goer.org: Links and Regular Reads

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Links and Regular Reads

In no particular order...

For the record, I am not affiliated with or receive income from any of the links below. Ok, that's not quite true. There's my Mom's book -- and occasionally she invites me over and feeds me rack of lamb. But that's as far as I'll go for pimping out my website.

Adiv Zelony, my brother-in-law, and lawyer to the stars! Or lawyer to the clones, anyway.
The Onion. We love The Onion around here. Even the old editorials from the "publisher emeritus", which we admit can be an acquired taste.
The Thinking Woman's Guide to a Better Birth, by Henci Goer. If you are pregnant, get this book. If you are thinking about being pregnant, get this book. If you are thinking about getting someone pregnant, get this book. If you know anyone who is pregnant, or who might get pregnant in the future, get this book. If your species reproduces by parthenogenesis, you're on your own.
The Brunching Shuttlecocks. Along the same lines as The Onion, but a little more geeky. Home of... the Bjork song! And Domifex! You just can't keep that crazy Lore Sjöberg down. (Note: this spot used to belong to SatireWire, but it closed up shop. And honestly, I just kept that link around as a sop to Sam. And what has that guy done for me lately, anyway? He just comes over and drinks my beer. Feh.)
Dave Hyatt. Developer of the rendering engine for Safari, Apple's Insanely-Great Browser, coming to an OS X machine near you. Dev stuff here. Why do people bother him with UI questions? Why, God, why?
Good Morning Silicon Valley. The first and only tech news site you need. These guys? No. these guys? Uh-uh. My only question is, why doesn't GMSV have an RSS feed yet? Why, God, why?
The World Wide Web Consortium. The keepers of the HTML 4.01 standard. For beginners, nearly incomprehensible. For others... still pretty incomprehensible. Why, God, wh -- oh, never mind.
Dave Shea. Maestro of beautiful CSS design, standards advocate, and caretaker of the CSS Zen Garden.
The Physics Humor Page. I suppose this site appeals to a limited audience.
Jamie Sawinski's Home Page. I've always liked JWZ's home page. It's a great example of what you can do with simple HTML -- no Flash, no fancy images -- if you feel like being creative.
Zeldman. What right-thinking HTML jockey wouldn't link to Zeldman? Well, me, for a while. I used to view Zeldman as the primary energizing force behind the WaSP and their obnoxious "Browser Upgrade Campaign". Sure, the Browser Upgrade Campaign was conceived with the best of intentions. Unfortunately, it led a swarm of soopa famous web developers to redirect their technologically inferior visitors to sometimes polite, but mostly annoying "Upgrade your browser" pages. I'd be fascinated to know how many grandmothers on Netscape 4 rushed to download a new browser over dial-up based on some snotty 20-year-old's say-so.

Fortunately, the Browser Upgrade Campaign has declared victory and gone home. As for Zeldman, I can't blame the overzealousness of his followers on him, can I? Heck, I might even buy his book. He's making plenty of sense to me now.
Marissa K. Gritter. My blogmother and Reader #1 of this site (sorry Mom). M'ris writes science fiction. She has some nice recipes. And she does not suffer fools gladly. (Of course, with so many fools out there, is that really the most realistic strategy?)
Bill Fredlund's The Making of the Western Mind. Bill's website used to have a horrible long URL that UCSC extension had given him, with tildes and God knows what else. I suggested that he get the domain name motwm.com. Now every time he mentions the website, he credits me and thanks me profusely. Hmmm... I think of the name, he does all the work... sounds fair to me.

Anyway, back to MOTWM. Everyone in the West could stand to do some "churchin' up". Go out there and study the ideas on which our 5,000-year-old civilization is built. Don't tell me that Cicero is boring just because the guy who wrote "How the Irish Saved Civilization" said Cicero is boring. No, no, no. Read the book. After that you can criticize the heck out of Cicero, or Western Civ for that matter. Just do the reading first. Please?
Jeff Cooper. Law Professor at Indiana University. Provides short, interesting, layperson-accessible legal essays. I'm hoping as the school year progresses, he'll continue to write more pieces about teaching classes and interacting with students. (Also he's definitely not that other law professor. Yuck.)
Mark Pilgrim. Web accessibility guy. Keeper of the Safari Bug List. All-around amusing fellow and ardent standards advocate. Give 'im a try.
Spinsanity.org. The best political site... ever. Spinsanity's mission is to "counteract rhetoric with reason". They do so by analyzing public statements and showing exactly where everyone on the Left and Right distort the facts and use subrational rhetorical tricks. I love these guys. (I kind of have to... two of them went to my beloved "Kremlin on the Crum", and two of them happen to be South Bay natives.)

The thing is that Ben, Bryan, and Brendan actually believe that there is a rational discourse in this country to critique. They honestly don't understand that it's all just marketing. This is their weakness -- and their strength.
TAPPED. The weblog of The American Prospect. The ordinary articles in TAP are often... ehhh. But the weblog is indispensable. How indispensable? If I were trapped on a raft in the middle of the ocean, I'd shrivel up and die from TAPPED-deprivation long before dehydration set in. Well, okay, that's going a bit far. Scurvy, though -- definitely before scurvy.