Entertainment

An old song with a haunting pro-life message:

There was a fair maiden lived in the north
Oh the rose and the linsey - oh
She fell in love with her father’s clerk
Down by the Greenwood side - oh

He courted her for a year and a day
Oh the rose and the linsey - oh
Till her the young man did betray
Down by the Greenwood side - oh

She leaned her back against the thorn
Oh the rose and the linsey - oh
And there two bonny boys she’s born
Down by the Greenwood side - oh

She’s taken out her little knife
Oh the rose and the linsey - oh
And she’s rubbed them of their life
Down by the Greenwood side - oh

Don’t miss this marvelous rant here:

“My personal perspective as a woman, a reader, a mother, and a Christian, is that I hate inclusive language. I hate it because I feel patronized when it’s in use. I hate it because I feel like its promoters, well-intentioned though they may be, are saying to me, ‘O woman, you are not smart enough to know when the words “men” and “man” refer to the whole human race and when they refer to males … I hate inclusive language because it insists that all the places I thought included me were actually excluding me. It seeks to drive a wedge between me and pretty much everything written before 1970. Inclusive language has robbed our language of the little honors paid to the feminine in the tradition of using the feminine pronoun for ships, countries, and abstractions. Inclusive language is the Mrs. Elton in the garden of literature, the tacky boor who wrenches every spotlight towards herself …”

“It was the Irish Catholics who came up with the idea to remember somehow those souls who did not live by the Faith in this life. It became customary for these Irish to bang on pots and pans on All Hallow’s Eve to let the damned know that they were not forgotten. In Ireland, then, all the dead came to be remembered. This, however, is still not exactly like our celebration of Halloween.

Is this finally the last straw? Are EWTN and the History Channel really worth risking the slightest exposure of your children to such images as you accidently hit Fox News on the remote?

I’m with Mr. Aaron Wolf, who says it is long past time to smash your television here:

“There is an invader in your home, and it sits like a god in your living room, in the place of the family hearth. It may hurt your vision, cause brain cells to die, and even keep you from reading a good book. But the worse thing about it is that it is an ambassador for the Culture of Death, a ‘big, bright, green pleasure machine’ whose goal is to introduce you and keep you attached to the world which hated Christ and against which Judgment is coming. It is impossible to shield yourself or your children from all evil (since we are born with Original Sin) but that does not mean that we should leave a 26-inch window into Hell open in the living room …”

How disappointing. To appease his anti-Catholic critics, it appears that Mel Gibson has decided to depart from the Gospels where the Jews are shown in a less than favorable light see. :

“Paul Lauer, marketing director for Gibson’s Icon Productions company, said Gibson has edited the film to show more ’sympathetic’ Jewish characters who were not calling for Jesus to be crucified. ‘We believe we have softened the story compared to the way the Gospel has told it,’ Lauer said in an interview. He pointed to Matthew 27:25, in which the Jewish mob calls for Jesus’ blood ‘to be on us and on our children.’ ‘That’s in the Gospel,’ he said. ‘It’s not in our film.’”

“Time to calibrate your gaydar, because Bravo’s ‘Boy Meets Boy’ (Tuesdays at 9 p.m.) is finally here. America’s first gay dating show isn’t just a dating show, you see. It’s a sexual shell game in which a mix of gay and straight suitors compete for ‘one exceptional gay man’ and, oh yeah, a secret cash prize. Of course James, The Exceptional Gay Man (TEGM), doesn’t know that half the men are straight — boy, won’t it be a hoot when he finds out? — which makes his earnest enthusiasm for his role as the gay bachelor all the more heartbreaking.”

A sad article (now deleted):

“Part of the problem seems to be that, in plain terms, boys aren’t being allowed to be boys. So what has begun to surface in pop culture is a masculinity reclamation project, a defense and validation of beleaguered boys and men. In much the same way that specialized television programs, movies and publications evolved over the years to cater to women, a whole new breed of guys-only offerings are cropping up. Much of the new go-guy fare gleefully plays to the lowest common denominators — the beer-guzzling, belching, T&A sort of entertainment generally associated with the average bachelor party.”