Good advice:

So learn the lyrics. Then you must sing them. In the car. On the beach. At the mall. Wherever teenagers gather. Then dance. Learn that “lady hump” song and dance like it’s 1952. Get out your best opera voice and warble “Don’t cha wish your girlfriend was hot like me,” and dance, dance, dance.

-Monique Doyle Spencer in an op/ed from today’s Boston Globe.

Today’s top story is the eagerly-awaited announcement of the winner of The Bookseller’s Diagram Prize for Oddest Title of the Year.

The winner, by a large voting margin, was a self-help book by the title:

As Joel Rickett, Deputy Editor of The Bookseller, observed, “[This book] makes redundant an entire genre of self-help tomes. So effective is the title that you don’t even need to read the book itself.”

Indeed, after reading this title, is there really any reason for another self-help book about getting out of relationships?

In my mind, the only comparable book title I can think of comes from these lines by Tom Lehrer

Speaking of love, one problem that recurs more and more frequently these days, in books and plays and movies, is the inability of people to communicate with the people they love: husbands and wives who can’t communicate, children who can’t communicate with their parents, and so on. And the characters in these books and plays and so on, and in real life, I might add, spend hours bemoaning the fact that they can’t communicate.

I feel that if a person can’t communicate, the very least he can do is to shut up!

…which, if there were any justice in this world, should have inspired the following book to end all self-help books about communications:

enough said…

Make no mistake: if He rose at all
it was as His body;
if the cells’ dissolution did not reverse, the molecules
reknit, the amino acids rekindle,
the Church will fall.

It was not as the flowers,
each soft Spring recurrent;
it was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddled
eyes of the eleven apostles;
it was as His flesh: ours.

The same hinged thumbs and toes,
the same valved heart
that-pierced-died, withered, paused, and then
regathered out of enduring Might
new strength to enclose.

Let us not mock God with metaphor,
analogy, sidestepping, transcendence;
making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the
faded credulity of earlier ages:
let us walk through the door.

The stone is rolled back, not papier-mâché,
not a stone in a story,
but the vast rock of materiality that in the slow
grinding of time will eclipse for each of us
the wide light of day.

And if we will have an angel at the tomb,
make it a real angel,
weighty with Max Planck’s quanta, vivid with hair,
opaque in the dawn light, robed in real linen
spun on a definite loom.

Let us not seek to make it less monstrous,
for our own convenience, our own sense of beauty,
lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are
embarrassed by the miracle,
and crushed by remonstrance.

-John Updike (from Telephone Poles and Other Poems)

COMMENTARY: I originally posted this poem last Easter but am reposting this again because I still think that John Updike here captures the scandal of the Cross in a way that few modern authors have.

Updike’s “in the guts” reflection on Easter centering on the physicality of the Resurrection starkly refutes both ancient pagan celebrations of the cycle of the seasons and modern fairy-tale interpretations of Easter as simply a hope of “spiritual” renewal.

Happy Easter to all!

• GO PATRIOTS!
• 15 buildings burn in Lawrence MA. I wonder how this happened? It started in an abandoned night club…
• An avalanche on Mt. Washington kills a hiker. Damn…to think I was supposed to be up there right about now.
• This election cycle is getting hot…Obama tells Billybop to back off? Good for him!
• How humans vote. Er…why we vote for who we do.
• WHY I BOYCOTT MARRIOTT…and you should as well.
• Now this is cool, and different. Wounded Marines training for careers in the film industry. Not what you expect.
• Free speech and hard core porn…excellent article.

Quote of the moment:

Since a politician never believes what he says, he is quite surprised to be taken at his word.

Charles De Gaulle (1890 - 1970)

“New England has a harsh climate, a barren soil, a rough and stormy coast, and yet we love it, even with a love passing that of dwellers in more favored regions.”

Henry Cabot Lodge

…if we got to help stop a terrorist attack.

Alex McIlveen, 45, a cab driver, heroically took on one of the terrorists who tried to blow up the passenger terminal at Glasgow airport. The terrorist’s body was in flames when McIlveen delivered his personal opinion in an undeniable fashion. To his surprise, though, the fellow didn’t flinch or go down. His doctor later told him that he’d torn a tendon in his foot.

