StarTribune.Com: Some newspapers pull, edit Doonesbury for language in strip about wounded soldier
Click here to see the uncensored strip. As far as profanity goes, it’s mild and it is at least in context.
Monthly Archives: April 2004
College Board Survey Meme
From a friend’s livejournal:
College Board’s 101 Greatest Works of Literature – bold those you have read, underline those you want to read. (I’m italicizing them because I’m too lazy to code the underlined ones.)
Beowulf
Achebe, Chinua – Things Fall Apart
Agee, James – A Death in the Family
Austen, Jane – Pride and Prejudice
Baldwin, James – Go Tell It on the Mountain
Beckett, Samuel – Waiting for Godot
Bellow, Saul – The Adventures of Augie March
Brontë, Charlotte – Jane Eyre
Brontë, Emily – Wuthering Heights
Camus, Albert – The Stranger (in both English and French)
Cather, Willa – Death Comes for the Archbishop
Chaucer, Geoffrey – The Canterbury Tales
Chekhov, Anton – The Cherry Orchard
Chopin, Kate – The Awakening
Conrad, Joseph – Heart of Darkness
Cooper, James Fenimore – The Last of the Mohicans
Crane, Stephen – The Red Badge of Courage
Dante – Inferno
de Cervantes, Miguel – Don Quixote
Defoe, Daniel – Robinson Crusoe
Dickens, Charles – A Tale of Two Cities
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor – Crime and Punishment
Douglass, Frederick – Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
Dreiser, Theodore – An American Tragedy
Dumas, Alexandre – The Three Musketeers
Eliot, George – The Mill on the Floss
Ellison, Ralph – Invisible Man
Emerson, Ralph Waldo – Selected Essays
Faulkner, William – As I Lay Dying
Faulkner, William – The Sound and the Fury
Fielding, Henry – Tom Jones
Fitzgerald, F. Scott – The Great Gatsby
Flaubert, Gustave – Madame Bovary
Ford, Ford Madox – The Good Soldier
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von – Faust
Golding, William – Lord of the Flies
Hardy, Thomas – Tess of the d’Urbervilles
Hawthorne, Nathaniel – The Scarlet Letter
Heller, Joseph – Catch-22
Hemingway, Ernest – A Farewell to Arms
Homer – The Iliad
Homer – The Odyssey
Hugo, Victor – The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Hurston, Zora Neale – Their Eyes Were Watching God
Huxley, Aldous – Brave New World
Ibsen, Henrik – A Doll’s House
James, Henry – The Portrait of a Lady
James, Henry – The Turn of the Screw
Joyce, James – A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Kafka, Franz – The Metamorphosis
Continue reading
Pat Tillman
BayArea.Com: SJ’s Tillman, who quit NFL to fight, killed in Afghanistan
He was three four years ahead of me in school and I knew his younger brothers. (The Tillmans were a sports dynasty at my high school.) I’m wondering what it’s going to be like to go home in May after this happened. This is the first person I knew within two degrees of separation of me that has been killed in Afghanistan or Iraq.
Along the same lines…
Pentagon Angered by Soldier Coffin Photos
The Department of Defense has been catching so much fire over this. It used to be that the cameras were on and taking the coffins off the plane was a last tribute and hurrah to those who had died. Now… the cameras are off. All the Vietnam-era people and family members of those who have died are up in arms because they want the world to see the coffins being taken off the planes and the bodies of their sons and daughters coming home. I happen to agree.
Guest Blog
I’m considering having people guestblog while I’m in California in May. If you’re interested, leave me a comment.
The Draft
I was talking to my mother last night and she told me that there is talk of Bush bringing the draft back if he is re-elected. I found this website which has various articles to back up the claims.
The administration denies it but I honestly don’t trust them as far as I could throw them, especially since there is legislation in Congress to do it.
Read this bill and this bill. Then keep track of the progress on the bill and write your reps if that is what you do in situations like this. Granted, it’s still in committee and will not probably come up until January 2005, but I think it’s an issue we need to examine in this election year, especially as it pertains to the War (and it still *IS* a war) in Iraq.
And for those who say “but this is good and will encourage patriotism”, go talk to someone who was alive during the Vietnam War and had a friend, family member, or classmate sent over. This will NOT be permitted to happen again, especially after the mistakes made in Vietnam and the effect it had on the lives of those who served there.
BBC Schtuff
I was listening to the BBC World Today as I normally do at midnight (it’s my lullaby since white noise helps me sleep) and the following headlines jumped out at me:
Vanunu prepared for jail release. Apparently, he enlightened the world to the fact that Israel had nuclear weapons. (“Nuclear”, by the way, is pronounced “new-clear”, not “nuke-you-ler” the way some unnamed world leaders pronounce it. My O-Chem professor threatened to fail us if we mispronounced it.)
Grameen Foundation allows loans to beggars. I couldn’t find a link for this but I thought it was interesting news. Apparently, the poor are much better about paying back the loans and the Grameen bank hasn’t lost a dime on the loans.
UN Darfur mission ‘within days’. This is good news as I had a Sudanese classmate at the seminary and since he went home, I’ve been doubly concerned about violence in Sudan. (I wonder how Ruben is doing…)
I actually like the BBC better than any US news source because their news actually tells me something about what is happening in the world. There’s always a story about something in the US, but I hear about Africa, Asia, and other interesting places that the American media tends to skip. One could say that their news is indeed “fair and balanced”.
Family Ties
On Saturday, Jon had to go deliver bulletins at the churches and I decided to walk around the church grounds at the first one. Like most country churches in southern Minnesota, the graveyard surrounds the church and this one literally has people on all three sides. It was interesting to walk around and see the gravestones and names of the people. Many had epitaphs and I wish I’d brought my Norwegian-English dictionary so I could have read them. Some people were born in Norway in 1830 while others have markers that just say “Baby ______” and the year the baby died. It was humbling to see those markers because they represented something in the life of a family that most people probably don’t talk about.
Walking through the graveyard made me realize how strange I am as a West Coaster. Everyone seems to be from somewhere else and people really don’t have ties to the land in as much of a sense as they do here. Some people have farmed the same land for 7 generations and most people in the churches have an ancestor that settled here from Norway 150 years ago. Times like Easter, Thanksgiving, and Christmas are huge around here because everyone lives within a few miles of their parents, grandparents, or other extended family. Church attendance is more constant because it’s a time to see all your family members and there’s a pride in the churches that I haven’t found in the West which is probably tied to that.