Eric Scheske

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Entertainment

Best Recent Films

Terry Teachout has resigned as the film critic of Crisis magazine. In his final column, he provided excerpts from what he "believes to be the 15 best American films of the past seven years." The excerpts are good, but the column isn't available on-line, and I&

Crazy Salaries

> [Gretta] Garbo's weekly salary in, say, 1931 was four times the average annual wages in the United States. (In 2002, the national median annual wage, $33,000, was at least fifteen times smaller than the weekly income of an equivalent movie star.) David Thomson, The Whole Equation

Digital Essay: Give Us Hockey . . . Or Not

Hockey came back this week. Canadians watched in force. Americans didn't: > The Outdoor Life Network's first telecast, a Philadelphia-New York Rangers game, was seen in 268,000 households (just barely beating “Quite Frankly,” we might add). In Los Angeles? A zero rating. Zero. Link [http:

Who Needs Clever?

A writer observes about Howard Stern moving to satellite radio where there are no censors: > Oddly, there was a charm to the censorship that forced the team to invent hilariously creative means for discussing raunchy topics with substitute topics. Somehow openly saying [expletives deleted] just isn't going

The Oprahfication of Judaism?

I have faith in Oprah. Don't ask me why, but I do. She won't fly: > Will Oprah join the kabbala cabal? > Madonna has been talking up the mystical form of Judaism to the already-spiritual talk-show queen for two years, in hopes that her fellow

Dead People Server

Another example of our culture's ongoing obsession with celebrity. This time, it's combined with our culture's twisted and ironic approach to death that ignores death as much as possible, except to embrace and celebrate it occasionally. The two extremes are related. I plan to

Katie

I'm pretty convinced now that Katie Holmes isn't following Humanae Vitae.

Secularists Wailing and Gnashing Their Teeth

A columnist at the relentlessly secularist Huffington Post is upset about Christianity. Link [http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-schaub/the-lion-the-witch-the-_b_8323.html] . Excerpts: > The Palm Beach Post reports that Bush's "Just Read, Florida" program has selected CS Lewis' The Lion, The Witch and the

Marshall McLuhan Revival?

> The average American is a ravenous media junkie, consuming up to nine hours a day of television, web time or cellphone minutes, according to new research which raises fresh questions about how technology is revolutionising society. . . > As information technology marches on, and search engine giant Google even raises

Not Sure Why This is News . . .

. . . but it's good to see folks outside of Focus on the Family noticing: > The biggest box office hits of the last 20 years are accused today of promoting unsafe sex and drug use, putting the health of their global audiences at risk. > Films such as Basic