• When M. and I left our hotel room on Tuesday, the lobby was full of the crackle of police radios. Everywhere you looked in downtown Chicago, there were cops standing around.

These are some kind of federales outside a federal office building on Jackson Street.

I was happy, therefore, to get home and learn that the huge crowds at Barack Obama’s rally were mostly good-natured and that there was no celebratory rioting.

• I will be watching for progress on rebuilding the Temple of Artemis.

• When Obama made his ill-considered remark about those of us in flyover country “clinging to guns and religion,” my first thought was to wonder which religion(s) he had in mind. Oleg Volk, a Russian-born photographer now living in Tennessee, created an image that mirrors my thoughts.

• And this post on “alternative” gun culture is all about others who don’t want to be victims, such as the Pink Pistols.

I have a number of substantive posts that I want to write, but I seem to not be getting to them.

Reasons: I am trying to finish a paper to be presented at the AAR. The easy narrative part is done, and so I am struggling with the theoretical part. Only to complicate things, it’s a co-written paper (with slides to be projected in sync with the text), and I have to see what my co-author will add, and how it all be integrated.

Are co-written papers a bad idea? Probably, if you both have busy lives and live 1,200 miles apart!

And then I have to finish reading and making notes on a new religious-studies textbook that I am supposed to copy edit and put into InDesign, knowing that the publisher and the general editor will be at AAR and will expect me to have intelligent things to say.

There are some posts (more to come) about M.’s and my Yellowstone trip on the other blog.

Expect more here, one of these days.

M. and I are off for a few days to pursue trout and mushrooms. Blogging will resume later next week.

Who says the mainstream media doesn’t do some things well? New York Times writer Mattathias Schwartz explores the world of Web trolls.

Ultimately, this issue is about the idea of the “commons” and whether the Web can function as a place to exchange ideas and information without getting buried in slime:

Does free speech tend to move toward the truth or away from it? When does it evolve into a better collective understanding? When does it collapse into the Babel of trolling, the pointless and eristic game of talking the other guy into crying “uncle”? Is the effort to control what’s said always a form of censorship, or might certain rules be compatible with our notions of free speech?

(Via Firedoglake.)

Boppin’ aroung the Pagan blogosphere in lieu of getting real work done . . .

¶ Lessons about getting spiritually comfortable in new ecological landscapes. I am not sure that I buy all of the writers’ asumptions, but it is a good topic to bring up. And as all good Phil Rickman fans know, there are things that can “kill you and eat you” right there in the Celtic homelands.

¶ Still on the Celtic spirituality “over here” theme, Fiacharrey at the Cypress Nemeton thinks about encounters with Christian apologists in two posts, one and two.

¶ John Yohalem’s perspective on attending a Passover seder this year.

But if there’s only one god (let’s call him El, the Genuine Article, as in a train high above the streets, or a box of exploding cigars), then he either rolls over and ignores us (the Red King a-dreaming) or he enters history, stirs the pot, tastes it now and then and adds spices to taste. (God-in-a-toque and the divine (Julia) child.) Jewishness is predicated on this interfering god, and interpreting reality through his interferences. (E.g.: Sodom means he’s anti-gay or something else that was done there.)

¶ Anne Hill is anticipating a central listing of Reclaiming-tradition bloggers

¶ The Nine Noble Virtues in LOLCat-ese. Eventually we will be tired of it — the LOL-speak, not the virtues.

Guest-blogging today at The Wild Hunt blog.