The Kids These Days TM are making demands on their colleges. They use a lot of hashtags, so it ends up circulating through to the media. From there, we go on to judge the opinions of 18-22 year olds and come up shocked when not all of them seem to be completely well thought out….
My Analysis of Tchaikovsky’s Iolanta: a Metaphor for Conversion
Saw the opera Iolanta by Tchaikovsy not too terribly long ago. It struck a chord with me in a particular way, and I figure I’d record my two cents on it for posterity. It’s a fairly obscure opera, it seems. As of today, no full-length recording of it with English subtitles exists on Youtube. More…
No, the Pope Is Not Calling For the End of Tax-Exempt Status for Uncharitable Churches
“Pope Francis Calls for Ending Tax-Exempt Status of Churches That Don’t Help the Needy” goes the headline from U.S. Uncut. To be fair, the U.S. Uncut website is one of the really bad clickbait, half-assed research political sites out there, but it’s the most egregious example of the most recent round of misrepresenting the words…
Christmas: The Christian, the Pagan, and the Secular
Most people will concede that, at its core, Christmas is a Christian holiday. At least historically, right? On the other hand, it has also been massively secularized, to the point where it can be celebrated faithfully even by the non-religious. The disparity between these two characteristics of the same holiday can throw people off, particularly…
Heroin and Prescription Drugs
The heroin “epidemic” is the new bête noire of local news organizations and to a lesser extent government legislators. It was mentioned on the Democratic debate last night, so I have a couple tabs on it open that I want to clear out. “Between 2002 and 2013, the rate of heroin-related overdose deaths nearly quadrupled,”…
Insulting the King in the Modern Day
In days gone by, when monarchies were still considered a legitimate form of government and not just a tradition kept alive for the sake of tourist dollars, it seems like it would have made sense that there’d be laws on the books making it illegal to insult the king/queen/royal family. But when America decided that…
People Say They Want to Bomb Fictional City, Keep Beating Their Wife
“30% of Republicans want to bomb the fictional town where [the Disney movie] Aladdin was set!” Republicans are so stupid, amirite? Also, 19% of Democrats apparently agreed too. But it’s all irrelevant, because none of the people polled were allowed calling out the question as fake. Scroll down to Question 38. “Would you support or…
The President As Christ
12 And The Media answered and said again unto them, “What will ye then that I shall do unto him whom ye call the President of the United States?” 13 And they cried out again, “Crucify him!” 14 Then The Media said unto them, “Why, what evil hath he done?” And they cried out the more exceedingly, “Crucify…
Science Has Not Proven People Who Swear Have a Bigger Vocabulary
“People who curse a lot have better vocabularies than those who don’t, study finds“. If you don’t want to read the whole thing, what they did find was that people don’t have a huge repertoire of swear-words, but if you put a classroom together, pretty much every single person is going to have a swear…
Dumb Hicks Think We’re Going to Run Out of Sun!
People who live in the rural south are all a bunch of dumbasses, amirite? Did you hear about these stupid hicks who banned solar panels in their town because they think it will drain the sun? What a bunch of uneducated morons! Figure 1. How you are imagining the entire town in question. An article…