Blogroll

Goldarn and fudge you SNL

This week governmentattic.org (“Rummaging in the government’s attic”) released a response from the Federal Communications Commission to a Freedom of Information Act request for complaints filed about Saturday Night Live. With a cover letter dated “December 21, 2021,” the FCC provided more than 350 pages of documents, which also covered a request for complaints regarding […]

The pornographic Renaissance book that originated in the Vatican

You’re moving into a new home, so you hire the skilled artist who decorated your current house to decorate your new home. For whatever reason, you fall behind paying him. Explicit drawings of 16 positions for sexual intercourse are on your walls when you go to see his work.

That’s reportedly the situation Pope Clement […]

Look who’s caving

I shook my head when I saw the lede in a USA Today article in this morning’s local daily: “The Western world stood up against Islamic terrorism Wednesday after 12 people, including four cartoonists, were assassinated in the offices of French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo outside Paris.” Fact is, akin to Sony and the movie […]

Anniversary of a banned American classic

This week marked the 75th anniversary of the publication of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. Normally, what comes to mind is the book’s portrayal of the plight created by the Dust Bowl years of the Depression. Yet it stands for another object lesson about America. It was banned — and burned — in the […]

2012’s most challenged books

Each year during National Library Week, the American Library Association releases a State of America’s Libraries report. One of the highlights (or lowlights) is that it contains the Top Ten List of Most Frequently Challenged Books, compiled annually by the organization’s Office for Intellectual Freedom. So here’s this year’s “winners”, in order, and the reasons […]