Links from the Seattle audition here. Meanwhile, the guy who is digging this stuff up is getting blogswarmed: As he writes: "I went from 396 hits the day before, to an utterly ridiculous 45,163. Behold the power of the internet"
“Hi, I’m Art Buchwald, and I just died!”
— Art Buchwald on video here. Now, that’s a classy and funny way to go. UPDATE: His last column, intended to be published posthuomously, is here.
Hate Crimes and The Religious Right
"Hate crime" legislation is intended to increase penalties for people who commit felonies based on the victim’s race, gender, sexual orientation, or disability. Why are so many religious groups on the right threatened by it? Are these people intending to commit crimes?
The Obama Smear Campaign In Its Early Stages
Here’s my attempt at an answer: Look, with all that is going on in the world, and with the importance of the next President affecting your finances and (in many ways) your life, if a candidate’s smoking habits (or lack thereof) operate as a relevant factor for you, then you should simply be denied your right to vote. Plain and … Read More
Bush: The Unpopular Ex-President, Too
Not only is Bush’s current approval rating lagging in the sub-40’s — the worst treand of any President in modern times — but he’s not very popular as a soon-to-be ex-President. The Bush Presidential Library [insert "My Pet Goat" joke here], like all presidential libraries, is intended to serve as a respository of all the great things and writing of … Read More
American Idol Wannabes Have To Clean Up Their MySpace
Death By Camera tracks down the MySpace pages of those losers on American Idol — you know, the ones who are so horrible that they get national exposure on television so we can (a) laugh at their complete lack of talent, and (b) watch them cry when they can’t can’t can’t understand why Simon and Randy and Paula hate them … Read More
Found
Found is a website (and magazine and book) devoted to, well, found things: notes, photos, whatever. For example, people buy a used book and find some cryptic note or picture wedged in the pages. The "object", if there is one, is to think about those small things we leave behind. Each found object is a story, although (of course) we … Read More
On The Golden Globes
I Tivo’ed it, and over the past few days, I’ve watched/skimmed through it, and I’ve decided I want to see/rent: Ugly Betty (it’s a TV show, yes?) Babel The Departed Pan’s Labyrinth Both Clint Eastwood films about Iwo Jima and yes, even The Queen. And Dreamgirls, someday. Borat, on the other hand, not so much.
Pray Harder
Via AmericaBlog, I ventured to the website of an ex-gay religious activist’s website. [Graphic at right courtesy of the aforementioned AmericaBlog]. Let me be clear about this — the website I ventured to was by someone who claims that he was able to "pray away the gay" within him, and now he leads a healthy heterosexual Christian life. (He is, … Read More
Timing Is Everything
Looks like Nathan Tabor picked the wrong day to write this: Democrats attempted to embarrass the President and portray him as being out of touch with the American public by forcing a vote on a federal funding plan for embryonic stem cell research that he had promised to veto. Embryonic stem cell research has resulted in zero successful treatments. That’s … Read More
“Lost” To Have A Coherent Ending
I was a big fan of Season One. I got lost during Season Two. So many plot twists and loose threads left me feeling, well, both overwhelmed and underwhelmed. But the hit series is coming to a close: The producers of "Lost" are looking to set a precise end-date for ABC’s Emmy-winning thriller, which some critics say has lost its … Read More
Like A Fish Needs A Bicycle
For the first time in census history, more women (51%) are living without a spouse than with one. It’s a trend that’s been going on for several decades. The New York Times fills us in. In 2005, 51 percent of women said they were living without a spouse, up from 35 percent in 1950 and 49 percent in 2000. Coupled … Read More
25 Years Ago: Air Florida Flight 90
It was 25 years ago tomorrow, on a snowy cold day (remember those?) in Washington, D.C., when Air Florida Flight 90 took off from Washington National Airport with its wings ineffectively de-iced. Moments later, it hit the 14th Street Bridge, crushing six cars, one truck, and killing four people, before it belly-flopped and sunk in the ice-covered Potomac River. All … Read More
Recommended Reading: Christian Right’s Use Of The Bible
It’s a bit scholarly and long, but interesting if you’re into that sort of thing. Margaret Mitchell is Professor of New Testament and Early Christian Literature at the University of Chicago. In this essay, entitled "How Biblical is the Christian Right?", Mitchell chonicles how the Chiristian right, who claim themselves to be biblical "literalists", frequently engage in biblical cherry-picking — … Read More
“An Inconvenient Truth” Banned From Seattle School
There’s about nine things funny with this story. Sad, and funny: This week in Federal Way schools, it got a lot more inconvenient to show one of the top-grossing documentaries in U.S. history, the global-warming alert "An Inconvenient Truth." After a parent who supports the teaching of creationism and opposes sex education complained about the film, the Federal Way School … Read More