Procrastination is the art of keeping up with yesterday.
Joyful Days kindly nominated me for the Thinking Blogger Award back in the days of the dinosaurs. Well, she isn’t that old, really — it was only last April. I am grateful to her for thinking of me, and ever since then I have been thinking deeply about whom to nominate in my turn. Or, to be more precise, I printed out the nomination post as a reminder, and then it got lost in a pile of “to sort/read/file” papers on a shelf under my desk…
Five People Who Make Me Think
Brain: an apparatus with which we think we think.
There is no expedient to which a man will not go to avoid the labor of thinking.
I was born not knowing and have had only a little time to change that here and there.
A great many people think they are thinking when they are really rearranging their prejudices.
Follow the path of the unsafe, independent thinker. Expose your ideas to the dangers of controversy. Speak your mind and fear less the label of ‘crackpot’ than the stigma of conformity. And on issues that seem important to you, stand up and be counted at any cost.
Yes, I know. I am supposed to link to five bloggers. Well, I already link to a whole blogroll of people who make me think, sometimes harder than I can stand, and most of whom have probably already been tagged for this meme. It is not easy being such a late-comer to the party.
The Envelope Please…
Here are my nominations of five bloggers who make me think. And who, as far as I can tell, have not yet been tagged (or just haven’t posted it — maybe they don’t do memes, but I am sure you will enjoy their blogs anyway). And, just for variety’s sake, whom I have never linked to before, except in my blogroll:
1 — Earth is Crammed With Heaven… is an absolutely beautiful and inspiring nature journal. Wonderful photos and quotations.
2 — From the Trenches of Public Ed. is a thought-provoking counterpoint to the majority of my reading. (Well, most of us who homeschool are doing it for a reason, right? So it shouldn’t be surprising if we write about those reasons.) Mr. Fermoyle is a social studies teacher with a passion to defend the public schools. And he has written an excellent American History Required Knowledge Test that I have been meaning to blog about for…well…let’s just say that I really deserve that procrastinating award, if anyone ever gets around to making one!
3 — Fantasy Fiction for Christians [this blog has disappeared, but she has a couple of Harry Potter articles left on her Writings page] is written by well-known blogger La Shawn Barber. I love fantasy fiction, and I enjoy Ms. Barber’s well-thought-out comments.
4 — Dragon Writing Prompts offers great quotes, brainstorming lists, many idea-generators, and The Fantasy Novelist’s Exam. What a great resource to kick-start your students’ (or your own) writing!
5 — I Can Has Cheezburger? …well, maybe it doesn’t exactly make me think, except that some of the captions (written like text messages) can be hard to figure out. But it does make me laugh — especially now that we have adopted our third stray kitten.
I won’t bother to reprint the Thnking Blogger rules, which I’m sure you have seen more than once before. Jasmine’s mistress over at Rurality had an interesting take on the rules, which may have some truth in it:
I suspect that ‘so people can easily find the exact origin of the meme’ really means ‘so I can get lots and lots of links.’ The blogealogy went backwards like this… Do click on some of the links above. After just a couple I found blogs that I not only hadn’t heard of, but who didn’t even link to anyone I’d heard of. And some of them are quite wonderful!
So, to sum up: Nice results from possibly scammy origins. How often does that happen?!
And I thoroughly enjoyed her “blogealogy,” so I decided to follow the lineage of my own Thinking Blogger ancestors back to the beginning. I found out that was nearly impossible to do on my glacially-slow dial-up modem connection. (Some of you out there use blog formats that make it frustratingly difficult to search your archives.) Oh, well. I have probably spent more time on this than it deserves already.
I wonder what else is lost in that pile of papers….
Denise Gaskins' Let's Play Math 
Yes, three months later I question the wisdom of the linkage that went into the award. But I still stand by my statement that you make me think!! And you make something I’ve struggled with fun & attainable.
I took a short look at the five you listed & will be back looking at them a little more in depth. They look thought provoking or for the last one, extremely entertaining.
I can’t imagine you using the pile method as I do. You give the impression of very organized.
Blessings,
Julie
I come across as organized? Oh, my! Well, to paraphrase last week’s Sunday School lesson (Samuel anointing David), “You look at the blogward appearance, but I look at the desk.”