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December 30, 2007
Christmas in NYC
Spent a lovely five days and nights in NYC at Christmas.Saw two fun shows - "Spamalot" and "Is He Dead?" - and the Christmas show at Radio City Music Hall - all highly recommended.
Enjoyed several evenings wandering through the holiday shops and watching the ice skaters at Bryant Park. Although the ice rink at Rockefeller Center is the famous one, Bryant Park is beautiful and it is not crowded so you can watch from the rink wall, shouting out encouragement to the newbies of all ages. Great fun, and some of the skaters are excellent.
In front of the ice sculptures at Bryant Park
Took youngest child to see Santa at Macy's. Although the Macy windows were a disappointment (the Bergdorf Goodman and Lord & Taylor windows were much better), the Santa we visited at Macy's was the REAL SANTA! The beard, the voice, the laugh, the Santa outfit - SPECTACULAR! And despite having dealt with crowds for hours, ALL the elves were smiling and full of Christmas cheer.
Window at Lord & Taylor
The Macy's Santa Train Conductor
Macy's Santa Elf "Lightfoot"
SANTA!
The Christmas tree at the Met was, as always, beautiful and worth the trip.Had an outstanding meal in Chinatown at Sanur and good dim sum at The Chatham. Also had a very good lunch at Toasties and enjoyed the jazz brunch at Rare Bar & Grill in the Shelburne Hotel.
FDNY: "Chinatown Dragon Fighters"
The holiday train show at Grand Central is always fun.Midnight Mass at St. Malachy's on West 49th had good singing and music - good homily, too!
The 7-day unlimited ride Metro card for only $24 made it easy to go all over the city using the subway and buses. An amazing bargain.
Merry Christmas!
Posted at 10:37 AM · Comments (0) · TrackBack (0) · Categories: Fun
The Best 19 Movies You Didn't See in 2007
From "The Best 19 Movies You Didn't See in 2007," by Alex Billington, FirstShowing.net, Dec. 24, 2007
The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford
Posted at 12:07 AM · Comments (0) · TrackBack (0) · Categories: Fun
December 29, 2007
Ring bell for psychic?
Doesn't the "psychic" know you're there?
I'm unclear on the concept.....
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December 28, 2007
The "monkeyman realism of eco-Christians and New Atheists"
The reduction of man to an eco-janitor, a being who creates waste and thus must clear it up, is more than a cynical attempt by isolated Christian leaders to connect with the public. Yes, Williams, Owen, the Holy See and Co. no doubt hope and believe (mistakenly, I’m sure) that adopting trendy Greenspeak will entice people to return to the church. But the move from focusing on love for God and one’s neighbour to focusing on ‘respect for the planet’ represents more than a rebranding exercise: it signals a complete abandonment by the Christian churches of the Judaeo-Christian tradition. And in this sense, it is not only God that is being downgraded by the new nature-worshipping priests; so is humanity itself. And that’s enough to make even a committed atheist like me worry about the current direction of the Christian churches.
. . .
The cult of environmentalism embraced by the Christian churches does away with morality altogether. Some sceptics claim that environmentalism is a new form of moralistic hectoring; it is better to see it as amoralistic hectoring. In judging everything by how much CO2 or pollution it creates, environmentalism dispenses with questions of moral worth and judgement.
. . .
Many of the great atheists of old were concerned with making man the centre of his moral universe; with freeing him up to become the ‘superhuman’ that he aspired to be, but which he could only glimpse in an illusory God. Today, by contrast, both eco-Christians and New Atheists want to bring man and God crashing back down to Earth… so that we can set about cleaning it up like the good little earthly janitors we are. At a time of such low horizons, is it any wonder that some people still do cling on to God, and seek transcendence from mundane everyday life through a belief in divinity? There is more humanity in their ‘superhuman’ delusions than there is in the monkeyman realism of eco-Christians and New Atheists.
"Mankind is more than the janitor of planet Earth," by Brendan O’Neill, spiked, December 27, 2007 (footnote omitted)
Posted at 08:37 AM · Comments (0) · TrackBack (0) · Categories: Nihilism