We have so many insightful and powerful diaries written here at Daily Kos. Our diaries inform, inflame, impassion, and even entertain. We Kossacks have strong voices and an even stronger will to be the change we wish to see in this country.
One of the richest, and perhaps most under-appreciated, areas of thought come in the form of comments attached to these diaries.
Here at Top Comments we strive to recognize and promote the talent of this community by highlighting outstanding comments found throughout the day by the diarist, and through nominations at made at TopComments at gmail dot com by your fellow Kossacks.
These nominations are subjective, and certainly not complete (as no one can read the complete site on a daily basis!). But we hope they will serve to shine a light where deserved, and to give the reader a good starting point in finding conversation on the site.
Please come in and make yourself at home! Join us beneath the fold...
No, this isn't about a doughnut, or a ham, or any other foodstuff that's been covered by a (frequently sweet) coating. Nor is it about freezing rain, something we had a lot of earlier in the year.
It's me: I'm glazed. Or glazed over. Being shorted on sleep for well over a week while the Boston Early Music Festival was in town and I was going to multiple concerts a day and staying out until very late left me glazed to a turn: six days in a row leaving Boston after midnight for the drive home, and then inexplicably waking up early the following morning will do it for you. I wouldn't say I'm non compos mentis, but the thought processes are not as smooth or robust as usual, and my voice lesson today was a bit of a disaster: my teacher wanted more energy, and it just wasn't happening. (Yes, I'm even worse than I was on Saturday evening, when last you saw my far-from-scintillant prose.)
On the other hand, it was a glorious week. The Boston Early Music Festival ended yesterday as gloriously as it began, with a wonderful final concert and a performance of a magnificent—and nearly four hour, though it didn't seem at all that long—opera. The word "wow" has never seemed so inadequate.
A disadvantage to glazing is that it takes longer than planned to write a diary and assemble comments, as witness the fact that it's 10:00:25 as I'm typing the end of this sentence. So the diary's going to publish late, on top of everything else. But at least beautiful music will still be running through my head as it does...
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We had some action today in the Top Comments mailbox, with a quartet of submissions (Dragon5616 sent two emails with his three suggestions) arriving by the 9:30pm Eastern Time deadline. The address of our mailbox for top comments submissions remains:
TopComments AT gmail DOT com
(change " AT " to "@" and " DOT " to ".")
Anyone can send great comments to our address. Be sure to include the direct link to a comment—the URL—which is available from that comment's date/time; we need that to find your choice. Please always include your Daily Kos user name in the body of your message, so we can credit you properly. If you send a writeup with the link, we are able to include that, too, though we reserve the right to edit.
From Samer:
radical simplicity makes a point that is simple to understand, yet goes over the head of most radicals. . . .
From Dragon5616:
Azazello makes an accurate observationabout the "crisis" in education in the sunspark says rescued diary truths twisted about teaching.
In Joan McCarter's informative front page post Thomas's ethical problems in the spotlight, Bindle speaks for Frederick Douglass and the rest of us about Clarence Thomas being given Douglass's Bible by one of his corporate handlers. Be sure to check the threads that follow.
In Eclectablog's good news diary TexDem discharged from the hospital in Minneapolis, cooper888 coined an appropriate eponym.
From princesspat:
The comment by HoundDog regarding the need to cultivate a greater collective intelligence and how reading Daily Kos helps us do so resonates with me today.
From sardonyx (your glazed Monday diarist):
In Seneca Doane's interesting diary Wal-Mart will be so sorry it won today, he points out in a diary update that Attorney at Arms has made a number of excellent comments in the diary, especially this one. I agree.
In DemFromCT's front-page story Gallup: 22% are hesitant to support a Mormon in 2012, Otherday writes that religious prejudice is wrong, and specifically about two situations that come to mind when thinking about LDS members.
Alan Grayson writes a diary (which I also got as an email) invoking a famous scene from the old Green Lantern comic book, but Ptolemy points out that the true progressive of the Green Lantern/Green Arrow pair was really Green Arrow. As a fan of comics who bought that particular issue at the local drugstore way back when, I had to include it—and the subsequent discussion—in tonight's list.
Please add your own comment finds below!
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A reminder: We still hope top mojo will return once we figure out how to strongarm convince Comment Search to give us exactly what we need in a form that we can use. Which is more difficult and requires more hand-editing than it should be (or used to be).