Christopher (atheist/neocon/liberal) and Peter (Christian/paleocon) Hitchens have an interesting family dynamic: from the Guardian.

Audience member: You've been casting furtive glances at each other throughout the whole event but you've never yet made eye contact. Would you for this final moment, look each other in the eye?

CH: You don't know what we've just been through. We were asked by James Naughtie to do an on-radio handshake, [and] I thought it was a handshake made for radio.

Audience member: So will you do it?

[CH and PH look briefly at each other]

PH: They want everything to be all right.

CH: They want a happy ending - that's their problem.

A nice display of wordsmithing by Peter Hitchens in a review of The President, the Pope, and the Prime Minister. From The American Conservative.

Had they been as successful as is now claimed, it is odd that so much of the supposed Reagan-Thatcher legacy has proved so easy to dismantle. The incompetent, extravagant Bush administration has probably sunk political conservatism in the U.S. for ten years to come, and perhaps longer. The British Conservative Party nowadays hopes to save itself by adopting the spending habits and social programs of its Labor opponents and shrinks like a prodded mollusk when asked to pronounce on issues of absolute morality or national independence. In both countries, actual and moral illiteracy are epidemic, and the liberty of the individual is in serious danger. The power of the Western alliance, once apparently unchallenged, has plainly passed its peak. The world has certainly changed since 1980, and to begin with, it seemed to be changing for the better. But can we now be so sure of that? It is too soon for such confident eulogies as this.

Several writers discuss the font they compose in: My Favorite Font, courtesy of Slate (one of the more nerd-conscious cultural webzines around.

...Soon after, Lew Bryson, a columnist for a beer-industry trade magazine called Cheers, lamented that beer had "lost its way." Bryson summed up beer's predicament: "Wine overcame beer's lead in the hearts and minds of American drinkers," he wrote. "Forty years ago, wine was mired in a swamp of low-margin jug sales. Drunks were called 'winos.' Now wine has cleaned itself up, with a freshly shaved face and a fashionable suit of casual clothes, and is headed uptown."

From Slate mag.

From his review of "Evening":

...Lila is scheduled to be married on the morrow to the kind of a bore who (I'm only guessing) would be happy as the corresponding secretary of his fraternity. She does not love him, she loves Harris. I already said that. But what makes this Harris so electrifying? Search me. If he is warm, witty and wonderful on the inside, those qualities are well-concealed by his exterior, which resembles a good job of aluminum siding: It is unbending and resists the elements.

Oh, but I forgot: Harris has one ability defined in my Little Movie Glossary: He is a Seeing-Eye Man. Such men are gifted at pointing out things to women. Man sees, points, woman turns, and now she sees, too, and smiles gratefully. Harris is a very highly evolved Seeing-Eye Man. Not once but twice he looks at the heavens and sees a twinkling star. "That's our star," he says, or words to that effect. "See it there?" He points. Young Ann looks up at the billions and billions of stars, sees their star and nods gratefully. Director Lajos Koltai cuts to the sky, and we see it, too. Or one just like it....

Some old movie trivia.

Dark Ages’ view of ailments was pretty bright. From MSNBC:

Treatment of the sick in the Dark Ages is poorly understood today because none of it was governed by law or written down, Lee said, but assuming that it was backwards and steeped in superstition would be a mistake....

Some of the most forward-thinking science in the Dark Ages was actually going on in monasteries, where monks trying to understand all of God's works — including the mysteries of the body — toiled with healing methods.

Caring for the sick, regardless of the motivation, is an important measure of what's going on in a culture, Lee said.

"I think the way people behave towards the weak is the hallmark of a civilization," she said.

Ingmar Bergman (1918-2007). Famous director of soap ads:

Fascinating site with alternate or fantastical maps: Strange Maps. Some examples:

- A map of baseball team allegiances (why do the Cubs have a dominion far exceeding the Sox?)
- A map of where the single population of one gender is greater than the other (there are a lot more single men in Seattle, and way more single girls all along the east coast).
- A map of the US where each state's name is replaced with the name of a foreign county which has roughly the same GDP (Arkansas [2.7] matches the output of Pakistan [270 million]).

Thanks to Worldmagblog.

After 11 years, Kenneth Branagh's Hamlet is finally on DVD. I wish Christmas came early this year.

Two movies in production which I'll have to see:

Kenneth Branaugh's remake of Sleuth. Love the idea of Caine playing Olivier's role.

A new Brideshead Revisited. The project has a new director now. The previous one, David Yates, wanted to make God the villain in the story ... so I suppose it can only get better with someone else calling the shots. I hope.

I know indie cred isn't very credible these days, but this movie has my attention. Juno got rave reviews at the Toronto Film Festival, which just closed up shop. And the soundtrack looks superb.

The cast looks top-rate as well. And Reitman's previous movie, Thank You For Smoking (adapted from Christopher Buckley's novel) was brilliant satire.

Federal Vision debate over at De Regno Christi. So far, it's been a really healthy discussion with a strangely appropriate diversion into where the TRs and FVs fall on the modern-postmodern continuum. Caleb Stegall's comments are great. Makes me wish I had followed The New Pantagruel before it went defunct.

Second: Slate's discussion of the new book on Patrick Henry College: God's Harvard: A Christian College on a Mission to Save America. Again, fascinating stuff, especially when compared to my own school.