On an old version of my friend Andrea Grant‘s home page, she posted a disclaimer to the effect that hers was pretty much just a personal site — not much of consequence, but full of the kind of stuff she liked to read on other people’s home pages. I had never really considered this before, but I realized it described my own browsing habits pretty well. I like reading about mundane, inconsequential crap — the more quirky and personal, the better. Hence my appreciation for stuff like Harvey Pekar‘s and R. Crumb‘s autobiographical comics (this would even apply to Chris Ware and Jim Woodring, come to think of it, even sans l’autobiographe), films like Eraserhead and The Straight Story, plays like Waiting for Godot, the poetry of William Carlos Williams and e.e. cummings, the music of Arlo Guthrie and Philip Glass, the The Andy Warhol Diaries, and my tendency to get sucked in by Real World marathons.
The J-Walk blog is one of my favorite recent blog discoveries (if “recent” can be stretched to mean “several months ago”), because it’s constantly updated with steaming piles of useless trivialities. And today, Mr. Walkenbach has directed me to another sure favorite — Kempa.com, by a guy who has some great Barnes & Noble stories. I mean, how can you resist stuff like a ranking of several limited-edition varieties of Kit-Kat bars? (No permalink available; it’s about 2/3 down the page.)
Also fun: The Book of Ratings, via Eve Tushnet (via Polytropos).
Also also fun: The Playground. (Also also via The J-Walk blog.) Be sure to check out Shakeitbabe and Shakeitbabe v.2 — both work best with Internet Explorer, incidentally
