Christian "Science"

WHAT?!?

"My goal is to make them think about evolution," he said. "Evolution as a philosophy makes monsters out of all us. It removes all that makes us human - morals, virtue, love, honor, self-sacrifice. All those become illusory. I'm trying to raise some questions. Who is the real monster here? I do it through a monster story."

WHAT?!?

!!! Whoever knew it would come down to this, that a major newspaper would quote a writer on the EVILS OF EVOLUTION without any aside, comment, nothing. What's next, elephants holding up the four corners of the world?

Sure, it's a newspaper from Alabama, but STILL. This is scary stuff!!! Am I alone in being terrified???

Even the Catholic Church officially accepted evolution as a valid scientific theory, compatible with Biblical scripture, in the 1920s! Come on!!!

Yes, Hootie made the list

Stylus assembled a list of failed followup albums to crossover/artistic breakthroughs. The selections are varied yet predictable. I wrote about ABC's Beauty Stab and Crowded House's Temple of Low Men.

My latest review for the Herald.

Duran on the run

A rather funny Duran Duran interview. I got helpful advice from Nick Rhodes:

"We, as a band, have an aversion to regular water put through a filter," says Rhodes. "For all you know, it's gone through a drug addict's liver."

A-pope-calypse Now

Last Wednesday, those ever-popular signs of the apocalypse got prime-time exposure on the premiere of NBC’s "Revelations," where Bill Pullman plays an intellectual of some sort being followed around by a nun who believes God is speaking through a semi-living dead girl. Pullman arrives just as a cabal of heartless men in white coats has gathered in a shadowy x-ray viewing room to discuss pulling the plug. Being the slaves to that ever-seductive false-God "Science," the doctors, in their infinite skepticism, somehow dismiss her random spewing of Latin as "brain spasms." Let's see--a comatose girl is caught in middle of a debate between science and religion. Sound familiar?

Thankfully, Terri Schiavo never randomly broke out in Latin. But for NBC the timing couldn't be any better. Especially since their epic "culture of life" wet dream has coincided with yet more apocalypse talk since the selection of Benedict XVI as the Catholic Church's new Pope. If you believe St. Benedict, who prophesied that the final Pope would come from his Order, then the selection surely marks the end of times. But then, isn't Benedict XVI a Dominican? And isn't the name pretty much arbitrarily chosen (I would have chosen something cool like Andre MMMI, but I digress)? No, it seems the true tragedy is most probably not the end of days, but the Church's missed opportunity to open its arms to new and former Catholics alike, as well as its failure to recognize the one place where their numbers are actually growing. A South American Pope, for instance, might have made more sense.

Amid talk that the Church was seeking to restructure and possibly considering a moderate, some were surprised that the strict Ratzinger was chosen. The process being as secretive as it is, we may never know the actual "rationale" (quotes connote this writer's skepticism that reason played any significant role whatsoever). But here's what we do know: it took the conclave a relatively short while to elect arguably the most powerful man in the Vatican. Given that the Church has hardly abstained from playing politics throughout its history, what's surprising is that we were even surprised at all.

So the Apocalypse is probably not upon us, but perhaps it is better to err on the side of caution. Considering the recent apocalyptic clamors, I've compiled a short list of things to do before either the end of days in general or the end of your days specifically:

1) Finish your living will and/or your novel.

2) Just for fun, free Fiona Apple.

3) Learn Latin to spice up your "brain spasms" should you ever become comatose (learning to spin your head in a 360-degree angle, a plus).

4) Shave your mustache or at least dye it to match your hair color. This means you John Bolton.

And finally,

5) Just for fun, become the Pope.

What to expect from il papa

At best we can hope that Pope Benedict XVI's reign won't outlive his predecessor's policies, which alienated hundreds of thousands of Catholics worldwide. What surprises me is that we thought the conclave would have even considered the election of a moderate. Here's Andrew Sullivan:

He raised the stakes even further by his extraordinarily bold homily at the beginning of the conclave, where he all but declared a war on modernity, liberalism (meaning modern liberal democracy of all stripes) and freedom of thought and conscience. And the speed of the decision must be interpreted as an enthusiastic endoprsement of his views. What this says to American Catholics is quite striking: it's not just a disagreement, it's a full-scale assault. This new Pope has no pastoral experience as such. He is a creature of theological discourse, a man of books and treatises and arguments. He proclaims his version of the truth as God-given and therefore unalterable and undebatable. His theology is indeed distinguished, if somewhat esoteric and at times a little odd. But his response to dialogue within the church is to silence those who disagree with him. He has no experience dealing with people en masse, no hands-on experience of the challenges of the church in the developing world, and complete contempt for dissent in the West. His views on the subordinate role of women in the Church and society, the marginalization of homosexuals (he once argued that violence against them was predictable if they kept pushing for rights), the impermissibility of any sexual act that does not involve the depositing of semen in a fertile uterus, and the inadmissability of any open discourse with other faiths reveal him as even more hardline than the previous pope.

