Happy Blog Day!

I was linked by Cardamom Addict today, and from her post I learn that today is Blog Day. This is the day that the blogger comes out of his hole in the ground, and if he sees his shadow, then we'll have six more weeks of memes and government-bashing...

Hold on, I was reading this wrong. Blog Day is when you give chocolate and heart-shaped paper objects to your favorite blogger. No?

Maybe Blog Day is the day Technorati Claus sneaks down your chimney and gives all of the good little bloggers fast new computers and dedicated T-1 lines? Or the day we give thanks to all of the bloggers who built our great nation (whichever one that is in any particular case)?

No, no and no. Blog Day is when each blogger, desperate for content as usual, highlights five new-to-them blogs and explains why you-the-reader should check them out.

So:

BLOGregard Q. Kazoo
The official blog for one of my favorite TV shows, Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends, is a great blog for anyone interested in animation (or writing for TV); it's currently featuring the life-cycle of one episode in great and fascinating detail. Also regularly posted are character design sheets and gorgeous backgrounds.

Grumpy Old Bookman
GOB (as he calls himself) is a British writer and editor of advancing years with a very jaundiced take on the book world. He's particularly interested in newer publishing strategies and ideas (such as print-on-demand) which is refreshing in a man his age. I don't always agree with him, but he's a good eye on the British publishing world and has interestingly idiosyncratic views.

The Art Department
I'm sure I've mentioned Irene Gallo's blog before, but it's still pretty new, and it combines two of the things I enjoy most: SF and art. Gallo is the art director for Tor (the biggest US publisher of SF and Fantasy), and so she knows everybody who works in the field and has been doing short interviews with a number of artists recently. She's also good at demistifying the process by which a picture gets stuck onto the front of a book.

John C. Wright
The LiveJournal of the SF writer John C. Wright. Wright is very verbose, very opinionated, fond of wordplay, and doesn't suffer fools easily. I don't agree with him on everything, but I'm often all of those things myself, so his LJ is like reading the work of an alternate-universe me. (Except Wright is even more all of those things than I usually am -- maybe he's me with the volume turned up.) He's also been recently running through a lot of the "Heinlein juveniles" (in the SFBC omnibuses, no less!) and reviewing them one by one. One of his posts can take ten minutes or more to read -- they're that long -- but it's generally worth the time.

News From Me
This one is a cheat, since it isn't new to me; I've been reading it for about a year, since I first dove into the blog world. Mark Evanier is a writer I first knew of from comics -- he turned Sergio Aragones's Groo into proper English, and wrote a long-running column for Comics Buyer's Guide about random topics -- though I think most of his time and money comes from TV stuff. He has a very active blog that usually stays in the neighborhoods of TV comedy/variety and comic books, but occasionally ventures further out than that.