Consider this an early Monday open thread. I'm told some of the current comment threads have gotten a bit tense, and while I don't know what the issue(s) of contention is/are, I'm confident it's not pie. Who doesn't like pie? Like this delicious-looking blueberry pie, for example — — blueberry pie may be the tastiest form of conflict resolution there is. Also, without wanting to impose any restrictions or enforced topics on this hopefully conciliatory peace-pie open thread, I do... Read more
God's drifting in heaven, devil's in the mailbox … "You're Gonna Lose That Girl," The Beatles"You're Gonna Miss Me," 13th Floor Elevators"You're Loved Tonight," Randy Stonehill"You're Missing," Bruce Springsteen"You're My Best Friend," Queen"You're My Thrill," Billie Holiday"You're My Woman," Van Morrison"You're Not Alone," East Village Opera Company"You're Not Drinking Enough," Don Henley"You're So Square (Baby I Don't Care)," Buddy Holly"You're the First," Unlikely Cowboy"You're the One," Buddy Holly The clip above for "You're Gonna Lose That Girl" is from Help!... Read more
In an hour or so I will cross the border from Pennsylvania into the strange, alien world where I work. The picture here, from the paper's website, conveys some of the through-the-looking-glass perspective of the tiny state to our south. The possibility of consumer protections against predatory, arbitrary and unfounded rate-hikes and fees from credit-card lenders is covered as a threatening storm cloud on the horizon. Bought-and-paid-for politicians screwing over their constituents to side with the credit-card lenders against consumers... Read more
Since I've written a bit lately about people who have chosen to become much more stupid than they need to be, let me take a moment to also discuss how this same dynamic can afflict actual geniuses — or at least those geniuses who seem most eager to have us think of them as geniuses. What I mean is that I'm not terribly impressed by Mensa. I think I'm supposed to be, and I would have expected I would be,... Read more
Tribulation Force, pp. 218-219 Jimmy Borland is like the scornful colleague from a thousand disaster movies. You know the guy — he appears shortly after the opening credits to mock the quixotic hero for foolishly believing that the experiment is too dangerous or that the long dormant volcano just discovered beneath Los Angeles is about to awaken. By the third reel, of course, the scornful colleague will be consumed by raptors and/or lava as the hero watches in horror after... Read more
National Public Radio earlier this week committed what I regard as one of the cardinal sins of reporting on poll results. NPR's Ted Robbins, reporting for All Things Considered, provided an otherwise helpful look at the supporters of Arizona's new immigration law. Introducing the piece, host Michelle Norris said this: Polls show a majority of voters support the law. In Arizona itself, it's a wide majority. Except that supporters have been far less vocal than opponents. At best, this sort... Read more
You're new to me. I'm new to you … "Witness," Sarah McLachlan"Wo Willst du Hin?" Xavier Naidoo"Woe," Tom Waits"Woe Is Skinny," Steve Hindalong"Woke From Dreaming," The Delgados"Woman at the Well," Nicholas Giaconia"Woman Be My Country," Johnny Clegg & Savuka"A Woman Is a Sometime Thing," Louis Armstrong"Woman Left Lonely," Cat Power"Woman on the Tier (I'll See You Through)," Suzanne Vega"Woman to Woman," Shirley Brown"Women and Men," They Might Be Giants It's seems that the vast majority of songs with the word... Read more
"I'm gonna lay down my burden," we sang, "(Way down) down by the riverside." But the fact of the matter was we weren't laying burdens down so much as taking them up. In the same Sunday schools and Bible classes in which we sang that song we were also being taught that we must shoulder the "heavy burdens hard to bear" that Jesus once mocked the Sunday school teachers of his day for burdening others with without lifting a finger... Read more
The following passage from Randall Balmer's Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory (thank you, again, for the book) struck me as appropriate for Flame War Thursday. Balmer wrote this in 1990, responding to his visit to Multnomah School of the Bible in Portland, Ore. In the years since then, however, the demeanor he describes has become much more widely familiar thanks to the wide world of the Web. The kind of urgent, earnest, somewhat belligerent "apologetics" Balmer describes has come... Read more
(Continued, sort of, from here.) Here is a measurement, a quantification, demonstrating the reality of what we’ve been discussing as a willful, deliberate, chosen stupidity. Public Policy Polling measured opinions following the massive, growing oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico and they had a hard time understanding their own results: We have some new national polling coming out tomorrow on offshore drilling. The most astounding number from the poll? 28 percent of Republicans said the recent oil spill in... Read more
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