Sounds a bit like Tom DeLay's philosophy

All Hail Darth Benedict XVI!

The new Pope looks like The Emperor from Star Wars. I bet he also jar jars his jabba the hutt and nutes his salacious crumb.

Meanwhile...

Tom DeLay is thinking: "Why can't we be more like Ecuador?"

Prison guard training is hard in Cali

Except, not at all.

I wonder what this qualifies me for in California. I play a mean tick-tack-toe and have been known to win at Connect Four. Maybe I can be the next Ken Jenne.

Or not.

Slave to Love

Me on His Highness Bryan Ferry. Americans make such lousy lovers because they don't own any Roxy Music records.

Ian McEwan on Saturday, happiness, Iraq

Salon ran a nice interview with Ian McEwan (make sure to get the day pass first), promoting his new novel Saturday, an at-times pedantic account of one day in the life of a happy man in 2003, on the eve of the Iraq war. McEwan notes the difficulty in writing about happiness:

There's supposed to be a universality to happiness while there's a distinctly individual quality about misery. I thought, if I'm going to write about an anxious world, it would be more interesting to put a very happy man into it.

George Bush's iPod

This was probably the most discussed item on the boards today. I couldn't leave work without posting it. What does it say that Bush's selections aren't much better (or worse) than Bill "Teach Your Children" Clinton's?

A closer look at the Fascist Feminist

because while reading the transcipt is funny, there is nothing like actually watching her squirm:

http://thiswebsiterules.com/home/album_showpage.php?pic_id=689

GOP consultant marries his male lover

I thank Andrew Sullivan for first reminding us of this story, buried in the Saturday New York Times.

Sin City - the same old story?

In a wonderful review that is a model of clear-eyed discernment, which will no doubt expose him to ridicule, Anthony Lane takes Sin Cityto task for being yet one more bastard descendant of Scorsese and Tarantino, a film that "know[s] everything about violence and nothing about suffering." His style more than ever a cautious mix of camp and moral clarity, Lane delivers a message to comic book enthusiasts who unwittingly fetishize violence in ever-more-stunning tableaux:

A short course in movie history would teach them that graphic novels themselves are soaked to the bone in a style that was brought to refinement by film noir. It might even lead them to a basic triple bill of “The Big Heat,” “Out of the Past,” and “Sweet Smell of Success.” There they would learn that the duel of shadow and glitter did not start life on a computer screen, that not all women are prostitutes with weapons strapped to their thighs, and that the drive to avenge—which is what fuels “Sin City,” to the point of perversion—can bring more pain than satisfaction in its wake.

Gee. I hope Alex doesn't get upset.

Saul Bellow R.I.P.

He's dead. As the sententious obituaries start to pile up, let's remember the best American novelist of the last 60 years by reading Seize the Day, The Adventures of Augie March, and, his masterpiece, Herzog.

Justice William Jefferson Clinton?

Quoting that scowling satyr Bob Novak, James Ridgeway suggests that the GOP's best way to keep Hillary from running for prez in 2008 is to nominate Bill Clinton to the Supreme Court (assuming William Renhquist resigns or dies soon).

Pope John Paul II's legacy

That marvelous old sinner Christopher Hitchens assesses the pope's legacy, which is rather mixed. The intersection of religion, politics, and liberalism is a perilous one; I suppose John Paul II did as much as any product of World War II and Vatican II could have, but was hopeless when we demanded the prosecution of child abusers who found sanctuary in a bureaucracy that hid them in clouds of incense:

A church that has allowed no latitude in its teachings on masturbation, premarital sex, birth control, and divorce suddenly asks for understanding and "wiggle room" for the most revolting crime on the books.

Hitchens errs only when he descends to the snarkiness that comes too easily for him, in a passage in which he can't resist rapping his favorite bugaboo -- the complicity between organized religion and the state -- on the knuckles. He whizzes past his historical analogy so fast that the ironies fail to resonate:

Actually, the Kennedy brothers were part of a Catholic cabal which imposed another Catholic cabal on the luckless people of South Vietnam. It's impossible to read the history of that calamity without noticing the filiation between the detested Diem dynasty in Saigon and the Kennedys, Cardinal Spellman, and various Catholic Cold-War propagandists from Luce to Buckley. However, there's no proof that the Vatican ordered this, and the Kennedys did repent by having Diem murdered, so perhaps we can let that one slide.

Paging Oliver Stone...

Buchanan's Own

It's a shame they didn't have any bacon bits.

It would have been like a modern tar-and-feathering for our diet conscious society.