There were no particularly Christian reasons to feel shame at that time in my upbringing. We slept in on most Sunday mornings of my early childhood, and no one had inferred to me in any way that sex was bad. But looking through the magazines was something Marcy and I definitely did under cover of darkness, regardless of how boldly they had been left in our path. We both knew that there was something inherently wrong with two little girls looking at grown-up naked women.

Read the whole thing.

Meanwhile, American Life League attempted to take out a full-page ad in the New York Times and the Washington Post that displays images used by Planned Parenthood in public school sex education courses. The ad was rejected because the images were considered “too graphic” for the newspapers’ readership.

I can understand the newspapers’ reasoning, honestly – I assume they would say the same about an image of the human reproductive system from, say, a ninth grade biology textbook. Right? I’m a little confused about this detail from the story:

Likewise, the New York Times offered to run the ad only if ALL would agree to blur the pictures. Its staff suggested that they could run a disclaimer saying, “Image too shocking for the New York Times audience. To see actual image and for more information, please visit: http://www.all.org/pdf/PP_HookingKids.pdf.“

That actually seems like a good compromise – I’m unclear as to who suggested it; the NYT or ALL? As a parent, I’m not crazy about the idea of a newspaper that my child might read including these graphic images in a full-page advertisement.

Because the images themselves are so explicit – I don’t understand how something like this even gets designed. I don’t understand how you have a staff meeting to look over the mockups, share feedback around the table, decide to go with the image of the young girl bent double with a mirror, exposing her genitals to the viewer so that they can be properly labeled. That’s the one. That’s what we want to send to the printers, distribute to the students, talk about with the kids, emphasizing there’s nothing to be embarrassed about and we just want you to be comfortable with your bodies so we can all be sex-positive. And let’s couple that with the image of the young boy masturbating.

Aren’t you ashamed?

Three engineers made an app for the ‘Íslendingabók’ database. People can now easily, and on the go, look up how they are related to other Icelanders. And a precious feature, using the bump technology, allows people that meet to just bump their phones together, to instantly see if they are too related to take things any further. The engineers’ slogan for this feature was: ”Bump the app before you bump in bed”.

http://www.newsoficeland.com/home/technology/innovation/item/1124-new-app-prevents-icelanders-from-sleeping-with-their-relatives

This is actually from Easter but I just stepped in cat barf while trying to apprehend a four-year-old bedtime parole violator and I wanted to remember the good times I once had.

Georgia Mojito, is what this may be called:

• Some lime juice
• Some mint-infused simple syrup (I’ll bring you some if you come to New Orleans)
• Some gin, and then maybe some more because who’s counting?
• Lots of ice

Combine those things in a cocktail shaker and shake. Strain, and pour over some fresh ice and club soda.

The scientific test to gauge if a computer can “think” is surprisingly simple: Can it engage in small talk? The so-called Turing test says a computer capable of carrying on a natural conversation without giving itself away can be considered intelligent. So far, no machine has made the cut.

Eric Brown, a research scientist with IBM (IBM), is charged with changing that. The 45-year-old is the brains behindWatson, the supercomputer that pummeled human opponents on Jeopardy! in 2011. The biggest difficulty for Brown, as tutor to a machine, hasn’t been making Watson know more but making it understand subtlety, especially slang.

It seems like an even better version of the Turing Test would be based on whether the computer could make the humans LOL. I did a bit of light Googling to see if there had been a test conducted along those lines and found this article from 2008, in which one computer told the following joke:

Roberts said Elbot worked by catching some of the judges off-guard with provocative answers or impishly hinting that it was, in fact, a machine.

“Hi. How’s it going?” one judge began.

“I feel terrible today,” Elbot replied. “This morning I made a mistake and poured milk over my breakfast instead of oil, and it rusted before I could eat it.”

Roberts also said Elbot tried to dominate the conversation to keep it from wandering into areas it was not properly programmed to handle.

Sounds to me like Elbot has better social skills than I do. (zing!)

Then I hopped over to Cleverbot to see if it could recognize random allusions to high-minded fare, and incorporate them into jokey banter. Transcript:

User: Schenectady. (I always like to lead with a word that is inherently funny.)

Cleverbot: Ist das dein name? (Is Cleverbot being snarky or does it think I’m speaking German?)

User: Yes.

Cleverbot: Hi, Kara. Then you must me a girl. Nice to meet you. I’m a girl too.

User: What? That makes no sense.

Cleverbot: But we’re married. (Admittedly, this is not a terrible response to the comment ‘That makes no sense.’ Also: is Cleverbot making a reference to current events?)

