Here’s today’s tasty tidbits, a little light, as is the news:
Here’s today’s tasty tidbits:
Here’s today’s tasty tidbits, concurrently Tweeted and Facebooked:
Sen. Lugar reportedly will unload on Obama today regarding Libya. Good for him! But the Hoosier blogosphere will be all atwitter with navel-gazing about how this is a “move to the right” to fight off challenger Richard Mourdock.
Is it just me, or does über-creepy Julian Assange of Wikileaks look a heckuva lot like John Hurt playing creepy Caligula in the BBC/PBS series I, Claudius? Judge for yourself: Continue reading “Separated at Birth?”
It seemed an interesting juxtaposition that The Writer’s Almanac and Front Porch Republic should today, on side-by-side tabs of my web browser, reflect on some of the big themes of life in this world. Continue reading “Life in this world”
From John Cleese comes advice on writing, creativity, getting in the zone, and interruptions:
While we can all use tips on such things, I made a connection that I don’t think is too eisegetical: Continue reading “Out of the mouths of …”
As Jason Peters puts it at Front Porch Republic, Zeus has been avenged for offenses against statuary.
“I guess it takes a divine sense of irony to destroy a fiberglass and foam statue outside a place called Solid Rock Church,” said Monroe assistant fire chief Connie Flagration. “You want irony in a god, but this might be going a bit too far.”
I don’t understand why I don’t hear weeping in heaven. Or maybe I do.
What a dreary afternoon for a holiday! I needed a pick-me-up, and P.J. O’Rourke provided it.
O’Rourke has a great idea for reviving the newspaper biz, which desparately needs great ideas and revival: the pre-obituary:
What I propose is “Pre-Obituaries”—official notices that certain people aren’t dead yet accompanied by brief summaries of their lives indicating why we wish they were.
The main advantage of the Pre-Obit over the traditional obituary is the knowledge of reader and writer alike that the as-good-as-dead people are still around to have their feelings hurt. It was a travesty of literary justice that we waited until J. D. Salinger finally hit the delete key at 91 before admitting that Catcher in the Rye stinks. The book’s only virtue is that it captures, with annoying accuracy, the maunderings of a twerp. The book’s only pleasure is in slamming the cover shut—simpler than slamming the door shut on a real Holden Caulfield, if less satisfying. The rest of Salinger’s published oeuvre was precious or boring or both. But we felt constrained to delay saying so, perhaps because of an outdated Victorian hope for a death-bed flash of genius.
Let us wait no more. With the Pre-Obituary we can abandon pusillanimous constraint and false hope and say what we think about the lives of public nuisances when their lives are not yet a dead letter. And we won’t be stuck in the treacle of nostalgia and sentiment. We won’t find ourselves saying of some oaf, “His like will not pass this way again.” Or, if we do say it, we can comfortably add, “Thank God!” The precept of Diogenes isn’t “Do not speak ill of the living.”
Think of the opportunities we’ve missed already….
By O’Rourke’s lights, several notables besides Salinger needed pre-obituaries, but we blew the chance:
But we’re not too late for some others:
I might quibble with few on that list, but overall, it’s target-rich.
In the spirit of Title of the song by DaVinci’s notebook, “Sunday’s Coming” from Northpoint Video. I could not figure out how to embed it, which proves that the author of Pithless Thoughts is more experienced than me at blogging.
“Sunday’s Coming” Movie Trailer from North Point Media on Vimeo.
Tipsy Teetotaler ن 
