The Full Moon Phenomenon...and 60 Million Blogs Worldwide?

In a previous career as a newspaper journalist, my colleagues and I got accustomed to the "full-moon phenomenon." During the few days before, during and after a full moon, newsroom phones would ring (day and night) with strange and bizarre questions from often strange and bizarre callers. I think the phenomenon's at work in the blogosphere.

How else to explain today's top news link, the tale of two Brits who used fluourescent light tubes filled with gasoline to stage a Star Wars-like light sabre duel...and ended up hospitalized in critical condition. A blog called Wherever You Are sums up a typical reaction fairly nicely. The Daley Blog dubs it "revenge of the accelerants."

The there's this: today's No. 5 news link about California neighbors complaining about the sheet metal-covered house in their neighborhood; its occupants say the metal protects them from bombarding radiation. The MeisterPlanet blog calls it the "tinfoil hat house."

He was grrrr----eat!
Todays' burstiest person is Thurl Ravenscroft, who died at age 91 over the weekend. For 50 years, he was the voice of Tony the Tiger and also sang the "You're a Mean One, Mr. Grinch" song in the original Grinch cartoon. Bloggers mourn. Another TV icon died this week as well: Howard Morris, the actor who played Ernest T. Bass on the Andy Griffith show.

60 Million Blogs?
Duncan Riley of the BlogHerald, provides a fascinating estimate of the number of blogs worldwide, complete with breakdowns by continent. His projection: 60 million. No telling how many of those are spam or inactive.

The filibuster fallout
Conservative bloggers Michelle Malkin, the Power Line team and idealogue James Dobson are bemoaning the Senate's compromise on the filibuster issue, calling it everything from a "complete bailout and betrayal by a cabal of Republicans" (Dobson) to a "pathetic collapse on the part of the Republicans" (Powerline). (Or maybe this: the pendulum is finally swinging back to a bit of moderate, common-ground, common sense?)

BLOGPULS TREND GRAPH OF THE DAY: Amazing, isn't it, how the terms "conservative" and "liberal" can track so closely? Maybe as a nation, we are collectively more purple than red or blue?