• Learn to say the magic words: “Verizon also monitors customer service calls for certain key words and can have supervisors leap in to save the day if they hear certain things — like, for example, ‘Cablevision,’ ‘Time Warner,’ or ‘Comcast,’ competitors frustrated subscribers are likely to say they will switch to.”
• Learn a new word: John Russo introduces me to the term “precariat,” which he defines as “those whose economic existence is characterized by unpredictability and insecurity along with limited means.” Not poor, necessarily, but living paycheck-to-paycheck and threatened by poverty if they lose a job, get ill or get in an accident.
Russo is a poli-sci guy, so he looks at everything backwards. The precariat is growing, and thus, he argues, it would be a vote-winning strategy for parties to support policies that would make life better for members of the precariat. I would say, rather, that parties ought to support such policies because that’s what policy is for — and that might also have the added benefit of, perhaps, winning more votes.
• I would like to see a televised debate between Christian commentator Bill Koenig and California state Assemblywoman Shannon Grove (R-Bakersfield) regarding the precise cause of the brutal drought that has been afflicting the Golden State. Koenig attributes the drought to his god’s displeasure with California’s legalization of same-sex marriage. Grove disagrees. She says the drought is due to her god’s anger over legal abortion.
I would like to see the debate moderated by Bill Nye and/or Dr. Louis W. Uccellini. First question for both Koenig and Grove: Why isn’t there an even worse drought in Massachusetts?
• Two quotes. First, from Martin Buber: “The perpetual enemy of faith in the true God is not atheism (the claim that there is no God), but rather gnosticism (the claim that God is known).” (via)
And second, from William Lindsey:
Nothing is more quintessentially Gnostic than Catholic magisterial teaching about gender and human sexuality. This teaching is gnostic in the classic sense of that term because it claims to have a privileged knowledge about matters sexual hidden from everyone but the ostensibly celibate men running the Catholic church.
A majority of lay Catholics — the people actually living with these issues of gender and sexuality in the real world — have long since rejected the hidden, gnostic knowledge of the hierarchy about these matters, because it runs against the grain of our lived experience as disciples of Christ carrying out our vocations in the world.
• Remember Philae — the lander from the European Space Agency’s Rosetta space probe that bounced on the surface of the comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko back in November and then went silent? It’s awake. Very cool.
• The Slacktivixen is headed to a reception after work today where her salon will be celebrated for winning the (well-deserved) annual “Best of the Mainline” recognition. That name for the posh, old-money suburbs west of Philadelphia gives this old Gospel song a whole other set of strange connotations:
The “main line” in that song refers to early telephones, not the Devon Horse Show, but I can’t help but think of the latter anyway. I imagine “Jesus on the Mainline” would probably get picked up by the Radnor police and given a one-way ticket back to Philly on the R5.
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