If you read this blog regularly you know that I go back a good ways with Josh Kornbluth, the San Francisco monologist/performer (“Red Diaper Baby,” “Haiku Tunnel”). Josh’s most recent show — a hit here in the Bay Area, and soon to open in New York at the Bank Street Theater — is titled “Love and Taxes,” and it recounts, in excruciating comic detail, the consequences of Josh’s many years of failing to file, and what it took him to make things right.

One of the points of the show — beyond providing two hours of great, neurosis-fueled entertainment — is to get audiences to think a little more deeply about taxes, to get beyond the simple knee-jerk of resentment. Cut through the right-wing rhetoric about waste, acknowledge the real problems of government giveaways to corporations and special interests, and you’re left with the very real fact that our taxes pay for important public goods — like education, and medical care, and research, and public safety, and defense, and… You get the point. When the Bush administration’s tax-cutting orgy finally exhausts itself and the nation wakes up with a multitrillion-dollar-deficit headache, we will all miss those things our taxes purchased.

So it’s a propitious moment in history for Kornbluth to begin a new blog, I R Us, propounding the case for taxation. (Full disclosure and/or proud credit-taking: I put it online for him.)

Now, taking arms against America’s long hate affair with taxes may seem a little quixotic, but then Josh, as a child of Communists and a creator of live theater, is no stranger to lost causes and long shots. I think you’ll find his writing hilarious and his ideas provocative. I don’t doubt that he’ll attract a certain number of gawkers who will find the notion of a “pro-tax blog” impossible to take seriously. But then, I think Josh has years of experience dealing with hecklers.

If you want to go straight to some good posts, there’s a running dialogue, a kind of faux-FAQ, that begins here and continues here and here.

Congratulations to Real Live Preacher, who has landed a book deal.

Longtime Salon readers may recall a feature we ran in the late ’90s known as the “21st Challenge” — a reader-response humor competition that had its 15 minutes of fame in the form of our “Error Message Haikus,” which went round the world on a million e-mail lists and wound up being mentioned in the Microsoft trial (without credit, alas!).

Charlie Varon was the co-creator of those contests. He’s better known in the Bay Area as a remarkable playwright and performer responsible for some of the past decade’s most original political theater (his shows have included “Rush Limbaugh in Night School,” “Ralph Nader is Missing,” and “The People’s Violin”).

I’m a little biased here, because I’ve known Charlie since we were in high school together and worked on the weekly student paper (he was my first editor, and still one of my best), but so what? I think Charlie is making some extraordinarily original political comedy in these dark days: it’s angry without succumbing to cynicism, hilarious without resorting to sarcasm.

You can hear it for yourself on a new CD he has self-published, titled “Visiting Professor of Pessimism.” It’s a live recording of a show in San Francisco that Varon performed in the middle of the Iraq invasion last spring. The pieces are character-sketch monologues that look, with clear-eyed, heartbreaking humor, at the terrible compromises of the war on terrorism, the awful deadlock in the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians, and the dilemmas facing Americans committed to peace.

And it kicks off with a parody BBC newscast announcing, among other things, a new breakthrough in genetic engineering, mixing genes from root vegetables and business leaders: “The goal is to breed a humble corporate executive — or, failing that, a ruthless potato.”

You can listen to free samples here, here, or here. Or read more here.

I met Scott “Understanding Comics” McCloud eight years ago (at the first Digital Storytelling Fest in 1995) and have been following his work with enthusiasm from a distance ever since. The concept of “micropayments” (small-amount payments directly from readers to content creators) was very much in the air then. McCloud now has a real-live micropayment-supported product out there: It’s a comic called “The Right Number,” which he’s publishing in three installments. Each installment costs 25 cents to read; you have to put a minimum of $3 into a Paypal-like account run by BitPass to get started.

I just paid my two bits and read the comic — a noirish (or, given its palette and ever-so-slightly adult nature, I should say “bleuish”) tale about “math, sex, obsession and phone numbers.” I found it more than engaging enough to bring me back for parts II and III, which is more than I can say about most Hollywood products that demand macropayments.

Meanwhile, if you’re here in the Bay Area and haven’t already heard the buzz, Josh Kornbluth has a great new solo show called “Love & Taxes” at the Magic Theatre, and it’s just been extended to early August. The show uses a comic saga of Josh’s deepening debts stemming from a failure to file his tax returns to make some deeper points about the purpose and value of the tax system — points that are hugely important at this moment in history, when the very notion of using public levies to support public goods is under assault by the president himself. At 4:30 on Sundays, after the matinee performance, Josh is also hosting free public forums called “Tax Talkbacks” with experts (this coming Sunday, New York Times tax-beat reporter David Cay Johnston is the guest).

If you don’t trust my enthusiasm — yes, Josh and I are old pals — you can check out the enthusiasm of other critics who aren’t friends with him.

William Gibson’s blog is becoming, day by day, an astonishingly rich trove of insight and ideas. Check out this essay titled “IN THE VISEGRIPS OF DR. SATAN (WITH VANNEVAR BUSH),” then read on to find out what Gibson thought about “The Matrix” when he finally watched it.

Noah Shachtman’s blog on Defense Tech is useful and timely.

The Raven: If it’s called a “rant,” it better be a rant!

Frank Lynch writes in to point us to a curious report on user interface design for urinals.

My old friend (old as in long term: we were high school classmates, and attended many a science-fiction convention together) Greg Costikyan, the veteran game designer who has written some fine pieces for Salon about gaming, has started a blog of his own. “I want to talk about games, and game design, as art,” he says. Anything he has to say on the subject should be worth reading.

Lisa Guernsey, the New York Times Circuits reporter, has a new Radio blog focusing in part on the ins and outs of the search-engine biz.

Steven Johnson’s books — “Interface Culture” and “Emergence” — represent some of the most thoughtful and idea-laden writing on technoculture you’ll find anywhere. Johnson, who was co-editor of the late lamented Feed as well, is now blogging away at www.stevenberlinjohnson.com.

Marc Canter was one of the people who, in the early ’90s, sparked what was known as the “multimedia revolution” to those of us who were involved, one way or another, in it. He’s still offering smart perspectives on how entertainment and technology collide — now in blog form.