A mix of aging links and stuff from today, crammed together in order to clear the buffer:

* “Slacktivist”:http://slacktivist.typepad.com/slacktivist/2004/06/christian_enter_2.html works up a righteous rage fuming about the aesthetic contributions of the evangelical subculture. Splendid as always. A taste:

The evangelical subculture is awash with bad art and dismal entertainments. From the _Left Behind_ books to the vast majority of “contemporary Christian music” (which is none of the above) evangelicals are eagerly buying up awful dreck, the consumption of which makes them worse people, worse neighbors, worse citizens and fundamentally worse Christians. This is theologically awful, politically vapid, aesthetically blasphemous stuff.

* Also in the “he knows whereof he speaks” department, Greg Costikyan uses an online museum exhibit as a starting point for “a bit of boardgame history rambling”:http://www.costik.com/weblog/2004_06_01_blogchive.html#108756424844851217.

* I usually roll my eyes whenever I read the words “guest blogger,” but “Josh Marshall”:http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/ gets credit for hosting a solid trio of proxies over the past few days. “Spencer Ackerman”:http://www.tnr.com/blog/iraqd, especially, was very fine.

* I was planning on writing about the dismal _Eats, Shoots & Leaves_ as soon as I got a chance to do a little more than thumb through it at the bookstore. But Louis Menand has “dispensed with the subject”:http://www.newyorker.com/critics/books/?040628crbo_books1 perfectly, not in a blog, but in one of those . . . whaddyacallit . . . magazines. His article spirals off into crunchy considerations of writing and “voice.” All this via God of the Machine, whose own “grammar thoughts”:http://www.godofthemachine.com/archives/00000555.html are another must-read.

* If you are a ninja, just how awesome a ninja are you? If you’re not, how awesome is your favorite ninja? Questions like these were hard to answer before, but no more: now we have a handy “ninja rating guide”:http://stagingpoint.com/archives/000327.html. My ninja is +25, which is not nearly high enough and obviously points to some flaws in the system. But it’s a start. (Hat tip to “Ed”:http://goesping.org/.)