Then I tried again.

Cleverbot: Who is going to speak first?

User: I speak for the trees.

Cleverbot: Yes but out of context. (Good comeback, Cleverbot!)

User: Have you not read the Lorax?

Cleverbot: No.

User: Then you wouldn’t recognize my allusion, which is too bad. I hope this makes for a good blog post. We need more traffic. Then again, there’s always money in the banana stand. (The ultimate test: has Cleverbot memorized transcripts from Arrested Development?)

Cleverbot: That would be you.

User: BURN! Well played, Cleverbot.

Cleverbot: Too true, too true.

Equal parts blue-eyed soul shouter and wild-eyed poet-sorcerer

I am an unapologetic fan of blue-eyed soul and all-other-eye-colors-soul, but what I really want is for this description to be applied to me someday. Maybe in a eulogy or an awards show tribute? Bookmark this, is what I’m saying.

So, the rules of the ice-breaker are as follows: look up your favorite artist and post a one-sentence description of said person. Explain whether this could theoretically be applied to you. Only one person gets to pick Bob Dylan.

Oh, or maybe we could guess? Like, guess who you picked?

This is probably why I don’t get invited to many parties…

Our mission is to engage and inform the world by promoting Kentucky people, places, and products. And to Kick Ass for the Commonwealth!

Kentuckians have been influencing and creating American and world culture for a long time. We were the first to sing Happy Birthday, fry chicken, and slap high-fives. We invented bourbon, bluegrass music, and the mother-freaking Kentucky Derby. We made cool cooler by birthing Clooney, Depp, and Hunter S. Thompson. We pushed the What-Are-Ladies-For-And-Good-At envelope with Loretta Lynn, all the Judds, and Diane Sawyer. We redefined sport with Ali, Sea Biscuit, and Rondo. We invented the gas mask, people.

We are the real deal. We are Kentucky.

Not a big fan of assorted Judds, but otherwise – Kentucky for Kentucky.

Also: the aforementioned horseys.

If only someone involved with the production had been to acting class.

The problem is that Catcher in the Rye is no longer a book for cool high school students.Catcher in the Rye is a book for cool high school teachers. Holden’s painful, alienating realization—that in life, phonies abound and beauty is a fragile, horrible thing we will forever chase and lose—is a fundamental teenage anguish. Adults who remember this feeling share the book to say: I understand that this world hurts. Here is someone else who understands. Assigning Catcher in the Rye has long been an acknowledgement that the moody sensitivity of teenagers is actually— despite its insufferability to older people—the correct reaction to the world.

Read more at Schools Should Replace Catcher in the Rye

Liebling had a Falstaffian presence, was fat and jowly, brilliant and egoistic. He wanted in this context to be seen as a crusader for justice. Knopf, he told the audience at Columbia, had failed in its promotion of The Moviegoer. Without A.J. Liebling, one was left to presume, a masterpiece may have been forever lost to posterity. But there was more to the story: A decade before, Knopf had published Liebling’s book Chicago: The Second City, and Liebling had never forgiven Knopf for not pushing the book vigorously enough. Now, given the opportunity to embarrass his old publisher for failing to champion Percy’s text, he did not hesitate to put the boot in.

and

Herbert Gold, a novelist who was also a member of the fiction jury that year, confirms Stafford’s description. Talese’s report, he says, “is complete bullshit. The fact was I loved The Moviegoer. I went to New York with that book under my arm hoping to convince the other two judges. But I can’t claim credit because Jean also loved the book.” The third judge, Lewis Gannett, a columnist for the New York Herald Tribune, was reportedly happy to comply. In fact, according to Gold, Gannett was not on intimate terms with the books on the short list. “My wife liked that one” was about all he could muster in response to some, and The Moviegoer won unanimously on the first ballot.

But Talese’s story was the version on record, and it was cited for years after. Stafford had to answer to the controversy until her death in 1979, and to this day Talese stands by his report. “If I wrote it,” he told me last month, “then it’s true. I am not a fiction writer like Walker Percy.”

Read more about Percy’s aplomb, etc. at Slate

This morning over breakfast S. asked me why I looked so glum.

“Because,” I said, “everything that exists is born for no reason, carries on living through weakness, and dies by accident.”

“Jesus,” S. said. “Aren’t you ever off the clock?”

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/shouts/2012/10/le-blog-de-jean-paul-sartre.html#ixzz29mrxS9iA

Mrs. Percy, a native of Doddsville, Miss., was known to everyone as Bunt. She acquired that nickname in childhood from her father’s farm workers, who referred to her as Little Bunt and then Bunt, said Mary Pratt Lobdell, one of her daughters.She enrolled at Millsaps College in Jackson, where she trained to become a laboratory technologist.She was working at a clinic in Greenville, Miss., when she met Percy. They dated seven years before marrying in 1946.

