Lee Felsenstein, last heard from regarding his program to hook up rural Laos for “pedal-powered” Net access, is posting again — this time with a recipe for successful, world-changing activism.

There are a lot of interesting new Salon blogs out there. I’ve been remiss in keeping up with them lately. I hope to get out more soon.

In the meantime, check out the bluntly named Why your wife won’t have sex with you — a series of in-depth essays on that very topic, from a woman’s perspective. It’s like a self-help book, only better written and with comments from the readers…

Speaking of comments, those of you who pay attention to the comments on this blog will have noticed a marked increase in the strange practice of spam-posting comments — reposting the same verbiage multiple times. (Sometimes this happens as a result of slow response time from the server, but those cases usually lead to 2, 3 or 4 reposts, not ten and 20.) This is a waste of bandwidth and, more important, a waste of this blog’s readers’ time. So cut it out. If necessary I’ll just turn off comments here, but I’d rather not do that. I’ve got no problem with endless vocal disagreement with me. There’s been lots of good, smart dialogue in there. But I have no patience for juvenile spam tactics.

And yes, I know that Radio UserLand’s comments feature is pretty rudimentary — it should offer the ability to delete posts, ban posters and otherwise moderate those comments boards. I’m sorry it’s not better. Since we don’t develop the software here at Salon, I can’t take this on myself, but will continue to communicate this kind of feedback to the UserLand team.

Hyperbole is a new, or fairly new, Salon blog from Jim Haefele, who seems to be in Tunisia and who writes today about the strange French love for televised competitive dictation shows.

Virtual Occoquan’s best-of-Salon-blogs offers a new edition all about money.

Congrats to Pesky the Rat‘s Susan the Human on finding a job.

The Raven takes apart the State of the Union:

What the White House thinks about you: You are simple. Parsing the speech reveals that in his 5,366-word speech, the average sentence was 18 words in length. Some might make the case that perhaps Bush isn’t good with long sentences, and we’ll admit the possibility. So you and the President are very simple people with limited attention spans.

Mark Hoback offers a slyly rewritten version of the Democratic response to Bush’s State of the Union:

Yes, the Republican Party now controls the executive branch and both houses of Congress and the court system and the military and the news media, but we patriotic Democrats will hold the administration and congressional leaders accountable. We are prepared to issue strongly worded statements, and unleash patriotic tongue lashings.

Why do people love to bash Martha Stewart? Rayne has some ideas.

“My Brain Doesn’t Bibliograph”: David Harris is using part of his blog as a what-books-I-read diary.

Good to see Julie/Julia getting some well-deserved press. [Link courtesy Bruce Umbaugh]

	No Code on how scam artists attempt to dupe emergency room staff into giving them their drug of choice.
	Julie/Julia’s odyssey through French cooking continues to delight — check out today’s post on mussels.
	Welcome to Salon Blogs’ second (at least) clerical blogger: Le Pretre Noir.
	“Instant Message: Married With A Girlfriend” is pretty much what it sounds like. But is it fiction or true confession?
	A new Virtual Occoquan came out while I was doing other things, with more gleanings of choice Salon Blog material.

Morgan Sandquist on reading Proust:

Reading Proust quickly is as dubious an achievement as breathing quickly. Read Proust because you want to be reading Proust, not because you want to have read Proust.

Miguel Octavio has been offering vivid reports from the street in Venezuela, where the strife between opponents of Chavez (Octavio is one) and supporters continues.

The Raven offers an in-depth and eye-opening review of the latest in telemarketing — offense and defense.

And finally, SRO (Hugh Elliott) has taken it upon himself to deconstruct the little caricature that accompanies my Salon column — and even offers some make-over tips. (In truth, the caricature is about eight years old; it’s the work of the extremely talented Zach Trenholm, and it’s overdue for an update.)

I’m continuing to enjoy the musings of Real Live Preacher. Here’s a choice passage:

I spent a lot of time in Mexico as a young boy. The preacher knows the mingled smells of outhouses, kerosene, and poverty. It’s something you never forget. One year during a bitter cold spell my father and his friends showed up at the border with a load of blankets and coats. The forecast was for temperatures well below freezing that night, and they knew a lot of families were going to be cold. The Mexican government forbade them from entering. Some bureaucratic bullshit, I guess. My dad said his kinder, gentler equivalent of “fuck it” and became a smuggler on the spot. He and the others made numerous trips across the border that day in different cars with blankets, food, and jackets crammed under the seats and hidden in the trunks. My dad felt that one’s calling to serve God was higher than one’s calling to obey the law. For Christ’s sake, he and his friends couldn’t let children freeze. “For Christ’s sake” packs a punch when you mean it literally.

Mark Hoback has posted a new edition of his Virtual Occoquan roundup of Salon Blogs posts and highlights.