Art

The Magdalene Sisters Documentary

I wrote a few months back about the Magdelene Laundries – In Mid-20th Century Ireland (until the last one closed in 1996), the Catholic Church ran commercial laundries, run by nuns, that were essentially prisons for wayward girls, who were deposited there by their families when they became pregnant, got in trouble or otherwise upset society.

The story of these prisons is now being told in a British documentary, Sex in a Cold Climate by Steven Humphries, and was then made into an award-winning (but denounced by the Catholic Church, big surprise) movie, The Magdalene Sisters by Peter Mullens, which is currently playing in the United States. I happened to run across an interesting article about the movie in Slate, and it occurred to me that, had I been born a few years earlier and in the wrong country, I would have been one of those girls.

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Bush’s “Terror Futures” Market: Betting on your loved one’s deaths

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Until the project was hastily killed yesterday; Pentagon bureaucrats were busily building a new Web site where we could all invest in the future of terrorism. Their “Policy Analysis Market” (funded by the Bush White House and thought up by criminal John Pointdexter) would have encouraged betting on the likelihood of assassinations, mass murders and other unnatural disasters. The Pentagon called its latest idea a new way of predicting events and part of its search for the “broadest possible set of new ways to prevent terrorist attacks.”

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Canadian Idol

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I’m sorry but the phrase “Canadian Idol” just doesn’t have the same ring to it. It sounds too much like “Canadian Bacon.” Plus, the contestants look like what you would get if you had, say, “Indiana Idol.” They are quite average-looking people. Apparently American has more than it’s fair share of hotties.

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Mel Gibson is a Total Nutjob

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Holy crap. What a fucking moron.

Gibson’s theology, writes Christopher Noxon in the New York Times, “is a strain of Catholicism rooted in the dictates of a 16th-century papal council and nurtured by a splinter group of conspiracy-minded Catholics, mystics, monarchists and disaffected conservatives — including a seminary dropout and rabble-rousing theologist who also happens to be Mel Gibson’s father.”

In the 1992 El Pais interview, Gibson said that “For 1,950 years [the church] does one thing and then in the 60s, all of a sudden they turn everything inside out and begin to do strange things that go against the rules.

“Everything that had been heresy is no longer heresy, according to the [new] rules. We [Catholics] are being cheated. … The church has stopped being critical. It has relaxed. I don’t believe them, and I have no intention of following their trends. It’s the church that has abandoned me, not me who has abandoned it,” he said.

I will never see any of his movies again.

(2014 Update: And I haven’t, either.)

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