Here’s today’s Tasty Tidbits I’ve thought worth memorializing:
- Chaconne Klaverenga leaves the nest.
- Boy! Am I glad I proofread that one!
- National debt as a moral issue.
- History should be honest, so let’s gin up some stories about an oppressed minority.
- A little Harry Potter history.
- Consider the case of poor Caleb Warner.
- Obama lied.
- Maybe the phrase “one flesh” is way truer than the hookup culture imagines.
- Monkey copyrights?
- A testy tidbit among the tasties.
- Another lyrical interlude with Brother Bruce.
1
Local classical guitar phenom Chaconne Klaverenga heads for Cleveland for college. I wish I could take some credit for this fabulous talent, but all I can do is wish her well as she heads out.
Dostoevsky said “the world will be saved by beauty.” This may not have been what he had in mind, but sometimes it seems close enough.
2
I used Dragon NaturallySpeaking at work to turn my spoken words into printed words. But I got a very vivid lesson yesterday on how important it can be to proofread the result ( which will always be meticulously spelled and will not have the telltale red squiggles for misspellings when the software does something just plain stupid).
I was dictating a letter to a recalcitrant Executor, with whom I have become a little bit impatient, reminding him of something he was to procure for us. Good ole’ Dragon NaturallySpeaking, however, inserted a gratuitous reference to what a prick you are.
Reminds me of WordPerfect for DOS, which knew nothing of computer giant Unisys and offered to correct the spelling to “anuses.”
3
Tom Peters at CatholicVote.org thinks the national debt is a moral issue in which every American has a stake. He cuts through some of the confusion, which grows up like weeds and will need whacked down again soon.
An important topic, but one on which both sides work from some hidden premises that could use a dose of sunlight.
4
“History should be honest,” says California Governor Jerry Brown, signing a bill requiring public schools to include the contributions of people who are gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender in social studies curriculum.
Was this a problem? Was there systematic exclusion from the curriculum? Or was there simply a failure to speculate that, say, Abe Lincoln was gay and did such-and-such.
Well, now we’ve got affirmative action. If they can’t find enough truly historic contributions from openly gay etc. figures, they’ll engage in a little “social promotion” of trifling contributions – in the name, ironically, of “honesty.”
“Today we are making history in California,” said State Senator Mark Leno, from San Francisco.
You can say that again! Like Rupert Murdoch’s minions hacked some phones and “made” news.
(Source: Wall Street Journal, with sarcastic commentary by Tipsy)
5
Regular people, whose eyes aren’t too close together for proper perpective on things, may not know that there was a nasty little bit of paranoia about Harry Potter in Evangelical/Fundamentalist circles. The same kind of people who got a case of the vapors when the “For Better or Worse” comic strip had an adolescent character start realizing that he was attracted to other “he’s” were sent over the edge at a fantasy series with witchcraft in it.
I don’t have the time to tell, nor you to read, all I could say about the zany inconsistencies — e.g., hissy fits about Harry while taking kids to movies full of gut-smut — but it is reported in the Wall Street Journal that Harry Hysteria (the anti- kind) is subsiding in that subculture.
I was leaving that orbit ten years ago when the paranoia was at its peak. Although my wife, the librarian at a Protestant School, has become a personal fan of Harry, I’m not sure she dares stock him yet in the school library.
6
Lest you think that only Fundy-typs are prone to hysteria, consider the case of poor Caleb Warner. (If the pay wall stops you, try here.)
7
Obama lied. There! I said it!
Politicians lying is nothing new, but when the lie is a sob story, based on your family history, told to pass a big controversial bill, it seems especially contemptible.
Here at the New York Times is the sugar-coated version. I just took the sugar off for you, with help from Ann Althouse.
8
Patrick Deneen at Front Porch Republic reflects on reports that Boomers (the people who gave you the Sexual Revolution and the inanity “free love”) seem to be breaking up uncommonly often as their partners in carnal knowledge decades ago re-enter their lives through social media.
He puts it in the context of political theory, because that’s just the kind of guy he is. I boil it down simpler: is there something that forever remembers “First … (ahem! cough! cough!” Love”? The Good Book says something about “one flesh,” after all, which appears to be what happens when men and women make the beast with two backs with or without prior clerical sanction.
But really, Mr. Deneen; must you call Boomers “Elderly”? I resemble that remark!
9
Legal conundrum du jour: Can A Monkey License Its Copyrights To A News Agency?
10
David J. Dunn (of whom I’ve never heard before) delivers himself of what the headline somewhat misleadingly styles “An Eastern Orthodox Defense of Gay Marriage.” Well, sort of.
What Dunn actually writes is a defense, from a distinctly Orthodox sacramental position, of the increasingly familiar point that civil marriage and religious marriage are not, or at least are not necessarily, congruent with each other. He adds that the distinction makes it theologically dubious to ask the state to “protect the sanctity” of marriage:
Anyone who thinks marriage is something sacred needs to recognize that from the church’s perspective all marriages granted by the state for tax and inheritance purposes are just civil unions by another name … Christians who demand the state take up the task of defending marital sanctity are effectively making the state their god … [O]nly the Holy Spirit has the power to sanctify.
Fair enough. But that’s not the same as saying that SSM as a civil union is a good idea from a public policy perspective.
The latter point, however, Dunn seems to assume is made by his religious/civil distinction. I find Dunn insouciant if not delusional on his apparent assumption that the state’s insistence on callings its civil unions “marriage” is adiaphora — a matter of indifference for Christians.
I agree with him that Churches holding a sacramental view of marriage are, to some extent, above the fray and should cease using the “protect the sanctity” trope in our arguments, but we are not utter strangers to those Protestants who do not view marriage as sacramental, and who consequently will have a much tougher time of dealing with the equivocation in our hybrid term “marriage.”
I think I’ve avoided the “sanctity” word in my arguments (Googling my domain suggests that I have), but I cannot ignore the real threat SSM poses to religious liberty — a threat that is more imminent for my heterodox brothers and sisters than for the Orthodox, to be sure, but a matter of concern nonetheless.
11
Sunset is an angel weeping
Holding out a bloody sword
No matter how I squint I cannot
Make out what it’s pointing toward
Sometimes you feel like you live too long
Days drip slowly on the page
You catch yourself
Pacing the cageI’ve proven who I am so many times
The magnetic strip’s worn thin
And each time I was someone else
And every one was taken in
Powers chatter in high places
Stir up eddies in the dust of rage
Set me to pacing the cageI never knew what you all wanted
So I gave you everything
All that I could pillage
All the spells that I could sing
It’s as if the thing were written
In the constitution of the age
Sooner or later you’ll wind up
Pacing the cageSometimes the best map will not guide you
You can’t see what’s round the bend
Sometimes the road leads through dark places
Sometimes the darkness is your friend
Today these eyes scan bleached-out land
For the coming of the outbound stage
Pacing the cage
Pacing the cage
Bon appetit!
Tipsy Teetotaler ن 