A hilarious tale of warring wedding chapels in Las Vegas. Money quote:
Reese also noted two fights that were documented in court files — one in which a Garden of Love employee was convicted of battery for kicking a rival chapel worker in the head, and another in which Craig Luell and two others allegedly tussled at the courthouse with a competitor.
"This is all Garden of Love," Jerbic said. "Beating people, threatening people, using tactics no other chapel uses. You don’t hear chapel vs. chapel. It’s chapel vs. Garden of Love."
If this isn’t a reality TV series waiting to happen, what is?
Is it a good thing that only 52% of Maryland’s black male athletes graduate? No. But the real tragedy is that only 54% of Maryland’s black male students graduate. We should fix that problem first– by improving public education so that students from poor and minority backgrouds come to college with the tools they need to succeed– and see if the athletic graduation rates don’t take care of themselves.
But it’s easy to write self-righteous editorials blasting high-profile sports programs for their academic failings, while fixing the class and race problems of American education will cost real money, and require actual work. And nobody wants that.
A trend that has gone too far? Gordon Beauchamp thinks so:
We live amid a veritable tsunami of apology. The Catholic Church, which, of course, has much to apologize for, has, of late, offered _mea culpas_ to Galileo, the Jews, the gypsies, Jan Hus, whom it burned at the stake in 1415, even to Constantinople (now Istanbul) for its sacking 800 years ago by the knights of the Fourth Crusade, an event for which the late John Paul II expressed “deep regret.” No wonder that a group in England, claiming descent from the medieval Knights Templars, is asking the Vatican to apologize for the violent suppression of the order and for torturing to death its Grand Master Jacques de Molay in 1314, an apology timed to commemorate the 700th anniversary of that fell deed. In America, the National Council of Churches apologized to Native Americans for Europeans’ discovering their continent and appropriating their land (but did not return any church’s specific holdings to any specific tribe). The United Church of Canada followed suit, officially apologizing to Canada’s native peoples for wrongs inflicted by the church; the native peoples, however, officially rejected the apology…
Facing history — that Gorgon’s head — dead on is never easy, and at times it is almost unbearable. The clearest lesson that it teaches is that grim one: _Homo homini lupus_. Still it chastens, tempers, rigorously instructs, is essential. The more we know of it, the better.
The Illinois senator makes all the right enemies. There really is a resistance on the left to even thinking about social security’s long-term vulnerability.
And easy-going Christians are a critical part of it:
The 2006 Gallup Halloween poll found 12% of Christians (versus only 3% of non-Christians) citing personal objections to the holiday on religious grounds. But despite this, Christians were no less likely than non-Christians to say they usually pass out candy (65% vs. 62%) or to say they usually decorate their homes for Halloween (44% each). Similarly, this year’s survey finds virtually no difference between the percentages of Christians and non-Christians saying they are buying Halloween candy or decorations.
The Dish 