Month: October 2006

  • Happy Halloween!

    OK now it’s time to take Halloween seriously. No more playing around. I attended Laurel Hill Cemetery’s special Halloween tour, and I did my best to soak up the spirits, which did not disappoint. Lest anyone think I am kidding, the languid and maudlin angel shown in the next picture is literally prying open the…

  • Republicans caught in the act of mean-spiritedness!

    As if we needed more proof…. And the victims? Why, the children, of course!

  • RINOs go trick-or-treating

    Larry Bernard is hosting this week’s special Halloween edition of the RINO Sightings Carnival. The posts take the form of trick or treaters, and Larry’s an excellent creative writer, so it’s very entertaining. Don’t miss it! But I’m wondering. How many parents would actually let their kids go trick or treating as a Republican at…

  • First they came for the gays….

    Most of us are in the closet, or we get treated like the people in the article. So says Kesher Talk’s Judith Weiss (via PJM), as she reflects on a growing trend noted in the NYT and on the minds of many — the deliberate shunning and cutting off of friends and relatives because of…

  • only more acceptable?

    It wasn’t that long ago that things like creating a new human liver from scratch were entirely theoretical. I didn’t expect to see actual hands-on results as quickly as this, but it seems to be happening (which is good news for Hepatitis C sufferers.) While they can’t yet grow full-sized livers, this is quite a…

  • This November, help implement martial law!

    Today’s Inquirer has a fun op ed by James Lileks, “The first 100 days if Democrats win”: Day 1: Party like it’s 1992; citizenship for all Gitmo detainees; a blanket amnesty; and a “Circle of Healing” ceremony held on the Capitol steps. I know that’s only Day 1, but I don’t want to spoil the…

  • We should all have the right to be orphans

    When I was still a kid, controversy raged in the Philadelphia area over whether an all-male prep school known as Girard College should be racially integrated. No ordinary boarding school, Girard College had been founded in 1848 according to the provisions in the much litigated will of philanthropist Stephen Girard. (A French born American patriot,…

  • My latest little friend…

    …is a Northern Brown Snake (Storeria dekayi dekayi). When I was a kid this was called the Dekay’s Snake. Now it’s usually called the Brown Snake, and sometimes “Dekay’s Brown Snake.” Believe it or not, this tiny thing is full-grown at 13 inches. The poor snake was in the middle of a well-traveled road looking…

  • married to the state?

    It’s all too easy to forget that some of the arguments for same sex marriage which drive the rank-and-file supporters involve — surprise — money (especially government “entitlement” money). From today’s Inquirer: Since her heart attack and stroke in March 2005, Heggs has been in and out of the hospital and unable to work. A…

  • Redeeming my Values mailer

    Have to say, I’ve been getting a kick out of some of the mailings I’ve been receiving lately. This one’s such a classic that I partially scanned it, and made a couple of minor changes to protect the innocent. Far be it from me to complain that the “Values” meme is overwrought….

  • depressing the vote

    I feel like taking a vote right now between two choices: I’m happy about the fact that the clocks are being rolled back so it will soon be dark too early in the afternoon. I’m very unhappy about the fact that the clocks are being rolled back so it will soon be dark too early…

  • Rainy day architecture

    The train to Philadelphia: I’m still in love with the Cira Center building. But the Rouse Towers aren’t bad either (even though they snub the tradition of William Penn’s hat).

  • Mountain of blowback at breathtaking speed?

    Via Glenn Reynolds, Mickey Kaus argues that “the breathtaking speed with which this sort of radical cultural change [same sex marriage] has gone from being unmentioned to being a litmus test for all rational people is one of the things that worries ordinary voters and turns them into cultural conservatives” and he objects to the…

  • Everybody needs to hate somebody

    But what do you do when you’re the victim of anonymous machines talking to each other? I recently received an automatically generated notice from an agency which asserts that I engaged in a financial transaction I never heard of but may well have been conducted automatically on my behalf and which may have generated some…

  • Softer core pumpkin values

    The other day I wrote a moral equivalency post which touched on sex with pumpkins in what some might consider an unseemly manner. I really should be more ashamed of myself, but it could have been worse. (If I’d been really stirred up I might have said “Peter Peter pumpkin eat her” or something.) In…

  • More marriage, more divorce?

    Here’s a Scandanavian study with results which strike me as counterintuitive, as well as stereotype-defying. Apparently, lesbian couples there have a divorce rate more than triple that of gay men. While the study has been cited by organizations opposing same sex marriage as ammunition for the argument that compared to heterosexual couples, gay couples have…

  • Different strokes

    Whipping as “therapy” for depression? Glenn Reynolds is right about the Siberian scientists being serious about this new treatment. They not only claim that being whipped works for depression, but the head doc has used the method to cure himself: Doctor of Biological Sciences, Sergei Speransky, is a very well known figure in Novosibirsk. The…

  • fine young autumn for nature’s cannibals

    “Take this country back by force!” While the phrase brings only 13 Google hits, earlier I heard a man say that, and while he might have merely been venting because of a bad hair day, he sounded awfully serious. (There are so many assumptions within the demand that if I wanted to analyze it I…

  • my bigoted inner child hates all bigoted debates!

    Despite the fact that I don’t get a large number of actual comments, I am forced to go to a lot of trouble to keep the comments feature turned on. I get more spam than many readers might imagine. It pours in, day in and day out, and it consumes many hours of my time.…

  • Art and Death at Strathmore

    I don’t normally review the DVDs I rent, but I’m making an exception with Terry Zwigoff’s Art School Confidential (IMDB link here). Anyone who wants to have a good laugh at Postmodernism (or modern art) should see it. Seriously, it’s the art school equivalent of William F. Buckley’s God and Man at Yale. Jerome (Max…