"2K8" is not a horrible football game, but like most athletes to come out of retirement, it's a mere shadow of its former glory. I would recommend this one for the hard-core football fan only.
On Monday, an educated young man massacred 32 people at a college in Blacksburg, Va. In 1999 an educated young man – a former IU student – went on a murderous rampage across Illinois and Indiana, which culminated in the killing of a graduate student in front of the Korean Methodist Church here in Bloomington.
On Monday in Lookout Mountain, Ga., four activists from the militant homosexual liberties group Soulforce were arrested for trespassing on the campus of Covenant College. They had been participating in an “Equality Ride,” a seven-week tour of demonstrating and pamphleteering at Christian colleges and seminaries, with the intent of undermining those institutions’ commitment to biblical sexuality.
Last week I found myself in New York City meandering around midtown Manhattan. Whilst I wandered, I chanced to see several advertisements of the Smoke Free Movies organization, which has been urging residents of the Big Apple to give an R rating to films that portray tobacco use.
Without a mirror you can’t know what you look like, unless someone tells you. Similarly, there are truths about us Americans that we’re blind to unless an outsider illuminates them for us.
A man of more wisdom and discernment than I once suggested that the things we hear the most about are the things we understand the least: peace, freedom, love, Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction. We talk ourselves blue-in-the-face trying to chase down each of these nebulous ideas and, when that fails, we talk some more.
I have a Super Bowl prediction: At half-time the Colts and their cheerleaders will switch roles. Peyton Manning will spend the second half prancing about the sideline half-naked, while the cheer squad blows a double-digit lead over the Bears.
On a crisp autumn evening as I jogged past Bryan Park, a crunchy old townie stopped me and asked me to sign her petition. I replied that I would need to know what I was petitioning before providing my signature. So this old, gray hippy lady -- let's call her Alice -- informed me that her organization wanted to end the euthanizing of animals at the Bloomington Animal Shelter.
Call me Scrooge, but I'm just about sick of smarm. American culture is saturated with hollow happiness and empty smiles. The facade of every advertisement tells us our wealth will make us happy, but only if we use that wealth to buy Product W from heartless Corporation XYZ. The hollow ringing of our spiritual emptiness is most deafening in the first three weeks of December, when we all bustle about, burning our wealth in an annual attempt to make the American Dream come true: Maybe this will be the year that I can finally buy happiness.
Two weeks ago the ghosts of George Orwell and Josef Stalin appeared in midtown Manhattan. Orwell was carrying a placard that read: "I Told You So," while Stalin's read: "Russia Did It First." The characters in the fictitious scenario above were drawing attention to a rule under consideration by the New York City Board of Health that would allow a citizen born in one of the five boroughs to legally change information on his birth certificate. The New York Times reported that the proposed rule allowing revision of historical documents will likely be adopted soon.
Solutions by The State News