Mark Hoback, on Fried Green Al-Qaedas, is providing regular tours of Salon blog-space. You can also access good updates from Christian Crumlish’s Radio Free Blogistan’s “Salonika” channel, which is aggregating salon-blog-stuff from multiple channels.

From the Raven: “Xtreme” Blogging! “I’d like to find the guy that coined that usage, because if I did, I’d wrap him up in kerosene-soaked rags and set him on fire while dragging him down the street tied to my rear bumper and I’d cut him loose into a gator-infested swamp, smoking, bleeding, and screaming. It would be Xtreme…. This isn’t just the devaluation of a word, it’s a full-scale linguistic holocaust.” Raven traces it back to the ’70s usage “Terminate with extreme prejudice,” which of course was a line from “Apocalypse Now.”

Kat Donohue takes on Justin Timberlake, Christina Aguilera and Shania Twain.

Portrait of a “fringe family” in difficult straits, from Rayne.

ExplodedLibrary.info reports on anti-linking policies at the L.A. Times.

Julie/Julia: “Something about the physicality of cooking, especially something complex and/or plain old hard to handle, is enormously sexy. Beef marrow bones are sexy. Chopping up a lobster is sexy. Making a three-layer cake is sexy.”

Tips for writers from Gareth Branwyn. [link courtesy Boing Boing]

	The Thing on the Roof: It had fur and claws. J.H. Farr’s spooky tale.
	A Halloween emergency room scene from No Code.
	Halloween games for kids from Rayne.
	All about tarot, from She’s Actual Size.
	Wozz offers a pithy summary of a recent Tom Petty interview in Rolling Stone.

While I was sick in bed, you guys have been having a useful conversation over at Radio Free Blogistan (at its new address) about what the hell the “Salon Blogs Community” really is, or means.

Since this project has always been, and remains, an experiment, I don’t think I have any fixed answer to that question. Technically, of course, a blog that registers with our community server — typically by having downloaded Radio through Salon and, after 30 days, paying the license fee — is part of the community. But since blogs can be anything — compulsively communicative or proudly isolationist — the notion of “community” is an awfully vague one. If there’s one thing I’ve learned in 13 years on the Well and seven years at Salon helping run Table Talk, it’s that you don’t define an online community from the top down — you let it define itself. So I’ll keep reading these discussions and conversations, chime in where it seems appropriate, and try to jot down all the useful suggestions that involve Salon doing something.

Here are some of the things we want and intend to do, soon, with Salon blogs:

(1) Begin occasionally featuring other Salon Blogs, not just mine, on the Salon home page headlines list. Doing so will, we hope, direct some more attention to bloggers’ work. Now, this will have its popular aspect (yay, Salon is sending us more readers!) and its unpopular aspect (Hey, how come you picked that blog to highlight and not mine?). But we’ll play around with it.

(2) Work with UserLand to eventually enable more “personalized” URLs. We know that most bloggers would rather be a name than a number! But this is a change that has to come from UserLand’s side. It’s their software.

(3) Build a more permanent listings page of Salon blogs that lives on Salon itself, featuring listings and brief descriptions of the blogs that have a more fixed existence than the “Updates” and “Rankings” pages. This listing would only be available to users who have paid their license fee for the Radio software. Still to be worked out: How is this page ordered?

I wish we’d been able to move on these changes sooner. This month has sort of been a wash for me — between the time-sink that was the Jason Leopold affair and other management stuff here at Salon, and then getting sick, all I can say is, I’m looking forward to November!

	“I have been aggressively overestimating the risks from the sniper and they still come out far lower than a lot of everyday activities, including ones that we have no control over.” David Harris considers the odds.
	There is serious (and not-so-serious) cooking — and writing about cooking — going on over at the Julie/Julia Project. If you haven’t yet checked it out, how can you resist Poulet Saute a la Creme… Bavarois a l’Orange…
	Toby grapples thoughtfully with the reaction to his critique of Michelle Goldberg’s “Peace Kooks” article.
	“I met Jesus in a diner in Lexington Park. I don’t remember what he looked like, but his name was Bob and he was from Chicago.” Read more on No Code.
	“Pulp Fiction” — postmodern? or modernist? Charly Z of Driver 8 weighs in.

If you want to add Google search to your Salon blog, John Robb has some code here. And Christian has some more useful info here.

Plan B: A Blognovel, which roared through August but was silent in September, is now back (this post explains the schedule), with a post-cliff-hanger installment.

Rob Salkowitz: Maureen Dowd just isn’t that funny.

Rayne Today on the yin and yang of zoos: “I’m continually shocked at how some exhibits (always the newest ones) are so popular and so cool, but at the same time how some of the exhibits are so pathetic and antique, unloved.”