Saturday, November 27, 2004

Lex Alexander: "(A) specific kind of American Christian conservative -- a group that tends to decry any notion of "victimhood" among women, minorities or other groups susceptible to prejudice or bigotry -- tends to see itself not only as victim but also as persecuted... ...I suppose I've always been sort of aware of this phenomenon, but when I began covering religion for the N&R in the mid-1990s I was stunned to learn how widespread, and how resistant to documented historical fact, it was." 8:35:47 PM    comment []

ACC Hoops: "(T)he gap between the ACC and the second-best conference in the nation could be as large as at any time in the past several decades." I don't know if I agree that it's a shame that the ACC teams will slip in the rankings as they tangle with each other, because they will get better through that competition, which matters more than rankings when the tourney rolls around. 8:25:50 PM    comment []

We watched ourselves as children and thought about the things we didn't know. My sister had some old home movies burned onto DVDs and gave them out at Thanksgiving. Much of the footage was of a long-ago family trip to Jamaica. I was 9, my sister and a cousin were 11, the oldest cousin was 14. In the movie we splash in the pool at a villa above Montego Bay and eat a coconut opened by the villa's machete-wielding handyman and ride his burro and play on the beach. What the children knew: this was the best trip, ever. Christmas in the tropics, with our parents and aunts and uncles and grandparents in bathing suits and sunglasses, laughing. What we didn't know: that Jamaica was simmering with social and racial tension and that our parents and grandparents were having very uncomfortable visits to town; that the burro would be tethered on a steep hill later that week and slip and hang itself; that our father would die young. My mother watched her long-haired 1971 self in the movie and said, that was the most horrible trip. Ignorance is bliss. 10:32:11 AM    comment []