The Friday Fillip

Because this is Good Friday, a holiday, and a serious one for many people, this won’t be a flippant fillip. I’m simply presenting you with two rather different blogs that might catch your interest.

The first is Hometown Baghdad, which describes itself as: “A documentary web series following the lives of a few Iraqi 20-somethings trying to survive in Baghdad.” This is an unusual implementation of the blogging format, using You Tube to play out documentary segments across the weeks. There are new video episodes every Monday, Wednesday and Friday; I’m not entirely clear but it seems that everything was filmed some time ago and, as I’ve suggested, is being published as a serial now. At any event, this blog will give you an insight into the Iraq war that you may not otherwise have had. I find it quite moving at times, though thankfully free of sentimentality (perhaps because the featured players are young people). If you only watch one episode, make it #7: “Symphony of Bullets.”

Utterly different from that is Quillblog, a production of the magazine Quill & Quire‘s “blog division.” A group blog, Quillblog ranges everywhere that books do, and brings you amusing comment, photos and the occasional video. Delightful. Take for example the current entry, Fun with press releases (Choose Your Own Adventure edition). It concludes in the following way:

If you choose to continue reading this post, click here.

If you choose to go to the Q&Q splash page, click here.

If you choose to watch Alanis Morissette singing that “My Humps” song, click here.

As I say: delightful.

Oh, and the Morissette video is interesting.