We salute Mr. McIlveen and wish him a speedy recovery and the best of medical care.

As for the terrorist, hopefully he won’t be able to father any future jihadists from this time on.

Update: July 5, 2007 7:50 pm

Always on Watch has posted a fuller account of the heroics of Alex McIlveen and three other fellow Scots who took on the terrorists as police stood by and did nothing.

Maybe it will fall on the Scots to save Britain from its new Prime Minister.

Update: July 6, 2007 1:37 pm

Fellow blogger Duncan Avatar alerts us to Iowahawk’s recording of Kahlid Ahmed’s
exclusive first person narrative about his very, very, very bad hair day. Iowahawk has outdone himself here!

Two truths about liberals:

It only takes 20 years for a liberal to become a conservative without changing a single idea.

Robert Anton Wilson

..and

A liberal is a person whose interests aren’t at stake at the moment.

Willis Player

Heh.

The media and the ‘educational system’ are the prime sources of racism in the United States.

Ishmael Reed

In belated honor of yesterday’s 5th Annual International Eat a Tasty Animal for PETA Day, I offer you this quote (with apologies to Bill Staines):

All God’s critters got a place…right next to the mashed potatoes.

Politics is the art of preventing people from taking part in affairs which properly concern them.

Paul Valery (1871 - 1945)

…and we are dumb to allow this to continue.

It is only by following your deepest instinct that you can lead a rich life, and if you let your fear of consequence prevent you from following your deepest instinct, then your life will be safe, expedient and thin.

Katharine Butler Hathaway

“One hundred years from now, it will not matter what my bank account was, how big my house was, or what kind of car I drove. But the world may be a little better, because I was important in the life of a child.”

-Forest Witcraft

I thought I had heard it ALL.

The U.S. Mint is a money-making government operation in more ways than one. In 2005, it made $730 million in profit. But pennies are being targeted as the big loser for the mint. It costs the government 1.4 cents for every penny produced. Multiply that by 7 or 8 billion pennies made each year and it comes to a $20 million loss.

This makes sense. Or is it cents. Whatever, I can understand this justification for ending the production of pennies.

“I cannot support eliminating the penny at this time,” said Rep. Carolyn Maloney, D-N.Y. …Maloney added that eliminating the penny would hurt the poor.

“A study by a former Federal Reserve economist shows that rounding hurts lower income most and this effect would be especially strong if only cash transactions are rounded,” she said.

This is the dumbest justification I’ve heard to date about the poor. Wow.

But let us never forget, especially today, that despite the name-calling, the jeers, the petty jealousies, we’re the envy of the world - and rightfully so.

The fact is that no matter what anyone says: No country has given so much to so many so often - while asking for so little in return - for so little gratitude than this great country of ours. So Happy birthday, America! Stand tall and proud - you’ve earned it.

Peter Brookes

If ye love wealth greater than liberty, the tranquuility of servitude greater than the animating contest for freedom, go home from us in peace. We seek not your counsel, nor your arms. Crouch down and lick the hand that feeds you. May your chains rest lightly upon you, and may prosterity forget that ye were our countrymen.

S. Adams

In the land of secret societies, and street gangs, there are subtle “signs” known only to accepted members of the group. Sometimes it’s the choice of clothes, sometimes it’s the choice of words, somes it’s merely a choice of hairstyle.

I grew up learning a way to speak with, and recognise, certain chioces of words to describe the same thing. It all depends on the atmosphere of course. More often than not it’s a matter of civility.

Liquor is useful to abreviate measured language. I suppose that’s why it’s known as “social lubricant”. Some folks familiar with alcohol learn to make a clear stand, while keeping nicey- nicey for the sake of politenecessity. (sic- I just made that up)

Sam Adams seems to have been such a man. How nice to not have to reinvent the wheel.

Liberals claim to want to give a hearing to other views, but then are shocked and offended to discover that there are other views.

William F Buckley, Jr