Makes you want to say "Hmm."

My blogpal, Curmudgeon, nominated me for a thinking blog award. I was honored and dismayed because I am the dinosaur he alleges to be at least with respect to my use of technology. I have been cheerfully blogging for a year now just telling myself that it is a word processor with a megaphone attached. I have tried making links. There is some half-baked HTML sitting in my pre-fabricated layout, apparently harmless, but not very effective: nothing up front where it counts. Now I need links and memes. I feel like a sham--how can I be a thinking blogger when I just got here by accident in a hot air balloon?

So I said thanks to Curmudgeon, sent an anguished email to my pal, Amy, and began looking at all the other posts and blogs on the meme trail. Learn from the experts or shamelessly copy.

First, the copying part:

This award/meme originated with this post on the thinking blog.

These rules also came from the original site, but I cadged them from www. secondeffort.blogspot.com, Curmudgeon's site:

The participation rules are simple:
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 easily find the exact origin of the meme,

3. Optional: Proudly display the 'Thinking Blogger Award' with a link to the post that you wrote (here is an alternative silver version if gold doesn't fit your blog).

Now here's the learning part.

When I reflected on blogs that made me think, I began in a rather pedantic way to think about content and rhetoric and audience analysis. In the midst of this, I got an image of a former student from years long gone by. He was not good at any of those concepts, but he managed to like me despite my efforts to teach him things he didn't have much use for. He would buttonhole me in the corridors or at the coffee shop and he would always have some wry way of looking at the world that was both funny and insightful. He would nearly always conclude some assessment of the foibles of the universe with a sideways cocking of his head and a coquettish finger by the side of his mouth as he said, as if it explained everything: "It makes you want to say, 'Hmm,' doesn't it?"

And that, I think, gets at what is a thinking blog, and, hopefully, makes me a thinking blogger. If you read some of these posts and go Hmm, then I can feel as if I have earned the award.

Now here are sites that make me go Hmm.

1. http://www.secondeffort.blogspot.com/This is not like grade school: I am not nominating him because he nominated me. In large measure, I keep blogging because he asked the question about why blog. That post got me started thinking, and, fortunately, subsequent blogs have kept me thinking about the things he has said and the the things that he hasn't: for example, living as a person of faith in a secularized, multicultural world.

2. www.lyricflight.blogspot.com Hayden has a very different look at the world than Curmudgeon's and lives in a part of the US that I have never visited. She makes me think about the sensual nature of food and its creation and also about the angst behind the wonderful life that Americans have enjoyed for some time now but which is becoming increasingly more difficult to sustain.

3. http://www.nambustory.blogspot.com/Merlin taught Arthur to be the once and future king by teaching him how to be a fish and a bird and all manner of creatures. If you want to achieve such grace, then this blog will help you accomplish that. It is also a tribute to a very fine writer who can make you care about life from the perspective of a banana slug.

4 and 5 http://www.crisispapers.org/ I hope this fits the criteria for a blog. My friend Marilyn recommended it to me. It is the entrance to a variety of blogs, essays and editorials and book- in -process chapters by a pair of editors describing themselves as progressives, which, as nearly as I can tell, is only vaguely in the tradition of Teddy Roosevelt when he was not charging up San Juan Hill. I like it because it provides more than the teeny sound bytes of US news that make it over here. Like most ex pats, I sometimes filter out the things I did not like about my country when I lived there and so I need some hard hitting news to keep my memory realistic, although I remember feeling even before I left that someone had stolen my country.


I would proudly display the thinking blogger award here except my efforts to display it have been thwarted by my technoinadequacy. Thanks anyway, Curmudgeon, it encouraged me to look around a bit more in this blog world.