This will be my first weekend off from blogging, so I want to wish a happy Fourth of July to my readers of the American persuasion. I hope you’re all stocked up on barbecue sauce and illegal fireworks. I’ll be back on Monday with a post on…something. But for now, I think I’m going to get a start on the second volume of The Walking Dead.

A recent poll found that Americans perceive terrorism and the federal debt as the most serious threats to the country. The fact that these two wildly different issues alarm Americans in almost equal measure shows that the turbulence of the last couple years has left our national psyche a little rattled. Of course, Americans’ fear of terrorism is nothing new. Memories of 9/11 loom large in our collective memory and we’ve been in a state of low-level panic ever since then, a state that is exacerbated by news of every half-baked attempt to wreak similar havoc. But the debt is a more abstract fear with more diffuse consequences. Americans are kept awake by what is essentially an accounting problem. How much more post-modern can you get as a society?

It isn’t difficult to discern the roots of this fear. The billions of public dollars spent on the TARP and economic stimulus have not improved the short-term economic outlook for most people and unemployment is still rampant, prompting a lot of questioning about the value of such spending. The debt crisis in Greece showed everyone that a spendthrift government can get itself in real trouble. My worry, though, is that this anti-deficit fervor might rob us of an economic recovery. The politics of the moment have already caused plenty of hand-wringing in Congress, where provisions to extend unemployment benefits and enhanced Medicaid funding are languishing. There’s historical precedence for the proposition that bad things happen when public spending is cut before the economy has fully escaped the doldrums. It would be tragically ironic if people’s fears lead to the financial hardships they were hoping to avoid.

Once again, I failed to make it into Time‘s annual list of the best blogs. It’s beginning to dawn on me that my scattershot approach to blogging isn’t helping me cultivate my on-line brand identity (and I just threw up a little in my mouth when I realized I wrote “on-line brand identity”). But all my favorite topics–politics, pop culture, tech, fishnets–already have popular and high-profile blogs devoted to them. I need to come up with some kind of stunt blogging event, like the girl who followed to the letter the edicts of Seventeen magazine for a month. Maybe I could chronicle my efforts to read every Star Trek tie-in novel ever written or to sample the dishes of every local restaurant in puréed form. There must be some way I can completely waste my time while still getting the attention I so desperately crave.

Salon has a short article about Zach Anner, the guy with cerebral palsy who is competing for a chance to get his own Oprah-approved talk show. Zach has become something of an Internet sensation and has surged ahead in the contest’s vote count thanks to some help from hackers in his fanbase. Now if only the media would stop using the lazy phrase “wheelchair-bound” to describe him. Maybe Zach can do an episode on disability etiquette once he gets his own show. Of course, that will have to wait until after we complete production on our special trip-to-Amsterdam episode.

I like videogames. And I like sex. So when I see a trailer for a side-scrolling game called Privates that features microscopic Marines battling evil germs as they travel through a vagina and colon, I can’t help but be intrigued. The game is designed to be a subversive bit of edutainment on practicing safe sex, but I can’t stop laughing at the prim-and-proper British voicework featured in the trailer. I can already imagine some flabby Fox News commentator frothing at the mouth when he finds out about this and raving about how this is just another example of Obama destroying America.

This game probably won’t be sitting on many Wal-Mart store shelves, but that hardly matters in this age of digital distribution. The game itself could be horrible, in which case I’ll feel silly about devoting a blog entry to it. And if it’s good, I’ll buy it and wait for the opportunity to shock one of my more conservative nurses.