So which is worse: praising kids, or teaching them to sing (to the tune of Frere Jacques) "I am special, I am special, look at me . . ."

My guest post on Alastair's blog is up now. Feel free to read and write over there as you choose.

I finished reading Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickled and Dimed last night. I know, I'm like the 75 millionth person to read it. Just hold on a sec. Kust wanted to mention one particular point of interest. In one portion of her project Ms Ehrenreich was working with a maid service cleaning houses. She found herself learning to resent the home owners she was working for. This isn't terribly surprising, nor do I blame her at all for that. Here's the interesting bit--just as she was getting ready to quit and move on to her next city, she told her coworkers that she was really only there to research her book. In the ensuing discussion Ms E asked about her coworkers attitudes towards the wealthy homeowners. She was surprised to find that none of them felt any resentment or hostility towards them. The said that they were hoping to someday be in such a position themselves.

Leaving aside the likelihood, or lack thereof, of middle aged house cleaners to attain the resources to someday hire out there own help, I think there is another interesting thing at work here. In his seminal work Envy: A Theory of Social Behavior, Helmut Schoeck points out that envy is much more likely to occur between near equals. Ms. Ehrenreich several times made mention of the fact that she was "only visiting" the world of the working poor, that she always knew she had her other, upper-middle class life to go back to. I would suggest that her problem with her clients probably stemmed from the fact that although she was not one to use a maid service, she was of the class of people who COULD do so. Probably some of her friends and neighbors used such services.

A twelve-year-old boy on the outdoor basketball court does not envy the success of the NBA star. The recent college star who failed to make a pro team might. That's not a comment on Ms Ehrenreich's character, just one on human nature.

It's really not worth noting the controversy which led up to this, but Peter Leithart's post here on vulgar language exactly echoes my own sentiments. As a baptist youngster I certainly bought into the idea of prohibited words, but through college and beyond I began to reason out many of these same ideas Peter mentions. I think there must be some sort of Aristotelian mean here. One should not be the sort of person who is known for telling dirty jokes, but one should not be a prude either.

Working with high school students over the last few years has made me both more sensitive to this question and more convinced of the general position. Also, being pastored by David Bowen, one who is not the least afraid to either mention a vulgar word in a sermon or to preach on sexual passages in the scriptures, has been helpful. I can't say often enough that I have the best pastor in the world :)

Worth reading: Po Bronson on recent research on the effects of praise on children. We had discussed this in a general way in my ESL teaching program, but I was unaware of this research.

For your edification, here are the 10 worst drivers ever caught on video. Don't laugh, it could be you next.

I wonder how many profs from the conservative presbyterian seminaries will be attending this? I don't mean that as accusatory, since I don't know ANY profs at these seminaries myself except through casual introduction or by reputation. It frankly looks like it would be a good conference for anyone seriously interested in reformation history.

I think Todd's post here is appropriate to any and all theological discussions going on.

BBC readio last night was discussing recent legislative changes (or proposed changes?) allowing for much larger casinos. The interesting bit was their guest interview with someone from a recent american national impact study group on gambling. I had no idea that such a study had been conducted, though I had heard about recent crackdowns on online gambling. Anyhow, this study group was recommending a moratorium on all new forms of legal gambling in the US. The BBC reporter asked whether allowing large casinos did not bring jobs and revenue into communities. The american rightly and eloquently pointed out that casinos do not create wealth, they merely transfer it to casino owners. They also have the effect of taking money which would have been spent on consumer goods of various kinds OUT of the local economy, which has a multiplier effect (you might want to take a macro-econ class if you aren't familiar with this). So, for every million dollars spent in a casino, that could be 3 or 4 or more million which is taken out of the local economy.

Overheard at lunch as two college age females walked by my table: ". . .so that's when I broke up with him even though TECHNICALLY at that time I didn't HAVE a reason . . ."

I can't help thinking that he might be better off now.

I was just thinking that an interesting use of identity theft would be to just be cruel to someone rather than trying to profit. If you had someone's credit card info and address, you could simply buy lots of things online and have it all sent to them. They would have a hard time both in getting it all returned as well as trying to convince merchants that someone else was responsible.

What better way to return to blogging than to point out this post on the menace known as scented candles?

Deaconpaul's money saving tips number 1: don't pay money for your international calls. This sounds like an incredible deal for those with friends or family around the world, so long as thy are in one of the available countries.

The first post here just cracked me up. We all ask dumb questions when we don't know what we're talking about, so I guess I shouldn't laugh.

World's 10 Oddest People

Some excellent police detective work on display here.

