Yesterday, my good friend Solonor tagged me with one of those chain-mail memes.

Usually, I don’t participate, but the meme was to identify 10 excellent blogs, and he was very kind to include me in his list of those that earn the distinction in his opinion, so I figure it’s only fair to play along.

My RSS feed reader tells me I have somewhere in the neighborhood of 150-165 blogs that I follow these days. Luckily for me, not all of those blogs post every day, or even every week, otherwise I would be so far behind I’d never catch up. Over the last couple of years, though, the content of my list has shifted along with the trend in blogs. Where it used to be that my entire blogroll was personal blogs, now the overwhelming majority of blogs I follow are topical, and the few personal blogs that remain are generally low-frequency posters.

So I found it quite difficult, honestly, to come up with a list of 10 really good personal blogs. What I ended up with is two lists of five blogs — one list of blogs that I really enjoy reading, and one list of blogs that I really enjoy looking at. I also ended up with a big empty space in my heart where all those friends from the early days used to be; blogging was a lot more fun when everybody knew everybody else.

My five favorite blogs to read:

1. Metamorphosism — This is, in fact, the only really personal blog on the list. I admire Mig for his wit and his insight, his sense of the poetic, and his genuinely warped sensibility.
2. 3QuarksDaily — Best group blog I know of; lots of great links to top-quality articles and other blogs, but also a fair amount of original writing by some of the contributors, including poetry. Because a number of the contributors are non-Americans, the point-of-view of the blog is refreshingly free of the American perspective of the world. This may be the best blog I read, period.
3. Dangerous Intersection — Also a multi-author blog, although the primary voice belongs to a fellow named Erich Vieth. His posts are intelligent and well-crafted most of the time, with only the occasional minor rant. I find myself agreeing with his opinions and/or appreciating his explanation of an issue over and over again. I realize the inadequacy of my own original writing every time I link to one of his posts and can only manage to croak out “Me, too.”
4. bookofjoe — Joe has a sharp eye for cool stuff, and often has good links to articles about a wide variety of subjects; I especially appreciate it when he blockquotes the entire article in his post rather than just posting a link, since newspapers and other periodicals often have stupid linking policies and/or the tendency to expire articles after a few days.
5. Daylight Atheism — There are a lot of atheist blogs right now, but “Ebon Musings”, the author of this blog, is one of the few who takes the time to write thoughtfully in a way that is purposefully designed not to confront believers but to try to explain to them why atheists think the way they do on certain issues and why religious dogma is so often inadequate.

Five favorite blogs to look at:

1. Roadside Scholar — Gigi Leonard blogs about art, crafts, design, and other cool things. I never know what to expect from her site, only that it will be fun to look at. She’s great about linking to the websites of the artists she features and she occasionally interviews them as well. I find her blog restorative after having plowed through a pile of tech blogs.
2. La Tartine Gourmande — most food blogs are visually appealing, but this food blog goes to 11. The author is a food stylist as well as a cook, and the craft shows. Plus, she often has wonderful stories about her recipes and her life in France.
3. Radiology Picture of the Day — I just find this site fascinating. Traditional radiology requires a great deal of observational ability to make out meaningful details from what generally appear to be grey blobs, and yet when you know what to look for it is a powerful diagnostic tool. Most of what this blog shows are X-rays, but the occasional MRI and/or other more modern medical imaging technology are all the more amazing when they appear here. Decidedly not everyone’s cup of tea, but I can’t stop looking.
4. Strange Maps — Many of us who spend time on the Site Which Must Not Be Named have become fans of this blog, and the pictures that he posts often appear on our web community’s site. Maps are strange and wonderful things indeed — informative, imaginative, wishful, controversial, and beautiful. This site captures all of those things.
5. Retro Thing — James Grahame, the site author, always has some tidbit from my childhood, or the tantalizing world that existed just before I was born, or some gadget that came from the inscrutable world of Japanese retro-tech, and yet the blog isn’t steeped in hipster irony or kitsch at all.

NYT writer and blogger John Tierney recently staged a contest for people to submit the Worst Bad Name, and today he announced the “winner”: a lady from Cleveland named Iona Knipl.

(Well, the actual winner is the reader who sent in the winning submission, but you get the idea)

The real amusement comes from the comments, where people felt obliged to chime in with dozens of punny names. Though people sometimes claim to know people with these names, more often than not these are the sort of “FOAF” urban legend things that the folks at Snopes spend a great deal of time debunking. Among the so-called “real, I *SWEAR*” names are such classics as Lemonjello and Orangello, “Anna Rexik”, “Dick Hurtz” and so on. At this point it’s hard to believe that anyone really thinks someone named their kid “Dick Hurtz”, but, then, most Americans still believe Saddam Hussein was responsible for 9/11, so what do I know?

Last week, it was Vidiot giving us a peek into the world of drinking rye whiskey like the big boys do, and today it’s Mark at “Going Like Sixty” giving us the inside scoop on the manly man’s way to smoke a cigar.

Ah, the joys of middle age, where nobody can tell you you can’t smoke big smelly cigars and swill down throat-scorching alcoholic beverages. There are indeed advantages to sliding into geezerhood.

I used to enjoy an occasional cigar, and by “occasional” I mean like one or two a year. Even at that low frequency, though, I bet I haven’t puffed on a Cuban Death Log in a good ten years. I do have a good reason not to pick up a real smoking habit, but I don’t have any particular explanation for having gotten so far away from enjoying an occasional cigar. I szuppose sipping whiskey and smoking cigars are sort of complementary behaviors, actually. Done right, they just about cancel out the associated unpleasant flavors in the mouth and tell-tale odors on the breath, and induce a similar degree of buzziness in the head. And that can’t be all bad.

Once summer starts up around here, I might have to consider spending an evening on the deck with a glass in one hand and a cigar in the other, contemplating the fireflies.

Now, who’s the expert on chasing younger women?

Mutual friend of Torrez “Vidiot” has a long post at his cocktail blog Cocktailians today about attending a rye whiskey tasting class.

The class was given by LeNell Smothers, the proprietress of a well-known boutique liquor store in Brooklyn and the maker of her own label of rye whiskey, Red Hook. Vidiot says they sampled half a dozen different whiskeys (not all of them strictly rye), and his post summarizes the characteristics and qualities of the whiskeys they tried, along with LeNell’s personal notes and recommendations.

I am still very much a complete n00b when it comes to whiskey. Over the space of the last year or so I’ve just started out trying a couple of Scotches, found that I really like Bourbon, and most recently branched out to try some Irish whisky. I would love to find a tasting class like this where someone who really knows their stuff can help the newcomer appreciate what the heck it is they’re drinking. Though I absolutely would not consider myself any sort of expert with wine, I did finally reach the point where I had worked out some understanding of it through my own effort, but I’m probably never going to be a big enough whiskey drinker to get the same level of exposure. I’ll have to look around and see if any of the better liquor stores around my area do events like this; I have to imagine that they do.