Another round of, “Wait, why are we talking about this?”

I’m not quite sure why there is a Debate going on about what Jessica Simpson named her daughter.

It was, perhaps, inevitable that we’d all make a federal case over the fact that Jessica didn’t give birth a month ago (she carried big at an early stage, I guess?), and there’s going to be ridiculousness over the mode of delivery whatever it was, but…we’re getting all upset over the name Maxwell for a girl? Really?

As celebrity baby names go, a girl named Maxwell is pretty well within the range of normal. As long as it isn’t YOUR kid having to show up at elementary school with that name, I don’t see why it has to be a problem. While we’re on the subject, I’ve seen some mostly normal couples give their kids some really obnoxious names, and if you’re one of those parents who gave their kid a name that looks like the alphabet vomited on a cheap linoleum floor, you’re in no position to throw stones.

 

Things which suck, and things which do not suck

DADT was finally repealed, which is awesome, but the DREAM act and the child marriage prevention bill were defeated. The latter especially shows a lot of Congressional Rethugs to be creeps. Might be used to fund abortion? Really? Could be used to usurp pro-life laws? REALLY?!

It’s the kind of attitude that makes me want to donate to groups that really DO provide abortion services in developing countries.

I probably should care about Wikileaks, but everyone is talking about Julian Assange so much that I don’t want to hear about it anymore.

There will be a lunar eclipse tonight. If I stay up to see it, I will be miserable tomorrow, but seeing how I feel today after a reasonable amount of sleep, I probably don’t have much to lose.

One of my friends on Livejournal pointed to a non-profit offering assistance to battered women. The non-profit is called “A Woman’s Place.” Really?! You start a non-profit to help battered women, and you call it THAT?

I’m also hearing about a Serbian dude who got so drunk while on vacation in Egypt that he jumped in the water and landed on a shark’s head. He’s in the news because, instead of getting eaten, he ended up killing the shark. File this under D for “Don’t try this at home, guys.”

I spent the weekend trying to bully my brain into complying with an attempt to write a synopsis for Charlinder. The brain demands more alcohol.

There are no “badass” lipstick shades

I would like to point something out to Shannen Doherty: if you need to announce that you are a badass?

You ain’t.

This is some funny shit, though:

I am of the mind that if your man is satisfied at home, he will not stray.

I am of the mind that Shannen Doherty is overly enamored of the sound of her own voice.

(I hesitate to use the tag “celebrities who should not be celebrities,” as by all accounts Ms. Doherty is actually a very competent actress, but with this book she has jumped the shark.)

Overused AND Misattributed

According to Wikipedia (not the most transparent of sources, but hear me out):

The most oft-cited Voltaire quotation is apocryphal. He is incorrectly credited with writing, “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” These were not his words, but rather those of Evelyn Beatrice Hall, written under the pseudonym S. G. Tallentyre in her 1906 biographical book The Friends of Voltaire. Hall intended to summarize in her own words Voltaire’s attitude towards Claude Adrien Helvétius and his controversial book De l’esprit, but her first-person expression was mistaken for an actual quotation from Voltaire.

Good. Now can we please retire that “I will defend to the death your right to say it” quote from liberal discourse? It is the grown-up version of that saccharine Camus quote of “Walk beside me and be my friend,” in that it was a good idea at first but it’s been parroted out so many times it’s lost the emotional impact it once had. The Camus quote is the refuge of 12-year-old girls who don’t know who first came up with it; the pseudo-Voltaire quote is the much-abused plaything of adults who ought to be able to come up with their own slogans.

(It popped up, predictably, at the Rally to Restore Sanity on Saturday. Most of my fellow attendees wrote their own material.)

 

What’s all the fuss about?

Apparently there was a hostage situation in Silver Spring yesterday. That is in my area. My dad works in the outer suburban part of SS, a friend lives near the building, and another friend works right next door.

Don’t worry, everyone’s fine. My friends were inconvenienced at worst and my dad hardly noticed.

This tends to happen when ugly shit goes down around DC. We had the sniper years ago, and while the rest of the free world saw us on tv fearing for our lives, we just went about business as usual. We had the hostage situation yesterday, and my friends commented on how it interfered with their commute.

9/11, however…now THAT was cause for concern. I was at school in Salisbury at the time, and knew my folks were nowhere near the Pentagon that day, but I had to call and make sure.

*shakes fist at sky*

I was working on a quick grammar lesson when a thunderstorm started up and we had to turn off the computers. Our power was out until mid-morning today, and then came on only sporadically until early afternoon. Good thing I didn’t try to go anywhere on Metro yesterday, as getting back would have been tedious.

So, I thought it would be fun to browse PoorlyDressed tonight…

…and this reminded me of something I’ve been thinking for a while:

see more

What exactly is the point of a Burberry scarf?

