Stan Taylor

Jason Lefkowitz’s take on President Bush’s nomination of Harriet Miers as Supreme Court justice:

[T]he nomination sends a message loud and clear to all the conservatives who have supported Bush through it all over the years:
You’ve been punk’d. Suckers.
This is the moment you’ve been waiting decades for. The moment when an opening on the Supreme Court could be filled by a real, rock-ribbed, hard core True Grit Winger. Someone who’d put the women back in the kitchen and God back in the classroom and courtroom where he belongs.
O the trials you have endured, waiting for this moment. You gave every spare penny you could find to the Bush campaigns. You wrote letter after letter after letter to the editor. You canvassed and lit-dropped till your feet bled.
You even turned your church over to the GOP — allowed the tawdry ambitions of man into the House of God — because you believed in George W. Bush. When he said he was born again, you nodded me, too. When he said he wanted a “culture of life”, you said preach it, brother!
And then, after all the years of waiting, the moment came. And George W. Bush looked back at you and said:
Fuck you.

Go read the entire post; it continues and gets even better.

Over at Marginal Revolution, Tyler Cowen posted titled “How to walk through a museum“. In addition to a number of specific suggestions to enhance your art viewing trip, he writes:

A key general principle is to stop self-deceiving and admit to yourself that you don’t just love “art for art’s sake.” You also like art for the role it plays in your life, for its signaling value, and for how it complements other things you value, such as relationships and your self-image. It then becomes possible for you to turn this fact to your advantage, rather than having it work against you. Keeping up the full pretense means that you must impose a high implicit tax on your museum-going. This leads you to restrict your number of visits and ultimately to resent the art and find it boring.

I used to go with Katie to the opera occasionally, but several years ago I put my foot down and refused to go with her. Reading the quote above makes me realize that I thought I was supposed to like it ‘for art’s sake’ and I finally admitted that I didn’t like it, and that I didn’t care whether anyone else thought whether I should like it.
But it also makes me realize that maybe others enjoy something else about opera bedies the ‘art for art’s sake’ angle. I’ll have to re-think whether there’s some other reason why I might find opera interesting.

Today is the Feast of St. Francis, my favorite Christian saint. The Prayer of St. Francis:

Lord, make me an instrument of your peace;
where there is hatred, let me sow love;
when there is injury, pardon;
where there is doubt, faith;
where there is despair, hope;
where there is darkness, light;
and where there is sadness, joy.
Grant that I may not so much seek
to be consoled as to console;
to be understood, as to understand,
to be loved as to love;
for it is in giving that we receive,
it is in pardoning that we are pardoned,
and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.

I just completed the unabridged audio edition of The Yokota Officers Club by Sarah Bird. This novel is the coming-of-age story of a young woman who grew up as the daughter of an Air Force pilot after the second World War. I highly recommend the novel. The characters have depth, the story has unexpected convergences. All in all, it’s an exceptionally well written novel.

This morning, while I was running on the Town Lake trail, I saw a woman wearing a T-shirt with this slogan emblazoned across her chest:

So, should I be embarrassed that I noticed it? Hey, I like to read t-shirts on passersby when I’m running.

Holy curmudgeon, batman! I can’t believe it: I agree with Andy Rooney about something, specifically, the cost of the war in Iraq (though I still can’t stand him).

While waiting at the supermarket checkout line a couple of days ago, I noticed that three of the celebrity news magazines (a.k.a. tabloids) featured the very same photo of Ashton and Demi on the cover (by using just their first names, I sound like I have some actual interest in their wedding or other celebrity ‘news’). I would think that each magazine would want a distinct photo. I would be interested in the learning about the processes that resulted in such amazing homogeneity.

As soon as the levees were breached and New Orleans started flooding after hurricane Katrina, I tried to impress on people that this tragedy affected all types of New Orleanians, not just the ones we saw on TV who were did not get out ahead of time: white and black; poor, middle-class, and wealthy (though some were obviously more seriously affected than others. That’s a discussion for another post).
As I’ve thought about this, I’ve concluded that standing water flooding is its own type of hell because it leaves your house and it contents in place for the most part, but also pretty much completely ruined. If your house is blown away by hurricane winds or washed away by torrents of water, it’s certainly tragic, but you pretty much know that you start over from scratch. But with standing water flooding, you eventually have to return to figure out what to do with everything–what stays, what goes, do you repair the house or rebuild, etc. This Flickr photo set shows what one New Orleans family returned to.

Over at Making Light, Jim Macdonald wrote an interesting post about the history of telling time.

I swiped this image from Eliot Gelwan’s excellent blog, Follow Me Here: