Linkage

The blogosphere has been buzzing over Roger Ebert's amazing smack down of Rob Schneider. Seems Schneider took issue with comments from the LA Times' Patrick Goldstien (whom I like a lot) about his latest film: Deuce Bigalo - European Gigalo and took out ads in the trade papers to say so. Goldstien has ignored him, but Ebert has risen to Goldstein's defense. Go read it now, along with able comments from Patrick Nielson Hayden at Making Light.

Nielson Hayden also links to an article in the Salt Lake Tribune which suggest that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, the Mormons, may not be growing as quickly as commonly believed, or as asserted by LDS officials. Hmm.

Fascinating post from Mark Kleiman. He offers a contrafactual historical proposal - "What would the religious map of Europe look like today if the English Civil War had taken place a decade earlier, putting well-disciplined English troops into the field on the Protestant side of the Thirty Years' War?" This post has a number of fascinating responses.

Eszter at Crooked Timber gives a shout out to blogger (and sociologist!) Jeremy Freese (and sociologist!) who is was having trouble getting his sofa into a new apartment, and then goes on to sharing and soliciting bad moving stories.

I'm not sure how I found her (could be Susan Kitchens) but I love mimi smartypants. (The penguins are not new. In fact, given the tone of the site, I suspect she may be thinking about losing the penguins now that that movie is so popular). This a typical entry:

Here is another thing that was much, much funnier in my brain than it was in real life:

Coworker: What does it mean when your cat starts pooping a lot?
Me: What does it mean?
Coworker: Yeah.
Me: Are you thinking symptom or omen?

And then I got the big snorting giggles while she stood there waiting for me to stop and engage in friendly workplace pet-discussion. Maybe I have just been damaged from my Classics major, but I love picturing some haruspex of excrement shouting, "Sire! The cat poop bodes ill today!"