If there's one thing that doesn't make any sense at all, it's our will to persevere in the face of daunting odds. If you fully grasped the odds stacked up against you, you'd stay in bed all day.

The nice people at ArchieMcphee.com have a few solutions to this age-old conundrum, like their Jesus Nodder, which at the low price of $7.50 "is a plastic bobble-headed tribute to a remarkable man." You could use him like a Magic 8-Ball oracle, or as a visual aid to your daily affirmations. Or you could throw caution to the wind and spring a few more bucks for the Devil Girl Nodder. Hey, you could use her to get permission for your crimes of moral turpitude, then fall back on the J-man for absolution ex post facto. It's easy to spring back from adversity with spring-loaded ethics.

These and other thoughts came to mind this morning when I ran across an item in the religion section of my Sunday paper. It's some sort of ecumenical PSA titled "Forgiven and Forgotten."

"Forget the past." How often we hear this advice. Why think about it time and time again? What a waste of time and energy! Yet, the accomplishment of this act of forgetting is sometimes difficult, especially when it is ourselves we must forgive. But if the apostle Paul could be optimistic about the future in prison, you can believe that God wants the best for you. Talk to God. Tell Him you need forgiveness for the wrongs in your life. God will forgive your sin. You can forget it.

Figures

I never quote from Salon, figuring that most of you probably read it every day. But just in case, here's a headline: Peter Arnett now reporting for Arab TV.

Oh for shame! Turns out he landed a gig with the pan-Arab satellite channel Al-Arabiya, which is based in Dubai. Here's editor-in-chief Salah Nejm: "I think he is unbiased and has a lot of experience." This may be true, of course, but it's also pathetic. Arnett's been busy, by the way, and since being sacked by NBC he's "been hired by a private Belgian TV network, a state-run Greek television channel and The Daily Mirror of London." The Mirror, by the way, is the British equivalent of the National Enquirer.

Juvenal Delinquent

If you're looking for some light Sunday reading, here's a pick from Arts and Letters Daily: The Satire of Juvenal. In case you aren't familiar with this guy, Decimus Junius Juvenalis wrote extensive commentary on Roman life in the form of politically incorrect poetic satires, from which a number of common aphorisms have become part of the Western canon.

Censure pardons the ravens but rebukes the doves.

More Juvenal can be found at quotationspage:

Be rich to yourself and poor to your friends.
Peace visits not the guilty mind.
But who is to guard the guards themselves?

If a friend is coming to pay you a visit, your whole household is in a bustle. "Sweep the floor, display the pillars in all their brilliancy, let the dry spider come down with all her web; let one clean the silver, another polish the embossed plate—" the master's voice thunders out, as he stands over the work, and brandishes his whip.

You are alarmed then, wretched man, lest your entrance-hall, befouled by dogs, should offend the eye of your friend who is coming, or your corridor be spattered with mud.

Language Bullies

Never thought I'd see a defense of George Bush's pronunciation of "nuclear" as "nucular," but Andy Lamey gives it a shot at the National Post in an article about the futility of linguistic prescriptivism. Lamey displays his own ignorance with artless and pig-headed abandon:

Language bullying—or prescriptivism, as it's more politely called—is conservative in the worst sense. It advances a stuffy and old-fashioned view of language, the rules of which it considers set by supposed experts, such as the authors of grammar books, rather than common usage. It is deeply anti-populist and snobby, not to mention just plain wrong and cranky.

When you aren't sure whether "different than" or "different from" is correct, when you lack confidence in your use of "to beg the question," or when you're puzzled as to whether "kudos" is a singular or a plural, relying on common usage isn't likely to set you straight. A prescriptive opinion is invaluable in such cases, and will keep you from garnering the sniggers of the cognoscenti. When Lamey says that prescriptivism is "populist," he's arguing that ideas about correctness are restricted to some special class of individuals. In this, as in everything he writes about this issue, he's dead wrong and ought to be vigorously horsewhipped for disseminating balderdash.

1:48:30 PM