I'm not a Roman Catholic (more a Deist Methodist), but I would think this were offensive if it weren't so laughable. (Hat tip: Fr. Jim Tucker who found it at Ship of Fools' Fruitcake Zone).

On a related note, Belle Waring at Crooked Timber links to a wicked riff by Michael Berube on the Left Behind series.

(I have to be careful not to be too scathing as I know several otherwise smart and educated friends and colleagues who have read those stories and not only liked them, but found them to be spiritually meaningful. For a more fun story about the end times, I instead would recommend this latter-day Heinlein).

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When I saw the title to this post at Transterrestrial Musings, I thought for sure that Rand had also seen the March 29 entry at Gravity Lens (probably will be archived here soon), regarding the Maxim covers that simultaneously featured both Marge Simpson and Paris Hilton. Apparently, the Marge version is selling out faster than the Paris version. Maybe there is some hope for Western Civilization.

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Father Jim Tucker, a libertarian Catholic priest in the diocese of Arlington, VA (where I lived during law school) points to this site, where you can hear audio clips of Greek and Latin classics with their original "classical" pronunciations (as I learned them in high school).

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I used to like Pee Wee's playhouse, especially after staying up all Friday night on a few occasions back in college.

Now Paul Reubens (a/k/a Pee Wee) is back in the news, pleading guilty to a misdemeanor obscenity charge in exchange for dismissal of the more serious child pornography charge leveled against him because of some questionable photographs seized from his home three years ago. Under the terms of the deal, Pee Wee cannot have unsupervised contact with minors, must register as a sex offender, pay a $100 fine, and enter counseling.

That's all just background for you to watch this neat little gem of children's programming.

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Last week, Ted at RocketJones pointed to this site featuring 50-word fictional works.

Here's my entry (logging in at 49 words, including the title):

The Sixth Republic

Beautiful bodies on the beach -- the Riviera.
Then, the bomb.
Like Byzantium's Hagia Sophia, Notre Dame is now a mosque.
As with Spain (now Andalusia), we could have fought.
We didn't.
France has its sixth republic: La Republique Islamique.
Baggy burkhas on the beach -- the Riviera.

I've been trying to expand this to a novella or novel length, but to little success so far. The bracketing lines of this story come from this image contrasted with this one.

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The London Royal Opera House recently fired Rubenesque American soprano Deborah Voigt from a role in Strauss' Ariadne auf Naxos that would have required her to wear a small black evening dress. This has led to some interesting but predictable hand-wringing over merit versus looks. After all, isn't opera all about the music?

Well, no, not exactly. This article cites a couple of good reasons that an opera company may legitimately exclude a plus-sized singer: if the role calls for a starving or sickly character (such as Mimi in La Boheme), or if the staging calls for active movements (say, up and down stairs on stage).

[Warning! Gratuitous name-dropping moment: please note the mention in the Miami Herald piece of my childhood friend Laura Claycomb, a rising star in the opera world, with whom I had the pleasure of singing and touring in my old church's youth choir back in the mid-1980s].

This debate calls to mind last year's blog coverage of the report that good-looking college professors score higher on course evaluations than the more homely.

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Lawyer, historian, and former librarian of Congress Daniel Boorstin passed away on Sunday at the age of 89 from pneumonia. Obituaries here, here, and here.

I read (and quite enjoyed) his The Discoverers. A much better read than Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything, which I am still slogging my way through. I have been meaning to read Boorstin's next two books in his intellectual history series, The Creators and The Seekers, and will now make a point of doing so. Favorite line from the New York times obit: "In the late 1960's, when antiwar protests swept the nation, he was a target of student radicals whom he denounced as 'incoherent kooks' and 'barbarians.'"

God bless him. May he rest in peace.

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