• What happens when the Christmas creep of retail spreads to evangelical mega-churches? Will visitors to the Hell House exit directly into the living Nativity on the front lawn?
• If we set aside its new president and its football program, I’m sure that Florida State is a fine institution.
• Here’s a video from the viral marketing campaign for a new movie about the ideomotor effect and Chevreul’s Pendulum. (And here, again, is My Ouija Board Story.)
• You know, if the Ferguson Police Department had accused Mike Brown of even half of this kind of behavior, everybody on Fox News would still be reciting this police report as evidence that he somehow deserved to be killed. White-on-white violence is a scourge in America.
• Samantha Field writes about Buffy, providing even more reasons to dislike Riley Finn. And Amanda Marcotte writes about Game of Thrones, providing even more reasons to dislike Tywin Lannister.
• Steve Benen reminds us of candidate Mitt Romney’s campaign promise: If elected, Romney said, his policies would get the unemployment rate down to 6 percent by 2016. It’s 2014. The unemployment rate is 5.9 percent. OK, then.
• The movie Love, Actually ends with the Beach Boys’ “God Only Knows.” The movie is a sentimental, sappy, sloppy, star-studded mess, but it’s also strangely affecting and I kind of love it. Here’s another gloriously sappy, strange, star-studded British presentation of “God Only Knows,” and I kind of love this too:
If you watch that video (and I hope you will), you may wind up with that song stuck in your head for a bit. If that happens, please just think of it as my message to you — my thanks and heartfelt appreciation to the readers, commenters, linkers, likers and sharers of this blog.
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