Burn Victim Towel Animal Update

Well, the burn victim towel animals have continued to appear in my cabin.

Below is a recent one, which is obviously a dog.

Towel_dog

The folks who guessed a penguin for the first one were correct. At least that’s what the cabin steward said it was.

One reader suggested a snow covered penguin, but I think there’s more to it than that. It was not only jet white, it also had no eyes.

Can you think of any albino, eyeless penguins?

I can.

According to H. P. Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness . . .

Suddenly a bulky white shape loomed up ahead of us, and we flashed on the second torch. It is odd how wholly this new quest had turned our minds from earlier fears of what might lurk near. Those other ones, having left their supplies in the great circular place, must have planned to return after their scouting trip toward or into the abyss; yet we had now discarded all caution concerning them as completely as if they had never existed. This white, waddling thing was fully six feet high, yet we seemed to realize at once that it was not one of those others. They were larger and dark, and, according to the sculptures, their motion over land surfaces was a swift, assured matter despite the queerness of their sea-born tentacle equipment. But to say that the white thing did not profoundly frighten us would be vain. We were indeed clutched for an instant by primitive dread almost sharper than the worst of our reasoned fears regarding those others. Then came a flash of anticlimax as the white shape sidled into a lateral archway to our left to join two others of its kind which had summoned it in raucous tones. For it was only a penguin – albeit of a huge, unknown species larger than the greatest of the known king penguins, and monstrous in its combined albinism and virtual eyelessness.

When we had followed the thing into the archway and turned both our torches on the indifferent and unheeding group of three, we saw that they were all eyeless albinos of the same unknown and gigantic species. Their size reminded us of some of the archaic penguins depicted in the Old Ones’ sculptures, and it did not take us long to conclude that they were descended from the same stock-undoubtedly surviving through a retreat to some warmer inner region whose perpetual blackness had destroyed their pigmentation and atrophied their eyes to mere useless slits.

The one in my room must have been a baby.

I’ll keep an eye out for shoggoths oozing out from under my bed.

Where Are the Anti-Communist Movies?

Abortions, pornography and contraceptives will be banned in the new Florida town of Ave Maria, which has begun to take shape on former vegetable farms 90 miles northwest of Miami.
Tom Monaghan, the founder of the Domino’s Pizza chain, has stirred protests from civil rights activists by declaring that Ave Maria’s pharmacies will not be allowed to sell condoms or birth control pills. The town’s cable television network will carry no X-rated channels.
The town will be centred around a 100-foot tall oratory and the first Catholic university to be built in America for 40 years. The university’s president, Nicholas J Healy, has said future students should “help rebuild the city of God” in a country suffering from “catastrophic cultural collapse.”

That’s the question being asked by David Boaz over at TCS Daily.

He notes that there have, actually, been some anti-Communist movies, but not nearly as many as there have been anti-Nazi movies, and the Communists killed far more people than the Nazis, thus creating innumerable dramatic human situations that could be illuminated through film.

I’ve got two thoughts on why there haven’t been as many anti-Communist movies:

1) Hollywood tends to the left of the political spectrum. It’s cultural/political ethos is socialistic to begin with, and there is less of a desire on filmmakers’ parts to go after Communists than people (like Nazis) that they perceive to be on the opposite end of the political spectrum (though, in actuality, the Nazi party was the National Socialist party).

2) The Cold War never got hot. What made Naziism so riveting and enduring an evil in film is the fact that a whole generation of Americans went off to fight it. Communism was a looming menace, but since we and the Russians (or the Chinese) never squared off in an actual world war, that looming menace never turned into the generation-defining experience that World War II was. If Stalin massacred more civilians than Hitler did (let’s suppose; I haven’t checked the numbers), we never had to fight Stalin, and that kept him from becoming an archtypal villain equivalent to Hitler in cultural stature. (Though he has clearly been the first runner-up in that category.)

So those are my theories.

What’re yours?

Pipes on Fascism Old and New

Yes, I know Daniel Pipes is a reliable apologist for Israeli policy, and likely biased in his assessments, but I have been surprised myself at the extent of the connections – not just ideological, but historical, political and structural – between the Islamofascists (for want of a better term) of the last half-century and Hitler’s Third Reich.

Guys like Yasser Arafat and Saddam Hussein could trace their political lineage directly to card-carrying Nazis. Fellas like Grand Mufti Mohammad Amin al-Husayni were their heroes and mentors.

Makes you wonder if Arab countries labeling Israel as the aggressor in the Middle East isn’t more brazenly twisted than O.J. Simpson and his search for the "real killers".

PIPES’ LATEST on CATHOLIC EXCHANGE.

The X Party Vs. The Y Party

It’s not uncommon to hear people refer to the Democratic Party as the "Mommy" party and the Republican Party as the "Daddy" party, but Michael Medved has a different way of characterizing the two.

In this column, he contrasts the "Senator" party with the "Governor" party, assigning the former role to the Democrats and the latter to the Republicans.

He bases this on a look at both where their recent presidential nominees have come from (legislative or executive backgrounds) and where their current crops of presidential hopefuls come from.

He also suggest that the tendency of Democrats to nominate senators for president and Republicans to nominate governors has to do with their (or at least their parties’ nominating core’s) view of government and the proper role of the presidency.

It’s an interesting hypothesis.

It’s also interesting to contemplate how it matches up with conventional political wisdom that it’s easier to get elected president if you’re a governor than if you’re a senator. One theory proposed to explain this is that governors have less of a paper trail than long-time senators do, meaning it’s harder to paint them as politically undesirable based on their past voting record.

But that’s just one theory, and there are several other possible ones here.

Whether any of them will help either party in ’08 (should either nominate a governor for president) is a whole different matter.

March Of The Burn Victim Towel Animals–Parte Deux

A time or two when I was on the Catholic Answers cruise, I found a mysterious line of animals appearing in my room after dinner that appeared to be burn victims made out of towels.

It wasn’t always clear what the animals were meant to be, but I BLOGGED ABOUT IT, and folks had fun guessing what some animals were.

I’d completely forgotten about this, but tonight this little critter showed up in my bedroom . . .

Mystery_critter_1

What is it?

I actually know what it’s supposed to be. (The cabin steward told me.)

I’ll answer tomorrow (assuming I’m able to log in tomorrow).

Till then, have fun guessing!