Sentential Links #14

Bumper crop of good stuff this week. Click for Context!

:: The Bard is loved for many reasons, none of which I would ever seek to contradict, and yet I’m most drawn to his ability to find grace and beauty in imperfections, in flaws. (Gotta read this blog more; wonderful post.)

:: This argument of universal sin, then, is an argument almost built entirely for cynical use. It has very little to do with morality as such. Instead, it has everything to do with power, with legitimating one’s own power and right to debate and trying to strip that way from others.

:: The family was held up at airport security when something in
Madge’s hatbox started vibrating. (The picture that this sentence captions is the joke. Click through and scroll down to the post dated August 26th — I couldn’t find a direct permalink.)

:: What the Presbyterian Church (USA) Has in Common With al-Qaida (That’s a headline to an article by James Lileks that made my jaw literally thud to the floor. My God, that man is insane.)

:: My father was forty-one when he died. His death was utterly unexpected. He was there one day. The next, he was not. He was survived by a wife and three daughters. (Read the post preceding this one, too. This is really a good blog, the kind of blog that, in a just world, would have a million hits a day while InstaPundit struggled to get a hundred.)

:: Revere of Effect Measure agreed to be both subject and part of my learning curve to present e-mail blog interviews – bloggerviews. (This seems like a neat idea — a direct exchange between bloggers, taking place on a blog. Whoa!)

:: Teaching 5-year-olds, I have discovered, is hard. (NOOOOO! Seriously, I think folks who voluntarily teach Kindergarten should either be awarded the Congressional Medal of Freedom, or tossed into the asylum with the guy who thinks he’s Batman.)

:: The problem with ID is that, unlike real revolutionary science, it doesn’t lead to any normal science. There are no ID-based research programs. Nothing has never been accomplished by applying the ID paradigm to a question in biology. All ID’s scholarly (and “scholarly”) proponents do is try to offer half-assed refutations of Darwin. You can quote Kuhn all you like, but you’re not doing revolutionary science unless your purported revolution leads to some normal science. Intelligent design does not.

:: What is fucking her up is the desperation, and the fact that she worked herself to death for over a month, and she still didn’t really save anyone. Now that she’s gone, it’s like she was never there. Even the ones she helped keep alive, she didn’t save. You try dealing with that reality. (Swearing in the original)

:: It’s getting down to the wire, and Mark and I are pretty excited as we face this big, huge, gaping unknown. (Sometimes you don’t know just how much that unknown is gaping.)

:: A couple of things I’ve learned, that I offer up, free of charge, to anyone parenting a teenager, or about to parent a teenager: (There follows, after this point, a list of things that really could also apply to a six-year-old. Trust me. I know.)

:: Just today, I was notified that I’ve gotten a sweet job clerking for a presitigious Camden County judge. (Congratulations to Drew!)

:: Is a virgin still a virgin if its hyphen is not intact? (As of this writing, this sentence is from the lead entry on this permalink-less blog headquartered at RogerEbert.com, but written by Jim Emerson, the editor of RogerEbert.com. It’s a confusing and counterintuitive set-up, as are most attempts by major news organizations to harness the power of blogs while still maintaining their distance from down-and-dirty Blogistan, but it’s still an interesting blog. And you wouldn’t know it was even there if you didn’t scroll all the way to the bottom of the RogerEbert.com front page. Come on, guys.)

:: For me, the working definition of a chickenhawk is–a chickenhawk is a cheerleader. A cheerleader for war. And not necessarily just the war in Iraq, or regional war in the Mideast, but war in general. A chickenhawk glorifies war as an enterprise, enjoying the heroics inside his or her head, mocking those less enthusiastic military aggression as pacifists, appeasers (Michael Ledeen’s pet word), even traitors.

Tune in next week for more good stuff. (Well, and tune in before next week for good stuff. Uh…yeah.)