File this under "Missing the point"
Un-fried "Latka Crisps".

Gotta Watch Out For Those Baseball Questions:

But perhaps nothing was so tortured during the show as its ending, when the governor was asked how he could be both a Red Sox and Yankees fan. This has no real political import, but fans engaged in the famous rivalry are so passionate in their hatred for their opponents that it's impossible that anyone could be true booster of both teams. Richardson's answer (too lengthy and unwieldy to replicate here) was a triple threat: implausible, shifty, and likely to please no one.

From Slate

The New French Foreign Minister
Christopher Hitchens says he'll vouch for this socialist's neo-conservative bona fides

Had the Socialist Party won the election, it is highly unlikely that such a distinguished socialist would ever have been allowed through the doors of the Quai d'Orsay. (Yes, comrades, history actually is dialectical and paradoxical.) In the present climate of the United States, a man like Kouchner would be regarded as a neoconservative. He was a prominent figure in the leftist rebellion of 1968, before breaking with some of his earlier illusions and opposing the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan—the true and original source of many of our woes in the Islamic world. The group he co-founded—Doctors Without Borders, or Médecins Sans Frontières—was a pioneer in the highly necessary proclamation that left politics should always be anti-totalitarian.

from Slate

Richard Posner likes Century Schoolbook.

And why one artist likes Palatino (Paltino Linotype is the font for this page, but only if your computer has it installed...)

From Slate.

Hermits Alive!

The Camaldolese Hermits of Monte Corona in Ohio now have a website!

Obviously there's some cleaning up to be done here, but on a time when I can investigate the css/html more...

Posting this so I can link to it for the new banner....

The Hapsburgs

A leftist critic, A.J. P. Taylor, has described the family that had once ruled over much of Central Europe (and for a while the Spanish empire) as follows: “While other dynasties are episodes in the histories of nations, for the Habsburgs nations are episodes in a family history.”

(Via Taki's Top Drawer)

This had me chuckling:

These young folks from Cornell are at their marriage preparation class (emphasis mine):

This whole while I was simply watching the spectacle unfold with a polite and attentive face, while the Doctor scribbled furiously on his note pad. I was quite taken with the general hilarity of this situation, in which my poor fiancé, himself a trained moral philosopher, was forced into being “instructed” in philosophy by this thoroughly confused, thoroughly modernist little man. He couldn’t stay silent forever, though, because we were eventually prodded for input. What were our “values?”

The Doctor explained, in a somewhat strained tone, that the concept of a “value” was itself a modernist (and thoroughly unCatholic) idea. I couldn’t faithfully capture the whole of his brief lecture, but my description of the session thus far should be sufficient to illustrate just how wrongheaded (in a truly pernicious way, though these poor souls obviously could not be accused of any deliberate malice) their presentation really was. They were advising us to go through life juggling weighing the pros and cons of every decision according to the guiding question, “What is important to me?” They wouldn’t presume to tell us the right way to live; rather, they wanted to help us break down the different possibilities, so that we could ponder what sort of life might suit us best. Their closest attempt at Catholicity was to ask, “What were Jesus’ values?” Of course they gave the sorts of soft, fuzzy answers that one would expect out of weak-minded liberals. It seems to me more correct to say: Jesus didn’t have any “values.” He simply lived his life in perfect obedience to the will of the Father.

Of course the couple understood the Doctor’s speech not at all. The only thing they managed to surmise was that he didn’t believe in values, from which they seemed to conclude that he was some sort of nihilist. With every subsequent activity the woman would begin, regretfully, with, “Well, this will be difficult for people who don’t believe in values…” and she’d glace at the Doctor.

The Pope (via John Allen) On Reforming the Church:

In São Paulo Friday morning, Benedict insisted that the saints of our epoch are the "true reformers," quoting his own homily during his first foreign trip in Cologne, Germany: "Only from the saints, only from God does true revolution come."

Yes, the graphics have dissapeared. I'll get around to fixing that.