The ad reads: “Are you sick and tired of cleaning up after your lazy, good-for-nothing family?” Try murder. It can be easy, even for a woman.
Heads and tails
All these years I thought I was going gray. Turns out I’m a peroxide blonde.
Which just goes to show that one of my Viking friends was right when he said, “I’m not getting grayer. I’m getting blonder.”
And here’s a story about a woman in New Zealand, an amputee, who got the Weta special effects people (the folks behind all the neat stuff in “The Lord of the Rings”) to make her a prosthetic mermaid’s tail.
Part of me thinks that’s a little creepy. But most of me thinks it’s pretty neat.
What bothers me is that the tail the technician is shown sculpting in the pictures doesn’t appear to be the same tail the woman is wearing in the photos. Perhaps there were alpha and beta versions. Or perhaps they’re making them available to the general market.
Tips on both stories: Fox News.
The Economy is Up
At least, it is for sales of Any Rand’s Atlas Shrugged and guns.
“‘Americans are flocking to buy and read Atlas Shrugged because there are uncanny similarities between the plot-line of the book and the events of our day’ said Yaron Brook, Executive Director at the Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights.” I haven’t read the book. Is it a tragedy? I keep thinking about buying a gun too, but I haven’t. I hear the supply is down because demand is so far up. No need to fear, Americans. Nancy Pelosi said she wasn’t interested in restricting second amendment rights for the time being.
The Economy Is Down
Humanities departments are among the hardest hit. In this post, Joel Mark comments:
The recession is not what is hitting the humanities departments of most of our major universities. Intellectual poverty and dishonesty are what is hitting them, in the name of such ideologies as postmodernism, neo-Marxism, socialism, political correctness, multi-culturalism and sheer selfish and immature anger (especially in the arts).
I love the humanities and have taught for several years in the humanities department of a university in California. The best place to study and learn about what we call the humanities today, however, is often as far away as possible from a major modern university.
If humanities departments in universities do suffer, that constitutes our best hope for a future rise in our actual learning in the real ‘humanities’ far from the angry ivory towers. So, I am optimistic.
Ash Wednesday thoughts
Over at Patrick O’Hannigan’s The Paragraph Farmer, he quotes Peter Kreeft’s response to the question: “But is not God a lover rather than a warrior?”
A: No, God is a lover who is a warrior. The question fails to understand what love is — what the love that God is, is. Love is at war with hate, betrayal, selfishness, and all love’s enemies. Love fights. Ask any parent. Yuppie-love, like puppy-love, may be merely “compassion” (the fashionable word today), but father-love and mother-love are war.
Read the whole thing. It’s not long.
In a somewhat related vein, I had reason to consult one of Sigrid Undset’s novels today (The Axe, the first novel of her less-famous tetralogy, The Master of Hestviken, which the author preferred to the more famous Kristin Lavransdatter, and I think I agree). Here’s a speech from one character:
“It is an easy matter, Olav, to be a good Christian so long as God asks no more of you than to hear sweet singing in church, and to yield Him obedience while He caresses you with the hand of a father. But a man’s faith is put to the test on the day God’s will is not his. But now I will tell you what Bishop Torfinn said to me one day—it was of you and your suit we were speaking. ‘God grant,’ he said, ‘that he may learn to understand in time that whoso is minded to do as he himself wills will soon enough see the day when he will find he has done that which he had never willed.’”
Olav looked earnestly before him. Then he nodded. “Aye. That is true. I know it.”
The Sea and the Skylark
On ear and ear two noises too old to end
Trench—right, the tide that ramps against the shore;
With a flood or a fall, low lull-off or all roar,
Frequenting there while moon shall wear and wend.
Left hand, off land, I hear the lark ascend,
His rash-fresh re-winded new-skeinèd score
In crisps of curl off wild winch whirl, and pour
And pelt music, till none ’s to spill nor spend.
How these two shame this shallow and frail town!
How ring right out our sordid turbid time,
Being pure! We, life’s pride and cared-for crown,
Have lost that cheer and charm of earth’s past prime:
Our make and making break, are breaking, down
To man’s last dust, drain fast towards man’s first slime.
“The Sea and the Skylark” by Gerard Manley Hopkins
Words Used to Mean Things
Over at “Follow the Money” blog, Brad Setser notes a Wall Street Journal story reporting, “Citigroup officials hope to persuade private investors that have bought preferred shares — such as the Government of Singapore Investment Corp., Abu Dhabi Investment Authority and Kuwait Investment Authority . . .”
Setser goes on to point out, “But it is striking that none of the ‘private investors’ mentioned in the Wall Street Journal are actually, well, private investors.”
Speaking of banks, did you hear President Obama say the Feds would strong arm banks to do what they want? Continue reading Words Used to Mean Things
The Tin Roof Blowdown, by James Lee Burke
James Lee Burke is a superior mystery writer. He writes in the tradition of high craftsmanship and sensitivity that characterizes the best Southern literature. I found The Tin Roof Blowdown brilliant and moving.
And I probably won’t read any more by him.
But first, a synopsis.
The setting for The Tin Roof Blowdown is New Orleans and its environs, during and immediately following Hurricane Katrina. The conflict is set off by a group of young black men who steal a motorboat (thus dooming a number of trapped people to drowning), break into a rich man’s house, and discover a treasure trove of drugs, cash and diamonds. That same night one of them is killed and another paralyzed by a bullet fired by someone in the neighborhood. Suspicion falls on a neighbor, whose daughter (by a strange coincidence) was recently gang-raped by some of these same young men.
Although investigation of his death is technically a federal matter (under 1960s laws dealing with deprivation of civil rights by murder), the bulk of the investigation is elbowed off (due to heavy case loads) to Dave Robicheaux, a sheriff’s deputy in New Iberia Parish and hero of a number of mysteries by Burke. He is unofficially assisted in his investigation by his friend Clete Purcel, a former cop and present skip tracer. Continue reading The Tin Roof Blowdown, by James Lee Burke
Suburbia in the Twilight
“Something essential, however hard to define, had been lost en route [to suburbia]; some aspect of innocence, perhaps, that at least to a romantic imagination, once existed in our towns,” according to Rod Serling apparently. “Casting a seductive smile, Serling alone continued to convey on TV what every other serious writer wanted to say but wasn’t allowed to”–that message being the dangers of commercialism and fear of current events.
Thanks for Delanceyplace.com for this excerpt.
Twisted Humor
“NASA global warming satellite crashes after launch”
*snicker* Maybe it was on a failed mission.