The Bible-minded Capital district

There have been a couple polls recently that suggest that the Albany-Schenectady-Troy, NY area is more godless or less godly, than most parts of the country, if you read the headlines:

These Are The Most Godless Cities In America. The subtitle reads: “A new survey ranks U.S. cities in terms of ‘bible-mindedness'”

August Rambling II: Smart is sexy and stupid is not

The New York Times’ prophetic 1983 warning about the NSA, which naturally leads to Glenn Greenwald killed the internet.

My Feelings About the Harriet Tubman Sex Tape in 10 GIFs.

Invisible Disabilities Day is October 24. I have this friend with rather constant neck pain, but she doesn’t LOOK sick, and therefore feels diminished by those who actually don’t believe her. Conversely, The Complexities of Giving: People with Disabilities as Help Objects.

Photos of the worldly goods of inmates at the Willard Asylum. I backed the Kickstarter for this and wrote about it a couple years ago.

“Each week, TIME Magazine designs covers for four markets: the U.S., Europe, Asia and the South Pacific.” Often, America’s cover is quite, well – different. I had noticed this before. I don’t know that it’s “stunning,” but it IS telling.

The Peanuts gang meets The Smiths, in which This Charming Charlie masterfully blends Charles Schulz’ comics with lyrics by The Smiths.

Beauty: skin deep

It’s well established in the literature that attractive people generally fare better. In many cases, humans attribute positive characteristics, such as intelligence and honesty, to physically attractive people without consciously realizing it.

I think that’s why the story of the dental assistant in Iowa who was fired for being too attractive – Cheri noted it recently – got so much attention.

At some level, I think the issue of the recent cover of the magazine Rolling Stone was upsetting to some people because Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is not homely.

TIME is not on my side

I have a current subscription to TIME magazine because it was so cheap, I couldn’t help myself. I alternate between buying TIME and Newsweek because, invariably, one or the other will make a deal so enticing – “Come back, Roger!” – that, even if I read only one or two articles a week, it’s worth it.

It’s particularly valuable because one can also access articles online. I go to the TIME’s log-in menu, and do what I’m asked to do, then try to get to the online article

You can't get to heaven on a pair of skates

“…’cause you’ll roll, right past those Pearly Gates.” Old song that popped into my head.

So Chris Honeycutt found my villainous thoughts totally inadequate; I’m unsurprisingly all right with that, and she came up with her own here and here and here. My, she’s thought about this a LOT, it would seem.

But in between, she poses this question: Can you be a good Christian and fantasize about being a villain? In the main, I totally agree with her that “we should want to be Christlike, but in reality we’re, well… not.
“Story is good, imho, for exploring those un-Christlike qualities that we possess. If we don’t face them as a reality, we can become repressed. And while suppression (holding back emotion and thought until an appropriate time and expressing them in appropriate ways) is good, repression (trying to hold back emotion forever until we blow like a tea kettle) is very bad.”

L is for Loving Day

I can’t believe I missed it. OK, until I read about it in TIME magazine, I’d never even heard of it, though it’s been going on for a half dozen years. There’s a group that has called for Loving Day Celebrations around June 12th each year “to fight racial prejudice through education and to build multicultural community.”

The celebration is named for Mildred Jeter and Richard Loving, who had the audacity to fall in love with each other. Unable to get married legally in their native Virginia – he was white, she was black – they got hitched in Washington, DC and “established their marital abode in Caroline County”, Virginia.

Ultimately, on “January 6, 1959, the Lovings pleaded guilty to the charge” stemming from their interracial marriage, “and were sentenced to one year in jail; however, the trial judge suspended the sentence for a period of 25 years on the condition that the Lovings leave the State and not return to Virginia together for 25 years. He stated in an opinion that:

“‘Almighty God