While doing a little start-of-the-year cleanup of my Blogroll links, these sites made for an interesting and wide-ranging night around the blogsphere:

* Over at The Wide Awake Cafe, Laura Lee is reminiscing about fur creatures of her past. Methinks she thinks of her cats the same way my wife Tracey does our rabbits.

* One of my favorite bloggers, Lorie Byrd, is looking forward to the new television season. Hmmm… wonder if she’d watch The Funeral Channel if that was on?

* One of Lorie’s fellow bloggers over at Wizbang!, DJ Drummond, is battling cancer and having to put some life goals on hold. Please keep him and his family in your thoughts and prayers.

* Along those same lines, Michael at Chasing The Wind is contemplating the nature of suffering, albeit from a different angle.

* Mike at MDV Outlook has it about right, I think, when writing of the mainstream dino-media’s coronation of “San Fran Nan” Pelosi and the Democratic leadership take-over of Congress (and his own state of New Hampshire):

In the next two years, lawmakers in Washington and Concord will attempt to expand the scope of government action. They will pass laws ostensibly designed to protect the weak from the powerful. But in doing so they will make the government that they control, already more potent than the richest tycoon or largest corporation, even more powerful. In many cases they will replace the collective judgment of millions of Americans with the judgment of a few hundred lawmakers.

Yes, the nanny state is back. Here’s to hoping that it takes less than two years for Americans to remember why they rebelled against it in the first place.

Indeed.

* Babulican at Stageleft is contemplating the “Greatest 10 Seconds in Rock”. I was thinking about the first ten seconds of Elvis’ “Hound Dog”, or perhaps Brian Wilson’s intro to “California Girls”. Perhaps you can think of others – click here and drop your own dime!

* And finally, a BIG blogsphere welcome to my very good friend Dona over at Septuagenarian! Dona is as wonderful a writer as she is a friend and confidant, so I invite you to check her site out.