The self-esteem movement bears fruit:
All the effort to boost children's self-esteem may have backfired and produced a generation of college students who are more narcissistic than their Gen-X predecessors, according to a study led by a San Diego State University psychologist.
The Internet, with all its MySpace.com and YouTube braggadocio, is letting that self-regard blossom even more, said the analysis titled ``Egos Inflating Over Time.''
The people who assemble our popular cuture, they be dummer and dummer. I pressed the Comcast Digital Cable magic information button for last week's episode of "Jericho," and this is what I saw: "A flashback through the 36 hours before the bombs exploded sheds light on the action of Jake and Hawkins, and reveals Hawkins' compliance in the events." Compliance? I'm guessing "complicity" is what was meant.
Cool show, by the way. Or at least it has hooked me.
Coincidentally, right after I read the news that Anna Nicole Smith had died, I came across this story about Indiana courting Hollywood:
The Indiana House voted 82-15 Thursday to pass a bill providing financial incentives for movies, TV shows and other entertainment productions to be made in Indiana.[. . .]
The question that so many are apparently asking: Did anyone NOT watch "American Idol"? Yes, that would be me. If I want to hear bad singing without even the benefit of several drinks in a smoky bar, I'll just put a tape recorder outside my shower. That attitude does, however, leave me out of a lot of conversations at work.
Here's a story that's both less and more than it appears. Because the whole focus is on the increase of women living without a spouse, the writers feel compelled to offer a whole set of reasons for the phenomenon:
Free at last, free at last. I will finally get my due after being held down so long by oppression:
After years of fighting for women's rights, the ACLU is now battling for equal rights for men.
Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus, as surely as blah, blah, blah. It was in the New York Sun in 1897 and is probably the most famous editorial ever blah, blah, blah. My boss made me run that on the editorial page every year.
The wonderful thing about this country is that we still allow (mostly) local sensibilities to govern local conditions. If Las Vegas wants to be a wide-open sin city, for example, and Seattle wants to be a politically correct have for lefties, so be it.
Oh, wait, I got that a little wrong. Seattle is the city in which voters just rejected a ban on lap dances and tough restrictions on strippers:
I haven't seen "Borat" and don't intend to, so judge my remarks about it accordingly. I'm squeamish about that kind of humor, which sets out to deliberately deceive people, then invites the rest of us to laugh at the fools who have been duped. Apparently, I'm one of the few people who feel that way. The movie made $50 million in eight days and seems on track to be the highest-grossing comedy ever. It's being praised from those across the political spectrum; here's a conservative who liked it:
Poor Ted Haggard, having to confess to being a "deceiver and a liar" -- and who apparently had sex as well -- must now redefine the rest of his life, in public. But some good comes from all tragedy. His ordeal has had the positive effect of encouraging another unfortunate to confess who he really is:
