• Robin Williams’ Top 10 Reasons to Be an Episcopalian. See also: David Simon on that time Robin Williams saved Homicide.
• Emily McFarlan Miller is a social media editor for a big newspaper. Her exasperation with trolls is therefore understandable, and her patient endeavor to figure out what it means to love our troll neighbors as ourselves is all the more impressive. Miller cites my favorite Bible passage on trolls, from the book of Proverbs:
Do not answer fools according to their folly,
or you will be a fool yourself.
Answer fools according to their folly,
or they will be wise in their own eyes.
She offers a bit of advice, and a good challenge/reminder that the Golden Rule applies even to trolls. Where Miller’s piece falls short, I think, is in the failure to acknowledge that “love your enemies” and “turn the other cheek” get exponentially more complicated when others’ enemies and others’ cheeks are involved.
• Bread for the World, gettin’ it right.
• “That’s been a bit embarrassing for creationists who share the biblical inerrantism but reject the flat-earth interpretation of people like Parallax and Johnson.” Glenn Branch delves into the world of flat-earth “science.” (“Parallax,” by the way, was the pen-name of prominent flat-earth proponent whose real name sounds like it was invented by J.K. Rowling — Samuel Birley Rowbotham.)
• Douglas Lee Leguin of Corinth, Texas, set an ambush for police, planted multiple explosive devices, and fired on police and firefighters in an attempt to spark some kind of sovereign citizens revolution. Leguin was arrested, uninjured, and now faces seven counts of aggravated assault.
Michael Brown was walking to his grandmothers’ house. Michael Brown is dead.
So.
• Archaeologists have found an ancient synagogue with mosaics depicting elephants and possibly Alexander the Great. Pretty cool. But I’m not sure why the UNC professor leading the dig says that, before this, “all stories found decorating ancient synagogues have been taken from the Hebrew Bible.” Helios, Apollo and the Zodiac aren’t exactly stories “taken from the Hebrew Bible.”
• I used to be a copy editor. I got laid off. I wasn’t replaced. Like tens of thousands of other copy editors in the past 10 years, I wound up without a job because my employer — a newspaper chain — decided it didn’t need copy editors anymore.
That’s why I still delight in stories like this one. They confirm that, in fact, the world desperately needs to hire many, many more copy editors. Hiring a good copy editor can help spare you from embarrassing typos, grammatical errors, and factual errors. Or from putting out election materials that feature a ginormous horse penis.
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