It is a boring, uninspired plaid pattern. It looks inoffensive on everyone but attractive on no one. It is a way of announcing to the world, “HEY LOOK, EVERYONE, I’M SOPHISTICATED AND RICH ENOUGH TO BUY SHIT AT BURBERRY!” It’s a way of paying good money for the privilege of giving free advertising space to a high-end clothier. You could get an equally usable, far more individual and attractive scarf at any of most mid-grade department stores for much less money.

I just don’t get it.

(The rest of the pic, however, demands no commentary from me.)

Reviewing a book I haven’t read

After reading the Amazon sample of Green Angel by Alice Hoffman, I can answer in the affirmative that the sample tells me all I need to know about the book. If I hadn’t read much of Hoffman’s previous work, I could probably be persuaded to buy Green Angel, and I would probably enjoy it very much.

Already having read a number of previous Hoffman novels, I would still probably enjoy Green Angel if I read the full story, but, having already consumed a lot of Hoffman fiction, especially Practical Magic, the sample is enough to show me that I don’t need to read Green Angel.

It looks good. It looks well-written and immersing. The problem is, it’s not the first time Hoffman’s written this set of characters. It’s not even the second. I read a few pages of Green Angel on my Kindle and mentally shouted, “She’s writing Sally and Gillian Owens again!”

The similarities between Green and Arora in Green Angel and Sally and Gillian in Practical Magic are so obvious as to be frankly offensive. If Hoffman’s found a basic model for storytelling that works like gangbusters every time for her, I don’t fault her for that, but could she at least try switching up the hair colors on her sisters?

There are basically three novels by Alice Hoffman that I can recommend: Practical Magic, Second Nature and The River King. Everything else is either a shameless recycling of themes and/or characters that she’s done already, or it’s not very interesting. I like the magical realism that Hoffman tends to write, and I’m cool with the maiden/mother/crone archetype that keeps cropping up, but the brunette/blond sisters are ready to retire.

“Qualified atheism.” Good luck with that, Your Holeyness!

The world’s biggest cultural imperialist, wealth-concentrating, woman-punishing, science-hindering, gay-shaming, AIDS-promoting pedophile ring continues to bring the funny like nothing else:

As part of Pope Benedict XVI’s efforts to further the New Evangelization, the Pontifical Council for Culture is setting up a new foundation aimed at reaching out to atheists and agnostics.

The people who threaten the insufficiently pious with Hell on Sunday and then continue to stonewall on the systematic cover-up of child rape on Monday are now trying to spread the Good Word to folks who’ve already figured out that Hell is not an issue?

Ha. Ha. Hahahahahahahaha!

This is my favorite part:

Archbishop Ravasi stressed that the new foundation is only interested in a “noble atheism or agnosticism, not the polemical kind — so not those atheists such as [Piergiorgio] Odifreddi in Italy, [Michel] Onfray in France, [Christopher] Hitchens and [Richard] Dawkins.” He sees such atheists as closed to dialogue: They view the truth with “irony and sarcasm” and tend to “read religious texts like fundamentalists.”

The Courtyard is open to godless heathens, just as long as they can’t pull off an effective debate. Guys like Hitchens and Dawkins tend to mop the floor with religious apologists, and folks like the Archbishop don’t want to be seen sponsoring that.

Rather, he said the new initiative wants to reach out to an atheism that is open to dialogue — what the archbishop calls a “qualified atheism” — and to do so through encounter and discussion. During these events, the aim will be to “search for truth” and to “show atheists the seriousness of theological thought,” he said.

Yeah, “qualified atheism.” They’d like to have “encounter and discussion” with us, assuming we’re not too sure of ourselves in the first place. I mean, Catholic debaters don’t want to go up against atheists who know what they think and are unafraid to say so; that would be an unfair fight.

My response to the Pontifical Council for Culture and its Courtyard for Self-Hating Goyim is below the jump:

David Bentley Hart: Not Even Wrong.

David Bentley Hart complains about how the nasty “New” Atheists are so boring (and he takes an awfully long essay to say how boring we are, too), so Kevin Drum points out:

But his pretensions are, if anything, even more insipid than anything coming from the New Atheists: they are, like Jesus, at least trying to reach ordinary people in language that’s meaningful to them. Hart wants nothing to do with that.

…

You can decide for yourself whether this string of words actually makes anything about God more understandable. I doubt it. But it hardly matters, because even if you like Hart’s formulation, this is simply not the lived experience of Christianity for most people. Hart would like us to believe that anyone who hasn’t spent years meditating on Aquinas and Nietzsche isn’t worth engaging with, but walk into any Christian church in America — or the world — and you’ll find it full of people who understand God much the same way Hitchens and Dawkins do, not the way Hart does. That’s the reality of the religious experience for the vast majority of believers.

And Andrew Sullivan tries on those Miss The Point jeans and decides he looks really sexy in them: