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I can’t forget the glamour

I can’t forget the glamour

Last updated on: April 25, 2017 at 2:49 pm by Fred Clark

I can’t forget the glamour 2017-04-25T14:49:46-04:00 Fred Clark

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• Pete Enns treats the “apparent-age” escape clause of young-Earth creationism far more seriously than any apparent-age young-Earth creationist does. (This is the non-falsifiable, yet also meaningless, claim that the universe is only just as old as Bishop Ussher said, but that God made it to look like it’s billions of years old. Also sometimes called “Last Thursday-ism” or “The Omphalos Hypothesis” (because Adam and Eve, the idea goes, had belly buttons).)

• When I was a youth-group kid in the ’80s, I once gave a gospel tract to Marie Castello on the boardwalk, because that was something they had us do. I think such “evangelism” was more about its effect on us than about what it might do for any of the recipients of our spiritual concern. Madame Marie accepted the gesture with more grace than I think I had on my side of the exchange.

Anyway, it’s nice to see The Temple of Knowledge getting some love from the Atlas Obscura. (via)

• Old joke: Family has a baby that seems perfectly healthy, but as he grows up, the kid never starts to talk. They take him to the best doctors, therapists, and specialists, and none of them can figure out what’s wrong. He seems otherwise perfectly healthy and quite intelligent, but he still doesn’t talk. Then one day at breakfast, when he’s 7 years old, he goes, “Ugh. This oatmeal is cold.”

The Mom is astonished. “You … you can speak,” she says, nearly sobbing. “All this time, why haven’t you said anything before?”

Kid shrugs. “Up ’til now, everything’s been pretty much OK.”

Writing online can make one a bit like that kid, only chiming in when something’s wrong. And, God knows, that gives us all plenty of material — the world is full of wrong, full of injustice and unfairness and cruelty and oppression and other sins. Like the bumper-sticker says, if you’re not outraged, you’re not paying attention.

But this is also true: the world is also full of right, full of beauty and truth and goodness and joy. For example, 100 years ago today, Ella Fitzgerald was born. Fitzgerald could sing any song and could make any song sing. Before her death in 1996, she gave us and left us hundreds of hours of recordings and it’s all wonderful. Here’s one favorite:

That’s from the complete Ella and Louis collection on Verve — a four-CD set of transcendent joy that you can probably find cheap in a used record store or in a few short clicks online.

EllaLouis

That’s a good place to start. Or you could check out any of the various affordable compilations of Fitzgerald singing the Cole Porter songbook.

• xkcd looks at the throwing-out-a-trashcan problem. It took me three tries. My first note attached to the can — left at the curb alongside the other trash cans — read simply “Trash.” That was obviously ambiguous and inadequate. My guess is the guys on the truck just saw that and thought, “Well, duh, of course.” The second attempt similarly failed to overcome the semiotics inherent in trash cans and the deeply ingrained and necessary understanding of trash-collectors that trash cans are always to be left behind on the curb. This is what “trash can” means.

I forget the final, successful wording, but it was something like “This can, which contains trash, is also, itself, trash. Please take the can itself as well as the trash within.”

• “I’m committed to rolling back the egregious abuse of the Antiquities Act to serve far-left special interests.” That’s Republican Sen. Orin Hatch complaining about two federal monuments in Utah designated by Presidents Obama and Clinton.

Just appreciate there how far gone one has to be to regard national monuments and national parks as “far-left special interests.” That vacuous buzz-phrase only pretends to be meaningful if you’re fully saturated in the alternative facts and delusional epistemology of AM talk radio and Fox News. The “special interests” who called for the designation and protection of these wilderness areas included environmental groups, Utah-based conservationists, and Native American tribes in the area. Hatch’s attempt to make such groups sound like a cabal of big-money fat-cats is just bonkers.

Sen. Hatch, by the way, is the same man who pledged that President Barack Obama would have the full cooperation of Republican senators if he nominated Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court. Merrick Garland, specifically. Obama did just that and Hatch — like the rest of his GOP colleagues in the senate — refused to allow a vote, or even any hearings, on the precise nominee he had demanded.

So the words that Orrin Hatch says cannot be trusted and Orrin Hatch cannot be trusted. He is, according to his own words, full of it. The only redeeming feature of Sen. Hatch these days is that part of him seems to recognize that he has betrayed his own principles and ought to be ashamed of himself.

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