The Dish

Under the covers, a beagle snoozes:

A Catholic laments:

It seems to me that the underlying problem with the contemporary hymns is an almost universal lack of understanding in the modern American Catholic Church about what Mass is in the first place. If it is a gathering of friendly Christian people around the table of fellowship in order to get strength and encouragement from one another as we all think about Jesus, why then the contemporary hymns fit the bill very nicely, but then, so would quite a few snippets of music I can think of like–"My favorite things" from The Sound of Music.

However, if the Mass is meant to take us to the threshold of heaven; if it is meant to be a glimpse of glory and a participation in the worship of the spheres of heaven itself, why then the sentimental, sweet and comforting songs just won’t do. They wont’ do not because they are bad or untrue, but because they are not good and true enough. Worship that takes us to the threshold of glory needs to be, well…glorious.

This is one area where my aesthetic sympathy for the theocons overwhelms my dismay with some of their theology.

(Hat tip: The Curt Jester.)

A new wrinkle in the war on terror:

This story has been repeated endlessly, both in the U.S. and in other countries. Someone — these are all real — notices a funny smell, or some white powder, or two people passing an envelope, or a dark-skinned man leaving boxes at the curb, or a cell phone in an airplane seat; the police cordon off the area, make arrests, and/or evacuate airplanes; and in the end the cause of the alarm is revealed as a pot of Thai chili sauce, or flour, or a utility bill, or an English professor recycling, or a cell phone in an airplane seat.

Of course, by then it’s too late for the authorities to admit that they made a mistake and overreacted, that a sane voice of reason at some level should have prevailed. What follows is the parade of police and elected officials praising each other for doing a great job, and prosecuting the poor victim — the person who was different in the first place — for having the temerity to try to trick them.

For some reason, governments are encouraging this kind of behavior. It’s not just the publicity campaigns asking people to come forward and snitch on their neighbors; they’re asking certain professions to pay particular attention: truckers to watch the highways, students to watch campuses, and scuba instructors to watch their students. The U.S. wanted meter readers and telephone repairmen to snoop around houses. There’s even a new law protecting people who turn in their travel mates based on some undefined "objectively reasonable suspicion," whatever that is.

My essay on the transformational potential of Barack Obama’s candidacy is now online:

Strictly speaking, Obama is at the tail end of the Boomer generation. But he is not of it.

“Partly because my mother, you know, was smack-dab in the middle of the Baby Boom generation,” he told me. “She was only 18 when she had me. So when I think of Baby Boomers, I think of my mother’s generation. And you know, I was too young for the formative period of the ’60s—civil rights, sexual revolution, Vietnam War. Those all sort of passed me by.”

Obama’s mother was, in fact, born only five years earlier than Hillary Clinton. He did not politically come of age during the Vietnam era, and he is simply less afraid of the right wing than Clinton is, because he has emerged on the national stage during a period of conservative decadence and decline. And so, for example, he felt much freer than Clinton to say he was prepared to meet and hold talks with hostile world leaders in his first year in office. He has proposed sweeping middle-class tax cuts and opposed drastic reforms of Social Security, without being tarred as a fiscally reckless liberal. (Of course, such accusations are hard to make after the fiscal performance of today’s “conservatives.”) Even his more conservative positions—like his openness to bombing Pakistan, or his support for merit pay for public-school teachers—do not appear to emerge from a desire or need to credentialize himself with the right. He is among the first Democrats in a generation not to be afraid or ashamed of what they actually believe, which also gives them more freedom to move pragmatically to the right, if necessary. He does not smell, as Clinton does, of political fear.

Justin Logan vents on behalf of his colleagues at CATO:

Now, we’re not posting articles every day about the Iraq war, it’s true. To be totally candid, I have very little left to say. It was a disastrous idea to get in, we should have gotten out immediately, we should still get out immediately. Full stop. We have precious little control over either the security environment over the long term or the political environment at all, so pouring money, men, or materiel in is throwing good stuff after bad. I imagine, although I’m not a soothsayer, that things will get noticeably worse for a time after we withdraw — but that this will happen whether we get out this year, next year, or in 10 years.

But in a nutshell, that’s about all I have to say. And I’ve been saying it to anybody who asks. Unfortunately, the New York Times hasn’t asked, and the Washington Post certainly hasn’t asked.

Why does anyone buy music albums any more? One suggestion:

Music is in a post capitalist environment, and totally uncharted territory for any commodity. There is no scarcity of music, and the supply outstrips the demand by miles. When people buy an album, they are saying "I like this music or artist enough to support them. I want them to continue to make great music, and I am moved and touched by what they create."

Will magazines be following suit soon?

Burkittsville, Maryland, 3 pm.

Or: figuring out why we sometimes see things that are not there. The "flying bluebottle illusion" is a real stumper. Video experimenting available here! On the geek-video time-watsing front, here’s a Scientific American piece just posted on how to turn a sphere inside out.

A helpful insight into what Senator Clinton means by the word.

About as good a pomo parody as I can imagine by LOLcat:

    april hates u, makes lilacs, u no can has.
    april in ur memoriez, making ur desire.
    spring rain in ur dull rootzes.
    
    earth in ur winter, covered in snow
    can has potato. PO-TA-TO.
    INVISIBLE SUMMER! RAININGZES!
    im in ur hofgarden, drinking ur coffeez.
    
    at archduke’s haus, invisible sled!
    im in ur moutainz, holding on tight.
    no can has cheezburger.
    oral sex metaphors in ur poem.

The original (for direct comparison) is here. (Hat tip: Boston Globe’s Brainiac.)