I can’t exactly call this “What I’m reading lately,” because I haven’t gotten around to fully exploring these trees. But here are two blogs I recently discovered with good stuff.

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John Glenn Taylor’s “Easily Mused,” which I stumbled across while trying to discover the source of the David Letterman catchphrase “I’ve been hyp-mo-tized!” Taylor apparently didn’t post for the entirety of 2016 due to life upheavals, so I can only imagine what his 2020 has been like… but in the “Easily Mused” archives you’ll find quite interesting links to late-20th-century comedy like Letterman, Woody Allen’s Take the Money and Run, and the Goons; comics from “Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?” to “Peter Porkchops”; and artists-whose-names-should-be-more-famous-you’d-think such as Eyvind Earle (Sleeping Beauty) and Heinz Edelmann (Yellow Submarine). Along the way I learned the significance of the pair of names Holmes and Rahe.

Don’t miss “How to Destroy Your Vinyl Records: A Guide for Seniors.”

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Chris Siebenmann’s “Wandering Thoughts” has more technical content — and lots of it! During my “Classic STL” class this past week, I name-dropped his post “Python synergies in list addressing” (January 2006), which succinctly explains all the +1s and −1s that we save — in Python, C, C++, pretty much any modern programming language — by dealing in half-open ranges instead of closed ranges. (This is also the subject of Dijkstra’s EWD831 “Why numbering should start at zero” (1982-08-11).)

As you’ll see from the blog’s index, “Wandering Thoughts” contains way too many posts for me to pick out any specific highlights. They’re all good, and all in nice focused microblog-esque bites — a skill I have not yet mastered.

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Incidentally, I picked up the phrase “blog roundup” from some other blog a long time ago; I want to say it was Scott Aaronson’s “Shtetl-Optimized.”