Journal of Post-Ralphaelite Thought

I remember reading Margery Williams' classic The Velveteen Rabbit to my kids when they were little. They are now young adults. If you've never read the book, get a copy, and find a kid to read it to. It is a subtle and beautiful work. I still can't read it out loud without getting choked up. But that's just me. "What is REAL?" asked the Rabbit one day, when they were lying side by side near the nursery fender, before Nana came to tidy the room. "Does it mean having things that buzz inside you and a stick-out handle?" "Real isn't how you are made," said the Skin Horse. "It's a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real." "Does it hurt?" asked the Rabbit. "Sometimes," said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. "When you are Real you don't mind being hurt." "Does it hap...

Merry Christmas/Happy Hanukkah/Cozy Kwanzaa/Saturnalia/Solstice to all who put up with my nonsense and lunatic prattling. It's been an interesting year, eh? A holiday shout out to several of my blogging buddies, who, though I don't always agree with, have become good friends. This includes the Whited Sepulchre , TarrantLibertyGuy, Browncoat Libertarian and Stephen Smith . Proof you can disagree without being disagreeable. A special shout as well to my old friend Dan , who I've known since 5th grade and who writes much better than I and has led a much more interesting life as well.

The whole culture war over Christmas can be neatly illustrated by the running edit battles going on in the Wikipedia entry for " Christmas Tree " where one side writes about the pagan origins of the Christmas tree, and the other immediately edits them out. This has been going on for weeks . Check for all the edits labeled for "Pre-Christian roots." This is a little like how Winston Smith spent his days in Orwell's Nineteen Eighty Four. Don't like the truth? Edit it. Then your truth is the truth. I came about this because I'd researched the history of the Christmas Tree and found reference to the pagan origins in Wikipedia, then went back a week later only to find them gone. The hand of God may be invisible but some of his/her bone-headed followers are leaving fingerprints behind.

For some years I worked in advertising. Among the many blots on my soul was the fact that I pimped Christmas and the Baby Jesus to sell worthless shit. Now I discover, thanks to Bill O'Reilly, I was doing the Lord's Work. Now that it's December, Fox News and its various reptilian talking heads are once again hard at work promoting the War On Christmas . Bill O'Reilly kicked off this holiday tradition a few years back. It's like the Right Wing's Charlie Brown Christmas -- they trot it out every year since they know it's a surefire ratings booster. It's most visible form is flogging various retailers who choose to say "Holiday Sale" instead of "Christmas Sale." This strikes me as odd. I have a hard time seeing how using the label "Christmas" as a marketing tie-in is promoting the beliefs of Christendom. If anything, it serves to further secularize a Holiday/HolyDay already weighted down with a vast collection of warmed over ...

A short economics lesson for today, courtesy of the magnificent Bananas Gorilla . A free-market economy is truly a marvelous thing if someone else is doing all the work. More of Bananas' wisdom can be found at the Japing Ape .

Not to beat a dead horse or anything but... 22 million missing emails from the Bush administration have finally been found. In case you've forgotten your ancient history, the Bush White House developed quite a case of  "Gosh, we can't find that," during the stink over the attorney general firings and the brouhaha surrounding the outing of CIA agent Valerie Plame . It will be interesting to see if the inquiring minds who are all a-twitter over the so-called "Climategate" emails will find this bit of news worthy of their pronouncements. The newly discovered emails cover 94 calendar days of email backups that include the periods where the above events took place. These are, by the way, mandated by federal law to be preserved. The reason given for their missing status was they were "mislabeled." Uh huh. While I'm sure there may be a fair amount of potentially explosive material to be discovered (well, not before 2014 at the earliest), th...

Hello, I am Capt. John Rogers (3RD INFANTRYDIVISION). I am with the Engineering unit here in Ba'qubah Iraq for the United States, we discovered about $10m (Ten million US dollars) which we want to move out of the country. My partners and I need a good and reliable person, we can trust to actualize this dream. The money is from oil proceeds and its legit. We intend moving it by diplomatic means to you or  to a safe and secured location of your choice. Once the funds get to you, please take your 30% out and keep our own 70%. I shall however leave out other details of this transaction until I receive an affirmation of your desire to participate. Please contact me on my personal email address below for more details. For more details please visit http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/2988455.stm . Yours truly Capt Rogers jrcaptianrogers7@gmail.com

Teenagers are so hard to shop for. Not sure what to get for that thumb-twitching, over-caffeinated gamer in your life? Commonsense Media has helpfully compiled a list of the top ten games to avoid (because of " excessive violence , negative role models, extreme gore, sociopathic behavior") this holiday shopping season. Of course, these are exactly the games your little sociopath is asking for, assuming he/she hasn't already bit-torrented them. Now you know what to ask for at GameStop. The list: Assassin's Creed II Borderlands Brutal Legend Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 Dead Space: Extraction Dragon Age: Origins Grand Theft Auto IV: The Ballad of Gay Tony Demon's Souls Left 4 Dead 2 Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars Remember, nothing says love like automatic weapons fire. Merry Christmas!

And now for a short break from ponderous holiday thoughts. Here's my latest geeky thing. I confess, I love my tunes, which is one of the reasons I finally opted for an iPhone -- it's a great portable music device. And not just when using it as an MP3 player. Lots of devices do that. It also has great streaming audio functionality. Apps like Pandora , Slacker and Shoutcast (to mention but a few) were what sold me. But when I'm home I don't always feel like listening to streams on my iPhone. I've got other stream players, such as my Roku Soundbridge and Linksys WMLS11B . Here's a brief discussion about one way (out of many) to manage tunes for these two devices. Both of these have remotes that let you browse for music servers on your network or  select preselected streams. While useful, both devices have only low-res displays which means a lot of drilling down using the remote -- not a very fast or intuitive method of looking for stuff. Since I can...