Six proud walkers

Welcome to another random walk in the blogforest. The rules are simple: start with an interesting blog that you don’t know, and write about it. Then, find another interesting blog on the first blog’s blogroll, and write about that – and so on. (But stop when you hit number six, no one’s got all day.)

This week I bring you a particularly beautiful bunch of blogs, featuring politics, photography, oil paintings, Japan, a lot of maps and more links than you could follow in a week. I took my lead from Shelley Powers’ Burningbird (an excellent blog in itself). Shelley introduced me to an extraordinary blog, which I hereby name as my #1 for this week: Mark Woods’ wood s lot.

Now five years old, wood s lot doesn’t contain many words by Woods himself. Mostly it consists of extracts, with links, from Web pages which have caught Woods’ attention. Which doesn’t sound so remarkable in itself, but listen to some of these voices:

It does no good to ask the weakling’s pointless question, “Is America a fascist state?” We must ask instead, in a major rather than a minor key, “Can we make America the best damned fascist state the world has ever seen?”

Urban exploration is free, fun and hurts no one. It’s a thrilling, mind-expanding hobby that encourages our natural instincts to explore and play in our own environment … So, no disclaimer. Not for your entertainment only. Please do try this at home.

My modest proposal would be that, instead of using intelligent design merely to fill in the gaps and inconsistencies of our most intractable scientific puzzles, we roll back what we’ve already learned about science and plug God into the equation at the outset. Kind of cut out those annoying scientific middlemen.

And art, and poetry, and more, and more. wood s lot is also one of the best-looking things I’ve ever seen on the Web, with some beautiful images and a spare, restful layout. Woods says:

My sense of collegiality with those of similar sensibilities coupled with the voice I find in producing this collage have acted as a great anodyne for megrims, funks and other assorted black dogs of a chemical, temperamental and/or situational variety.

That’s exactly how it feels.

wood s lot led me to

2 Blowhards, a wonderfully-titled blog “in which a group of graying eternal amateurs discuss their passions, interests and obsessions”. (The group numbers four, incidentally.) A particularly striking current entry is a long and respectful study of the work of Pino Daeni, an artist who got his start painting romantic fiction book jackets [illustrated] and now sells sub-Sargent oils of women in nice frocks [illustrated] for twenty grand a throw. Not my thing, as you might imagine, but a fascinating insight into a side of the art world which doesn’t get much exposure. The author promises that this will be the first in a series on “artists who seem to be important in the gallery scene yet tend to be ignored by the Art Establishment for reasons valid or otherwise”; it’ll be interesting to read his take on the talented Mr Vettriano.

From 2 Blowhards I arrived at

Plep. (No, no idea.) Not so much a blog as a linkroll, but it’s a linkroll like few others.

The Vindolanda writing tablets, excavated from the Roman fort at Vindolanda in northern England.

Welcome to the world’s first on-line thrift store art gallery

Every Christmas, my Aunt Joan gives me a Monet calendar. After a couple years the same old paintings became dull. So she started enhancing the master’s works with a variety of stickers.

History and culture of the Perl programming language, by its creator, Larry Wall.

Most of the links relate to history in some sense of the word, apart from the ones you’d file under ‘geography’, ‘art’, ‘science’, ‘culture’… I don’t know who the author of Plep is, but he or she is, essentially, interested in everything.

In Plep‘s imposing blogroll I found

alive in kyoto, the personal blog of a guy from California who once caught 13 largemouth bass in a single day but is now living in Kyoto. This is essentially a photo blog, which makes it quite clear that living in Kyoto is not at all like (say) living in California. One picture is captioned “There are a number of places where you can get made up and dressed up like a maiko, then stagger around in platform okobo sandals and get your picture taken.” Another has the title a different angle on Kiyomizu-dera. It’s an educational experience – and the pictures are beautiful, too.

Leaving alive in kyoto, I entered

The Map Room, a weblog about maps. Does exactly what it says on the tin. Cartography is relevant to a surprisingly broad range of subjects (well, it surprised me). As well as news items about the theft of antique maps and updates on the latest Google Maps mashups, there’s material here on GPS accuracy, Hurricane Katrina, the Pakistan earthquake and the eternal standoff between China and Taiwan over how the latter should be described (quite an important consideration if you’re drawing a map).

The Map Room has a number of map-related links, including

Terkepes egoblog. A Hungarian-language blog might seem an eccentric choice, given that I know rather less Hungarian than I do Chinese (I mean, I’ve never even tried to order a Hungarian meal). However, this is a blog where the visuals do the talking: specifically, maps. And what maps. This blog looks like something by Edward Tufte: it could be a master-class in the presentation of cartographic information. 3D relief maps, population density maps, watershed maps, global currency movement maps, street maps, Google Maps… they’re all here.

The chances of my happening on Terkepes egoblog in the normal run of things are essentially nil. I’m glad to have seen it, though – along with all the other five. Travel by blogroll: I can recommend it.