In the seasonal spirit of gratitude, I would like to take a moment to express my appreciation for Brian, Shanna and Noel, the Three Amígos Stooges Wise Persons regular inhabitants of the peanut gallery, as well as the small contingent of lurkers and anonymice. I take pity upon your bewildering lack of discernment and good taste in reading material, but be that as it may, I’m humbled and glad for the fact that you willingly choose to spend so much time reading my fulminations and manifestos instead of being good little worker drones for The Man.
November 2010
Peotillomania
“Hitchens Beats Blair in Religion Debate.” Well, I guess that settles that! Let’s get God’s tombstone ready! Oh, wait, what? You say Hitchens himself was “sorely defeated” by “the most fearsome and effective” (or is that “interesting but stupid“?) William Lane Craig? And Richard Dawkins is rude? Is that a point for God or for Jesus? Who’s keeping score?
Bought, Ensouled
“When you leave a product on the shelf, your body and soul start reclaiming itself,” says Talen. “Consumerism is never surprising. It is predicable.” His alternative call to arms? “Be imaginative.”
I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud

No, Atropos, No
Michael Schaub and Matt Zoller Seitz bring up one of the lesser-acknowledged aspects of the holidays, the opportunity to reflect on those who aren’t around to share them with us this time.
There will be years and years, each small forgetting a betrayal, each small betrayal a comfort, each small comfort another death. There is no lesson here, no lesson. Narcissus sought himself reflected in the world and found only death. Plums will bloom until there are no more plums. I will join him diffused into the soil, our component atoms intermingled one day soon, a dog and a man who walked together for a time, a brief spark of sweetness in an aching world.
Where at Least I Know I’m Free
DiCaprio then called himself half-Russian, the state-run RIA Novosti news agency reported.
Putin has carefully cultivated a tough-guy image throughout his political career, using strong language in speeches and practicing judo and even co-piloting a fighter jet in front of the television cameras.His latest stunt came earlier this month, when Putin burned rubber on a racing circuit in a Formula One car.
Write Away
But my big question is whether Zuckerberg is right when he supposes that young people are likely to permanently adapt to alternatives to traditional email. While it’s true that kids are developing some new habits that will last a lifetime, it has always been the case that some teen habits change as they get older, especially as they enter the work force.Fact is, many businesses run on email today and though things will change over time, I don’t see instant messaging, text messaging, Facebook messaging or any other technology threatening email anytime soon.
This doesn’t mean Estleman and I are Luddites or cheesy romantics. It’s both simpler and more complicated than that. It means we don’t believe that faster is necessarily better, and we’re distrustful of a bill of goods that our gadget-drunk culture has swallowed whole, the illusion that technology has some magical power to improve our lives. Estleman and I are essentially conservative animals who distrust the notion, so prevalent today, that all things can be improved with the right technology, the right information, the right management, the right laws. While mankind strives to improve itself to death, some of us want no part of it.…One could argue that writing is writing – it’s all communication – whether it’s scratches on a cave wall, glyphs in stone, ink on papyrus, pencil on paper, typed characters on bond stationery, or digits in the ether. I disagree. In writing and reading, no less than in art, the medium of creation and consumption is critical to a work’s effect. That’s not to say that writing longhand is better than writing on a typewriter, or that writing on a typewriter is better than writing on a laptop; rather, it’s to say that each of these acts is different from the others and will yield different types of prose.…Similarly, tapping out an e-mail and hitting the Send key (or texting with your opposable thumbs) produces a different effect from composing a letter, revising it, putting it in an envelope and mailing it to someone. And opening that envelope and reading that letter is a different experience from reading an e-mail or a text message. It simply is. It’s more tactile, more suspenseful, more personal – and more likely leave a lasting impression. When writing an e-mail, I find I write much faster and with less thought and feeling than when I write a letter.
Weard Beirds
I have never known my husband without his beard, a fact that disturbed me in the early years of our relationship. What was he hiding: a weak chin, a saber scar, a slothful nature, a psychological need for a barrier between himself and the world?…My son, at 25, sports something that alternates between a five o’clock shadow and a two-day stubble. I personally am not crazy about this; it looks as though he has forgotten to shave. But I suppose this is the point — the look is an affectation of forgetting to shave, not a real forgetting. As I think more about it, the shadow/stubble carries interesting resonance. Unlike my husband’s clipped boxed beard with its sense of modesty and stability, my son’s quasi-beardedness is more whimsical, more a self-proclaimed mask. It also announces its transitory state unequivocably: No sooner is it achieved than it is erased in order to be begun again. This seems emblematic of our current Internet culture which is ephemeral and continually in need of updating. My son’s quasi-beardedness may also reflect a slowing of the progress from childhood to maturity, what sociologists, referring to the years between 20 and 30, have dubbed “emerging adulthood.”
Nepenthe
Soldiers haunted by scenes of war and victims scarred by violence may wish they could wipe the memories from their minds. Researchers at the Johns Hopkins University say that may someday be possible.A commercial drug remains far off — and its use would be subject to many ethical and practical questions. But scientists have laid a foundation with their discovery that proteins can be removed from the brain’s fear center to erase memories forever.“When a traumatic event occurs, it creates a fearful memory that can last a lifetime and have a debilitating effect on a person’s life,” says Richard L. Huganir, professor and chair of neuroscience in the Hopkins School of Medicine.…”Erasing a memory and then everything bad built on that is an amazing idea, and I can see all sorts of potential,” she said. “But completely deleting a memory, assuming it’s one memory, is a little scary. How do you remove a memory without removing a whole part of someone’s life, and is it best to do that, considering that people grow and learn from their experiences.”…Wolpe could see only limited uses for erasing a memory for now, such as for those suffering after a rape or single terrifying event.“Certainly, there may be appropriate applications,” he said. “But human identity is tied into memory. It creates our distinctive personalities. It’s a troublesome idea to begin to be able to manipulate that, even if for the best of motives.”
Pics or It Didn’t Happen!
Popular TV personality Bill Nye collapsed onstage Tuesday night in front of hundreds of audience members during a presentation at USC, campus officials said.…Tristan Camacho, a USC senior who attended the lecture, said Nye was walking toward the podium when he collapsed mid-sentence. “Then after about 10 seconds, he popped back up with much gusto and asked everybody how long he was out for and went on with a story about how a similar thing happened to him that morning.”Nye appeared determined to finish his presentation, but began slurring his words and stumbled against his laptop, Camacho said. At first, Nye refused the offer of a chair and continued taking sips from a water bottle. Camacho said Nye was eventually removed from the stage.“Nobody went to his aid at the very beginning when he first collapsed — that just perplexed me beyond reason,” USC senior Alastair Fairbanks said. “Instead, I saw students texting and updating their Twitter statuses. It was just all a very bizarre evening.”