The Links Effect

I've been slacking again, and I had promised I wouldn't. The 'Worth A Gander' section - stage left - has taken on some new names, but apologies to two of the three bloggers newly added for the delay in adding their links. The blogroll looks as if it is on random select at the moment, and really does need an overhaul but fear eats the soul when I even contemplate rejigging the blogs listed. Sometime soon a skip will be placed next to the blog, and a few of them will be drop kicked in. The rest will get reshuffled to give some semblance of order.

Isn't It About Time We Had Socialism? is the blog of a fellow SPGBer, Gray, who operates out of Denmark. A kindred spirit of sorts, in that he is one of those all too rare SPGBers who actually likes sport, and he can even contemplate the existence of sport in a socialist society. (From my experience, quite a few SPGB members must have been the last to be picked when it came to School footie games, and this has coloured their outlook on the question of sport in a socialist society.) However, he goes and spoils it by supporting Gillingham FC, and having a fascination for Rugby Union. I'll stick to reading his blog for the politics. ;-)

Piers is another SPGBer armed with a blog. Border Fever operates out of Cumbria, with a socialist spin on Carlisle, Cumbria and the World.

What do I know about Carlisle? Well, they have a footie team, who spent about two minutes atop the old First Division back in the mid-seventies. Their star player at the time was Chris Balderstone, who was one of the last breed of professional footie/cricketers (Andy Goram doesn't count). They were last seen being promoted back into the football league after spending some time in non-league football. By all accounts the fans are gutted that they won't be playing Accrington Stanley next year.

What do I know about Cumbria? Apart from travelling through it from time to time when going between Scotland and England, my main experience of Cumbria was attending a Socialist Party meeting in Barrow back in about 1990/91. I was part of a Lancaster Branch contingent that sought to provide support for a couple of comrades seeking to generate some activity in the area. My memory of the meeting is a bit hazy, but I remember that the local comrades were a tad over optimistic in the size of the venue they booked, a middle aged cynical CPGBer done the 'What about human nature?' objection routine that had probably been done on him a hundred times before, and the pub/Labour Club we went to after the meeting was one of those: "We only like locals in here type" places.

What do I know about the World? It's small, but I still wouldn't want to leaflet it.

Fear in the City of the Living Dead is the blog of Buff, a good friend of Kara's from back home in Indiana. He writes like a dream on such varied subjects as films, censorship and porn (erm, isn't that basically David Cronenberg's Crash?),and this recommendation is being typed in green-with-envy ink through gritted death. He is a seriously funny writer, and now that he has escaped from MySpace to write in the outside world I can no longer get away with lifting his jokes and passing them off as mine. If another friend of Kara's from MySpace, Abby, decides to set up a blog, then I will be really stuffed for material to fill this blog.

All three blogs are well recommended, and I'll be sure to click on their links 25 times a day when I should be doing more important things like playing solitaire on the computer, downloading Ed Harcourt tracks off the internet and putting in bogus bids on ebay.