I've seen this story twice in the past 24 hours: Thou Shalt Not Text During Lent. (Other Link.) I'm guessing a bishop or two has suggested that technological abstinence would be a good form of penance on Fridays during Lent. In translation, it gets exaggerated a bit: "The Roman Catholic church has added a technological twist, by asking that its followers forswear text messaging, social-networking Web sites, iPods, cell phones, computer games, and all sorts of tech trappings on Fridays, and more days if possible."
If anyone runs across ecclesiastical authority that makes it a sin to blog during Lent (besides Culbreath, who fasts from blogging every Lent), let me know. If I have to ditch BYCU on Fridays, that'd be tough. I think I could weather it, though, if I had enough beer.
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Get a Life, Episode 12,009 . . . but it's kinda neat: The gaping hole costume.
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You might say Tom Woods is a bit pessimistic . . . and rightly so:
Economist Robert Wenzel rightly describes the stimulus as “just the insiders raiding the till while there is still money in it.” Trillions of dollars are likewise being thrown at financial institutions that (if we actually believe in the free market) richly deserve to go bankrupt. Nationalization of the banks is being openly discussed–an outcome our rulers assure us they would undertake only as a last resort, deploring every minute of it, and only for our own good.
We are learning what it is like to live in an Orwell novel. Our television screens are filled with people offering choices between idiotic and suicidal option A and idiotic and suicidal option B. We are being told that we must at least partially nationalize our banks, prop up zombie companies, lower interest rates to zero, and pass stimulus packages in order to escape the fate of Japan–which, um, partially nationalized its banks, propped up zombie companies, lowered interest rates to zero, and passed eight stimulus packages. We have a president who tells us we cannot rely on the free market to get us out of this mess because the free market is what got us here, as if the Federal Reserve and its bubble-inducing monetary policy never existed.
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Since the recession hit, Ms. Johannes, has been recording two or three debt-collection messages a week, up from just two or three a month in 2007. "People like British accents because they are different," she says. "And people tend to listen to anything that is different even if I am just saying: 'Hey, you owe us money.'"
Mr. Bjelajac has a simpler theory about why male customers respond well to British female voices. "They think Elizabeth Hurley is on the other end," he says.
