Sorry I missed last week. I hope this makes up for it.
I Didn’t Take Civics in Grade School
And I earned about 88% on the American history and civics quiz linked from this post, but I confess I don’t think I would have gotten one of the questions if I had not read the post. Answer the 33 questions yourself and tell us how you do.
Targeted Reading for Boys
Ballantyne the Brave is the website and blog of Joshua T. Phillips, 15, who is dedicated to inspiring boys to read good books like those of G.A. Henty and R.M. Ballantyne. It was Robert Louis Stevenson who gave us the phrase “Ballantyne the Brave.” Phillips writes, “He did this to honor Ballantyne for his bold vision of manhood — a vision which influenced Stevenson himself.”
I see one of Ballantyne’s books is on Leif Ericsson, called The Norsemen in the West. Rife with errors no doubt, but hopefully fun to read.
The Pot Calls the Kettle, um . . .
Somehow, I think this is funny.
American writer Tobias Wolff considers conservatives (i.e., people not on his side) to be the rudest of Americans. He write, “When I see someone being rude to a waiter, or blocking the road in a Ford Expedition, or yakking loudly on a cell phone in a crowded elevator, I naturally assume they voted for George W. Bush.”
Give it up.
About time too
Anthony Sacramone, formerly of “Luther at the Movies” and “First Things” is back blogging at Strange Herring.
I suppose he’ll suddenly give it up again in a couple of weeks, but for now, our long night of the cyber-soul is over.
Tip: First Things.
Shameful coverup
Remember the Bower family? The missionaries whose plane was shot down over Peru in 2001, resulting in the deaths of the wife and daughter?
Turns out the CIA lied about the circumstances of the action.
Story here.
Public service announcement
To retailers who started putting out Christmas merchandise in October, and radio station programming directors who are already playing “seasonal” music, and homeowners who’ve put out their holiday lights, even though it isn’t Thanksgiving yet.
I understand. I’m a Boomer too. I know that Christmas was the most wonderful, magical time of the year when you were a kid. It was for me, too. I, too, would love to recapture that feeling.
However. You’re not a kid anymore. You’re an adult, too beaten up by life to be taken in by glockenspiel music and colored lights. Especially when you strung those colored lights yourself.
You will never get the magic of Christmas back by making the holiday longer. You’ll only get it back by making the holiday deeper.
The people who invented Christmas actually believed that God became man. That means that all our highest aspirations, dreams and hopes are not fantasy, but fact, and that Ultimate Truth came down to hang out with us a while. And then died for us. And then defeated death.
When you get that, you’ll get Christmas back.
Just thought you’d like to know.
eHarmony forced to provide same-sex matches
From Chris Field at Townhall.com, by way of Culture and Media Institute:
The California-based company will begin providing same-sex matches as part of a settlement with New Jersey’s Civil Rights Division. Garden State resident Eric McKinley filed a complaint against the online matchmaker in 2005.
Under terms of the settlement, the company can create a new or differently named Web site for homosexual singles. The company can also post a disclaimer saying its compatibility-based matching system was developed from research of married heterosexual couples. …
Because the “gay rights” movement is all about, you know, just letting people alone.
Here’s the post.
Frankenstein: Prodigal Son and City of Night, by Dean Koontz, Kevin J. Anderson and Ed Gorman
A few years back, as Dean Koontz explains in an introduction to the first book of this series, Frankenstein: Prodigal Son, he made a deal with the USA Network to write a contemporary television series based on the characters of the old Frankenstein book. One assumes that the network execs either misunderstood his script, or understood it all too well, since both parties agreed to go their own ways in the end, each party producing a Frankenstein after their own heart.
The conceit in this series of books is that, although Mary Shelley’s famous novel is based on fact, she got the ending wrong. The monster did not kill Dr. Frankenstein, nor did he die himself. Instead, endowed with extremely long life through being struck by lightning during his creation, he has lived on, mostly in hiding because of a facial injury, gradually learning to control his rage. At the start of Prodigal Son he is residing in a Tibetan monastery. He does not yet know that Dr. Frankenstein has survived the last two centuries as well, his life extended through a series of self-designed surgeries. When he does learn this, the monster leaves the monastery and travels to New Orleans, where Dr. Frankenstein now lives the life of a biotech millionaire and VIP, under a new name. Continue reading Frankenstein: Prodigal Son and City of Night, by Dean Koontz, Kevin J. Anderson and Ed Gorman
The Life After
Makoto Fujimura writes:
N.T. Wright, the Bishop of Durham, wanted the title of his new book to be “Life after Life after Death.” Harper Collins, his publisher, decided the title would be a bit confusing, so they re-named it as “Surprised by Hope,” surely more conventional, but an appropriate nod to C.S. Lewis’ classic book “Surprised by Joy.” I prefer Bishop Wright’s initial instinct; for the audacious reality of the resurrection claim does not invite easy, conventional titles. The claim of Christianity was, and is, a Jewish carpenter from Nazareth who redefined life, death and, the Life thereafter. The expression “Life after Life after Death” invites us to a severe paradigm shift in our thoughts on life and death. What we think of as the end, is only a pause,: and the pause is only the beginning; a beginning of a new beginning.