...am I the only person who thinks she sounds dumb as all hell in this interview with Charlie Gibson? Maybe that's just how she talks, but she sounds like she's reciting these answers from memory rather than actually thinking about and responding to Gibson's specific questions. And then there's this exchange, where she clearly has no idea what Gibson's talking about. I'm totally not impressed, but I wonder how the general public (particularly the people who didn't roll their eyes and groan when she started spewing that lameness about God's plan and quoting the Declaration of Independence) will react. In any case, Sarah, you'd better do some more Wikipedia cramming before that next interview!

For like the sixteenth time this week, I am reminded of these Sinfest strips:

2008-09-06: Imperil The World 6
2008-09-07: Imperil The World 7

I like Roger Ebert's take on Palin as well.

Indeed! So make sure you go download it before 1:00 PM EST tomorrow to help Firefox set the world record for the most downloads in 24 hours. So far it's pretty cool -- and I love that it now resizes entire pages instead of just text, which I think is particularly great me since my 1920 x 1200 screen resolution tended to make everything tiny -- even though my favorite theme no longer works with it. Oh well... hopefully it'll get updated at some point. 😛

I have a couple other posts in the works (one about a recurrent obsession and its latest manifestation; another on freaking Hillary Clinton and the potential damage she's doing with her most recent comments on sexism and even more explicit feminist slant), but I thought it was important to link to this Huffington Post article on Memorial Day. April Somdahl's heartbreaking experience -- and that of her late brother -- highlights yet another unfortunate effect of the Iraq War on the lives of service members, military families, and the rest of us as well.

I realize how this sounds coming from me, but I hope that you all have (or had, depending upon when you read this) a blessed and reflective Memorial Day. Wishing you a "happy" or "joyful" one doesn't seem quite appropriate in light of that article and what the day signifies.

I just did a rundown of the sites on my blogroll. Apparently many of them haven't been updated in quite a while -- some not since 2006! I'm fine with that (I keep them there mostly as a reminder to myself about the existence of these people, and even if they haven't updated their presence on the blogroll will prompt me to send out an e-mail to check in with them from time to time), but it's still kind of shocking in some cases. Frex, I'm pretty surprised that Omni stopped posting altogether in May. Considering how long Omni had been posting -- and how long her posts were on average! -- that was kind of like looking out the window and seeing Pegasus pigs soaring above the neighbors' rooftops. Ah well, what can you do?

Anyway, I found only one 404 error, so that's good (the offender was a reference to Tamara's old blog, which I've since updated to reflect its current URL). And I have added a link to my sister's blog, Hot Box, so now y'all can visit there if you like and marvel at how the same genes contributed to such markedly different viewpoints. I will admit to being a big fan of the header image, though!

I've got tons of tabs open in Firefox, so it's time to clear away some of 'em with another fun linkage post! I certainly don't expect you to go clicking them all, but here's some of the stuff I've been reading about recently.

Wikipedia pages open:

Shockwave (Transformers) -- Natch, in keeping with the recent Transformers obsession, I've been reading a lot about the characters. Shockwave is bloody awesome. Figure versions of him are also bloody expensive (especially when they're badass customs), so I currently lack a representation of him among my TF legions. 🙁 (more...)