I said the dry spell would probably last until the twelfth day of the year? I was wrong. Things got a little wet last night. My wife has to publish a booklet for our parochial school's annual Mardi Gras auction party. It takes about ten hours, and she's starting this weekend. I volunteered to take The Seven to the drinking club for drinks and dinner. They behaved perfectly (in the upstair "Go-Up-Here-While-Dad-Drinks-With-The-Boys Room"). We ate dinner, then rented a movie, came home, shot pool while my wife finished up, then watched the movie (Little Miss Sunshine) (nutshell review: I give it a 6, not appropriate for small children, it's rated "R" but it's more like a PG-13/R hybrid).
The Eastern Orthodox Church is booming. It's ancient and its worship is arcane. But it's attracting converts across America. Maybe those Latin Mass folk aren't nuts at all.
Something is freaky in Missouri. Two boys disappear into the same man's apartment and they seem fine:
A neighbor, Rick Butler, 43, said the FBI came to his door Thursday night and showed a picture of Ben, asking if he had seen him. He said he had not. But he had seen a boy he now believes was Hornbeck.
He said he saw no evidence that the boy now believed to be Hornbeck was scared or trying to get away. He had seen Devlin and the teen pitch a tent in the courtyard. On another occasion, he found the boy's cell phone and returned it to him.
"I didn't see or hear anything odd or unusual from the apartment," Butler said. "I just figured them for father and son."
With stories like this, I wish I didn't have an imagination.
Think you read a lot? Check out this guy's list. I stumbled across his blog yesterday.
More stem cell research fraud. This industry isn't even off the ground yet, but it's more scandal-ridden than the old Southwest Conference. Great augur for the medical establishment's future.
Here's the best commentary I've seen on the Duke rape case. Excerpts:
Duke is also a cruise ship staffed by angry anarchist professors and captained by an administration that will throw its student-passengers overboard at the least hint of a storm. For $46,050 a year (according to the university's website), Duke will apparently grant you hot-and-cold-running strippers, teachers who hate you, and an administration that trembles every time the wind blows. . . .
The school is already beginning to suffer. Applications for early admission (the earliest statistics available) show a 20 percent decline compared with last year. The first lawsuit has been filed against the school, by a student whose professor is accused of deliberately giving F's to the only two lacrosse players in her course. The local North Carolina press, which whipped itself into a frenzy attacking Duke last spring for allowing rich white lacrosse players to rape a poor black woman, is now whipping itself into a frenzy attacking Duke for failing to defend its accused students against obviously false charges.
Once the three charged students have been cleared, a flurry of lawsuits will come against the school and the professors who openly denounced the students. With the whole nation watching–and now convinced the students were railroaded–Duke seems likely to lose those cases badly. In truth, the school deserves to lose those cases, for it set up both ends of this nightmare: last spring's outpouring of anger at race, class, and gender abuse, together with this winter's outpouring of anger at the violation of the accused students' rights.
And finally, one belated Brews You Can Use:
European men are flocking to Bulgaria to buy 'breast-boosting beer' after EU accession led to customs duties on the drink being abolished. The millet-ale called Boza which is made from fermented wheat flour and yeast is being snapped up by bar owners, shopkeepers and shoppers from across Europe. They are said to be keen for their wives and girlfriends to benefit from its reported ability to make women's breasts grow.
With a little advertising, maybe this stuff will penetrate the U.S.'s transgender market as a sex-change dietary aid.
Enjoy the week.
