Read more about the article Makeup is the new girdle.
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Makeup is the new girdle.

I stopped wearing cosmetics a few months ago, after about half a year of using the stuff only sparingly. I started weaning myself off makeup because I had come to hate the hassle of applying it, and because I hated fretting about my appearance. I was also beginning to think of makeup as old-fashioned, an antiquated 'modesty' that inspires shame in one's true appearance. The longer I go without a cosmetic product on my face, the more I believe that makeup needs to go the way of the girdle. The restrictive, uncomfortable, needless, obsolete girdle. How many undergarments are you wearing right now? I'm guessing two at most. Likewise, I only wear two small undergarments below my clothes, even on the most formal occasions. Interview? Presentation? Class? Wedding? A bra and underwear are always adequate. Since I've never had to wear more than two undergarments, I find it staggering that women used to wear massive bras, high-waisted underwear, girdles, pantyhose or stockings, garter belts, slips, and camisoles. I often wear less than that as a full outfit. Anyone who knows me in real life can confirm that I regularly step out in leggings and a t-shirt (plus two small undergarments beneath). I don't say this to titilate, just to illustrate, because I suspect my bare-bones attire is quickly becoming the norm. I've spent a lot of time on college campuses- big and small, public and private, Jesuit and blessedly godless. Everywhere I've seen legions of women and girls decked out in equal or greater states of undress than my own. Gone are the girdles. [More . . . ]

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The woman called out that she learned to play the guitar with that song …

At a recent Paul Simon Concert, a woman named Rayna Ford called out that she learned to play guitar with the song Paul Simon was about to play, "Duncan." And then Paul Simon invites her to come on up. This is quite a feel-good moment. I'm glad someone took a video of it.

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The filtered Internet

It used to be that people were subject to the whims of old media, human gate-keepers who decided that type of information we should see. The Internet was supposed to change all of that, but we are now seeing startling examples that Facebook, Google, and Yahoo News among many other companies, are using algorithms to please us by giving us what they deem to be “relevant.” Author Eli Pariser, executive director of Moveon.org, asked several friends to search the same term (“Egypt”) in Google, and they received dramatically different results. It turns out that there is no longer any standard version of Google. The new version uses dozens of bits of information about you to give you what it thinks you want. Facebook also employs such relevance algorithms to weed out information, and even “friends” that it has decided that you don’t want. In the case of Pariser, whose politics are progressive, Facebook edited out information from his conservative “friends.” What would be the advantage to giving us what we want? Certainly, some of us want to live in a world where everyone appears to think the same. But such filtering would also have a commercial purpose—giving only “relevant” hits might facilitate Internet sales. In this excellent ten-minute TED talk, Pariser tells that the Internet is increasingly geared to giving us what we want to see rather than what we need to see. In this talk, Pariser has challenged the new Internet gatekeepers to make this ubiquitous filtering of information transparent and to give user control over it. We will all be better off, he warns, when we get information that makes us uncomfortable, and information that is important, as well as information that challenges us, rather than simply giving us what they think we want.

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Frustrating Funeral

I have been to quite a few funerals in the last several years. Most of them were for elderly relatives. Some few of these funerals annoyed me because the master of ceremonies was a minister who apparently knew little of the departed, and so just delivered a half hour recruiting speech for his church, and called no other witnesses. This weekend I went to the funeral of a cousin by marriage, my own age, who suddenly dropped dead. The processional music was appropriate for the deceased: "Margaritaville." So I was looking forward to the service. A relative stood up at the lectern and said that this was to be a celebration of life. More hope rose. But what followed was twenty minutes of pious speech about how important it is for everyone to love Jesus, especially since this life is not the important one, but rather the next. Eventually he wound down and briefly mentioned a couple of actual details from the life nominally the topic of this occasion. I knew that his family partook of that popular death cult, Fundamentalist Christianity. But my few conversations with the suddenly departed never led me to believe that he took that afterlife very seriously. He seemed a live-life-to-the-fullest sort who embodied the Martin Luther quote: "Who loves not wine, women and song, Remains a fool his whole life long." So this service by someone who knew him did not strike me as entirely appropriate. Granted, it did match the services I'd attended for his elder relatives, and did not seem to discommode his closer family. I see there is a sociological purpose to sharing ridiculous claims, and of being reassured by authority figures that these absurdities are true, especially at times of stress. It is a form of claiming kinship, of affirming loyalty to an in-group. But to me, a funeral should be a celebration of a life, a sharing of a personality and experiences. It annoys me when the service primarily focuses on recruiting for a church, and as an aside, oh, yeah, this man also had an individual life.

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On dealing with the lack of hell

I sometimes listen to AM religious talk radio because I'm amazed at the sorts of the things I hear. Today, while listening into local St. Louis 24/7 "TruthTalk" Christian radio station KJ SL in my car, I heard a bit of contentious discussion between a radio host and a caller. I believe that the host of the radio show was Bob Dutko. Dutko has long held the position that "Jesus really is the only way and He really did rise from the dead, physically and historically." When I first tuned in, the caller was talking, saying something much like this: I believe that the spirit of God resides in every person, and that people can live good and meaningful lives without belonging to any church. I believe that God will reward them based upon the good things that they do, and based upon how they treat others, regardless of whether or not they follow any religion. Good-hearted people who do not believe in Jesus or follow a religion will not go to hell. The host told the caller that his "new age" religious outlook was hopelessly naïve, and that he needed to read the Bible, whereupon he would see that there is only one way to avoid hell is by accepting Jesus Christ as Savior. [More . . . ]

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