Tuesday Miscellany

Allen Barra published a piece about GKC in the Wall Street Journal last week. When I edited Gilbert Magazine, Barra would occasionally write to me and even sent me an autographed copy of one of his books. Needless to say, this doesn't mean I know the man by any stretch, but based on that limited correspondence, free book (especially!), and things I've read by him, I'd say he's a real decent guy.

And it's a real decent piece, which includes a new caricature of the great man (on your left). Excerpt:

For the last three decades of his life, Chesterton waged public duels with opponents of religion and democracy, such intellectual heavyweights as Bertrand Russell, H.G. Wells and George Bernard Shaw. In comparison our own day's best-known atheists, Christopher Hitchens and Bill Maher, hardly weigh in. Chesterton's public debates were invariably amicable; after all, he reasoned, "If there were no God, there would be no atheists." Some of GKC's most fervent opponents on ideological grounds remained his friends for life; Shaw, for instance, called Chesterton's biography of him "the best work of literary art I've yet provoked."

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New Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison pictures!

"Among the souvenirs most requested by museum visitors are photos of Cash during his now-legendary performance for inmates. Until recently, Brown said, all he could offer were the photos included with a CD of the concert. But thanks to his fluke encounter with a former newspaper reporter last year, the museum now sells candid photos of Cash taken during that 1968 visit, as well as an 18-by-24-inch print of the singer standing in front of the prison's east gate."

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Making calls from the FDR playbook: Make a crisis sound like a war, and the American people might give you a visa to do whatever you want and extend government's powers however you please:

Vice-president-elect Joe Biden likened the country's economic crisis to the attacks of 9/11 Monday in a private meeting on Capitol Hill.

“We're at war,” Biden told congressional leaders of both parties during their sit-down with Barack Obama in the Capitol, according to two sources familiar with the exchange.