Thank goodness we’ve got all the important problems dealt with, so we can focus on the miasmic “rapiness” of car ads. As part of a discussion on the elements of a story (protagonist, conflict, theme, etc), I showed my students — all of whom are girls — this ad. They all saw it during the… Read More How You Know There’s Nothing “Rapey” About the Audi Super Bowl Ad
Every technological advance contains cost; functionality does not always transfer. Some time over the holidays, after wrestling with Verizon FiOS, I finally pulled the plug on the cable. Verizon still provides my internet and phone, but I watch TV on the Roku box. Between Netflix, Hulu Plus, and Amazon Prime Instant Video, I had everything… Read More How Facebook Saved the Superbowl
[The following post will be of no interest to people who are not fans of George RR Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series.] This is me, calling it. (h/t: Finish the Book, George) When the HBO series started, I knew this wouldn’t work. I knew that the series would go faster than the books,… Read More George Will Not Finish the Book(s)
Medieval Musings is the kind of blog that I would like to write, if it didn’t already exist. The Middle Ages continues to fascinate, both for its seeming atavistic structure (men who work, men who fight, men who pray!) and the constant, chaotic change. Western Civilization went from seeming collapse to being poised to take… Read More Arabia Before Islam at Medieval Musings
He spent decades shielding priestly molestors. He deserves no less. A Church expert said the “very unusual” punishment showed how seriously the US Catholic hierarchy was taking the case. “To tell a cardinal he can’t do confirmations, can’t do things in public, that’s extraordinary,” said Jesuit scholar the Reverend Thomas Reese, a Georgetown University fellow,… Read More Retired Cardinal “Stripped of Duties”
French President “shocked.” They always are.
You can’t make these things up. Between 2003 and 2011, 4,265 people were murdered in the city of Chicago. In 2012 alone, 512 people were murdered in the city. Operation Enduring Freedom, the name for the war in Afghanistan, which started Oct. 7, 2001, has seen a total of 2,166 killed. The war has been… Read More Chicago Twice as Dangerous as Afghanistan
If you ever needed a definition for “spin”, this is it. In response to the news today that the economy contracted -.1 percent in the final quarter of last year, Democrats are touting the claim that this is “the best-looking contraction in U.S. GDP you’ll ever see.” The claim was originally made by chief U.S. economist for Capital… Read More A Few More Contractions, and the Economy Will Really Be Rolling!
Over at Protein Wisdom, a former Marine and gun store owner speaks a few truths. Writes Jeff: Unfortunately, we’ve become expert, as a popular and political culture, at pretending we haven’t encountered those very truths we continue to molest — all in an effort to will new truths into being out of something so gossamer… Read More The Irrelevance of Conservative Despair
This is several days old, but since I greatly enjoyed David Mamet’s The Secret Knowledge: The Dismantling of American Culture (Have you not read it? You must), it would be remiss of me not to link his brilliant, hilarious essay for the Daily Beast, “Gun Laws and the Fools of Chelm.” It contains many useful arguments… Read More Gun Laws and Other Acts of Folly
Content Blues 