Blogs that make you go hmmm…

My good neighbor to the North, Brent McKee, has bestowed upon my humble blog a meme (and this just goes to show you how much I know—I thought it was pronounced “mem,” as when Madeline Kahn says to the cowboy in Blazing Saddles: “Tex mem?”) and to be honest, this isn’t any ordinary meme (you know what I’m talking about—the ones that ask “Paper or Plastic?”…or some such esoteric claim) but one that asks you to name five blogs that make you think.  I’m nothing sort of astonished when Brent says Thrilling Days of Yesteryear starts up the old thought processes for him because usually when people comment on my blog it’s a variation of “Lots of free time on your hands, huh?”

Anyway, here is how this meme works:

1. If, and only if, you get tagged, write a post with links to 5 blogs that make you think.

2. Link to this post so that people can find the exact origin of the meme.

3. Optional: Proudly display the Thinking Blogger Award on your site with a link to the post you wrote.

Even though Brent’s already tagged Tom Sutpen, Stephen Cooke and Richard Gibson’s pop culturally delicious If Charlie Parker Were a Gunslinger, There’d Be a Whole Lot of Dead Copycats (which, in all fairness, has already been tagged previously)—one of the blogs I was going to include on my list, I thought I’d take a stab at this.  Here goes:

1. Blog d’Elisson – If you look at the “Yet More Self-Aggrandizement” Section in the right hand section of Steve’s blog, you’ll see a quote by me that I confess I swiped from Kaspar Gutman (Sydney Greenstreet) in the movie The Maltese Falcon.  But in “liberating” this quote I meant no malice: simply put, Steve is one of the most fascinating individuals I’ve ever met.  His blog is a living, breathing example of esoteric; he has so many interests that he reminds me of a good friend in college who could hold forth on any subject without any hint of “I know more than you do.”  (Or, as Walter Brennan used to put it: “No brag…just fact.”)  There’s always something to be learned or taken away from Blog d’Elisson—and if you ever get the pleasure of meeting the man himself in person, take it from me: there’s no pretense about him, what you see is what you get.

2. Pop Culture Petri Dish – I have only one complaint about Tony Kay’s blog…he doesn’t update it nearly enough.  As an observer of pop culture, I am full-green-envious of those individuals who dissect it better than I can, and Tony is definitely in the top five.  In watching the TV chestnut Streets of San Francisco on DVD, Tony can’t help but marvel at the huge leaps in technology made since that series’ 1972-77 run: “’Where's his cell phone?’ my mind cried out more than once as I watched a beat cop forced to run to the nearest pay phone to call in a crime scene, and observing antique equipment like Tele-type machines and, hell, electric typewriters was like peeking in on a living museum.”  Great stuff.

3. The Third Banana - As an individual who’s been known to drive people out of the TV room with cries of “That’s so-and-so!” any time I recognize a character actor, it’s nice to know that Aaron Neathery and Company are there to share their immeasurable knowledge of comedians who are either forgotten today…or were obscure from the get-go.  Case in point, this on-the-money mini-review of The Wrong Miss Wright (1937), a Columbia two-reeler starring Charley Chase that Aaron notes “is arguably better than most of his final performances for [Hal] Roach…”  Nice to know that I’m not the only one who thinks Wright is one of Chase’s best comedies.

4. Something Old, Nothing New – I’ll just put it as succinctly as I can…I want to be Jaime Weinman when I grow up.

5. Scrubbles.net – Like any good pop culture blog, Matt Heinrichs samples everything from the buffet, from Siskel & Ebert to erotic playing cards to Disneyland records.  Matt consistently emphasizes what people have long suspected but are afraid to admit: kitsch is cool.