So, as put off as I was by the nutmeg grater's header of a pentegram with purple roses, I actually kind of enjoyed reading through her thoughts. After a while, I began to see her blog as a personalized newsfeed that focused on several issues:

1) How evilJoe Lieberman is (no real argument there)
2) How great Ned Lamont is
3) How much the war sucks
4) Third World Relief efforts
5) Bad spinach

Same with Ravings of a semi-sane madwoman (whose title sort of pisses me off- it's like saying "writings of a semiclothed nudist'), only with slight variations and a bit more focus on artistic food.

Now, here's what surprised me. Granted, while many of the issues above are important to me, most of them are readily accessed at CNN or Reuters or another site like that. Reading Jason Kottke's blog, I was surprised to see a number of rather obscure entertainment stories, including one about Season 5 of HBO's The Wire, which I hadn't known had been picked up for another season. While it might sound petty to focus on this feature rather than one of the human rights stories in Rose is Rose's or the Nutmeg Grater's blogs, the uses of blogs actually made a lot more sense when I saw a series of articles on things that I follow put together. While I think Jason Kottke is crazy for giving Serenity only 2.5 stars, it's clear his blog is one to watch for a variety of stories that I might not otherwise notice. Thus, the idea of a personalized news feed, as mentioned above. Jason Kottke isn't creating a blog for me, but because many of his interests sync up with mine, I will continue to check out his blog. It's like having your news served to you at a bar; the bartender makes conversation and commentary, and that's great, but ultimately, you're getting the drink you want. Does that make sense? Am I crazy?