“Listen, I known you since you was a little kid. You was always a regular kind of crook, I never figured you for a louse. Even doing our kind of business you gotta draw the line somewheres.” –Thelma Ritter to Richard Widmark, “Pickup on South Street” Read more

EVEN TINIER BLOGWATCH: I think Brink Lindsey and I are talking past one another on this whole “meanings of life” thing. I wanna know what love is; I don’t want to decorate my House of Being. I don’t want to be noticed (which is what the cow in his first example gets)–I don’t want meaning conferred upon my life by my society (or by people who want to turn me into delicious steaks). I want to be right. This is... Read more

MINIBLOGWATCH: Can’t post now–got much else to do today–but I’m worried that my computer will crash if I don’t close some of these windows. Later today you’ll get a) What’s Up With the Ivy League? Are They Just Nuts?; b) language as poetry; a bigger blogwatch, including a very brief reply to Brink Lindsey; and whatever else crosses my mind. For now, check out these folks, why don’t you. Don’t Be A Shamed: Gallows humor–nicknames for the pipe-bomber. Another One... Read more

BLOGWATCH POSTSCRIPT: Progressive Catholic has a bunch of good posts: It doesn’t start in the seminaries; teens need the sounds of silence; and memories of those “carry a baby doll around to learn why you shouldn’t get somebody pregnant” high school exercises. I disagree with him on priestly celibacy–I just don’t think the celibate priesthood is the reason Catholics have devalued marriage, and as for problems in the priesthood, there’s so much else to fix that I’m not sure why... Read more

SPEAKING OF GOD’S EYEBALL: I really, really like this quote, from Fr. Richard Neuhaus: “Also enigmatic but suggestive of something genuinely interesting in Derrida’s thought is what might be viewed as a theological turn. Asked about his role as the world’s most famous philosopher (a description he does not dispute), Derrida opined: ‘I have been given this image, and I have to face some responsibility, political and ethical. It is as if I am indebted to—I don’t know to whom—to... Read more

THE POLITICS OF DANCING: There’s one song that conjures up for me the relentless creepiness of God’s presence. In C.S. Lewis’s Perelandra (best book in overrated space trilogy… let the flaming commence…), Dr. Ransom the Earth man wonders what unnerves him so much about the un-Fallen planet where he’s landed. He has this feeling, all the time–suddenly he recognizes it. It’s the feeling he used to have at parties, the feeling that would prompt him to go out and have... Read more

Oh, and the Yale Free Press Blog is back on the attack. Read more

I went down to the Institute And asked the doctor there In the Department of Blogwatch “What’s the meaning of this [unintelligible]?!” He said, “You aren’t crazy, You ain’t insane, It’s just you’ve got a Blogwatch in the center of your brain!!!!” The Cranky Professor finally has a blog! Michael Dubruiel: Comforting the sorrowing and acknowledging the wrongness, the outrage, of death. Brink Lindsey‘s reply to the stuff I said in the Blogwatch below. Charles Murtaugh is unfair to Leo... Read more

“Occasionally I always drink too much.” –Richard Erdman to Dick Powell, “Cry Danger” Read more

DIDN’T POST AS MUCH AS I’D HOPED TO TODAY, but tomorrow you get a whole new feature. It’ll be called “The Politics of Dancing,” and it’ll involve me taking various phrases from pop songs and riffing on what they make me think of, philosophical implications (intentional and very much not so), and assorted whatnot. So tune in. Read more