A steaming plate (pile?) of fresh pixels is now being served at the photoblog.
Month: November 2004
The War On Christmas
Secular extremists are on the warpath again and the location of this year’s pogrom is Maplewood, New Jersey. The battleground, as usual, is the school. The object of their contempt: Christmas. Just for starters, it’s no longer to be referred to as Christmas. Can’t have that. It’s now to be referred to as a “holiday season”. How inclusive.
Schools planning “holiday season” programs have been instructed to not include any icons or images in their pamphlets or concert programs that might be construed as religious symbols; for example, Christmas trees or dreidels. That might be offensive to someone and might also be construed as promoting a particular religion. Children are so impressionable, you know. And sensitive to the mere mentioning of religions to which they may not belong.
I can’t resist stopping for one brief second to point out that the word holiday is merely a contraction of the words holy day. Clearly the secular extremists aren’t paying close enough attention to details. If you’re going to wage a proper pogrom, at least be creative enough to invent some Orwellian euphemism with which to replace the nasty, unprogressive words “Christmas season”. Referring to holy days clearly won’t do.
Blues and Guns
Via Instapundit comes an article in Slate which I find unintentionally hilarious. The really funny part occurs at the very end.
“Is there something you’ve always wanted to do but were too scared or embarrassed to try? Ask the Human Guinea Pig to do it for you.”
So what was the wild, dangerous thing that some reader sent the “Human Guinea Pig” out to do?
She went to fire a gun at a shooting range.
Inflation? What Inflation?
Nothing to see here, folks. Move along.
Caroll: Darwin, Dickens & Pinker
For that niche audience out there interested in the application of evolutionary psychology to lit crit, Joseph Caroll’s book, Literary Darwinism: Evolution, Human Nature, and Literature, is out and given a lengthy positive review by Denis Dutton: “The Pleasures of Fiction” in Philosophy and Literature and, of course, on A&L.