Welcome back...

Welcome back, Sausage Factory (sorry to disappoint anyone who expected to see a posting about Gabe Kaplan here). Many of us bloggers hadn't given up hope that Dan Lett's blog would return, as is evident by the long-standing, for-a-time-dead links on the sidebars of our blogs. Dan Lett is one the Free Press's best critical thinkers writers and it's good to see him posting again.

Local blogs

I recently discovered a couple of punchy local blogs more than worth adding to my blogroll.

PolicyFrog is an interesting read. See for example this

post on what I see as the Free Press's maddeningly simplistic and analytically-poor editorial efforts (in a world of exploding online content, the Free Press still seems to think its competitors are limited to the Sun and the local TV stations - the grey pap it tries to feed us in editorial form just doesn't measure up against the quality news and editorial material I can access within seconds from elswhere, including from other major Canadian dailies). While PolicyFrog's flavour is overall a little to the right of Prairie Topiary's, it's certainly worth a regular read.

The Rise and Sprawl is a pretty fantastic, well-researched, urban-focused blog. I love the fantastic photographs of Winnipeg past and present and the great research on the city's history and architecture. I love too the cogent and biting critique of our urban space's management, which is sadly characterized more often than not by its lack of vision, ignorance of planning basics, and discarding of urban history. The world could use more blogs of this calibre.

Photo: "Drawing for a Typewriter, 06/23/1868," a printed patent drawing for a typewriter invented by Sholes, Glidden, and Soule.