Gotta use up all the links in the fridge before this stuff goes bad.
• The headline on this Consumerist piece is misleading: “Study: Errors Found in as Many as 26 Percent of Consumers’ Credit Reports.”
Yes, credit records are filled with incorrect information, but those are not “errors.” That’s the business model of the credit-rating agencies. They don’t want accurate information. If they used accurate information, they would have no basis for shaking down consumers through various “protection” plans and “free” (not free) credit report services.
• That time when Babe Ruth and Reinhold Niebuhr were teammates.
• BuzzFeed’s Jessica Misener offers “33 Ways You Know You Were a Youth Group Kid.” I already knew I was a youth group kid. So what this list really tells me is that I’m about 10-15 years older than Jessica Misener.
• According to a new survey by the Barna Group, 42 percent of white evangelicals went to see The Avengers in theaters this summer.
(Cackles nefariously, rubs hands together.) Yes, yes, the Whedonization Plot is all going according to plan …
• “Where are all the customers? And where’s their money?” Walmart discovers that bank subsidies, austerity and deficit-fretting can’t make the economy grow — that takes customers spending money. The key word is “spending.”
• I’m not a cardinal, or even Catholic, so I don’t get a vote for the next pope. But if I did, I’d happily vote for Jan Phillips. Everybody says they’re in favor of revival, renewal and the rebirth of our churches, but when someone like Phillips spells out what that might actually look like, they all back away. Everybody wants resurrection, but nobody wants to die.
• Your periodic reminder that if you’re part of the religious right, then being an AIDS-denying racist won’t get you fired, marginalized, or condemned by your colleagues.
• “In Billy Graham & Me a new book in the Chicken Soup for the Soul franchise that was released [Feb. 12], 101 people who have met Graham on the public stage share their private memories of the 94-year-old preacher.”
It would be a tremendous privilege to sit down with Billy Graham and get to ask him, in person, the one question we all most want to ask: “So, what was Johnny Cash really like?”
• Caleb Wilde: “11 Worst and Best Things to Say at a Funeral”
• Can we not agree that it would be wrong not to avoid commending Lowering the Bar for not failing to find this sentence unpleasing? (via Jay Lake):
The grounds of appeal announced on Monday state Justice Sifris erred in not finding Mr Goldberg was wrong in failing to set aside the summonses.
• If you are a resident of Maricopa County, Ariz., and you travel anywhere in the world other than Maricopa County, Ariz., then the first thing you say to anyone — the very first thing — must be, “… but I have never voted for Sheriff Joe Arpaio.” Otherwise you will be treated with an appropriate mix of disdain, suspicion, revulsion and pity.
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