a weekend linkathon

Dead Poets Society as the celebration of a narcissistic demagogue

On older piece at Mockingbird about Jonathan Haidt and why scandals are entertaining and hypocrisy so common

Christian Brady writes on Boaz in the Targum of Ruth as passively going along with a lot and how Ruth is presented as the active agent in the narrative.

If you want to read how far short the Mars Hill triperspectivalism falls from the kind of stuff John Frame was exploring at the time he promulgated the concept go over here.

This one's about the old Kerrigan/Harding scandal and, as such, might be before the time of some readers but here's a fascinating quote:
http://www.slate.com/articles/sports/fivering_circus/2014/02/nancy_kerrigan_and_tonya_harding_revisiting_figure_skating_s_greatest_scandal.html

But Harding sees only a conspiracy against her and not her own part in her poor Olympic performances. In Nancy & Tonya she says of her terrible showing in Lillehammer, “It wouldn’t matter if I did three triple axels; the association wasn’t going to let me represent them.” Needless to say, she did not even do one triple axel, but instead sobbed about a broken shoelace to the judges, who gave her a whole new free skate. She sees people taking things from her that she never earned.

People who think that we don't have animal sacrifices for the well-being of humanity like they did in the pre-scientific era just don't read enough about medicine.  Bleeding horseshoe crabs because their blood has a blood purifier that can be used to purify human blood samples is incredible and a reminder that in some sense someone's blood ends up being shed in pursuit of a beautiful dream of healthier people.  We'll get to how beautiful dreams come at the price of sweat and blood and so on later.
HT Mockingbird, and dietary ideals of various sorts to establish who is truly righteous haven't gone away, either, obviously.

A possibly Captain Obvious piece considering how comedians and funny people can have a cruel streak.


Film Crit Hulk, "The Wind Rises and Cinematic Moralism"
I think Film Crit Hulk, of the reviews I've read of Miyazaki's film, is the one whose view is no coincidentally 1) most persuasive as an interpretation of the film that I saw and 2) also most closely corresponds to my own interpretation of the film, of course. ;)  Speaking of which ... Wenatchee The Hatchet has a guest piece about The Wind Rises as a story of ambition and delusion over at Mockingbird now.  Of course, shameless self-promotion of a link there but definitely go read Film Crit Hulk both for the review and for the amusing Hulk-speak. 

A fascinating bit about the nexus of charity, fundraising, arts promotion, and oratorio as a less-scandalous alternative to opera in Handel's Messiah.  As a reminder that Handel worked in an era before there was anything like intellectual property as we've thought we've known it:

http://www.theguardian.com/music/2014/mar/13/handel-messiah-helped-london-orphans-foundling-hospital
...  The composer frequently recycled sections of his own music: his coronation anthem Zadok the Priest appeared in his later oratorio Esther, his oratorio Israel in Egypt borrows from his funeral anthem for Queen Caroline, Messiah itself borrows from his early Italian duets. This was common practice – Handel didn't just borrow from his own work, he also borrowed from Telemann, Muffat, Bononcini and others, so much so that Handel's contemporary, the composer William Boyce, said of Handel: "He takes other men's pebbles, and polishes them into diamonds." .

Carl Trueman on celebrity pastors
http://www.reformation21.org/blog/2014/03/celebrity-pastors-a-retrospect.php
Part of me thinks that, if the early warnings had been seen as significant for something more than the nomenclature of the seating at the big venues, perhaps things might be differentmolesworth_reasonably_small.jpg today.   Maybe we might have a culture where bad behavior is publicly called out by the movement's leaders, no matter how significant for ticket sales the person at issue might be.   But I think the game back then was more to do with sending signals about who counted, where patronage was to be found, and who needed to know their place and keep their mouths shut.

http://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2014/03/mark-driscolls-problems-and-ours
The recent revelation that Mars Hill Church in Seattle paid an outside company to boost sales of its pastor’s books has raised questions not simply about personal integrity but also about the very culture of American Evangelicalism.


The time signature of the theme from the first Terminator film is ... ? Big spoilery hint, it turns out to be an unlucky number.