I’m so proud of my versification of the Boring Prophet from Life of Brian from this comment thread that I’m giving it its own post. May Otis the (Almost) Prophet live on!
1There shall, in that time,
be rumours of things going astray, erm,
And there shall be a great confusion
as to where things really are.
2And nobody will really know
where lieth those little things wi—
with the sort of raffia work base
that has an attachment.
3At this time,
a friend shall lose his friend’s hammer.
4And the young shall not know
where lieth the things
possessed by their fathers
that their fathers put there
only just the night before,
about eight o’clock.
Leaves a Mark has a great piece (first of three) on the role of the prophet. Will Shetterly posts some Woodie Guthrie lyrics that go right to the point of it.
What I want to know: Do prophets have a choice about being prophets? Jeremiah sure didn’t.
I’ve been impressed (depressed?) lately with the slide of a middle-aged friend into the moralism of an old fuddy-duddy. Specifically, she is convinced that “young people today” (YPT) have no sense of the common good and no meaningful sexual mores. Let’s take these two complaints in reverse order. Then we’ll look at what her complaints have in common.
When it comes to sexual mores, she is concerned that YPT have moved from dating to “hooking up” and “friends with benefits.” She fears that YPT will not learn the habits of intimacy they’ll need later in life and that they experience a vacuousness in meaningless, isolated flings.
I remember when I first heard about the shift away from dating to hooking up, probably about ten years ago. At first they were calling it an increase in group dating, since mixed groups would hang out together as the rule, with couples pairing off only ocassionaly and without any real duration. From there we went to the terms “friend with benefits” and “hooking up.”
As a married thirtysomething now, I can’t profess any expertise at this. But I do recognize it from when I was younger, I suppose when it was just developing. Dating, whatever its benefits, is a bitch, as any insipid Cathy cartoon strip will tell you. Most people aren’t any good at it. Hanging out with mixed groups of friends, however, is much easier to pull off. You can hang out with people without the manufactured risk of “the date” and without closing off your options prematurely. Frankly, I would have been happier in high school had dating been dead then. Click to continue reading “On institutionalism and old fuddy-duddies”
Unleashed by a local ne’er-do-well who could not afford to feed them the 300 virgin girls they demanded, several disgruntled demons attacked students in a nearby school. A police investigation soon followed, and the Ugandan anti-demon lobby is calling for tougher legislation against the irresponsible employment of naughty demons. (Really.)
Here we go. Tom Ridge is talking about delaying the election if there’s a terrorist attack. We managed to hold elections in the middle of World War II and the Civil War, and we were certainly in more danger then. But let some terrorists blow up a building again, and we’ve got to shut down the whole democracy.
What would it take, really, to make the election impossible to carry out? Wouldn’t they have to bomb many, many polling places? Seems like if they bombed even a dozen or two, it would be no threat to the election overall.
Unless somebody is afraid of losing.
Another friend started a blog this month. Welcome Wade and the gang at The Think Tank: Great Minds Do Not Have to Think Alike. They’re now on the blogroll under “civitas” (along with last week’s addition “Leaves a Mark“).
