300 is getting people mad. Pretty funny stuff. From the NY Times:
All of the good guys are white people and many of the bad guys are brown. (How this could have been avoided in a film about Spartans versus Persians is never explained; the distinctly non-Greek viewers at my showing seemed to have no trouble placing themselves in the sandals of ancient Spartans.)
But such criticisms aren't really worth arguing with, because they are not serious in the first place – and that is their whole point. Many critics dislike “300” so intensely that they refused to do it the honor of criticizing it as if it were a real movie. Critics at a festival in Berlin walked out, and accused its director of being on the Bush payroll.
Is beauty in the eye of the beholder? Not anymore. Two Australian scientists have quantified it. No more Shallow Hals:
Their invention uses facial measurements, related to ratios and images of models, actors and some 200 women from around the world.
After a photograph of a woman's face is put into the program, it returns a beauty rating of between one and 10.
Maybe they should install these readers at bars. At closing time, a drunk can click a picture of his new escort, read it into the machine, and thereby make sure he doesn't fall into the trap of that country song: I went to bed at 2:00 with a 10 and woke up at 10:00 with a 2.
Another reason I don't drink hard liquor: 40-year-old Tadeus Konopizc, from Zakopane Poland, cut off his own penis and testicles with a 6 inch kitchen knife in a drunken rage after his wife left him. He had reportedly consumed multiple bottles of vodka.
Ask Men dot Com has run a list of basic etiquette. Fundamental stuff, but a lot of teenagers and twenty-somethings these days could use it.
Eugenics returneth (subscription might be required):
How widespread is the practice of prenatal eugenics–that is, the use of abortion to eliminate fetuses that have genetic abnormalities? A new paper offers some speculation. The data are far from comprehensive, but it's possible to make estimates–for instance, that nearly 30 percent of the roughly 6,150 Down syndrome fetuses that are conceived in the United States every year end up being aborted. The numbers from studies conducted overseas are higher, ranging from 32 percent in Western Australia to more than 80 percent in Taiwan and Paris.
How can they tell whether the fetus is mongoloid or merely vibrantly French?
Something for Monday Morning
Since we are convinced that God is to be found everywhere, we plow our fields praising the Lord, we sail the seas and ply all our other trades singing his mercies.
St. Clement of Alexandria
