Category Archives: essays, editorials, fisks, and rants

“The New Faithful”

Tonight I am glad I live in Baltimore. I went to a lecture at the Baltimore (Roman Catholic) Basilica of the Assumption where many people, old and young attended including Cardinal Keeler, the former Archbishop, Archbishop O’Brien, my current Archbishop, and George Weigel, whom I respect greatly as a faithful Catholic intellectual (He presented the second lecture in the series of three). The lecture I attended was the third in a new series entitled, “The John Carroll Lectures”. The presenter was Ms. Colleen Carroll Campbell, author of “The New Faithful: Why Young Adults are Embracing Christian Orthodoxy”.

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Steal this Idea

A story in the San Francisco Chronicle quotes “Emily Solomon, 45, a Washington, D.C., playwright and Pennsylvania native”:

[The news media] completely downplayed the first serious female candidacy. When she won New Hampshire, it wasn’t, ‘The first woman to win New Hampshire,’ it was ‘Clinton steals New Hampshire.’ Very subtle sexism, you know. And I’m not even a rabid feminist.

Okay, I am tired of this “very subtle sexism” thing. What Solomon is saying in this remark is that the only way people could have reported Clinton’s win in New Hampshire was by specifically pointing out that she was “the first woman to win New Hampshire.” Anything else, apparently, would be “sexism,” albeit ”very subtle sexism.” If Obama had won New Hampshire and no one reported it as “The first African-American to win New Hampshire,” would that have been racist? I doubt it. (So would that difference be racist, or sexist? Honestly, I don’t care. Nobody should. There are bigger fish to fry.)

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Starbucks: Rules of Engagement

  1. If you are in the drive-thru lane and ordering more drinks than there are people in your vehicle, then you should be inside the store. The drive-thru lane is not for people like you. It is for people who are both in a hurry and able to be served quickly. Practical considerations regarding the interior upholstery of your car and the liquid and often sugary nature of beverages from Starbucks should further dissuade you from abusing the drive-thru lane in this manner.
  2. If you are in the drive-thru lane and ordering drinks for only the people in your vehicle, but there are more than four people in your vehicle, then you should be inside the store. The drive-thru lane is not for people like you. See above. It may also be helpful to note that if there are more than four people in your vehicle, it is likely that at least one of them needs to use the restrooms inside. Why not take the opportunity?
  3. If you are inside the store and ordering more drinks than can fit in one of those stiff paper drink carriers (i.e., more than four) and it is clearly a Starbucks “rush hour” (e.g., any weekday morning between 7:00 and 9:00), then, while you think you are being nice by bringing coffee to everyone in your office, you are clearly oblivious to the presence, needs, and emotions of the people behind you in line. You need to cut back on your generosity or change your timing, or your co-workers need to be getting their own drinks at this or another Starbucks or similar coffeehouse.
  4. No matter the circumstance, you should never be ordering drinks for other people at Starbucks unless you are intimately familiar with both all of the usual options regarding the particular drinks you are ordering and all of the preferences of your absent companions regarding those options.
  5. If you find yourself at Starbucks purchasing drinks for a party not present at the point of purchase or on site, do not, under any circumstances, contact the absent party via mobile telecommunications device. Recognize that if the absent party is so picky about his or her drink that whatever you bring back will be rejected unless absolutely perfect, then that party is either so insufferable that he or she does not deserve to have a drink brought back to him or her, or that party failed in his or her duty to correctly instruct you on how to order his or her drink. The risk of an improperly constructed beverage falls to the party who failed to properly instruct his or her point-of-purchase proxy.
  6. Finally, if you are not going to Starbucks yourself, but are instead sending someone to Starbucks for your drink, so that person will soon find him- or herself in one of the scenarios described above, then your duty as a polite member of civil society is either to be intimately familiar with all of the usual options regarding your drink and to properly instruct your point-of-purchase proxy beforehand, or to recognize that you have assumed the risk of an improperly constructed beverage, or to go get your drink yourself.

Thank you. That is all.

An Apparent Failure of Logic

About Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, Dianne Feinstein says:

“Each one of them represents a different constituency, and the constituencies are knocking heads at the present time. . . . There are women all over the country, and particularly in my state of California, who feel that she hasn’t been treated fairly. . . . They want her to stand tall.”

Um, huh? Maybe I missed something, but how does “[being] treated fairly” have anything at all to do with how good a candidate you are? (And what exactly does “stand tall” mean in this context?”) Leaving aside the allegations implicit in Feinstein’s statement that there has been unfair treatment and that it is because Clinton is a woman—the truth of either is irrelevant on this particular point—being treated unfairly by others, regardless of the reason, says nothing of one’s own qualities and characteristics as they pertain to the job of being President of the United States.

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