Author Archives: Jen

About Jen

Jen isn't quite sure when she lost her mind, but it is probably documented here on Meditatio. She blogs because the world needs her snark at all hours of the night... and she probably can't sleep anyway.

Rules for Political Discussion

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I know this sounds utterly weird coming from me (who criticizes Bush every chance she gets) but I’ve seen some things that are completely over the top recently and I’m getting sick of it. I have been critical of Bush from Day 1 but I’ve backed up my criticism and praised him for things I think he did right. (Those entries do exist. Really. They do.) Here are some rules I think all bloggers should follow in discussing politics, regardless of where they stand on issues.

1.) Do not apply labels of “God’s chosen party” and “Satan’s party” to the U.S. political system. No party has a monopoly on the truth and no party is all good or all evil.

2.) Do not claim that Jesus was a Democrat or Republican. This goes along with #1. No party has a monopoly on Christianity and likewise Jesus. Jesus is not a Republican or Democrat — He is the Son of God and God does not discriminate between the two parties.

3.) Do not refer to members of either party as “the embodiment of evil”, “the Great Satan” or anything like that because it just stirs up more divisions. No person is that evil nor their ideas insidious enough that they should be called “the embodiment of evil” unless they have done one or more of the following:
a.) taken over a sovereign nation and created a dictatorship
b.) killed off all of their political enemies in the attempt to do a.
c.) caused the genocide of a minority of the population or of the opposing ethnicity after committing a and b.
d.) rigged an election and taken over the government in a bloody coup attempt involving a,b, and c.

4.) Name the news source from which you have taken the evidence to back up your claim and said news source shall be judged on the basis of its leanings. Let’s face it: the Drudge Report is garbage, FoxNews is hardly fair and balanced, and AirAmerica is leftist in response to the other two. Let’s try to find impartial news sources, mkay?

5.) Agree to respectfully disagree with those who do not share your views. I am not going to call you a “fascist pig” if you disagree with my somewhat Democrat leanings , so please refrain from touting how evil left-leaning people are, OK?

6.) Do not morph the name of the hated political candidate into a string of profanities. I think we’re all out of high school and don’t need to engage in such behavior as it is sophomoric and really does not help your case or argument. 🙂

If we could get bloggers to follow these rules, perhaps politicians would follow suit.

Book Meme

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From Chris:

“We have a special visitor today,” he said in a booming voice as he reached a young family in the back of the church.
—A Can of Peas by Traci DePree

1. Grab the nearest book,
2. open it to page 23,
3. find the 5th sentence,
4. post its text along with these instructions,
5. point back to where you got the idea so that we can follow the threads.

Car Is Totalled

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Jon lost control on a gravel road last night and the car ended up in a ditch on its side. Because it’s a Volvo (and those suckers are built like tanks), Jon walked away with only some minor scrapes and bruises. Sable (our Volvo) on the other hand, is possibly totalled. Her windshield is cracked, the rear windshield shattered, the frame is bent a bit, and the right mirror is gone. We are praying really hard that she can be salvaged but people (in an effort to make us feel better that has royally backfired) have told us that she’s probably totalled and to get a new car.

We are kind of attached to Sable, so keep us in prayer that we can get through the insurance mess. We thankfully have temporary wheels as a parishioner had an extra car. (Reason # 34564 that I love Minnesota: people actually *HELP* others out instead of saying “that’s nice” and going to play frisbee golf instead of helping.)

College Board Survey Meme

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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

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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.