Nov 6 2006

Necrophilia. Sigh.

Filed under: General,Politics— arlen@ 9:55 am

Ann Althouse isn’t the only one that’s picked up on this story but I’ll single it out here just because she’s an easier target. (I would have simply added a comment to her blog, but she won’t let me).

In a nutshell, three stupid kids thought it’d be fun to dig up a month-old corpse of a pretty lady and have sex with it. They weren’t able to; they were caught long before it got that far (surprise!) but when the DA charged them under Wisconsin’s sexual assualt laws, the judge in question threw out those charges for the rather amusing reason that the legislators who drafted the law never mentioned the word necrophilia in their debates, and so (this oh-so-clever jurist reasoned) that must mean that when the lawmakers said â€œThis section applies whether a victim is dead or alive at the time of the sexual contact or sexual intercourseâ€ they obviously didn’t want to bar necrophilia.

Is terminal silliness sufficient reason to impeach a judge?

Good-bye, FranklinCovey

Filed under: General,Technology— arlen@ 12:30 pm

I’ve long been a fan of Steven Covey’s work. I’ll admit to being disappointed when he sold out to Franklin, now FranklinCovey, as the “First Things First” system he’d been detailing was a better approach. Still I understood the economics of it.

I’ve been a user of Franklin (now FranklinCovey) planners for almost a decade, now, but the end has arrived. My annual visits to the store have been more like pilgrimages, where in addition to the latest page packets I picked up some motivation to continue. But no longer.

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Nope

Filed under: General,Politics— arlen@ 11:02 am

Nan Lee writes about Barack Obama:

With those vote-leaking drawbacks, Obama looks like heâ€™s worth it and could possibly bring it home.

Nope. Not gonna happen. You see, Barack Obama has one very obvious drawback: he’s a Senator.

In races for the White House, Governors rule. In the last century, the only times a Governor has been weak is when he’s campaigning against a sitting prez or veep. No Senator has ever beaten a Governor. A Senator did once manage to beat a sitting veep, but fer cryin’ out loud, it was JFK over Nixon, and even then it was so close some still think Daley rigged the election (more than was customary for Chicago politics, that is).

I’ve said this before: if the dems are serious about the White House, look to the Governors, not the Senators. Senators talk; Governors administrate. The people trust Governors more than Senators. And Barack, if you’re serious about the presidency, look to the State House, not the White House, for your next stop.

That’s what I’m talking about

Filed under: General,Theology— arlen@ 7:41 am

When I started this blog, one of the things I wanted to talk about was the relationship between Good and Evil. Not in any sterile, merely philosophical way. I wanted to talk about the effect they have on each other, the responses they call forth from each other.

Ben Witherington, author of the Gospel Code, which I wrote about earlier has located a stellar example in the events in Amish schoolhouse.

We can learn much from the example of the Fishers, mother and daughter. Both of them stood up, at a time when the rest of us would have excused them from the duty, for what they knew to be Right, to be Good.
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Oct 9 2006

You Know What’s Depressing?

Filed under: Books,General— arlen@ 8:40 am

A recent issue of The Writer contains an aricle by Brian Sousa about reading your writing aloud in order to find mistakes (an admirable practice, I might add, especially for checking dialog). I stopped reading when I came to:

Perhaps they were noticieable only to me, but there were sentences, even whole paragraphs, that when verbalized compelled me to rewrite.

The word “verbalized” means “put into words.” It’s impossible for sentences and paragraphs to exist without having first been put into words. And it wasn’t the process of putting them into words that caused the errors to become obvious. It was the process of speaking them aloud, something “verbalize” doesn’t necessitate.

Of course, I knew what he meant. What he meant was “vocalized,” not “verbalized.” But I ask you, what is more depressing than an magazine devoted to writing that cannot be bothered to use the right word?