Yet another mindless Internet quiz

Which M*A*S*H* character are you? I’m taking a poll.

I am B.J. Hunnicutt, nice-but-boring guy who replaced Trapper John, who went home.

I was going for Father Francis Mulcahy. I actually met the actor, William Christopher, who played the character. He had relatives in Connecticut and I sat in a living room kind of fawning all over him as he tried to talk about autism (one of his sons is autisic). I can’t say the resulting story was any good, but I can say that William Christopher was as gracious as the character he played.

Utah hearts online porn

Conservative and religious Americans tend to consume more online porn, according to this study (and thanks to Super-Sanctified Susan, Correspondent, who found the information on a break from her constant Bible study).

Utahns (Utahites?) are especially prone (tee-hee! it’s double-entendre night! again!) to the pastime. Eight of the top 10 porn-consuming states voted for John McCain in the last election.

From the study: In states where residents agreed with the sentence ”I have old-fashioned values about family and marriage,” citizens bought 3.6 more porn subscriptions per 1,000 than states where residents skewed liberal. There’s a silver lining, though: Church-goers tended to buy less porn on Sunday, though their consumption the rest of the week made up for the time they spent in church rather than at the keyboard.

Bless their hearts.

UPDATE: A DJ reader respectfully disagrees that the differences are all that significant.

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Dear Baby Jesus, Samurai Version

I don’t know what you’re doing tonight, but “Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby” is on at 7, and I am so there. My favorite scene is, of course, the prayer scene. However, I live in the godless Northeast and when I saw this in the theater with my son, we were the only two laughing.

But I laughed enough for everyone.

Evolution gives me hope

Well, it did after I read this, though the line “our blind iniquities and inequities may produce a biological Armageddon and end our life sentence with a full stop” made me set down the pom-pons a moment, but still.

Look at it this way: We are constantly changing to adapt to our environment. Our current environment — economically speaking — sucks gerbils through a drinking straw (I think that’s the technical description for it). And so we adapt, because we want to survive, and once we’ve adapted, well, we survive.

See? Simple. I feel better. Don’t you?

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When I open my mouth…

…my voice sounds like this.

O.K., that’s only in my head. In reality, I am a faulty and quivering alto.

Do you think, when you get to heaven, you get to have the singing voice you hear in your head? Because mine sounds exactly like Yolanda’s and boy am I going to sing loud.

Shet yer (electronic) piehole

I don’t often find inspiration from the websites I check daily. (So why do I visit them, you ask? Wouldn’t know. Maybe I’m deep like that.)

But. On The Daily Beast, Mark McKinnon calls a halt to our instant-messaging culture. His battle cry is a reaction, in part, to our elected leaders spending too much time Twittering and not enough time listening to their President give his speech earlier this week.

(Which is a tinge ironic. Their President, himself, is known to be devoted to his CrackBerry.)

But unless we’re the leader of the free world, maybe we don’t need to be in touch so much if all we have to say (on Facebook, say) is “Susan is sitting down to eat her meal.” I mean, maybe if I’m eating snakes or something that’s worth sharing. But only snakes and worse.

I’m not sure we live such fascinating lives that we need to chronicle them hour-by-hour. And yet we do. Facebook boasts 175 million users. Not to get all existential, but what is the point of that, d’ya think? And what does it do to the human brain to complete an act, and then hurriedly sit down to record that act, no matter how trivial?

(Full disclosure? I write this as a total hypocrite. I am a Facebook customer — though most days I’m not sure why and most of my Susan is’s are complete fiction.)

The ethics of budgeting

Imagine, if you will, trying to balance a municipal budget when the economy is tanking (my new catch-phrase, also to be read as “the tanking economy,” “we’re doing down,” and “oh shit, it’s over”).

(Can one say “shit” in a blog called “Dating Jesus.” I believe that one can.)

How impossible is it to balance the multiple needs of your citizens, including vulnerable ones for whom the tanking economy (verbal tic) is felt most keenly. Over here you have the homeless, and there are the drug-addicted standing behind the single mothers struggling to pay their heating bills so that their children in subsidized day care centers can sleep comfortably. Outside the door is the line forming for the food pantry, and what about your elders on fixed incomes? Go ahead. Choose the people to whom you’ll say no. And good luck with that.

You need the wisdom of Solomon, only his best-known method of deciding between two tough choices – threatening to chop the baby in half — just won’t, uh, cut it.

To help make those awful decisions, Alexandria, Virginia has hired an ethicist. Michael A. Gillette, president of Bioethical Services of Virginia, Inc., told Sojourners magazine, “In times of fiscal stress, localities are forced to say ‘no’ to some programs that do good work for people in need. The judgments made around these types of decisions are just as much ethical as they are financial or political.”

If not more so. Obviously, any budget created in times of need will disappoint someone, and the choices are untenably hard. We are struggling with this same issue here in Connecticut — both in our state government and our municipal ones – and I bet I could disagree with just about any expenditure proposed in favor of another, equally-deserving expenditure.

But imagine. A budget with ethics.

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They’re out there. Over the lake.

Earlier this week, news reports suggested the presence of Others Out There. This photo was taken by my friend, Alan, who has his own blog and a keen talent for seeing things overhead that the rest of us routinely miss.

He swore on a stack of Bibles he really took this yesterday, over Lake Terramuggus in Marlborough, Conn. Al is a wonderful friend, a twisted bastid, and he is emphatically not a liar. He’s sent the photo to a local weather-guesser to get an idea of just what kind of cloud this is. Barring that, maybe we’ll send it to NASA.

So maybe this is just a cloud floating over the lake on an unseasonably warm day. Or maybe…

“Dating Jesus” is in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch

Years ago, the newspaper wouldn’t give a moment’s notice to my skimpy lil’ resume. I can’t say that I blame them.

And the writer asks precisely the question I’ve often asked myself: For whom did I write this book? Beats me.

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A Holocaust denier steps in it again

Bishop Richard Williamson, who’s put himself and the Roman Catholic Church in hot water by his vocal refusal to accept that six million Jews were killed in the Holocaust, today had his apology refused by the Vatican, which earlier this month had asked for it.

Bishop Williamson apologized for causing hurt, but he did not apologize for his actual original statements that place the number of Jewish dead at 200,000 or 300,000, and refutes the presence of gas chambers entirely.

In reply, the Vatican said that his apology was not adequate.

They take such statements seriously in Germany, where the bishop’s most recent televised interview was conducted. Officials there suggested issuing an arrest warrant for the British citizen, who is back in his homeland after being expelled from Argentina.

Pope Benedict originally suggested the bishop and other ultra-conservative Catholics comeinto the fold after their excommunication in 1988.

The recalcitrant bishop said he might be called a dinosaur or an idiot. I do not understand all the mechanics of the Catholic Church, but I think there’s a far darker word for him.

Here’s a short guide to apologizing, Bible-style.