This commercial for Folgers is remarkable, but is it not also realistic (the attitudes, not the acting)? I don’t have this problem at home, and it’s not because we drink Folgers Instant. My sweet wife makes a great cup of coffee as well as many other great things, both edible and non. Great home, great chicken pot pie, great kids–all kinds of great things.
Arrested for Proselytizing
I got an email yesterday passing on this prayer request:
Pray urgently for our dear brother Argyris Petrou, a minister and missionary serving in Athens, Greece teaching and church planting. Argyris was arrested for proselytizing, which is against the law there and will stand trial this Wednesday, 11 June. Argyris could go to jail for 2-3 years. Imagine that in the land Paul evangelized so long ago! Pray for wisdom and peace for Argyris and his wife Dena, as well as their three sons. Pray also for the solicitors who will represent Argyris as well as the judge who will hear the case, that God would protect and deliver Argyris.
UPDATE: The court Argyris ‘not guilty!’ Praise the Lord.
Not Their Experience
I didn’t see this article when we were talking several weeks ago about Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, but I think it’s important to link to it. The scientists at Reasons to Believe (RTB) say they haven’t seen the type of blacklisting described in the movie. Of course, they aren’t employed by these universities either. “RTB believes that God has miraculously intervened throughout the history of the universe in various ways millions, possibly even billions, of times to create each and every new species of life on Earth.”
In Reasons To Believe’s interaction with professional scientists, scientific institutions, universities, and publishers of scientific journals we have encountered no significant evidence of censorship, blackballing, or disrespect. As we have persisted in publicly presenting our testable creation model in the context of the scientific method, we have witnessed an increasing openness on the part of unbelieving scientists to offer their honest and respectful critique.
Tell Me Six Things
How about a little comment meme? Tell me the first thing that leaps to your mind when you read each of these things?
- Excellent source of calcium
- New and improved
- 75% off
- New York Times Bestseller
- Get ‘Em While They’re Hot
- Y2K Compatible
With the corrected spelling on this post, you may comment at will. No, please comment. I will add this post to my list of good reasons for flushing myself. I can hear the drain coming now.
You Take the Fig Newton. I’ll Make Do with This Cookie
I saw the picture of compromise or making do this week. In a hot parking lot (our highs were in the low 90s) a little water had collected. Three ducks sat by this quart-sized pond, perhaps imagining the 1,000 lakes of Minnesota.
Speaking of making do, I see that copy editors are ecspected to0 now everthing. Where do you go to make sure you are spelling or correctly using a phrase or word you don’t readily use? Language Log posts some facts on making do, which is not making due, akin to paying your dues or anteing up. It’s making a situation do, which is what we say with almost every post here. Eh, we’ll make this post do . . .
Next Conference is on Wallace and Gromit
Henderson State University is holding an academic conference on “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” and other works by scholar and all-around nice guy Josh Whedon. No joke.
Among the papers: “Buffy and Feminism,” “Buffy and Identity,” “Gender Stereotypes and the Image of Domesticity in ‘Firefly,'” “‘Firefly:’ The Illusive Safety of Big Damn Heroes” and a Durand favorite by a British scholar, “Hero’s Journey, Heroine’s Return: Buffy, Eurydice and the Orpheus Myth.”
Have the conferenced on Harry Potter, I’d like to know? How about “The Simpsons?”
Writing about Food
Writer Lara Vapnyar teaches at City College in New York, and this NY Times article reports that “her students often turned in work filled with sex and gore. One assignment she gave them was to write about food and how characters responded to it, to teach them how preferences, memories and quirks could make up a personality on the page.
“‘Beginning writers often don’t give their characters enough particulars,’ she said. ‘Food is something that readers can understand.'”
Doesn’t this sound like a good assignment? I’ve wanted food in my stories ever since I read something about the rich diets found in French fairy tales. Take “La Belle et la Bête” or “Beauty and the Beast.” Belle is trapped in the castle and does not see her ugly suitor except over a meal. Of course, he’s so pathetic she finally gives in to him, and voila, a happy ending. What a great story.
