Devil Eyes/Go To The Moon/Tapped (Friday Cat/Concert/Better Know a Blog Blogging #3)

Friday Catblogging

If you try to take the remote control away from Karina, you are liable to get the devil-eyes. Then again, control of the remote is a standard privilege for the small and furry.

Friday's Free Concert Clip

Since I used them for Wednesday's NASA article title, we're going to go with a video of Moxy Früvous's You Will Go To the Moon, complete with science nerd graphics. I particularly like the simulation of Earth's impact with another object that formed the moon back when the solar system was young.

It turns out that they played the song at their November 24, 1999 show at the Harro East in Rochester, and that I'm pretty sure at some point during the show you can hear Alex and I whooping in the background...but that's not the reason I'm mentioning the show. Let's face it, I saw them over 50 times, so it's not hard to pick shows that I attended. No, I would suggest that one of our readers, and he knows who he is, play tracks 13 and 14. That is all.

Better Know a Blog

I've danced around this one long enough. If you like some policy with your politics, there is no better blog out there than Tapped, the official blog of The American Prospect magazine. Situated comfortably between The Nation and The New Republic, though thankfully closer to the former, it may very well be the finest political weekly in the land. They cover both foreign and domestic policy, generally with a bit of wonkishness, but not so much that the reader is expected to be an expert. Unlike the strident voices that my co-blogger finds occasionally grating (and I can't blame him), they tend to maintain a bit more decorum, though they have been known to light up those who make foolish statements (Jonah Goldberg, Kathryn Jean Lopez, and the rest of the gang at the consistenly wackily conservative National Review are always popular targets). Popular topics at Tapped include healthcare (they're for universal coverage, as we all should be), foreign policy (they prefer strategy to strategery), electoral politics (they're not sold on the mainstream media's bizarre notion that the Democratic congressional class of 2006 is conservative, primarily because it's not), and organized labor. The latter topic deserves mention: organized labor is a key part of the democratic movement, but is very poorly represented in the blogosphere, and it is good that they're doing their part to include it in the discussion. Beyond the main blog, they run two additional blogs via the magazine and several of their contributors have blogs of their own, all of which I'll mention in the coming weeks, focusing on, respectively, politics and the media (Horse's Mouth), global economics (Beat the Press), foreign policy and hardcore music (Spencer Ackerman's toohotfortnr), and everything under the sun (both Matt Yglesias and Ezra Klein). Reading Tapped regularly will give you an amazing grasp of political events with which you can impress your friends and acquaintances at wine and cheese parties. Print and online subscriptions are available as well.