The question was:
Would you save one 5-year-old child from a burning building, or save 1,000 embryos.
The honest answer, which reportedly has never been realized, demonstrates that so-called Right-To-Life advocates are not what they profess to be and can not in all honesty insist that others conform to their Right-To-Life demands.
But to me this question exposes a possibly more fundamental hypocrisy.
The New York Times continues to offer age-old questions that can be answered in as may ways as the wind blows. This week it was Should Literature Be Considered Useful? This, of course, begs the question of whether we should consider this question useful, let alone ask what we mean by literature. I suppose no one would even consider asking if art was useful (a good painting can hide those pesky nail holes left by the not-as-good painting you gave to the Animal Shelter for their annual fund raiser).
Doing a mind dump about literature I know that it generates many jobs—writer, publisher, editor, bookseller, etc.—and has a huge secondary market in the folks that purchase the books, read the books, and study the books in school (not to mention the billions and billions of reading groups on the internet). But what do they say in Bookends?
Continue reading “An ice-axe to break the sea frozen inside us”
I don’t know if this qualifies as a reblog or just plain stealing. If the gendarmes drag me off to the slam, I hope I was at least instrumental in spreading the message.
[From Slate]
On his cartoon blog Zen Pencils, Gavin Aung Than turns inspirational quotes into comic strips. For his newest strip, he illustrated a quote from Bill Watterson’s 1990 speech at Kenyon College in the style of Calvin and Hobbes, which Than considers “the greatest comic strip of all time.” The comic strip below “is basically the story of my life,” Than writes, “except I’m a stay-at-home-dad to two dogs.” You can read more at Zen Pencils, where this comic originally appeared.
A Celebration of Reading 