New Year Greetings for 2006

I hope to resume a more or less "normal" rate of blogging soon.

I note that the on-line magazines such as Slate and Salon have a fair amount of "filler" at this time of year. These are sometimes good and interesting, though, and here are some I recommend:

From Slate: a warning to all those who have a romantic idea of opening a coffee shop. (Sure it is written from a New York perspective, but I bet the same thing happens here all the time.)

Also from Slate: a woman has a go at being an inflatable mascot at a basketball game. Quite a few funny lines (and I share her mental inability to take any significant interest in team sports. Or even solo ones.)

From Salon: a writer who stumbled into being a newspaper food critic for a couple years explains how debilitating the job became.

Speaking of food critics, I have always enjoyed listening to Alan Saunders on Radio National. He seems too smart to not share the same reservations that the Salon article writer has about the whole field of "food porn", yet he keeps at it (broadcasting and sometimes writing on food in all its aspects) for years.