I loved when Hank Hill dreamed about meeting Willie Nelson and mentioned that he had been to or seen every installment of Farm Aid, then added, "I don't care much for that Bryan Adams, though…"

My brother used to add his action-figure of A-Team-era Mr. T to our nativity scene. Every year it was a battle of wills with him and Mom: she didn't know exactly when Mr. T would make his appearance; and my brother didn't know how long he would remain there before being discovered.

I think it's because the verses are couched in the language of loss that we usually associate with death. That is, when a loved on dies, it's common to hear someone say that he or she is now in heaven, "watching over us." In this song, it's easy to imagine that the "Every breath you take…" lines are spoken by one…

You want the most laughably non-action-movie songs in action movies? Check out the end credits to First Blood and Rambo: First Blood, Part II.

The Human Race:

Hey, at least you guys stopped him. Seriously, with all the posts about how awful these news stories are, your story is the flip-side: there are lots of people out there who, given the chance, will intervene to stop something terrible from happening.

Not that people dying from drug- or alcohol-related reasons is good, by any means, but I find the reports of people doing violence to each other much more upsetting. If someone has so much to drink that he just up and dies, well, we can imagine that he made some really stupid decisions and it's a real shame that that…

Booze + summer heat + drugs = lots of bad stuff

Europeans seem to be less bloodthirsty than Americans, too. Not that it's always been that way, but I think they got it out of their system by (1) killing the fuck out of each other for millennia, and eventually setting up literal factories of death by the mid-20th century, and (2) encouraging most of their "problem…

There's a lot of truth to this. I think back to the hovels I was willing to live in when I was in college, and I begin to realize how a person can contract various water-borne diseases whose vectors I couldn't comprehend at the time.

When I was in the age demographic that mattered for music, electronic music was definitely not the style of choice for frat boys, jocks, wanna-be tough guys, or other macho posers. What's next? People wilding to an Enya album?

Catholicism (and maybe all Christianity) is, in my mind, always at its best when it represents the poor and oppressed, and perhaps most especially when the Church itself is repressed, outlawed, and even driven underground. This probably goes back to the religion's founding, when it was a fugitive movement, hiding…

Regardless of country, wherever the sex and child molestation scandals have surfaced, the good priests are the people we've barely heard anything about. We've heard from the victims, of course, as is only right, and from the mendacious Church leadership who seemed to have seized every opportunity for moral and legal…

A lot of Catholic missionary work is supported by the Church in that they are usually led by religious orders, which receive donations; and the individual missions also often seek direct donations. Every now and then at just about any American parish, they'll take up a collection for the missions. I always assumed…

Interesting that you mentioned this, since yesterday at Mass, the celebrant was a guest, a Franciscan priest who works as a missionary in Morocco. He explained that the laws of Morocco are such that citizens of that country can only be Muslims, but people of other faiths (Christianity, at least) are tolerated, and…

I notice that lately he's also been adding a dead bald eagle somewhere on the ground.

This is extra funny because I just finished reading a half-dozen Onion policitcal cartoons, and this would be a perfect quip for "Kelly" to make, down in the lower-right corner.

Hey, I'm not in your fucking army!

…appearance ends in bizarre and upsetting stream of obscenities and racial slurs.

Lou Bega approves, reminds world he is not dead!