Month: May 2006

South Union, Kentucky, dusk.

This feature is officially over, but I had so many sublime or touching submissions that I didn’t post I’m going to publish a few of the remainders over the coming weeks, every now and again. Please don’t send me any more. It took most of my weekend to download and organize just the hundreds I received. I now have one week’s worth of images from around the world – an astonishing display of the web’s power and diversity. When I get a minute, I’m going to find a way to gather them all together and publish them somehow – either on the web or on paper. So stay tuned.

That’s the caption Time Out New York put under my photo in the listing for tonight’s (sold-out) sex talk with Dan Savage and Erica Jong. Beast? What have I, what have I, what have I done to deserve this?

To cheer us up.

Not to be out-done, Hillary is set to unveil her own biopic tomorrow morning. Jake Tapper has the scoop.

It can lead to what the Brits elegantly refer to as "cock-ups."

Christianists, according to this site, are now on the verge of marketing a video game that places thirteen-year-olds as warriors in the End-Times. Yep: now teens can wage war and practise murdering infidels on a computer, befopre they have to do the real thing after the Rapture. Here’s the site for Left Behind games (from which the graphic above is taken). Money quote:

This game immerses children in present-day New York City – 500 square blocks, stretching from Wall Street to Chinatown, Greenwich Village, the United Nations headquarters, and Harlem. The game rewards children for how effectively they role play the killing of those who resist becoming a born again Christian. The game also offers players the opportunity to switch sides and fight for the army of the AntiChrist, releasing cloven-hoofed demons who feast on conservative Christians and their panicked proselytes (who taste a lot like Christian).

I’m not sure who the AntiChrist will be. Maybe the designers are waiting to find out who becomes the Democratic party nominee.

(Graphic: courtesy of the Left Behind Games site.)

Cathy Young notices some academic double-standards.

Well, not so great. The signal, like a cell-phone signal, went wobbly a little before Philly and has been dodgy ever since. Now it’s back. I guess country-wide broadband access is enough to ask – but traveling at the same time? We’re not quite there yet. That’s especially true since the electricity keeps going off in the train-car at random moments, requiring the connection to reboot. Still, I’m posting this chugging toward NYC in the quiet car. So don’t give up yet.

A Jewish reader writes:

In principle, I could not agree with you more about the alarming intolerance that many Christianists display.  Indeed, I chuckled and silently cheered (like many others) as you took down Pat Robertson for his grandiose leg-pressing dreams.  And yet, at the same time I find myself in quite a bind on days like today, when I turn on the television and see that very same Pat Robertson passionately pleading with his constituency to donate to impoverished Jews in Israel.  As a Russian Jew and a strong supporter of Israel’s right to exist in safety and peace, it blows my mind that I have to turn in desperation to the Bible Network in order to find any support of the Jewish state or acknowledgment of the lack of moral equivalency between terrorism and self-defense; while most other media outlets have as their favorite pastime the portrayal of Israel as some Goliath state seeking to destroy all in its midst (the #1 threat to world peace, if you remember), the only solid support for the Jewish people in Israel comes from the very people whom I detest for their intolerance on other fronts.

This reality puts me in a rather uncomfortable spot. Because, the fact is, I cannot help but be grateful to Christianists like Pat Robertson for their support for the cause most important to me.   Their hatred of gays has to go on the back burner (despite how important that cause is to me as well), because what is going on in Israel seems to be much more a matter of life and death.  Perhaps when the rest of the world gains some sense and stops trying to deligitimize the Jewish state at every opportunity, I will be able to break from my uncomfortable allegiance with the Christianists. But in a world gone mad, it seems only fitting that such mad allegiances should exist.

Just wait for the rapture … and such alliances may not seem so sensible.

"You’ve got to tell the people in Washington not to nominate Hillary. It would do so much damage to the Missouri Democratic Party. I disagree with the way she’s going to the right, but my biggest problem with it is that it’s not working. People don’t believe she’s a moderate," – Nora Walcott, outgoing executive director of the Greene County, Missouri, Democrats.

(Photo: Jim Watson/AFP/Getty)