My bookmarks have gotten out of control, so I'm offloading some of them on you ...

• Perhaps not surprisingly, Playboy's list of the hottest bloggers doesn't feature a literary blogger. However, my vote would go to Brigitte Dale. She's fucking gorgeous--and, with twenty-six percent of the vote at the time I posted this, she's in the lead.
• Newsweek reprints a 1945 letter by the late, great Kurt Vonnegut. (The letter, incidentally, is in Vonnegut's Armageddon in Retrospect.)
• I thought this question--"Are men boring?"--had been settled centuries ago. (The answer, of course, is yes. Just ask your wife.) Apparently, it still merits "deep" analysis: "Jess Spillane, 44, a teacher in Plymouth, says: 'It's to do with macho-ness. The more macho a man is, the more boring he can be--that's why gay men are generally better company. When macho men talk about their work, they have a point to make. They want to drum it home. Or they don't talk at all. There are two types: the pompous and the somnolent. Heterosexual men with macho leanings are the opposite of women who are happy to divulge the downsides of their life or job, the moans, the insecurities. You bond with people when they admit their vulnerabilities. Self-doubt is interesting.'" Sorry, I was busy watching Die Hard and trying to think of somewhere to drive, so I can fiddle with my new GPS navigation system. What were you saying?
• Somehow, the Suicide Girls are back in my bookmarks. It's been a few years since I last paid them a visit, but it's nice to know they're still among the most beautiful women on the Internets.
• As a devoted fan of all things heavy metal--particularly death metal and, to a smaller extent, black metal--this struck me as interesting: "A common mistake made by the uninitiated listener is to conflate death metal and black metal. I've been at a few parties or dinners or whatever where someone has asked me to describe the difference between the two. To answer involves me trying to explain a blast beat, followed by vocal impressions of a death-metal vocalist (low, deep, guttural growling) vs. a black-metal vocalist (usually higher, wispy, wraithlike, and screeched). Admittedly, sometimes it can be like splitting hairs. Black metal's gone through various shifts, but generally speaking, the guitars buzz, the drums are quick, the vocals shrieking, ghostly, and anguished. The early work had a particularly eerie, lo-fi sound. As the scene developed, and younger musicians mastered their instruments, the structures grew more complex. Black metal is generally not as straight-up technical as death; it's usually more classically symphonic. (Of course, there are always exceptions, such as the early Floridian death-metal crew Morbid Angel, who created complex, epically sublime death constructions.)"