TSO has a good idea. I too am bookmarking EWTN's video archive of Pope Benedict XVI's visit to America, about which I said woefully little due to post-tax season fatigue.
April 2008 Archives
Click here to see my best man's third baby and first girl. Cute!
Some students at Centennial High School* have shaved vertical lines into their eyebrows in a trend recently made popular by hip-hop star Soulja Boy. School officials say the mark looks like a gang symbol.
Centennial administrators are telling students with the lines that they can't return to school until they shave their eyebrows off. Assistant Principal Mark Porterfield said the students are not suspended, but they are not allowed in school until they cooperate.
Somewhere in the back of my mind I hear:
Stop, collaborate and listen
Ice is back with a brand new invention
Something, grabs a hold of me tightly
Flow like a hawk move daily and nightly
Will it ever stop? Yo I don't know
Turn off the light, and I'll glow
To the extreme, I rock the mic like a vandal
Light up the stage and wax a chump like candle
OK, that was off the top of my head. It's too bad these teenagers don't realize they're aping a style pioneered by one of the most ridiculed rappers of all time. That could put a swift end to the practice.
Found at The Daily Eudemon.
* This is not Centennial in Champaign.
La-di-da, la-di-dy
I sure love AskMeFi
A bit belated, but you get the picture!
This hilarious New Yorker piece confirms many Catholic traditionalist's worst suspicions:
The Woodstock-based events producer Chris Wangro is not a very religious person, but he has always believed that something magical happens when a big crowd gets together. (This is what led him, after stints as a clown and an agitprop street performer, to begin staging concerts in Central Park—Earth Day, Paul Simon, Lou Reed, Sonic Youth, David Byrne.) So, Wangro said last week, he felt at ease when the Office of the Papal Visit hired him to plan a youth rally at St. Joseph’s Seminary, in Yonkers, to welcome Pope Benedict XVI. “It’s all very similar,” he said. “Ultimately, it comes down to creating a community through the show.”
It was four days to showtime. The Pope was arriving in Washington, and Wangro, wearing a leather jacket and Lennon-style sunglasses, was zipping around the seminary in a golf cart, attending to logistics. The audience—twenty-five thousand young people, selected by lottery from around the country—would be bused in on Saturday morning, and Wangro had planned a music festival to entertain them while they waited for the Pope. The lineup: Kelly Clarkson and groups called Saint Michael’s Warriors, the Messengers of Christ, A Fragile Tomorrow, and Jammin’ with Jesus & Friends. Wangro pointed to the stage. “This is purely a rock-and-roll rig,” he said. It was left over from a Rolling Stones show, but Wangro had installed new features, including secret exits, extra floor space, and, on the stage, a thirty-foot-high backdrop depicting a rising Christ surrounded by purple and gold sun rays. Backstage, he was setting up a papal greenroom that would impress even the most demanding diva: fresh flowers, mirrors, Oriental carpets, a decorative cross selected by the fathers at the seminary, a couch-filled seating area, a “very fancy mobile toilet unit.”
The whole thing is pretty funny. But... Kelly Clarkson?
Me, to the son of an 89 year old client: "Does your mother... um... do... does she um... does she do lots of prescription drugs?"
(For those of you who are mortified, this is what I was talking about.)
I can't wait to see what comes out of my mouth tomorrow
One of my favorite journals, The New Atlantis, just unveiled a swank new web design featuring new weblogs and also posted their Winter 08 issue.
Scrappleface make funny: New Hillary Ad Touts Experience Firing Top Aides
This question on Ask MeFi reminded me of this old James Fallows piece which reminded me of this obnoxious article in The Economist from February that I had meant to comment on:
As the battle for the Democratic nomination reaches a climax in Texas and Ohio, the front-runner's speeches have begun to paint a world in which laid-off parents compete with their children for minimum-wage jobs while corporate fat-cats mis-sell dodgy mortgages and ship jobs off to Mexico. The man who claims to be a “post-partisan” centrist seems to be channelling the spirit of William Jennings Bryan, the original American populist, who thunderously demanded to know “Upon which side shall the Democratic Party fight—upon the side of ‘the idle holders of idle capital’ or upon the side of ‘the struggling masses’?”
There is no denying that for some middle-class Americans, the past few years have indeed been a struggle. What is missing from Mr Obama's speeches is any hint that this is not the whole story: that globalisation brings down prices and increases consumer choice; that unemployment is low by historical standards; that American companies are still the world's most dynamic and creative; and that Americans still, on the whole, live lives of astonishing affluence.
After admitting that "for some middle-class Americans, the past few years have indeed been a struggle," the article then goes on to call this creeping populism "worrying" and to blast the Democrats for addressing those concerns. The Economist is right to note the many benefits of globalization, but as more and more families are losing their houses and jobs, it would seem an odd political strategy for candidates to remind them that globalization has increased consumer choice. Well, Mr. Machinist, it sucks that you got laid off and are losing your pension and your house, but look on the bright side, Americans live lives of astonishing affluence. Besides, there are plenty of call centers hiring!
I realize that I shouldn't expect the Economist to take any other stance than this, but even by the magazine's own standards, this is a particularly shrill.
If you want to get an idea of the mood inside the journalism business these days, wait till midnight tonight, turn off all the lights in your house, shut yourself in your bedroom closet, put on your sunglasses, pull a paper sack over your head, and stare expectantly at the future.
Clinton’s approach in Pennsylvania provides a nice contrast with Obama’s. He stands on a platform surrounded by screaming supporters. Clinton sits at a table with local business leaders, local academics, and the mayor of Pittsburgh discussing ways “we can collaborate to find solutions.” When audience members share their worries with her, she thanks them for their “courage,” blames Dick Cheney, and nods at them like a supermom: maternal, efficient, and in control.
I find both approaches a little creepy.
