Image courtesy of Mazen Kerbaj. Death and Destruction courtesy of the Israeli air force.

Previously, Mazen Kerbaj duets with the Israeli air force in Beirut during the summer of 2006.

David Owens explains why we should all quit using pennies.

I can’t remember the last time I used pennies to make an exact change transaction. Any Lincoln lovers out there who would just hate to see the penny go?

This news story was just brought to my attention recently:

The Vatican updates list of Mortal Sins

Although I’ve been in pretty much strict ideological disagreement with almost everything the Vatican has released in my lifetime, and have been especially distressed by the more recent conservative, introspective direction that Benedict seems to be moving in, I am glad to see the men in Rome at least making some attempt to address more directly the problems of the contemporary world.

Although the “sinfulness” of birth control and genetic research still continues to baffle me (and most other intelligent, ethical twenty-first century people), it’s good, I think, to see the growing wealth divide addressed as an ethical issue.

Somewhat related to the previous post about the costliness of the world, a brief article about Rent vs. Buy Myths that ruined the housing market.

Because I’m no economist, I’ll refrain from making any quantitative analysis myself, however, I will say that I’ve always thought of renting vs. buying as a kind of lifestyle choice. Owning a house, and especially the land around it, ties a person to a certain place. Renters are more mobile and less likely to grow roots in a given area than home-buyers I think.

I think the desire to “own” a piece of land or house even when it would be more practical or efficient to rent is a particularly American phenomenon though – especially since there is still so much room left in this country to develop. In places where people have lived for thousands of years (say, Rome or Greece) and there is no room left for new development – private ownership for those who don’t already own is a non-issue.

An interesting argument (which I mostly agree with) in Slate magazine here:

But there’s a powerful case to be made that in an age of equitable marriage the engagement ring is an outmoded commodity—starting with the obvious fact that only the woman gets one. The diamond ring is the site of retrograde fantasies about gender roles. What makes it pernicious—as opposed to tackily fun—is its cost (these days you don’t need just a diamond; you need a good diamond), its dubious origins, and the cynical blandishments of TV and print ads designed to suggest a ring’s allure through the crassest of stereotypes.

All of this written, naturally, by a female columnist. Thoughts?

A privately owned and operated zero-G airplane flight company gave a free ride to Stephen Hawking today in honor of his 65th birthday, allowing the world’s expert in quantum physics and space-time to experience weightlessness for the first time.

It’s been mentioned in the news a little bit, and it’s one of those stories that reads more like a personal anecdote than journalism (i think they call that a fluff piece, but i do not consider this to be any amount of fluff), which i sometimes like and sometimes don’t. I like this one. In this particular report, there’s a line about the test flight:

“On Wednesday, the plane’s crew and Hawking’s assistants ran a test flight, using a 14-year-old boy to stand in for the British professor.”

that is cool. In the extremely good and incredibly endearing [fiction] book, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, by Jonathan Safran Foer, the main character is a young (7 or 8 year old) boy who lost his father in the 9/11 disaster. One of the boy’s biggest heros is Stephen Hawking, and he writes letters to Hawking asking to be his apprentice. Later in the book, Hawking writes him back. It’s pretty fantastic.

When i read about this 14-year-old stand in for Hawking, i immediately thought of Foer’s character. in 2007, the character would be about 14 years old. I imagined that the real-life boy has a similar admiration for the scientist, and Hawking has sort of taken him under his intellectual wing and is perhaps nurturing the fascination for science and the immensity of the universe. I secretly hope that is the case here, so that the 14-year old boy grows up and develops a literary sense to write a short story or something that details his talks and creative exercises with Stephen Hawking.

it’s one of those times where you catch a glimpse of something (imagined or not) that you really want to read about, and if you don’t find something already out there, you’ll have to write it yourself.

Just checking Michelle’s blog today, I realized she had some nice things to say about the entry on happiness from the other day. Thanks Michelle! I also noticed she mentioned the infamous Christopher Hitchens’ article from Vanity Fair magazine entitled Why Woman aren’t Funny.

Now, in the not too dim and distant, Hitchens was turning out to be one of the great contrarians of his generation. He took on a number of issues that most considered settled (The Balkan War, the sanctity of Mother Theresa), and exploded them, providing I think, an excellent (if not radical) take on conventional wisdom. I liked reading Hitchens in much the same way one enjoys any great deconstructionist – it’s a lot of fun to read popular opinion cut to shreds.

Now, I always new Hitchens wasn’t going to be a new Nietzsche (who basically wiped the floor with the past 2000 years of western history, religion, and philosophy proving he was one of the greatest [and perhaps craziest] minds of the last century), but I knew he was headed downhill (way downhill) when he jumped on the neo-conservative bandwagon following the invasion of Iraq.

If the Vanity Fair article posted above proves anything, it shows that he’s completely lost his grip on where to use the critic’s razor. For a more complete dressing down, look here, and here.

The problem with the American political left (and now I’m sounding like a parrot of big media) is that they are increasingly looking more and more like the political right. Hitchens sudden conservativism is certainly symptomatic of the larger problem. What this means, of course, is that the American public is left without any true alternatives to the current monolithic two party system. When both democrats and republicans are spouting almost the same rhetoric (and then denying they ever did any thing of the kind), what can young voters hope for come 2008? Everyone seems to want change, but it’s difficult to imagine it happening when those in Washington all vote and act so much alike.