LADY CHILTERN: I will love you always, because you will always be worthy of love. We needs must love the highest when we see it!–Oscar Wilde, An Ideal Husband Hee, Wilde gets to beat up on (what later became) Ayn Rand’s philosophy of love! (More Wilde later tonight.) Read more

FARM BILL FOLLIES: The Club for Growth and the Washington Post on farm subsidies. Read more

Blogwatch, where the guys are drips;Blogwatch, where they rip your slips… The Agitator: Questions for the Democrats. I know they’re kind of tendentious, esp. toward the beginning, but I guess I don’t mind b/c I agree with many (though not all) of his premises. He also has a round-up of five songs stemming from the US civil rights movement. And while I think the civil rights movement too often becomes a self-comforting narrative of borrowed righteousness (They Might Be Giants’... Read more

NOTHING ORIGINAL IN ME EXCEPT ORIGINAL SIN: My apologies to the people who have complimented me for coining “Potterdammerung”–I totally didn’t. I’ve seen it in several places, including, I think, Cacciaguida‘s opera-and-Potter-heavy site. Also, this seems as good a time as any to link to my old post on the awesomeness of fanfiction. Read more

OKAY, I succumbed and wrote a couple posts after reading The Potterdammerung. They’re here. The first one is pretty abstract, with no references to specific plot events–it’s about the (or a) difference between genre-crossing and genre-switching–but the second one is spoileriffic. Read more

My attitude toward butter is essentially this: Anything good enough for Cleopatra to bathe in is good enough for me.–Al Martinez, “Nothing Is Better Than Butter,” in Best Food Writing 2000 Read more

Loving you is driving me crazy;People say that you were born lazy’cause you think that blog is a four-letter word… Paleo-Future: Gardens of glowing electrical flowers. Sed Contra: Powerful post on St Camillus de Lellis. Vatican Film Library: Includes footage of Leo XIII–and a 1911 Inferno! Via Dappled Things. And this has an awesome headline, over a truly amazing story. Read more

Everybody’s got blogwatch but me… Family Scholars: Elizabeth Marquardt has a powerful NYT op-ed about children with three parents. Marquardt’s Between Two Worlds: The Inner Lives of Children of Divorce is amazing: introspective, forgiving, and insightful. I would pay lots of money I don’t have to make every newspaper article that quotes Stephanie Coontz quote Marquardt as well. Hit & Run: Vote for the Guilty Party–“none of the above; for a new election” option proposed in Massachusetts. Sounds blatantly awesome.... Read more

OR POSSIBLY CHOOSE YOUR OWN ADVENTURE WITH RANDOM PAGES RIPPED OUT?: Ever get the feeling that your “conversion story” is just God playing Mad Libs? (scare quotes for great justice!) Read more

They haven’t watched this blog on the air,Not that anyone but me even cares… A mix today of serious and… a supervillain with a fudgsicle. The Agitator: House crime subcommittee hearing on pain treatment. Beaucoup Kevin: The greatest panel in comics history. Via Journalista. Child of Divorce/Child of God: “At Prison Fellowship, our focus on shalom was about more than theory. It was about finding better ways of administering justice that incorporated restitution and restoration of shalom into the process.... Read more