Category: Debris
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In Lieu of Original Content
“The people have spoken, goddamn them.”
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The Long View
From Bob Woodward, we’ve learned that President Bush doesn’t give much thought to history — “History? We don’t know. We’ll all be dead.” — but for those of us who do, the San Francisco Chronicle has put together a nice collection of statements from prominent military historians, including G. Kurt Piehler, a member of my dissertation committee.
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Presidential Referendum
Not surprisingly, President Bush was at his best last night when asked about his faith and family. Ignoring for a moment the relevance of such questions in a supposed domestic policy debate that never addressed the environment, the Patriot Act, or stem cell research, those two questions allowed Bush to put aside policy (which is awfully complicated) to talk instead about feelings and relationships.
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Party Politics & the Movies
Yeah, I know that Kerry’s plan for Iraq is only slightly less doomed to failure than Bush’s, and I know that Kerry’s years in the Senate have taught him too much about political compromise, but here, finally, is an honest-to-goodness, no-doubt-about-it reason to get behind the Kerry/Edwards ticket.
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To-Do List
Pack for tomorrow’s flight to Boulder (iPod, digital camera, cell phone, laptop, projector, books, and . . . oh yeah, clothes) . . .
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Transition
Yesterday was my first day as a full-time writer. I spent the morning cleaning my office, stacking books, arranging my desk — you know, preparing.
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Still Big News
Yesterday, after weeks of bloody fighting in Najaf, The Times ran another piece on Falluja, and I’m at a lost to explain why it wasn’t front page news. In all of the sound a fury of the Sunday morning spin fests, shouldn’t someone have been talking about this?
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Aw, dat’s cute
A friend asked for a childhood photo, which was enough to send us digging through old albums. Quite a couple, eh?
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Ch- Ch- Ch- Ch- Changes
On September 7, I’ll be leaving my full time job and taking a ten hour/week graduate assistantship so that I can try being a writer for a while. I’ve decided to call it “being a writer” instead of “working on my dissertation” because I don’t dream of being a dissertator for a living.
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More Church Stuff
My recent rambling on “relevance” is far and away the most-read, most-linked-to, most-commented-upon post in Long Pauses history, which is both strange and strangely comforting. The more I search, the more fellow travelers I find.
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Mr. Bush Comes to Town
It’s interesting to see how Bush’s rhetoric has evolved. While admitting — finally — that WMD have not been found, he continues to litter his speech with allusions to them, though they’ve now morphed into “weapons of mass murder,” and — in a turn of phrase that would have made Monicagate-era Clinton proud — they are now modified with the nebulous term, “capability.”
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Relevance
I don’t, by any stretch of the imagination, claim to be a Merton-like contemplative, but I am suffering the realization that I no longer know what relevance the evangelical church has for me. If I leave, I want it to be a considered decision rather than the slow consequence of atrophy.
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The Living Room Candidate
It’s embarrassing to admit just how effective those “morning in America” spots really were.
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Get Mortified
The most recent episode of This American Life (which is worth listening to in its entirety) ends with an eight-minute reading by Sascha Rothchild. And by “reading” I mean “really funny, really frightening performance of several pages from her teenage diary.”
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Pretty close
What he actually said: “In terms of this administration, we laid out the facts very clearly for the American people.”
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Christian Entertainment
“No, sadly the popularity of Bad Christian Art is not the result of a lack of Good Christian Art. It is a result of the rejection of metaphor.” — Slacktivist
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Catchin’ Spears
I’m guessing that it’ll go something like this:
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Cattle Call
My wife and I spent the weekend in Louisville, Kentucky, where, among other activities, we spent two hours in a long line, in a hot hotel, surrounded by other people who thought that it might be fun to be an extra in the new Cameron Crowe film.
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Moral Equivalence
A nice post yesterday from slacktivist.
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Amen, Brother!
“It’s not as if all preachers, including for instance John Donne, were merely dispensers of predigested, soundbite rhetoric and cliche; good preachers are gifted articulators of the thorniest, juiciest, most dangerous, most contradictory problems, dilemmas, controversies.” — Tony Kushner
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Friedman on Fresh Air
In case you missed it yesterday, Terry Gross’s interview with Thomas Friedman is well worth a listen. The first twenty minutes features a discussion of globalization, in general, and outsourcing to India, specifically.
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Is It Just Me?
We Americans represent less than 5% of the world’s population. For every 21 citizens of the world, only one is an American. We Americans represent less than 5% of the world’s population. For every 21 citizens of the world, only one is an American.
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My Famous Wife
Joanna was featured on NPR’s Weekend Edition
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Looking Back
Yesterday, I found the “Peace on Earth, No War on Iraq” sign that I carried in a protest during the rush to war, and it occurred to me that I am genuinely proud of that act. It’s difficult to explain, but I know that it was absolutely the right thing to do. I guess that’s why I’m taking some comfort from quotes like these, all taken from traditionally conservative commentators
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Boxes, Boxes, Boxes
The movers loaded up a truck yesterday, and it should arrive in Knoxville on Monday. Our new home will soon be filled with familiar furniture, all of it bittersweet for now. We’re both exhausted.
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Because You Lied
Andrew Christie imagines what he would tell Dick Cheney if he were in Kerry’s shoes. I just wish that Kerry would say something. His “we need a broader international coalition and more troops” line is already wearing thin.
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Beautiful
When I asked my ESL students last night about the great literatures of their native language, one of the Iranians told me about the Arab conquest of Persia. In their effort to erase all evidence of Persian culture, the ancient Arabs outlawed the speaking of Farsi, which, of course, only served to inspire a new generation of writers.
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God Save the Queen
Joan Chittister watched Condoleezza Rice’s testimony with great interest, hoping to learn more about our government’s pre-9/11 knowledge of al-Qaeda. Instead, she was stunned by “the amount of self-congratulation spent on the fact of the testimony itself.”
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Writing in the First Person
My brain is turning soft. It’s not that I’ve forgotten to update my 2004 film viewing and reading lists; it’s that I have, for all intents and purposes, abandoned my intellectual life. I don’t have the energy for it. Or the time. Or — and this is the big one — the attention span. And it’s starting to wear me down.
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CSS Zen Garden
With my last reworking of Long Pauses, I attempted to rebuild its architecture from the ground up using CSS. Cross-platform and cross-browser problems stopped me dead, though. Just when I thought I had it all figured out, I’d open a page in Netscape or Safari and watch it all blow up.