It's proving impossible to keep up with blogging or much of anything else these days. In fact, I have trouble reading the few blogs I look at regularly. On rare occasions when I post almost daily I get little else done. Among the things that don't get done are: a redesign of my own website; a relaunch of Terminal Zone; a long list of project ideas, which as of today includes two more. I do manage to get my Recycled Goods and Jazz Consumer Guide columns done in a somewhat timely manner, but don't have enough surplus bandwidth to review much more music, and there's no way to economically justify myself as a music writer. My unrated list currently hovers around 950 records, which would take me at least nine months to drain if I got nothing new. I try to keep up a steady reading pace, but the books are piling up too -- not as fast as the records, but I read a lot slower.

The two new projects are:

• New Israel Peace Plan -- not a new project, but a new directory for the draft I wrote last month. I don't know how far I want to go with this, since activism isn't something I have any desire to get into. But the new directory will allow for collecting comments, producing refined drafts and supporting materials, etc. Like many of my project ideas, this is one waiting for someone to pick it up and run with it.

• The Case Against the Bush Republicans -- a starting place for formulating the 2006 elections argument that follows from my 2004 letter arguing for electing Kerry over Bush. This one should go back deeper into Republican history and the evolution of their cynical, demagogic, and ultimately dangerous system of politicking. This may actually turn out to be a practical approach to the book I've been thinking about for the last decade.