The view from the Baddeck, Nova Scotia, wharf at 4 p.m., December 28, showing the iconic Kidston Island lighthouse in the right foreground, Beinn Bhreagh in the left middle distance, and Contrarian's Kempt Head home barely visible in the center background....
As an antidote to Keillor's unpleasantness, check out this short, sweet talk by Apple founder and design genius Steve Jobs, his 2005 commencement address to the graduates of Stanford University. Contrarian doesn't usually link to YouTube videos with three million views, but perhaps some of you missed it, as we had. Hat tip: Doug MacKay....
Raised as a Plymouth Brethren, at the opposite end of the Christian spectrum from Unitarians, Keillor joined the Episcopal Church as an adult. Though he affects a charming, avuncular manner while spinning yarns from fictional Lake Woebegon on NPR's Prairie Home Companion, he is said to be vain and disagreeable in person. When the "Jewish guys trashing up the malls" column appeared in the Minneapolis Star Tribune, a friend of editorial page editor D. J. Tice wrote to ask why he decided to run it. Dice replied:Unitarians listen to the Inner Voice and so they have no creed that they all stand up and recite in unison, and that's their perfect right, but it is wrong, wrong, wrong to rewrite "Silent Night." If you don't believe Jesus was God, OK, go write your own damn "Silent Night" and leave ours alone. This is spiritual piracy and cultural elitism, and we Christians have stood for it long enough. And all those lousy holiday songs by Jewish guys that trash up the malls every year, Rudolph and the chestnuts and the rest of that dreck. Did one of our guys write "Grab your loafers, come along if you wanna, and we'll blow that shofar for Rosh Hashanah"? No, we didn't. Christmas is a Christian holiday - if you're not in the club, then buzz off. Celebrate Yule instead or dance around in druid robes for the solstice. Go light a big log, go wassailing and falalaing until you fall down, eat figgy pudding until you puke, but don't mess with the Messiah.
We discussed the column and whether it crossed the line, aware that it had already stirred controversy. We decided it was not anti-Semitic, not least because Keillor spread his nastiness so widely, the way many Christians (and others) try to spread good will at this time of year. He is a regular presence on our Sunday page, with a substantial following, and our bar is very high for spiking a regular column. In no case, however, does our publishing a column... imply any endorsement of its message. We publish pieces that we think are provocative and/or illuminating. Sometimes what is illuminated is not exactly what the writer intended, and the reaction to Keillor's piece suggests this may be one of those times. Wouldn't you agree that readers with eyes to see may have learned something from this piece? For my part, Keillor is welcome to his narrow, misanthropic Christmas. I hope the real spirit of the season reaches him someday.The pastor of the offending and offended First Church congregation responded with what could be called Christian charity, were it not for the legions of Keillor-minded adherents to that faith. The best response Contrarian saw came from a fellow Minnesotan. For Adam Minter, a Jewish writer now living in Shanghai, Keillor's column immediately called to mind the Christmas party he attended at Shanghai Putuo Spare Time University a few days ago. His description, and one other response, after the jump.
Long-toothed newshawk Dan Badel recalls: [caption id="attachment_3999" align="alignleft" width="250" caption="Model 28"][/caption] I distinctly remember several of us standing around watching in awe in early 1976 as our trusty Remington was set aside and our first IBM Selectric was set up in the newsroom at CIGO radio in Port Hawkesbury. The entire set of characters fit on one shiny little rotating metal ball, which you could easily swap to change fonts or type size. For news copy, we used the ball that produced only oversized upper-case letters because they more-or-less matched the font used on CP wire service stories tapped out 24/7 on our...
Speaking of Glenn Greenwald, the Salon.com columnist has a fact-filled column eviscerating Barack Obama's claim that Senate Democrats are "standing up to the special interests" opposed to American health care reform. Greenwald catalogs the explosion in health insurance company stock prices as the severely watered-down reform bill edges toward passage. By way of illustration, he notes that Susan Bayh, wife of Indiana Democratic Senator Evan Bayh and board member of the Indianapolis-based insurance giant WellPoint, has seen the value of her stock in the company rise between $125,000 and $250,000 since her husband helped defeat the bill's already lame public option. Although...
Prime Minister Stephen Harper's insistence that the torture of prisoners Canada hands over to Afghan authorities is a problem for Afghanistan, not Canada, calls to mind Tom Leher's lyric about rocket scientist Wernher von Braun's apparent indifference to the consequences of his work on Germany's World War II V2 rocket: Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down? 'That's not my department', says Wernher von Braun. In fact, as Bob Rae points out in the same Globe and Mail article, transferring prisoners with the expectation they may be tortured is a violation of the Geneva Conventions - a war crime,...
Who knew that the US Government and various states had commissioned hundreds of comic books? Richard Graham, librarian at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, knew, and he assembled a collection of more than 180 digitized examples on the UNL website. Charles Schutlz (Peanuts), Hank Ketcham (Dennis the Menace), and Chic Young (Blondie) were just three of the artists who turned in stints as civil service cartoonists. Topics ranged from the benefits of treating children for lazy eye, to the wonders of DDT in the battle against malaria. Dennis the Menace had a thing or three to teach the Mitchell family about household safety. The...
From a story by Alexandra Zayas in the St. Petersburg (Florida) Times: TAMPA — For the first time in history, it allowed a human to tap a backspace key and make a mistake go away. Called "Selectric II," it was conceived when Richard Nixon was president, when IBM made typewriters and when a hand-typed card catalog tracked every book at Tampa's downtown library. Librarians got machines for the public, giving each a room of its own with walls the shade of an avocado. The workhorses spit out labels for spines of books and stamped Dewey decimals on paper cards. They typed resumes, got...