This and that from here and there

  • Indian candy cornWe’ve got a spot of Indian sum­mer going on now. The tem­per­a­tures are back in the mid-90′s, and the air con­di­tion­ing has been hum­ming along all day. I’ve always been kindly dis­posed toward the idea of Indian sum­mer, but I think that was just because it sounded nice. Or maybe I was just recall­ing that I like Indian candy corn bet­ter than the other stuff. You know, bor­ing candy corn … Cau­casian candy corn. But appar­ently I’ve been duped by clever mar­ket­ing, because this weather isn’t charm­ing at all. Walk­ing back from the store with an after­noon root beer, my hair got blown back into my face by the nasty hot wind so I looked like the abom­inable snow­man … well, more like him than usual, even.
    Bumble
    So, while my hair re-hydrates, here are a cou­ple things from around the ‘sphere:

    • Polit­i­cal cor­rect­ness watch — hol­i­day edi­tion — The Span­ish are can­celling fies­tas with explod­ing Muhammeds (HERE), the Ger­mans are can­celling a Mozart opera that fea­tures the head of Muhammed as a prop (HERE). Who knew the Prophet got out and about so much? The PC thing is typ­i­cally off-base. Since the Span­ish cel­e­bra­tion com­mem­o­rates their free­dom in 1492 from 700 years of Islamic oppres­sion, seems like there’s more than a lit­tle Iber­ian tack­i­ness for Mus­lim rad­i­cals to get offended at — truth and his­tory, just to name two. And in the case of this recent pro­duc­tion of Mozart’s opera “Idome­neo”, the hero brings out a bloody sack of sev­ered heads includ­ing that of Posei­don, Bud­dha, Mohammed and … Jesus. And they’re only wor­ried about the Mus­lims get­ting offended? Good grief!
    • Tak­ing all the fun out of booger jokes — Frederica’s got an essay called “Open Sea­son on Beauty” (HERE) that’s part movie review and part social com­men­tary (as the best movie reviews gen­er­ally are). It turns out that the cur­rent Shrek rip-off movie turns up the vol­ume on the gross­ness, fea­tur­ing all things slimy, smelly and excre­men­tal. Oh lovely. And she won­ders what in the world all this is doing to the chil­dren who these movies and prod­ucts are aimed at:

      Sure, potty-talk has always been funny to kids. But grownups didn’t teach it to them. They had some­thing more sig­nif­i­cant to impart: sto­ries to help chil­dren pre­pare for the world they were grow­ing into.


    Related posts:

    1. Happy birth­day, Mozart
    2. NBC shocked and amazed
    3. Quick Hal­loween re-cap

    October 2nd, 2006 | Grace | No Comments |

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