7 Quick Takes (8/27/10)

Posting here kind of fell off towards the end of the week, because I moved back into my dorm today, and I had to spend a lot of the week packing, unpacking, and finishing my secret sewing project (pillows for me and my two suitemates that were embroidered with our name and an iconic image from a favorite book series).  I’ll post pics of the final results next week.  Needless to day, even with advance planning, I ended up closing up the last seams in the car.

In the spirit of the return to Yale, if any of you haven’t seen the music video the admissions office hired students to produce, it’s quite fun to watch.  I appear (extremely briefly) twice, the first time at around 3:40 in a red shirt and later, during the melee fighting, I’m in the background with an ax and a short sword. If you’re wondering what armed combat is doing in an admissions video, perhaps you should see it yourself. And possibly click here.

But if you seriously want to know why I’m so glad to be back at Yale, perhaps it would help to view ’95 Theses,’ a history of Martin Luther in rap.  The song is a reworking of Jay-Z’s song which featured the chorus “I got 99 problems but a bitch ain’t one” which is reworded as “I got 95 theses but the pope ain’t one.”
I’m always so happy to wake up at a school where people spend their free time writing lyrics like:

I told y’all that Rome’d best agree to my terms
if not you can eat my Diet of Worms

[…]

Oh snap, hes messin with the holy communion.
But I aint never dissed your precious hypostatic union!
One place at one time. Well, thank you Zwingli.
Yeah, way to disregard that whole Im God thingy!
Getting all up in my rosary you little punk.
Your momma shoulda told you not to mess with no monk.

Full video below:

Again, so very tired from moving this week, so I’m just going to do quick links for the rest of the seven takes. Epiphenom has linked to a great visualization of changes in religious identification in England.  Interesting data presented in a great formal.  (Have I mentioned lately how much I love Flowing Data‘s discussions of chart designs?)

The only thing I liked better than James Mollison’s up-close photographs of apes was the explanation of how he managed to get the shots (via Andrew Sullivan).

I’m sorry I missed putting up a Weatherwax Wednesday post this week, but I’ve saved the draft (which I quite like, for next Wednesday).  In the meantime, check out this Pratchett short story titled “Death and what Comes Next”

Finally, I wrote two pieces for The Huffington Post this week, both centering on the Park51 mosque and community center.  In the first, “Censoring Moderates Fuels Radicals” I discuss why Newt Gingrich’s goals re the mosque seem to resemble the foreign policy of South Korea, and both are likely to be unsuccessful.Here’s a quote from the second piece, “The Real Threat Posed by the Cordoba Mosque”

For some minority groups, their very existence is perceived as offense. Whether the mosque is two blocks away or 80 (as Newt Gingrich prefers), the offense is still in existence. The real provocation is the act of being publicly Muslim and then demanding to be treated the same as everyone else.

I’ll be posting one final wrap up here later today.

[Seven Quick Things is a blog carnival run by Jen of Conversion Diary]