Something is very wrong with Mona Charen. That’s obvious to anyone who reads her repugnant recent column and it’s apparently obvious to Charen as well. She’s even managed to creep herself out with her eager defense of torture and thus her self-esteem is at an all-time low. So Charen does what many of us do when we’re feeling deservedly ashamed and repulsed by our own failures: She looks for someone worse with whom she can compare herself favorably. As the... Read more
Left Behind, pp. 379-381 When Buck and Chloe reconnected with Hattie and Chloe’s father, it was clear Hattie had been crying. The Event occurred just over a week ago, so it shouldn’t be out of the ordinary to see people red-faced and puffy-eyed from frequent crying jags. So soon after such an earth-shaking trauma, nobody would need a particular reason to break down crying. The two-thirds of the earth’s people remaining would all be prone to sudden, irresistible waves of... Read more
I’ve long admired (abstractly, from afar) the kind of piety and devotion described in Brother Lawrence’s The Practice of the Presence of God (the full text is online here) or the idea of Frank Laubach’s “game with minutes” as described in his Letters by a Modern Mystic. Such efforts to find the holy in the mundane and to seek an attitude of love and prayer for everyone we encounter seem saintly in the best sense.* God knows as well that... Read more
The word from Typepad is that I need to help “train” their new spam filter, by which they mean using their new tool that allows me to surf through everything the filter flags as spam, selecting all of the legitimate comments and republishing them while confirming the spamminess of all the actual spam and deleting those comments, screen by screen. TypePad also reminded me that TPS reports now need to use the standard cover sheet. Apparently there was a memo.... Read more
The Good News: Typepad has revamped it’s spam filters for comments. The Bad News: It’s now classifying lots of legitimate comments as spam — sort of the spam-filter equivalent of lupus. I’m trying to figure out what I can do to tweak this. They’ve changed the comment-editing interface (unannounced and without instructions), so I’ll see if I can navigate that to make this work better. My apologies for the infuriating inconvenience (particularly to those of you whom Typepad seems especially... Read more
To fully appreciate the perspective, values and standards of “Movieguide,” consider this: They present an annual award called the Faith & Values Crystal Teddy Bear Award for Dedication to Redeeming the Values of the Mass Media of Entertainment. Last year, a Special Lifetime Faith & Values Crystal Teddy Bear Award for Dedication to Redeeming the Values of the Mass Media of Entertainment was given to Pat Boone. I don’t know if they refer to this as the F&VCTBADRVMME for short,... Read more
Steve S. e-mails this nugget from Zev Chafets’ New York Times Magazine profile of former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee: The governor was especially happy that morning about an impending endorsement he expected (and received the following day) from Tim LaHaye, the author of the apocalyptic Left Behind series of novels. Left Behind is wildly popular among evangelicals, who have bought more than 65 million copies, making LaHaye a very rich man and one of the few writers who is also... Read more
Left Behind, pp. 367-377 Rayford Steele has taken Hattie Durham aside for a lecture about sex, sin, God and the end of the world. This will not be an argument or a dialogue or even a conversation, he explains. He will do the talking and she will do the listening. Once he’s done talking, he will allow her to speak, but only once he’s done. One of my repeated complaints about this book is that it is not creepy enough.... Read more
A Christmas tradition: If you’re looking to download some good, free and legal holiday music follow this link any time between 12:01 a.m. Saturday and midnight Sunday to get your copy of “Seriously West Coast Vol. 2, Happy Holidays” from Nettwerk Music Group and The Vancouver Sun. It features Sarah McLachlan, Barenaked Ladies and plenty of other quality Can Con. “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas,” Hem “Magic Snow Music,” Christophe Beck “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen/We Three Kings,” Barenaked... Read more
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