for adding TCm to their blogrolls:
Second, I want the thank the Unofficial Battlestar Galactica Blog for the recent link and for pointing me to this rather simple Battlestar Galactica drinking game.
Third, I wanted once again to pimp for two sites intended for Texas bloggers:
As always, if you’ve linked or blogrolled Target Centermass and I haven’t found you, please send an email or post a comment. No good deed should go unrewarded.
EDIT: Correcting when the TexasBlogfest 2005 is happening. Hey, I lost track of dates.
I’ve added a new “My Blogroll” category to Target Centermass as a place to announce additions and to pay homage in one fashion or another to the blogs I read.
As a first post in the category, I want to list tonight’s new additions:
If you’ve got any blogs to suggest, leave them in the comments.
A first for the blogosphere, and a major coup for blogger Garrett M. Graff.
With an official credential hanging from his neck, a young man stepped into the White House briefing room Monday as perhaps the first blogger to cover the daily press briefings. He found the surroundings to be dilapidated and cramped and concluded that his morning at the White House was “remarkably uneventful.”
Graff’s site, fishbowlDC, labels itself a “gossip blog about Washington, D.C. media” and has the seemingly standard list of left-wing links, right down to the obligatory Instapundit link for an illusion of balance. Still, that said, hats off to Graff for his pioneering accomplishment.
Much has been made in the media and the blogosphere of the release of Italian journalist Giuliana Sgrena and her subsequent wounding at a Baghdad checkpoint by U.S. forces. Itailian security agent Nicola Calipari was killed in the incident.
Since the day Sgrena was kidnapped, Dr. Rusty Shackleford at the Jawa Report predicted her release and said he felt something was “fishy” about the whole story. He has repeatedly written about the Sgrena affair and today blogs his mounting suspicions about the story.
Doesn’t this whole incident seem more than a little odd?
Sgena was kidnapped by her admitted friends in Iraq.
She was kidnapped while on the phone with another journalist.
A tape was released of her begging Italy to cave to the terrorists demands of pulling Italian troops out of Iraq the day before the Italian Senate was to vote on that very issue.
On the tape Sgrena appears to tell the ‘terrorist’ holding the camera to stop. He follows her order as if she is directing.
The tape came exactly two-weeks after she was captured.
One month to the day after her abduction she is released.
On the day of her release her car speeds toward a US checkpoint, fails to stop when ordered, fails to heed warning shots, and the car is ultimately fired upon.
In the end, who looks like the bad guys? The terrorists? The jihadis? The ‘insurgents’? No, the US.
Today, CNN carries Sgrena’s tale. Sgrena, who writes for the communist Il Manifesto, disputes the U.S. version of the story.
[…]Giuliana Sgrena wrote, “Our car was driving slowly,” and “the Americans fired without motive.”
She described a “rain of fire and bullets” in the incident.
The U.S. military said Sgrena’s car rapidly approached a checkpoint Friday night, and those inside ignored repeated warnings to stop.
Troops used arm signals and flashing white lights, fired warning shots in front of the car, and shot into the engine block when the driver did not stop, the military said in a statement.
But in an interview with Italy’s La 7 Television, the 56-year-old journalist said “there was no bright light, no signal.”
Apparently, however, Sgrena cannot keep her story straight, as the very next paragraph shows she told an Italian government official a different tale.
And Italian magistrate Franco Ionta said Sgrena reported the incident was not at a checkpoint, but rather that the shots came from “a patrol that shot as soon as they lit us up with a spotlight.”
Well, Ms. Sgrena, was there a light or wasn’t there?
In an interview with Sky TV, Sgrena said “feeling yourself covered with avalanche of gunfire from a tank that is beside you, that did not give you any warning that it was about to attack if we did not stop — this is absolutely inconceivable even in normal situations, even if they hadn’t known that we were there, that we were supposed to come through.”
So now it was a tank away from a checkpoint that lit up the car? Folks, I’m not buying a word this woman says.
Freakin’ hilarious reality TV, Iraqi-style, courtesy of Jeff at Beautiful Atrocities.