Think I better knock on wood - Updated

Very strange thunderstorm here. Started out on only one side of the house, thankfully the north where most of the windows are so it will blow some cooler air into the apartment. Meanwhile, it's been much too long since I made the rounds on my blogroll so let's see what the other fine bloggers in my world are talking about these days.

I suppose I'm going to rot in hell for laughing at this.

My pals at the Swashzone are blogging up a storm. Always worth starting at the top and just scrolling and don't miss Captain Fogg who never fails to bowl me over with his eloquence and his eye for underreported stories. Like drones on the US border.

Of course there are legitimate uses for drones, but there are legitimate dangers, not all of which concern collisions and the urge to deploy more eyes in the sky; the insistence that we can and must trust the government with another spy tool seems to make liars out of the people making careers out of telling us we can't trust anyone but them.

And his encounter with the refined wingnuts in the South is somewhat heartbreaking.

I'd ask her to define liberal, but I know she's define it as its opposite. I know she has no awareness of current events, history or anything outside the Yacht Club Republican cocktail-hour school of economics and social criticism.

Avedon is posting a bit less these days but still has posts chock full of not to missed links. Like the comeback of debtor's prisons.

One afternoon last spring, Deborah Poplawski, 38, of Minneapolis was digging in her purse for coins to feed a downtown parking meter when she saw the flashing lights of a Minneapolis police squad car behind her. Poplawski, a restaurant cook, assumed she had parked illegally. Instead, she was headed to jail over a $250 credit card debt.

My friend Dan at Pruning Shears wonders if the Gulf gusher will be a lost opportunity to come together in common purpose, or not.

[Link fixed] And Hart has a fascinating post on a past environmental disaster that created the Salton Sea, that big, impossibly blue body of water in the middle of seemingly nowhere that you might sometime fly over on trips to the West Coast. Addendum: Sorry bad link. Fixed now and there's a part two since I posted.

[More posts daily at The Detroit News]