Klavan nails it again
It hailed today. Again. Bigger hail this time, and it lasted longer.
Clearly, we have offended Divine Providence. In the spirit of all modern politics, I shall not hesitate to call for full confession of all our corporate sins, just as long as the sins I’m talking about are those of the party I’m not in.
Through the good offices of a friend, I got a replacement for the lost grill on Mrs. Hermanson, my ’98 Chevy Tracker, today. He even put it on for me. It’s maroon, while Mrs. Hermanson is white, which makes her look a little like a circus clown’s face. But my last two cars have been white, and I’m kind of hungry for some color on my ride.
Also, painting it would be like, you know, work.
Tonight I’ll pack her up so I can get an early start for Story, City, Iowa tomorrow. It’s supposed to rain all night, and continue raining tomorrow, and in Story City they project a 50% chance of rain Friday and Saturday. So I have a feeling this isn’t going to be the best weekend ever.
But I promised to be there, and we Vikings keep our vows.
By way of Libertas, here’s another incisive piece by novelist Andrew Klavan, this one from City Journal. It’s about children, and what our culture is doing to them.
The teacher told me that she once had to explain to the class why her last name was the same as her father’s. She dusted off the whole ancient ritual of legitimacy for them—marriages, maiden names, and so on. When she was done, there was a short silence. Then one child piped up softly: “Yeah . . . I’ve heard of that.”
I think our culture, which probably prizes children more than any in the history of the world, nevertheless sins against those children by hitting them from two sides. On the one side, the sexual “options” we give their parents deny them the security of stable homes. But we figure, “That’s OK. The state can parent them.” Only the state’s a lousy parent. So the kids end up with (at least) two sets of dysfunctional families.
But the heart of Klavan’s article is a call to creative conservatives to make a cultural impact that will show the kids there’s a different way.
Conservatives respond to this mostly with finger-wagging. But creativity has to be answered with creativity. We need stories, histories, movies of our own. That requires a structure of support—publishing houses, movie studios, review space, awards, almost all of which we’ve ceded to the Left.
Blogging like the Dickens
Mowed the lawn tonight—a tremendous achievement and a triumph over the very forces of nature. I’ve been wanting to mow it all week, but it’s been a solid wall of rain. And I’m leaving Friday morning for Scandinavian Days in Story City, Iowa (where, as it happens, my grandmother was born) to do a Viking gig. So I very much feared the grass would be permitted to express itself in all its creativity until next week. I don’t want that. I think my neighbors are close to firebombing me for lowering property values as it is.
I’ve come to realize that Barack Obama is right on one thing. This election is bringing Americans together. Not over him—the most he’s ever done to reach across political lines is to move the line to the left. No, the one thing Republicans and Democrats can now agree on is that the Clintons are incredibly sleazy and tiresome.
Oh, you came for blogging related to literature? How’s this? Charles Dickens desk sells for $850,000 in a London auction.
The money raised at Wednesday’s auction will go the Great Ormond Street children’s hospital in London. Dickens was a close friend of the hospital’s founder and spoke at its first fundraising dinner in 1858.
The buyer, the report says, is a tarot card reader. Could be worse, I suppose. It might have been a Dan Brown reader.
I’m taking bids for my own desk, by the way. Buy it now, before I die and the price goes way up! Extra-large size, made of steel with a formica top. Genuine rust at no extra charge. You can have it for just a tenth of what they got for Dickens’ desk, and this one’s a whole lot newer!
Intercede For Each Other
Let me pass on these thoughts from Mart De Haan of RBC.
He has made us interdependent on one another, dependent on Him, and hopeless apart from that for which we can take no credit. He has urged us to share in one another’s growth and joy by holding one another up before His throne of grace.