Right, Lent. I’m giving up french fries. Starting tomorrow because I didn’t know I was doing it when I got lunch.
Category: Religion
The Post has a fairly deep and interesting article about the assembly of a His Dark Materials movie.
HDM and Philip Pullman are a source of great conflict for me. The Golden Compass is a stunningly, impossibly good book, and The Subtle Knife was excellent too. But reading The Amber Spyglass was like a punch in the stomach, or maybe a stab in the back.
I read the books as soon as they came out, so it’s been a few years. Maybe if I started Compass now I’d see it coming, but I didn’t then. It’s one thing to set up an oppressive, evil church in an alternate universe and make your point through metaphor; it’s very much another to have one of your most sympathetic characters, ostensibly from our world, say “the real Catholic Church is a bad thing and here’s why.”
It’s not like I burned the book after that, or even put it down. I finished it, and I was still affected by the story and moved by its ending. I have a difficult time even expressing what I disliked about it.
I guess what it comes down to is that my mom read Compass to the kids in her middle school class, at a Catholic school, on my recommendation. They loved it. I have no doubt that many of them went on to finish the series themselves. And it doesn’t feel right to know that they got to the end of Spyglass to find a brilliant, trustworthy author turning a shared story into a political statement against something in which they probably believed. Against a church that, in my experience, is nothing like the way he portrays it.
I have no problem with the call to question your beliefs–that’s a call it’s been my job to make, and one that I welcome for myself. And of course the reflexive response is that it’s his world, he has the right to do with it what he wants.
That’s not true. But that’s also a subject for another time.
Philip Pullman and Tom Stoppard–I’ll definitely see the HDM movies, when they finally get made. I hope they live up to the books. But it’s going to make me sick to know that there will very likely be people from my church protesting and condemning the third movie, and that there will be other people hating them for it. What does that solve? Who learns anything from that? Why such a waste of a potentially perfect story?
Interesting theory over at Achewood: is telemarketing really just the phone calls of the damned?
Sumana sent me pretty cool article.
“Louisville Christians are demonstrating that the Church is indeed one. Predominately black Forest Baptist Church has joined predominately white Highland Baptist Church in commemorating those killed by violence in the Louisville area during the past year. Church members drive white crosses into the ground outside their churches equal to the number killed during the past twelve months….”
Times like this, I like to remember my city’s motto.
Louisville: Hey, we’re not Cincinnati.
On Saturday, Father Joseph Pilger was found beaten to death in his home in Lexington. That the article mentions his criminal history is a pretty clear indication that the AP has already decided on the motive; it barely mentions the fact that oh yes, he’d been living with an unnamed younger man for a month, and also his car is missing.
Father Pilger wasn’t someone I knew, but he could very well have been. It’s frightening. Lexington’s not a great town, but it’s not a hot spot for priest-murder, either.
Two hours of sleep last night, as I stupidly stayed up until three before I even realized that I still had to do my homework. I say “stupidly” because I wasn’t even staying up for any specific purpose–I just hung out with Michelle and Jessica and David, beatboxing and rhapsodizing about the Neptunes. That’s college, I guess, but then I thought I was supposed to get good at time management someday. Ha ha ha!
That wasn’t exactly the best night to skimp on sleep, either, as today was a big day: not only our biggest crowd at Chalk Circle, but my first ever show as the drummer for Grandma’s Genius! And it rocked! We’d practiced together on exactly one song, which we didn’t end up playing, and the PA was crap, which made for a frustrating beginning. As it turns out, though, once we got started we had a pretty flawless forty minutes. We’re good at this!
Then, just as we finished our last song (BNL, “Brian Wilson,” where I get to go crazy thundergod at the end), the first drops of rain started to fall… all over the band that had earlier refused to swap us time slots.
That’s right. God loves Grandma’s Genius more.
(Also, found while searching for Neptunes sites: Conch is their specialty!)
The heat appears to operate entirely independent of my control, turning itself on sometime around 10 am and turning itself off around 10 pm. The knobs on some of the radiators don’t turn at all,and the ones that do turn have no effect. I wasn’t under the impression that this was how radiators worked! Evening is interesting, at least, as I have to open windows around 6 and turn the space heater on again by 11.
Things that have distracted me lately:
- “…our machines have to keep grinding over it, the grit in their backwash sandblasting the blood away.”
- “Ah, it’s just someone sitting there, because you don’t see dead bodies, you just don’t.”
- The same girl who recommended
- Also, they have a song about Lion-O.
- As the only one of my friends still here for the break, I’m taking care not only of Idaho but of Meghan’s turtle and Ken’s red-bellied frogs (plus their cricket-based food source). The resulting situation can be seen camwards.
And that’s the news from Kentucky.
Update 0757 hrs: In response to any questions you may have about the show, the answer is “yes.” Whoo.
Three entries in three days is almost unprecedented. Maybe I’m trying to make up for the fact that I’m heading home for the weekend–again–and when I get back I’ll commence trying hastily to ink this week’s toon. Ah, the jet-setting life of an unpaid cartoonist! Ha ha! See you Sunday.
Update 1353 hrs: But before I go, I feel I should mention that my roommate has purchased his very first professional team from Yahoo! Shopping. I mean, with prices like these, who can refuse?
Less than a week until Anne makes her presence known on the Centre campus. It’s an event we’ve been looking forward to all year. Ken stuck a little portrait of Ms. Murray on our markerboard in August, and it’s been saying horrible and profane things daily ever since; now that the countdown has begun, she’s taken on positively demonic aspects. It’s only a matter of time until we see her in concert, and I fully expect some kind of pyrotechnic battle between good and evil when the curtain opens. Ph34r!
Heading home for the weekend. This has disadvantages, such as the fact that I won’t be able to hang out or play videogames; it also has advantages, in that I will miss at least a day and a half of Rush Week. Ah, those crazy fraternity boys!