If I was honest I would probably be ashamed … Gary Jules, "Mad World" Bauhaus, "Bela Lugosi's Dead" Echo and the Bunnymen, "People Are Strange" Don McCloskey, "Up In This (Blood on the Banjo Remix)" Velvet Underground, "Stephanie Says" Aimee Mann, "Save Me" The Cranberries, "Zombie" The Ramones, "I Wanna Be Sedated" Kasey Chambers, "If I Were You" The Replacements, "Rock 'n' Roll Ghost" Two vampire movie soundtracks, a zombie, a ghost and Donnie Darko. Kind of creepy. Read more
Left Behind, pp. 205-206 We last saw Left Behind's other protagonist, Buck Williams, 20 pages ago, in Frankfurt, Germany. Buck slipped off to Frankfurt after escaping London, where the same menacing forces of the global shadow-government that had killed his friend Dirk had tried to kill Buck by planting a bomb in a police car. He narrowly escaped but a Scotland Yard inspector named Alan Tompkins was blown to kingdom come. Buck is traveling under the name "George Oreskovich," a... Read more
"I don't think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees," President Bush said after, as many had anticipated, the levees were breached. If you haven't seen it yet, Crooks & Liars has the video of Bush getting briefed before Hurricane Katrina by officials who were anticipating — and urging him to anticipate — that very thing. This is a weird pattern with this administration. They get warned. They ignore the warning. The thing about which they were warned happens and... Read more
… without explanation, he resumed blogging as though nothing had happened. Read more
10 observations about my new world map shower curtain 1. The map includes states and provinces, but only for the U.S. and Canada — which is to say only for the two countries in the world whose states and provinces I could already identify on a map. This diminishes the educational potential of my shower curtain. You'd think they'd at least have finished off North America and done Mexico too, but no. So I still don't know Durango from Jalisco.... Read more
I'm repeating myself here, but what's the point of having a blog if you don't allow yourself to harp on your personal hobbyhorses … In the previous post, I mentioned the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program, or LIHEAP, a government subsidy program that enables poor families to buy heating fuel. This is a good program and a necessary one — heat is a necessity, not an option. But then so again is food. And many low-income American families cannot... Read more
Rep. Joe Barton, R-Texas, is a petulant jerk. The cost for residential heating oil is still well above what it was last year — which is a source of real hardship for many Americans this winter. And they're not getting any help from Congress, which still isn't funding LIHEAP, the Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program, at a level that would allow all families that qualify to receive assistance. Poor Americans are getting some help this winter from, of all places,... Read more
Left Behind, wrapping up Chapter 11 As an evangelist, the Rev. Bruce Barnes gets a few things right. Evangelism is what Chapter 11 of Left Behind is all about. This is an awkward topic. In American culture, evangelism has become something dreaded and despised — perhaps most of all by the very evangelical Christians who are constantly being told that if they were good Christians, they would be doing more of it. How did this become the case? How did... Read more
Apparently Howard Dean, on CBS News' Face the Nation on Sunday, compared Vice President Dick Cheney to another famous vice president who was later tried for treason. The comparison is somewhat strained. First, Aaron Burr was acquitted. Second, Burr never shot anybody while in office. Although John Quincy Adams did say, when Burr died, "Burr's life, take it all together, was such as in any country of sound morals his friends would be desirous of burying in quiet oblivion." Perhaps... Read more
The paper ran a long piece yesterday called "Music attracts teens to hate groups." The local angle was a guy named Robert T. Huber, a hatecore musician who lives in Newark, Del., where he's a doctoral candidate at the University of Delaware. Like most doctoral candidates, he teaches and grades papers. That's a worrisome thought if you're an undergrad physics student at UD and you're black, Jewish, Catholic, gay, Asian, Hispanic or even white but not, you know, a racist... Read more
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