RENE MAGRITTE, MASTER OF HORROR: Me and my big mouth. I was really psyched that Sean Collins decided to dedicate his October blogging to horror-related posts, and fired off an email in which I asked whether he was a Magritte fan, and, if so, whether he’d be interested in blogging about the Belgian surrealist’s use of horror imagery. Like so many people to whom I shoot oblique, half-thought-out one-liners, he replied, “Hey, intriguing! Why don’t you do it?” Um, because... Read more

They looked like everyone else They forced locks They replaced lost objects [clipped] –Paul Nouge Read more

Oompa, Loompa, doopity-doo I’ve got another blogwatch for you… Amy Welborn: Possible hope for Terri Schiavo. Pray for her; go here for more info. Sed Contra: Responds to my post on health insurance; Dorothy Day pickets Saint Joseph. Thrownback: Amazing post on hearing confessions, from a blogging priest. The Washington Post on the Kay Report on weapons programs in Iraq. Via Oxblog. LaserMonks. As Mark Shea said, Only in America. Read more

“True ‘compassion’ leads to sharing another person’s pain; it does not kill the person whose suffering we cannot bear. … “…The request which arises from the human heart in the supreme confrontation with suffering and death, especially when faced with the temptation to give up in utter desperation, is above all a request for companionship, sympathy and support in the time of trial. It is a plea for help to keep on hoping when all human hopes fail. As the... Read more

SEASICK, YET STILL DOCKED: In a ragged mood. Not up for ramblin’. Lots of fun stuff for you, though, some of it written or mostly-written already. Coming distractions: horror imagery in Magritte; the happy ending of “What You Can Do for Your Country” (well, somebody’s happy, anyway…); comics and The Spanish Tragedy; and a week-long series of brief posts on same-sex marriage that should give you a much more cogent picture of my position than I have heretofore presented, and... Read more

HE’S BACK! (Sort of.) Read more

FOUNDING BROTHERS: This is not so much a history of the American Revolution as a series of instructive vignettes. As such, it mostly succeeds. Some thoughts: FB starts out kind of gassy and repetitive. Stick it out, though–the repetition fades, and the book reads very quickly, so it’s worth fighting through the occasional boring passages. Ellis sometimes resorts to telling rather than showing. This is especially clear in his acid portrait of Thomas Jefferson, whom he views as a self-deceiving,... Read more

“Well, at least we saved humanity. That’s something.” –Scott “Little Mary Sunshine” Summers, somewhere in Essential X-Men vol. 1 or 3, I don’t remember which Read more

HEALTH CARE: Some links from Hit & Run: 1) Outsourcing socialized medicine, 2) Delinking health insurance and employment. As you all know, I’ve really started to notice this problem since I became self-employed. It’s huge. It’s important. The comments sections to those posts, esp. the second one, are also well worth your time. While we’re on this subject, tonight I went to a happy hour sponsored by the Young Leadership Network. The speaker was Rep. Paul Ryan, R-WI. He startled... Read more

GHOST SHIPS: I promise I have a reason for asking this: Can anyone recommend a movie about a haunted ship? This movie should be either a) really good or b) jam-packed with conventional accouterments of the genre. It need not be both. The absolute ideal movie would include every trapping of the genre, plus lots and lots of shots of the ocean, plus it would be easy to find on DVD at the local Blockbuster. I’m totally serious about this–it... Read more