Saturday, 07/31/04

A Vatican body called the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith recently issued a hotly awaited document clarifying papal policy on feminism. What struck me more than the handwringing about polymorphous sexuality and moral decline was the matter-of-fact assertion that there's no sex in heaven. "The temporal and earthly expression of sexuality is transient," quoth the Washington Post. It brings to mind the elderly joke repeated by Prairie Home Companion this afternoon, to the effect that Baptists condemn fornication because they're afraid it will lead to dancing.

While attempting to find a copy of the document, I learned that the CDF is a modern rebranding of what used to be called... nobody's going to expect this... the Inquisition.

Bonus points: the CDF's position on the "validity of baptism conferred by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints" reads, in its entirety, "Negative." With such marvelously pugnacious brevity at their disposal, one has to wonder why it took forty years to tackle feminism. 05:53PM «

Thursday, 07/29/04

Bob Edwards, rudely demoted by NPR six months shy of his 25th anniversary of hosting Morning Edition, is moving to XM satellite radio.

Jon Carroll once referred to Edwards as "Bah Bedwards", and it was years before I could hear it any other way. 10:02PM «

Today I learned that plantains are closely related to bananas. I also discovered that I have a cold. 09:39PM «

On Tuesday morning, listening to an NPR story about Barack Obama, I was struck by Renee Montagne's strangely tortured description of Obama, if elected, as "only the third black American to serve in the Senate in the last 100 years." His speech was the best fifteen minutes at the convention, but nothing in the NPR profile was as interesting as the unstated assertion that there were black senators more than fifty years before the civil rights movement.

Half the mystery, of course, is the 17th amendment, which only made senators directly elected by the population in 1913. A day later, I'd poked around enough to encounter the bizarre fact that not only was Mississippi the first state to send a black person to the Senate, but the gentleman in question served the balance of Jefferson Davis' term, who had decamped to run the confederacy. That's hilarious! Mississippi ought to put a capsule version of that fact on its license plates.

The next morning Slate ran a short piece on the subject, and did a better job than I would have anyway, so go read that. 09:38PM «

Monday, 07/26/04

Since Fahrenheit 9/11 came out, I keep seeing references to "My Pet Goat". It's a pretty unbeatable marketing campaign, and I finally knuckled under and checked out its Amazon page.

Related purchases are about as political as you'd expect. "Michael Moore Is A Big Fat Stupid White Man", previously unknown to me, stands out against a pretty left-leaning list: Molly Ivins' "Bushwacked", Richard Clarke's "Against All Enemies", Ron Suskind's "The Price Of Loyalty", etc.

Then there's the sole reader review:

After reading the enclosed story "The Pet Goat," I was stunned by its lyrical beauty and easy cadence. The tempo, the choice of words, and the layout on each page captured my imagination so much that it took me about seven minutes to recover my bearings.

Five stars. Sadly, the book is back-ordered. 06:01PM «

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