BLOG SCANNING (3#)

Kabul, Perugia and Chicago . . .

I decided the best thing to do on New Year's Day was to just stay indoors. But domestic tranquility has been a bit disrupted by the neighboring kids who have been setting off firecrackers downstairs in the alley. Anyhow, I've been catching up on my rss reader's contents which, at times, seem a bit overwhelming. I'm still not used to using it; sometimes it seems to save me some time, but sometimes not.

# Sanjar has written a longish blog entry about returning to Kabul recently after a trip. I've been meaning to link to it because it's atmospheric at a grassroots level. Obviously, Sanjar is multi-lingual and articulate in English. Are there many people like that in Afghanistan? I don't know about "many." There may be some, but they do seem to prefer to maintain a somewhat low profile, perhaps for the sake of their personal safety.

it feels like kabul is like having a penpal in a very faraway place, through whose eyes you can see it in a rather unusual way.

# Frank in Perugia has posted a new entry. Frank seems to think that Amanda Knox and the other defendants have been "lynched" on the Internet; he worries about such bias affecting the trial proceedings adversely.

Amanda's image as a femme fatale may be partly due to the necessity of the Press to organize the information into a digestible story; maybe some of them are pushing familiar buttons and evoking stereotypical memes in the process, but I don't think the jurists are drooling over the tabloids or even perusing blogs.

# Michael Miner posts an appreciation of
Roger Ebert's Blog. I didn't know Ebert had a Blog.

"it's occasional, rather than pounded out in a ceaseless rush like an AP trunk wire; it's meditative; it's personal; and it's deeply intelligent... and it's the only blog whose readers alert me to posts that I can't afford to miss... Blogs such as Ebert's establish a new realm of the public intellectual."

Wow! That seems like rare and high praise indeed. I'll have to try to check it out when I have an available moment. If you're a fan of Ebert's, you'll be happy to discover his Blog.

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