The Police to Perform Surprise Gig at 2007 Grammys

Not much of a surprise anymore.

Read more here.

Sean Michel: The Next American Idol

About a week ago, I saw an advertisement on TV for the upcoming episode of American Idol. As the images were flashing by, I thought I caught a glimpse of a guy I knew from college named Sean Michel auditioning there in front of Simon, Paula, and Randy. And wouldn't you know, sho' nuff, it is he. I'm a big fan of his beard and he sang Johnny Cash's "God's Gonna Cut You Down." What more could you ask for? GO SEAN! You're going to Hollywood dawg!

Watch the audition here.

Here's another link.

Cruise 'is Christ' of Scientology

The Messiah?

The Right Not to Know

A few posts back, I quoted Alexander Solzhenitsyn at length on politics and the perils of having a society dominated by only the legal level of reality. I found this interesting article which highlights another part of the Soviet Russian exile's 1978 Harvard commencement address. The writer of the article, Darryl E. Owens, makes the claim that the media is doing a lot to encroach upon our right to privacy. Here's a sample:

Once, some things were private. But today unmentionables routinely are aired on The Today Show.
But the practice seems all the more disturbing in a case like Shawn's, yet another reminder of America's schizophrenic mind-set.
In a day when Big Brother eavesdrops on our chats, satellites can read our tattoos, and our most private moments can earn a very public airing on the World Wide Web, we vociferously bemoan our withering privacy.At the same time, an insatiable, vaguely prurient curiosity has yanked down the veil that once cloaked private life from the searing public eye and replaced it with a clear curtain.

The "Shawn" mentioned above is the Shawn Hornbeck--the now young man who was abducted four years ago in Missouri. Owens is critical of Oprah Winfrey's having Hornbeck and his parents on her show just days after his being rescued, asking the boy himself if he had been sexually abused. After Shawn opted not to talk about his experience, Oprah went to his parents--she "went there"--and asked if they believed Shawn had been abused.

As America hung on every word, the parents of the Missouri boy looked the Queen of All Media in the eye, slowly bobbled their heads, and answered, "Yes."Yes, indeed. After all, wasn't that the burning question that inquiring minds wanted to know? Isn't it what we deserved to know?

It's this right to know that bothers Owens, me, and Alexander Solzhentisyn. Don't we have the right not to know, and doesn't Shawn Hornbeck have the right not to relive a painful experience on national television. Here are Solzhenitsyns' thoughts:

Because instant and credible information has to be given [ in the media], it becomes necessary to resort to guesswork, rumors and suppositions to fill in the voids, and none of them will ever be rectified, they will stay on in the readers' memory. How many hasty, immature, superficial and misleading judgments are expressed every day, confusing readers, without any verification. The press can both simulate public opinion and miseducate it. Thus we may see terrorists heroized, or secret matters, pertaining to one's nation's defense, publicly revealed, or we may witness shameless intrusion on the privacy of well-known people under the slogan: "everyone is entitled to know everything." But this is a false slogan, characteristic of a false era: people also have the right not to know, and it is a much more valuable one. The right not to have their divine souls stuffed with gossip, nonsense, vain talk. A person who works and leads a meaningful life does not need this excessive burdening flow of information.

One must wonder if Oprah and other journalists who are so quick to nab the story and get the scoop think of what they're doing in these cases as "gossip, nonsense, [and/or] vain talk." I think Oprah probably has good intentions, but you know what they say about those.

Human Body Adventure

In China they have this exhibit for kids called Human Body Adventure. Each piece in the exhibit reveals the functions of the body. I think this is what I think it is....Don't do it kids! It's a trick!

Scientists reconstruct Dante's face

Read about Dante's makeover here.

Solzhenitsyn and Politics

As I implied in a post months back, one of the reasons I tend to steer clear of politics is best summed up by Alexander Solzhenitsyn in his 1978 Harvard commencement address. There, he warns against understanding reality in a purely legal way. That is, the legal level of reality becomes the predominant one, thus pushing the religious and spiritual levels to the fringes. And, as long as you are right according to "the letter of the law," no other considerations need to be examined. Here are his words:

People in the West have acquired considerable skill in using, interpreting and manipulating law, even though laws tend to be too complicated for an average person to understand without the help of an expert. Any conflict is solved according to the letter of the law and this is considered to be the supreme solution. If one is right from a legal point of view, nothing more is required, nobody may mention that one could still not be entirely right, and urge self-restraint, a willingness to renounce such legal rights, sacrifice and selfless risk: it would sound simply absurd. One almost never sees voluntary self-restraint. Everybody operates at the extreme limit of those legal frames. An oil company is legally blameless when it purchases an invention of a new type of energy in order to prevent its use. A food product manufacturer is legally blameless when he poisons his produce to make it last longer: after all, people are free not to buy it.

I have spent all my life under a communist regime and I will tell you that a society without any objective legal scale is a terrible one indeed. But a society with no other scale but the legal one is not quite worthy of man either. A society which is based on the letter of the law and never reaches any higher is taking very scarce advantage of the high level of human possibilities. The letter of the law is too cold and formal to have a beneficial influence on society. Whenever the tissue of life is woven of legalistic relations, there is an atmosphere of moral mediocrity, paralyzing man's noblest impulses.

Throughout the rest of the speech, Solzhenitsyn continues to call for "voluntary self-restraint" as the way to save society from the mediocrity he mentions above. In a society governed by the rule of law, there must be sacrifice and temperance. Societies governed by an "objective legal scale" are indeed great, but do we dare to continue to promote such societies if all moral or religious law is forced out of the public sphere? Out of all discussions regarding public life?

Irony, or Politics as Usual

The political world, for the most part, is not a realm that I often find myself that enthused about. However, I couldn't help but see the irony in this story from the Washington Post. The article's about Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats taking over our legislative branch. By the way, is she doing the Arsenio Hall up there?

Here's an excerpt:

Despite the promised "new direction for America," getting the money out of politics and all of that, some facts of Washington life appear immutable and eternal.

"One hundred hours to make this the most honest and open Congress in history," House Speaker Nancy Pelosi declared at the beginning of a history-making day -- which ended last night with the Democrat from California presiding over a glitzy fundraiser open to anyone with $1,000 for a ticket.