1. This is cool. Galen Fott walks us through Fred Astaire’s still-amazing gravity-defying dancing on the ceiling act in Royal Wedding. Sure, I knew how this trick worked — a giant rotating set. But it’s one thing to know that and quite another to consider all the technical, logistic and artistic challenges involved in making that trick work (think about shadows, for one thing). Director Stanley Donen did this again for Lionel Richie’s “Dancing on the Ceiling” video, and Fott includes some “making of” footage from that video, in which Richie talks about the challenge of pulling off this trick when you’re not Fred Astaire.
Speaking of dancing Freds, here’s Mister Rogers learning to moonwalk. You’re welcome.
2. “What a magnificent fat bastard he was.” Sad news: Tunch, John Cole’s enormous, beloved cat, and the unofficial mascot of Balloon Juice, died this weekend. Balloon Juice readers have already donated close to $8,000 to the Marion Animal Resource Connection in Tunch’s honor.
3. Catholic blogger Brandon Vogt was excited about the new encyclical produced by popes Benedict XVI and Francis, and he wanted to spread the word.
Not so fast, said the Vatican’s copyright lawyers, swooping in like the strike teams of Disney or the RIAA. Vogt “quickly received a litany of emails from the USCCB and Holy See, explaining that they had a clear and legitimate copyright on the text. And since I had no permission to share it, I was engaging in illegal activity. … I was accused of ‘[violating] both civil and moral law’ and ‘stealing from the pope.'”
Vogt apologized (prudently, as these idiots were threatening legal action to punish him for helping to spread The Light of Faith™©®), but he has since started a petition drive to get the Vatican to start publishing things like its Catechism and papal encyclicals under a Creative Commons license.
It’s a good idea. A much, much better idea than threatening faithful Catholics with cease and desist orders for evangelizing with a copyrighted gospel. Institutions make people stupid, and whoever it was at the Vatican who thought this was a smart, virtuous or intelligible policy is someone who has clearly been institutionalized for far too long.
I’m not a fan of the Navigators’ reductive, soterian “bridge illustration,” but give them credit for this: They don’t have a team of lawyers sending threatening letters to would-be evangelists who borrow the idea.
4. The problem is not only that Republican lawmakers oppose accurate sex education. The larger problem is that Republican lawmakers themselves have never had accurate sex education.
5. Bad Jackie supports the troops: “Inspired by prayer, Virginia politician starts errant bedsheet drive for troops in Afghanistan.” This is a darkly funny true story about people who might have seemed, at first, to be rallying to respond to others in need. Yet when they were informed that those others were not actually in need — at least, not in this particular way — they were not relieved, not happy to learn that no such deprivation or injustice was occurring. They were, instead, angry, resentful and disappointed. That suggests that the only need really motivating their actions was their own need to imagine themselves superior to others — to savor whatever indignation and offendedness they can find, or concoct, about those others. This is a story, in other words, about people failing C.S. Lewis’ “test” and thus becoming, as he wrote, “fixed for ever in a universe of pure hatred.”
6. “You’ve got to pick up every stitch.” When those who fail Lewis’ test are unable to find (or, rather, to notice) any actual outrages with which to feed their appetite for indignation, their next step is to invent new outrages. The classic historic form of this process of concocting outrages at which to take offense is the witch hunt. Literal witch-hunting may seem old-fashioned, but some of these folks still like to kick it Old School: As long as there are still witch hunters, the world will be full of “witches.” (Warning: The first of those links goes to a Jason Pitzl-Waters post that includes a Carman video — a very Carman, Carman video. You have been warned.)
7. Joe Hanson provides a .gif and an update on a crowd-sourced art project on the Man in Black. And that’s a good excuse to listen to the man himself: Here’s a song for victims denied justice. And here’s another for violent men who seem to escape justice. Those two songs together are a fine illustration of what “apocalyptic” means.
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