Month: August 2008

A really moving first-person account from Bob Morris:

In a voice as clear and resonant as any wedding chime, she told us that marriage is a choice people make to love each other, even in difficult times when we don’t feel so loving. She told us that marriage isn’t only about love. It’s about a promise. And it’s also about a choice to keep coming back to reinvest in that promise, year after year.

I found my cynical self fighting tears as we exchanged rings and offered vows.

Then I sang “Till There Was You” while strumming my ukulele, just as I had very early on in our courtship.

 

We had been on a beach in Florida, during our first weekend away together. I wasn’t sure I could survive three days with him in a small hotel room. And I wasn’t sure as we walked along the beach one night that he wouldn’t laugh in my face if I got out my ukulele and sang a love song to him.

 

But when I finished, there were tears in his eyes. “I never expected that from you,” he said.

 

Neither had I. It surprises me every day, this thing called love.

Two very weird comments from two very smart and informed men. David Brooks essentially argued last week that John McCain had no choice but to go Rove, and launch the first wave of seriously negative advertizing because of the nature of the media and campaigning. And now Mark Halperin seems to think that McCain’s gaffe about how many houses he owns will rebound against Obama … because it "opened the door" for McCain to go negative on Rezko, etc.

Earth to both: Nothing in this campaign so far suggests that John McCain has the slightest compunction in using the nastiest, toughest tactics he can possibly find as often and as powerfully as he can. His Paris-Britney mockery and his accusation that Obama is putting his own political career in front of what he believes is the interest of the country were a warm-up. You can see the rationale, and it’s worked pretty well so far. But please spare us the crap about McCain really wanting to rise above it all. He has a choice; and he doesn’t.

"I also like the line from this song about hollow chocolate bunnies. I hated those when I was a kid: They looked great at first, but when you bit into ’em you got nothing but air. And even the thin skin of deceptive chocolate was usually substandard once you tasted it," – Glenn Reynolds.

Pretty goofy stuff here – but funny after a fashion. How does John McCain turn around the economy? The way he turned around his own finances! Marrying an heiress:

K-Lo rejects women priests:

Women will not be, cannot be, should not be priests in the Catholic Church.

She gives no reason for this, besides  saying that "what the Womenpriests are doing and talking about is another church, whether they accept that or not." She believes that the Catholic Church "can’t be re-made" and therefore needs not argue about women priests on the merits. This is the hierarchy’s insistence: this is a subject that cannot even be discussed. The truth, almost certainly, is that those now outside the "church" will one day be seen as those most committed to its survival.

The latest polling:

Judith Watt praises bad taste:

Not every designer, of course, can manage the necessary combination of self-awareness and sly humour. Some go too far, stretching the joke until it snaps and their customers end up wearing top-to-toe gold-plated leopard-skin. This is not clever; it’s just showing off. "Comme only gets away with bad taste because it does it in a cerebral way," says the fashion writer Kay Barron. "Flashy, on the other hand, is not good. It means you have no style of your own." Moralioglu agrees. "Top-to-toe designerwear–it’s too much of a uniform… There has got to be a bit of joie de vivre in life." He feels, too, that the brain needs to be engaged for bad taste to work: you do have to think about it.

Bamboo by David Solway

Bamboo talks.
It can’t keep secrets,
likes to speak its mind,
always lets you know what’s happening
in its rooted brakes and colonies,
takes its topics from black topsoil and river muck
bringing the underground to light;
and because it lingers for years between flowerings,
it scrapes one stalk against another
like cricket legs or rhythm sticks
to pass the time with music—
that is,
when it isn’t busy jiving with wind
or chatting with a little bird
or talking shop with clumpgrass
or whispering to itself
or buttonholing strollers, insisting:
Cut me down,
make me into a flute.
Bamboo talks.
Sometimes it sings.
All you need to do is listen.

(Image by Flickr user Joi)

Photographer Spencer Tunick has a simple gimmick; get lots and lots of people to take off their clothes and stand in formation. Kinda hippie fascism. I’d be happy to strip on a nice day, not so happy about joining the Nuremberg rally:

Newcastle’s finest after the jump, if you love the thought of Geordies exposing their privates:

More images here.

Graeme Wood thinks that the Pizza Huts and Tim Hortons on military bases in Afghanistan are self-defeating:

These shops suggest why the comforts could end up doing harm. The aroma of individual-size pizzas fills the air, and they remind soldiers of home. But these greasy, frisbee-sized madeleines are really reminders that they’re not home. They’re far from it, and stuck with an inferior alternative. In the Canadians’ clubhouse, the life-size cardboard cut-out of Don Cherry, beloved hockey commentator for the CBC, is a reminder of their nation’s most popular sport, but also a reminder of how far away they are from their living rooms and friends. A Canadian Navy lieutenant notes that the soldiers who are constantly calling home tend to be the ones most likely to pose disciplinary problems.