The crazy lady strikes again

An editorial by Forbes magazine's editor is causing a huge stir. This editor is recommending that men marry women who intend to stop working once they get married (if they ever intended to have a career in the first place). His advice (and yes, the editor who wrote the op-ed piece is a man, folks) is based on his perception that women in the work force are more likely to (to put it in Christian terms) be tempted to commit adultery than are women who do not have jobs after they marry. He feels... Sign in to see full entry.

Another one of the articles in the Chicago Sun-Times series on evangelicalism talked about the racial divide in Chicago churches. Black Protestants in particular tend to think of evangelicalism as a whites-only phenomenon, a club filled with right-wing Republican bigots. Therefore, this group of Christians is very reluctant to call itself evangelical. One of the very few black pastors to call himself evangelical is Rev. James Meeks, a Baptist minister who runs a church on Chicago's South Side.... Sign in to see full entry.

Because this is about a specific Protestant movement - and more specifically, about my observations of that movement - this entry is going in here. It doesn't belong in From Death Into Life. I've read yet another article on the Sun-Times website - actually, the first in a series of articles on the Protestant movement I call evangelicalism. ( Here is the link to the entire series.) Right now, I'm reading the article in the series entitled (for the purposes of this blog entry) The Image Problem.... Sign in to see full entry.

According to this link on the Chicago Sun-Times website, God has apparently become a subject for polite discourse. As this website states accurately, it used to be considered very rude (particularly in upper-crust white society) to discuss religion. Those who evangelized or proselytized for their religion - no matter what that religion might be (although most proselytizers were of the fundamentalist Christian persuasion back then) - were considered uncultured hicks from the wrong side of the... Sign in to see full entry.

Many of my story ideas have come from the website of The San Francisco Chronicle. This newspaper offers an excellent Strange But True section, with many of the same stories as those on the equivalent AOL News site. The Chronicle site also has very talented headline writers. For example, on the main web page of the newspaper, the article about an Apple iBook catching fire is entitled It's Apple flambe. Their Strange But True site is literally loaded with such creative headlines, specifically... Sign in to see full entry.

Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies fans will remember that the Warner Brothers cartoon character Bugs Bunny had a distinct Brooklyn accent. He apparently inherited this accent from his mentor, and the man who provided him with his speaking voice, Mel Blanc. This link from AOL's Strange But True news service proves definitively that Bugs Bunny is not the only one with a distinct regional accent. Apparently, farmers in Great Britain have noticed that their cows moo with distinct regional accents,... Sign in to see full entry.

We medical geeks have two - count 'em, two - medical shows to watch. I'm not talking about Grey's Anatomy or Scrubs; I'm talking about ER and House, MD. Ah, heaven! Both ER and House, MD have enough medical terminology in their respective scripts to satisfy even the most geeky of us. I would have loved these shows in high school; back then, I had to be satisfied with drooling over Johnny Gage in Emergency!. (That alone dates me more than I'd like to admit in public. I take after my mother - I... Sign in to see full entry.

I took a three-hour break while my daughter coopted the computer to work on Liz's Journal. (Extra note: It's her birthday, not mine. Make sure you put "Liz" in the subject line of any comments you might want to make to her on Liz's Journal.) I spent the majority of that break basically vegging out, watching TV. But I did get some housework done - enough to concern my daughter. The corner of the kitchen I was cleaning was dirty, and I dug up an interesting nest full of cockroaches in the process.... Sign in to see full entry.

I'm not talking about anything entitled The Lighter Side, nor do I plan on doing anything that might be termed "on the lighter side" (that is, humor or a "fun" topic) in this entry. Instead, I am talking about what constitutes "the lighter side" on television, particularly daytime TV. It seems as if daytime TV is geared toward traditional women's interests - relationships, makeup, fashion, and so forth. These topics bore me silly; besides, I have definite views about some of these issues, and... Sign in to see full entry.

This article (just click on the words "this article") talks about the political influence of the Religious Right (the conservative, Protestant-influenced movement which came to prominence in the late 1970s, and took credit for the election of Ronald Reagan to the American Presidency). It discusses the difference between the various strains of Protestant thought - the fundamentalists (particularly fundamentalist separatists like my former neighbor, the Baptist minister), the evangelicals, and the... Sign in to see full entry.