Monday Morning Link Farming

How was your weekend, readers? Mine was very busy indeed. On Saturday, I spent time in lovely Columbia Country NY with my familie francaise--they're not actually family, but close friends for three generations--swimming and eating and best of all, drinking wine at lunch (Macon vin blanc, mmm). Sunday I treked out to the Rock the Bells hip-hop festival, which was a downer because of the abundance of pouring rain and the crowd which was more "Heineken and puke" than "peace and love." Who would have thought that Rage Against the Machine, with all their glorious anarchist-socialism, would attract so many goddamn frat boys?

Anyhooch, the soggy day was redeemed with a viewing of the Simpsons movie which was appropriately hilarious and even a wee bit political, and so now here I am, facing another Monday morning of being a motivational challenged 20-something slacker in hot, humid NYC.

Here goes my procrastination rundown:

• The Times, triumphant in its power to obtain various reading material, reads Hillary's angsty college letters and concludes little. Just like they did with HP 7.

• My man John Edwards rails against big media and the haircut scandal. Amen. (TPM/youtube)

• Caryn James has a typically un-insightful piece on Austen-mania. And concludes, stupidly, as everyone does, that Austen is escapism for women. Not exactly, Caryn, but we shall deal with that later.
  

• Over at HuffPo, another Egalitarian Bookworm takes JKR's side against snooty Byatt and Bloom.

• At Hullaballoo, a really really great explique of Giuliani's horrible legacy of racist mayoring in NYC--a legacy which makes me so mad I have a hard time explaining it to people who weren't New Yorkers during the "glorious Giuliani year." Blech.