Eric Scheske

They're taking that New Age stuff pretty far in one Iowa village: "It's official: Maharishi Vedic City has gone all natural. "The town of about 200 in southeast Iowa has become what some experts believe is the first all-organic city in the country.

A freak seven-story wave that slammed into a cruise ship sent furniture sailing through the air, knocked Jacuzzis overboard and forced some passengers to sleep in hallways in life jackets. LINK [http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/C/CRUISE_SHIP_DIVERTED?SITE=APWEB&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT]

We missed this one. We assume that short hair has now become the rage in Berkeley, Madison, and Ann Arbor: > Bureaucrats in North Korea's Communist Party, summarizing their understanding of the way the brain works, announced in January that, henceforth, all men would be expected to wear

From News of the Weird (no link available, sorry): TalkToAliens.com began taking orders in March, recording people's messages at $3.99 per minute and beaming them into space, aimed toward the Milky Way by a huge parabolic dish antenna in Connecticut on a relatively accessible FM frequency.

V. Gene Robinson, the gay Episcopalian "bishop" from New Hampshire, is a supporter of Planned Parenthood, it would appear. He spoke at Planned Parenthood's fifth annual prayer breakfast last week about political battles. Two quotes: "Our defense against religious people has to be a religious

"A man allegedly unhappy with penile-enlargement surgery he underwent mailed explosives to a Chicago plastic surgeon, according to a federal grand jury indictment." LINK [http://www.kentucky.com/mld/kentucky/11406638.htm].

The New York Times has dedicated extensive ink to a condescending "analysis" of the Catholic Church's irrelevance to many Catholics. Here are two excerpts from the article by Colm Toibin, apparently a gay fellow with an undisclosed homosexual axe to grind with the Church. Two excerpts:

"A group of American students revealed last week that they had submitted an "academic paper" consisting of computer-generated gobbledegook to a scientific conference - and it was accepted. The students were convinced that many academic conferences were only concerned with profiting from the submission fee for papers.

We promised last week to post passages from The Drama of Atheistic Humanism (see "The Cube and the Cathedral," Friday, April 15, 2005). The task proved harder than we anticipated. Not because there aren't a lot of great passages, but because de Lubac's text

A reader sends this along: The Washington Times reports that Metro Man (discussed yesterday in "The Punchy Journal") is out and manly men are in. Excerpt: > The Harris survey was conducted among 1,003 men and 1,128 women 18 or older from across the United States.