• Quick note to everyone who has planted or tended forsythia bushes in their yards: Thank you. I needed that.
• Sometimes the fun in reading blogs via Feedly is the juxtaposition of disparate posts. First came this: “MRC Attacks the Media for Covering Sports, Non-Christian Faiths.” Followed by this: “No, Jesus Did Not Get Booed at a Hockey Game on Easter Sunday.”
The latter — the strange tale of the Boston Bruins’ costumed good-luck charm for playoff games — seems like it was tailor-made to address MRC’s supposed desire for more Jesus, less sports reporting in the media. But if you read what the persecuted hegemons of the Media Research Center actually had to say in the former link, you’ll see that “more Jesus” isn’t really what they want from The Evil Media. What they want is an arrangement in which they, the majority population, are free to go about their lives without ever being reminded that religious minorities exist. “If there’s 80-85 percent Christians,” says MRC’s Dan Gainor, then media coverage of religion should be 80-85 percent Christian. Otherwise, he whines, The Evil Media must be “attacking” Christianity.
• So I watched the first episode of the newish CW show Star-Crossed. I wasn’t hooked, but I wanted to see how it stacked up against the first episode of the fun old series Roswell. That’s the standard, I think, for extra-terrestrial teen dramas, and the Roswell pilot, especially, offers a great model for establishing premise, characters and romantic tension while still being great fun. What struck me with the newer show was how much darker it seemed. If you’re looking for a pop-culture angle for how America has changed itself over the course of 13 years of the Global War on Terror, I think you could find one in the contrast between the first episodes of these two odd little teen fantasies.
• “You can’t do this sort of thing with God’s word and you can’t claim that God is telling you to deny what God had told us from ancient days up to now.”
• “Philly preppies accused in ‘Main Line take over’ drug operation aimed at cornering supply to fancy schools.” OK, so maybe Terrence McCoy of The Washington Post has never spent any time in the wealthy western suburbs of Philadelphia, but didn’t he at least have to read Catcher in the Rye at some point? Nothing in this story is surprising except maybe that the network of high schools supplied by these guys didn’t include Shipley.
• Here’s my neighbor BooMan musing on David Foster Wallace’s call for “anti-rebels” and the way that the once rebelliously ironic tools of the counterculture seem to have “created a kind of closed circle impermeable to artistic sincerity.” What good is it to be a smart-aleck, he asks, if you “lack any core convictions”? And here’s David Dark saying something very similar, “Top 10 Reasons We’re Glad a Catholic Colbert Is Taking Over Letterman’s ‘Late Show.'”
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