Catching Up on Stuff

A few Sunday-evening items:

• Attention Canadian Embassy: You'd better start looking into this incident and sending some Mounties out to speak with the appropriate folks before things get out of hand. (You know how the Blogosphere can be...)
• Via Freakonomics, Israeli political cartoonists are hard at work creating anti-Semitic cartoons in reaction to the call for such material by the Iranians.
• I'm keeping an eye on GOP Nebraska Senator Chuck Hagel for 2008. Here's a bumper sticker I might get.
• Technorati has the Feb. 06 State of the Blogosphere, Part Two posted.
• A few months ago, I linked to this 2003 Atlantic Monthly piece by Jonathan Rauch about introverts after seeing it discussed on Ann Althouse's blog. Now, Prof. Althouse again points to The Atlantic Monthly, this time to an interview with Rauch about the lasting popularity of that three-year-old article. Excerpt: The weather's not interesting. But once an introvert gets on a subject that they know about or care about or that intrigues them intellectually, the opposite often takes hold. They get passionately engaged and turned on by the conversation. But it's not socializing that's going on there. It's learning or teaching or analyzing, which involves, I'm convinced, a whole different part of the brain from the socializing part. (SSMW, take note.) Internet-wise, they say this is AM's most popular piece ever. Here are a bunch of the people that link to the 2003 article, and here are a bunch more.
• I just got done watching the documentary Paradise Lost: The Robin Hood Hills Child Murders about the so-called West Memphis Three. (I know, I'm about ten years too late.) I'm not sure what I think about the whole thing, other than that the way things were presented in the film made me question their guilt. However, was there evidence that could have been shown differently had another filmmaker made the doc? I always hesitate to jump on the bandwagon one way or another on these things, because I was not a juror. The movie was by the same guys who made the recent documentary Metallica: Some Kind of Monster, which I liked quite a bit (they got their entree into MetallicaWorld by virtue of their PL:TRHHCM work). I just started the follow-up, Paradise Lost 2: Revelations. Comments to possibly follow. Initial comment: This documentary is waaaaaaay meta. Lots of Heisenberg at work here.
• Here's Cinerati on the purpose of the blogroll. Excerpt: So it seems to me that blogrolls can serve three purposes, or combinations thereof: the living bookshelf, self-promotion, or grab bag. The question is, "is there some kind of moral/ethical standard which should be applied to blogroll use?"
• I guess it's true -- Size Matters!
• The (Neutral) Cheerleader Paradox. Excerpt: I was watching women's hockey and noticed that there were "neutral" cheerleaders. In addition to being so PC as to make me gag, this strikes me as somewhat paradoxical. Presumably the purpose of the neutrality is to remain "positive" and not cheer *against* anyone. But it seems to me that this is literally impossible for the following seems true to me. Connectedness Thesis: For any event E, E is good for the home team if E is bad for the visitor.