Read more…

Walker Percy is most deserving to make it on our celebrity database. They were born in Birmingham, AL in the country of United States. Walker Percy is most known for being a Author. Walker Percy celebrity status also due to The Moviegoer.

Generated by the WordPress Celebrity Database Plugin. Get yours today!

The best part of this plugin is you can add a spun article to each post making it extremely unique and full of rich content. Watch the video to see a demonstration.

We definitely need this. I don’t care what we have to cut, you tell the proles in Accounting to make this happen.

Via Colossal, a cool blog about the art world.

Sometimes I think I’m too much of a fogey, because this, to me, is interesting but not significant.

My 12th grade students read Walker Percy’s novel The Moviegoer over the summer and so we’re discussing it now in class. I love teaching novels that almost everyone in the class hates on their first read. And I get it; I can see why today’s 17 year old teenagers would hate The Moviegoer. It’s light on action and heavy on abstractions and is the product of an era distinctly not their own.

I wasn’t familiar with The Circe Institute before happening upon this lovely post, but they seem like nice people.

I want to teach my students to read well – and deeply – not because I want them to read good books by the bushels or stock their shelves with well aged classics. I want to teach them to read well because there is a God-breathed universe of truth available to those who, as Binx Bolling recognized in his own broken way, seek it.

When I started counseling I saw our work as serving the mother-child dyad. I wanted to help the woman and save her unborn baby. Over time I began to see more and more the frayed communal fabric in which these women and children are wrapped. I began to appreciate the connections they lacked—to their own fathers, to their children’s fathers, to happily married couples who could serve as models, to churches where they were nurtured and shown God’s love. Now I see my job primarily as helping women find people in their own communities who can give them support, advice, and most of all the hope that married love is possible.

Read more at The Weekly Standard – “Sex and the City.”

I look at this book, which is expensively bound and covered and art-directed, and which in a few months’ time will be printed in vast numbers on thick creamy paper with tastefully ragged edges, and I think, God damn, a lot of people are going to buy this book. In every generation the literary world needs to crank out certain stories about writers, the same ones every time: the Wunderkind, the Outsider, the Mad Genius, the Somber Master, and so on. The machinery of literary fame has seized upon this guy to star in one of its stories.

Read more: http://entertainment.time.com/2012/07/25/i-hate-this-book-so-much-a-meditation/#ixzz23OMKxrLR

With sly humor he shows us our strategies for solidifying and shoring up these tenuous Selves. We can, for example, seek status (my Self is better than yours). We can quiet the self’s discomfort through connoisseurship, associating the Self with what it owns: a Stella McCartney dress, a $2500 fixed-gear bike. These moves are nothing more than attempts to give the Self an illusion of reality. Seeing through it is the real “help” Percy offers.

An Existential Guide For When You’re Really ‘Lost’

Discuss – not me and my Wes Anderson issues, but the movie, spoilers and all, in the comments.

JOB reviews Beauty Will Save the World:

The idea of the Church today serving as patron of the arts seems as outmoded as arranged marriages and the divine right of kings. At least, artists in general no longer look to the Church for both guidance and support for their creative endeavors. Given the mostly bankrupt pop-cultural shenanigans that pass for “art” these days, things have come to a sad pass indeed for the artist, the Church and the world in general. So what happened, can it be fixed and if so—how?

Read more…

Potter’s poignant poetry:

The day before you died I thought I’d bring
You tulips for your bedside table, bright
Ones, pink and white, to give your gaze a place
To rest, to make your labor seem less harsh.
Read more…

And whatshername interviews Friend of this Blog, Amy Welborn:

Sicily was far away and someplace I’d never been and never thought of going. So in a way, it was sort of like “going to” death in this sense. Although I did think about it, fearfully, it was not someplace I took seriously about traveling to—death, that is. It was also someplace that Mike would never, ever have traveled to. I could not imagine it being part of a family journey in the hypothetical land of “If Mike were still alive.” It seemed very far away from life with him, as well, and I suppose I hoped that if I went to Sicily, I wouldn’t be as burdened with the loss.
Didn’t work, of course, since, as I write in the book, even seeing a crucifix made of lava rock festooned with glitter in a souvenir shop on Mount Etna can make you miss your husband just as much as driving by the YMCA where he died back home. Read more…

Peruse the Pentecost issue!