Pumpkin Carving

Teaser Anguish

Ever see a great link but can't click through because of the computer you're on? This happened to me today. So now here for you all, Vietman considers ban on small-chested drivers.

Obama Infomercial!

So, will you watch tonight? I'm not sure I care to sit through the whole thing but I am very curious to see what the ratings will be. Against it is the fact that it is essentially a 30 minute ad. For it is the public appetite for political theater. Against it the fact that normally for political theater you need the drama of an opponent. For it is the fact that people watch sermons on TV too. So who knows. Either way what an closing gesture, a 30 minute aria on a gusher of cash!

Ho Hum

Finley Farm

The girls were very excited about the bonfire, the hot dogs (C. 2, B. 2, W.4), the hayride, and the smores.


Especially the smores

Now He's Gone and Done It

Richard Dawkins vs. Harry Potter. He's writing a children's book, only this one will lift the veil on the insidious nature of fairy tales. It's one thing to go after the Judeo-Christian myth, but I think he is going to find the public a lot less receptive to giving up their Harry Potter. New Atheism is punchy and polemical in long essay form. Why expose its lack of charm to the rigors of the bedtime story?

Public Grief

Anne Pressly passed away last night. P. and I were coming home from the country when we received a call. It was a shock to me how affecting it felt, made worse I think by reports of her recent improvement. This morning at St. Andrews church, where Anne attended on occasion and was a member of a bible study, Philip redirected the tenor of his sermon to focus on recent events. He appeared to speak extemporaneously, and it was moving and direct. He said he had spent most of the week at the hospital. He fought back his tears at one point but many in the congregation was less successful.

Afterwards P. said it surprised him that people who did not know Anne would allow themselves to become so emotionally involved in her death. Then there was the item from the paper earlier in the week where coverage of the attack and the outpouring of public support drew the criticism that other violent crime hadn't produced the same result. Is there something selfish in participating in grief for someone you do not know? Is public sympathy undeserved or illegitimized if it is not dispensed equally?

To think that it seems you would have to pretend that personal knowledge is the only true ground for grief and that every death has the exactly same claims to symbolic or emblematic significance. Sure public grief can be outsized and massive. And maybe we find disproportionately compelling the deaths of the young or the attractive or the successful. But we are a society, and our sense of ourselves is not just individual but also collective. And in judging our collective status we rely on the emblematic all the time. It is not just the man who committed the crime or the young woman who suffers and cannot survive but society too that is guilty and victim. The shock of the unlooked for event, the unnatural interference of violence and death, they seem to me good reasons for public grief.