I don't know what people would do without friends like my much loved girl-bud, Angeleno Lisa Siegel, who brought a great blog on Salon to my attention today. Go have a look at Open Letters to George W. Bush, Letters to the president from his ardent admirer Belacqua Jones.

Samples (all from different posts):

Dear George,
Your piety is slowly metastasizing from sea to shining sea. No valley is too deep nor mountain too high to escape the loving touch of your Christian grace...

Praise God! The Supreme Court has cleared the way for a municipality to level a home to make way for a strip mall. In doing so, they have struck another blow for the rights of the consumer and for the continuing growth of our feral economy. We must uphold the sanctity of the American home that it might be developed commercially. The happy homeowner is the one whose house has been reduced to rubble. He is the true patriot contributing to our country’s greatness...

Plan A: Nuke Peoria and blame is on the terrorists. There are several advantages, here. It’s quick, cheap and cuts down on possible court challenges. Once again, you could role-play the brave leader, stoutly mouthing platitudes. You’d have a lock on beefing up the Patriot Act and you’d shut the naysayers up. There is one downside. One leak and your administration would end up strapped to gurneys while some “love” juice was IV’ed into your arms....

Delicious irony, bloodletting sarcasm, spot-on-point posts. Enjoy!

UrbanDictionary.com now defines "dooced" as losing your job for something you wrote on your online blog -- I learned this from the following almost recommended reading, under USA Today's provocative headline:Warning: Your clever little blog could get you fired.

This article is, like duh, should it be any surprise that if you blog about work, your employer might have an interest in what you say about the company, your experience there, employee morale, the intellectual property that might be at stake?

But it does offer some interesting statistics about blogging, American-style:

Blogs are proliferating as fast as a computer virus. According to a report this year by public relations firm Edelman and Intelliseek, a provider of business-intelligence solutions, about 20,000 new blogs are created daily, and an estimated 10 million U.S. blogs will exist by the end of 2005. [...]

More than 8 million adults in the USA have created blogs, according to two surveys by the Pew Internet & American Life Project, a non-profit research center studying the Internet's social effects. And 32 million Americans are blog readers - a 58% jump in 2004.

Old joke, still apt:

Minnie Mouse is crying her eyes out. She wants a divorce. She and Mickey go to a marriage counselor. "He accused me of having an affair!" sobs Minnie. "I did not!" says Mickey, "I just said she was f***ing goofy!"

Last week, ... brought a new restriction. [Chinese] officials reiterated that "as soon as possible," all Japanese animé and Western cartoons, including those of Disney, will be purged from Chinese TV - to be replaced by all Chinese-drawn cartoons.

from a Christian Science Monitor story, Even Pop Culture Must get a Stamp of Approval in China

it continues:

"There is a reluctance to put Western culture and thinking in children's heads, and we have enough superb drawing to fill our [television] channels," explains the Beijing-based scholar.

One fad that has faded is rock music, which briefly flourished in the 1990s before it inevitably took on a political cast. It was pointed out that Soviet youth during the glasnost period listened to rock music. That took away the kind of support necessary in China to make anything new take hold. China's ace rocker Cui Jin [sic - he means Cui Jian] was censored, as are those few foreign bands who still come here.

"China is becoming more diverse," says University of Chicago expert Dali Yang. "Some of the changes are normal fads like any country has. [But sometimes] China feels like France, where it feels its culture and language are under siege. I think the country is trying to strike a proper balance."

No, not a prisoner or hostage relief action, but absolutely free and legal downloads of all nine Beethoven symphonies performed by the BBC Philharmonic, conducted by Gianandrea Noseda, courtesy of BBC. The symphony MP3s will each be available the day after webcast/broadcast and the broadcast schedule is published at the above link. As of this writing, two of them are available for immediate download.

One of my earliest memories, and one of the few comforting ones of my father, was waking up in the middle of the night and sneaking downstairs to see why the music was playing so loud. It was my dad, standing up in the dark, with his eyes closed, waving his arms, conducting Beethoven's 9th performed by the New York Philharmonic along with Arturo Toscanini playing on RCA Victor recordings.

Happy Listening.

He's not Chinese, nor is he American, he does live in China and he often has riveting personal insights and enviable inside information (which I'd guess comes from multi-linguality) about things Chinese and the world of ideas. He's unpretentiously expressive and admirably prolific. He's a frequent commenter on this site and was one of the first to blogroll it. I've never met him and know little more about his anonymous identity than he gives on his own site, Angry Chinese Blogger.

I'm not on a campaign to drive traffic here, preferring it to develop naturally and modestly. My link list is pretty short, owing somewhat to inattention and as well to selectivity. But I've just added ACB and I recommend you give it a read--often. It's a sister site to this one in spirit and I feel a spiritual and intellectual kinship somehow with it's author, even though and perhaps especially as we sometimes have quite different perspectives.