I saw one of the more curious films of recent years this week. Tarnation is a documentary of sorts by a young man whose mother suffers from severe mental illness. I say "of sorts" because this is obviously more personal to the filmmaker than perhaps any documentary has ever been. Jonathan Caouette had an early interest in filmmaking, thus resulting in lots of footage of his life and family from his early years. The story, as he presents it, begins with the marriage of his grandparents and the borth of their only daughter, Renee. Renee turned out to be quite a beauty and had considerable success as a child actress and model. One day in her adolescence, though, she jumped, for whatever reason, off the roof of her house and landed on her feet without bending her knees. Renee was paralyzed for 6 months though the doctors said that it was a psychosomatic condition. The doctors recommended shock therapy, which her parents agreed to. Every week for 2 years. Mr Caouette reported that nothing of her original personality was left after this experience.

Renee remained a beuty throughout this period and eventually met and married a travelling salesman and became married. The marriage did not last long and the husband left, unaware that his abandoned wife was pregnant. Thus the filmmaker is born.

At age 4 Jonathan's mother, in a psychotic state, took him to Chicago from their home in Texas, without any money contacts or apparent plans. Someone took them in off the street and raped Renee in front of her son. Renee called her father who wired money for bus fare. A short while into the bus ride Renee was removed from the bus for "disturbing the other passengers". She was taken by the police and jailed for a time before being sent to a mental hospital. Jonathan was sent into foster care.

As is sadly too common, Jonathan was abused quite a bit by his foster families. Eventually his custody was assigned to his grandparents in Texas and he continued to live with them until he was 23 (iirc). Jonathan did occasionally visit his mother and on one of these visits met a drug dealer who game him two joints which Jonathan duly took home and smoked. The joints were laced with PCP and induced a disorder known as "depersonalization" where he felt like he was a spectator of his life rather than a paricipant. During this time he started developing his acting talents, some of which are showcased. Jonathan made short films where he would play young women giving monologues about their very troubled lives.

In his teenage years Jonathan became active in the gay community where he was fortunately able to make some friends. As you might expect, this was still an exteremely troubled period for someone in such a difficult family situation. Jonathan reports that he quite often broke furniture in his grandparents home and staged frequent suicide attempts.

The remained of the film is not nearly so dark. Jonathan, follwoing the death of his grandmother, went to New York where he found acting work and a stable (gay) relationship. His mother, still quite psychotic, comes to visit him occasionally and he has also established a relationship with his fther whom he had never met earlier.

The whole film is made up of film clips from his life, photographs, interesting graphic pyrotechnics, and, from end to end, his favorite songs. I learned from Roger Ebert's review that he was able to do all of this for only $218. The producers did have to spend money to get all the song rights and print it.

So, I was quite impressed with the film. It was a startling yet open and unadorned look at mental illness and its effect on a family. After watching it I checked rottentomatoes to see how the critics had scored it. Unsurprisingly to me, it got a 91% favorable score, as well as a 100% score from site visitors.

Here's what is very interesting to me though: checking the Netflix reviews, most of the viewers only gave the film 1 or 2 stars. The most frequent epithet used was "self-indulgent". I'm not entirely sure how one could make an autobiographical film which could avoid that charge. It seems like a lot of films I have enjoyed have gotten that word tossed at them. I guess for me I consider it a good thing when a filmmaker fills up a film with things she or he find interesting. Maybe "self-indulgent" is just the opposite of "pandering", which would perhaps set up the flip side of the critics versus popular reviewers dichotomy.

In some sort of effort to make itself look shallow, The Atlantic has published a list of the 100 Most Influential Figures in American History. As an aside, nothing in the title rules out non-americans, so why isn't George III on the list?

Anyhow, their "american history" appears to begin in 1776 with one notable exception. The notable exception is also the only figure on the list who was a pastor, namely Jonathan Edwards. Martin Luther King Jr and Lyman Beecher are the only other figures on the list who are even remotely christian leaders (Beecher and Edwards are at 90 and 91 on the list). The two Billy's (Sunday and Graham), and all other pastors, theologians and evangelists apprently had less influence on America than Ralph Nader.

No composer or artist made the list unless you are willing to count Stephen Foster or Elvis Pressley for the first or Walt Disney for the second. No poets are named. Instead we have 24 presidents and other high government figures, 2 baseball players, and Mary Baker Eddy. Shouldn't the inclusion of Jonas Salk cancel Eddy out? Also included are 2 pairs of people (the Wrights and Lewis and Clark), which I'll just call cheating.

Somehow my friend Todd, despite all his coverage of happenings in Scandinavian churches missed this fine story.