The matchflick column is here:  http://www.matchflick.com/column/1882

I reported a little while ago on Atwood not attending a conference in Dubai because the conference censored an author whose book had a gay muslim character.  Atwood (and the rest of us) have since learned that the conference says they didn’t censor the book or author, but that they did not choose the book for inclusion in the festival.  The author seems to have exaggerated.  Atwood is going to appear at the conference via satellite for a panel on censorship.

I think there’s going to be a lot to talk about.  Her own book, The Handmaid’s Tale, is still under review by a school system after a challenge.  Part of that book was inspired by Atwood’s visit to Islamic countries and her experimentation with a burka.

Also, while the conference says it didn’t censor the other author’s book, one interview I read did say that a conference organizer felt the text was “too controversial.”  As we asked in book group last night, what’s the line between “I censor your book!” and “Sorry, due to its content, we won’t work with this book–it’s too controversial/thought-provoking”?

1.  That re-communicated bishop I wrote about has been charged to disavow his denial of the Holocaust.  (See the story here:  http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7869995.stm).  Interestingly, he is not being called on to disavow any of his sexist shit.  He doesn’t believe women should wear pants.  I’d like to sick the ghosts of Katharine Hepburn and George Bernard Shaw on him.  It’s also fascinating that the Pope apparently didn’t know he’d been saying all those anti-Semitic things.  Isn’t the Pope infallible?  Oh, wait, if he were, this guy wouldn’t need to be re-communicated.

2.  Obama has signed into legislation a bill that will grant insurance to a bunch of children.  I am all for this, and for the eventual plan to have everyone covered.  However, I find it odd that we always take care of the children first.  I know that it’s easier to make people care about abstract children than abstract adults, but adults are more likely to get seriously ill as their bodies fall apart.  And if the adult in a child’s life is ill, that child suffers big time.  Won’t somebody please think of the adults?

3.  I heard Heart’s “All I Wanna Do Is Make Love to You” in the car today.  I have three problems with this song.  You know the story, right?  A woman picks up a hitchhiker and fucks him for a night and then she runs into him years later.  She has had his child, and says she only slept with him because her partner was incapable of providing said child.  Fine.  But she says, “We made love–love like strangers.”  Um, they were strangers.  It wasn’t “like” they were strangers.  Second, she said “I am the flower, you are the seed, we walked in the garden, we planted a tree.”  Has this woman not taken any biology classes?  Middle school bio will tell you this isn’t how you plant a tree.  Third (and this is not a writing problem), I remember when this song came out and all these guys would dedicate this song to their girlfriends.  Presumably because they had only listened to the title of the song.  Or else there were a bunch of sperm-lacking men who were comfortable enough about it to make songs suggesting they be cuckholded.

4.  If you haven’t seen them, there are two souces of internet fun you need to see.  www.escapistmagazine.com has two weekly series.  Zero Punctuation is a review of video games by a brilliant, funny Brit who lives in Aussie Land.  I don’t even play video games, but I love this series, mostly because of the analogies (he makes fun of his own analogies this week).  Unskippable is a new series that does the MST3K thing to video game opening stories.  Again, you don’t have to be a nerd, you just have to have a sense of humor.  Most videos are only five minutes.  Enjoy!

The Zero Punctuation guy's basic relationship to most games

The Pope just re-communicated four bishops who were excommunicated in the 1980s. Richard Williamson, one of the four, is a holocaust denier and thinks 9/11 was a zionist plot. While he’s been vocal about these things for years, since he gave an anti-semitic talk this week, people are upset about the timing of the re-communication (know a better term? I don’t).

First: this has nothing to do with timing. He’s been a bigot and an idiot 24/7 for years. If the issue is his belief about Jews, then what week he gets reinstated shouldn’t have anything to do with the complaints against the church now.

Second: but, his excommunication didn’t have anything to do with his beliefs about the Jews. It was because he saw the church as becoming too liberal and he joined a splinter group of traditionalists. Now that we have a very traditional Pope, it makes sense for him to be brought back in.

Third: after all, you can be a bigot and an idiot and be a Catholic; you just aren’t supposed to go against whatever they’re for at the moment.

Theoretically, excommunication comes if you’re a heretic. To be a heretic (by the way, that word comes from the Greek for choice), you have to have a member of the Church tell you what to believe and then refuse to believe it. This is what distinguishes it from paganism, etc.

As far as I know, Catholics still have the choice to not believe in the holocaust. Has there been an official position on that?

P.S.  I’m not defending this guy; I’m just questioning the logic of the complaints.  If I got to design hell, he would be in it, along with a bunch of other stupid/evil people.

My friend Afzal asked me yesterday what I thought Cheney might do now.  Here are my top five ideas:

1. He will retire to an undisclosed location to ponder whether his nickname is unfortunate, if fitting.

2. He will start construction on the third Death Star.

3. He will hide in his man-size safe to wait out the racial civil war my mother assures me is coming.

4. He will wait for someone to ask him who to hire for a powerful job and then nominate himself.

5. After taking off his human camouflage, he will return to his planet of Predators a failure.  While he hunted the most dangerous game–man–he did not get a kill shot.

1. I was not impressed when Wolf Blitzer told me that they could show me what the Mall would look like if I were watching the inaugeration from a plane overhead. Methinks CNN believes random technology is a replacement for coverage.

2. I was happy that they did not have that stupid crawl on today. The crawl started right after 9/11, when there was news other than 9/11, but we couldn’t talk about anything else. 9/11 is over and there isn’t usually enough news in the day (that the American press will cover), so they need to get rid of the words at the bottom of the screen. I get distracted from what they’re saying because I see ” . . . Madonna’s elbow” and then I have to wait until it comes around again.

3. I can’t help but think that Justice Roberts was trying to ruin Obama’s mojo on purpose.

4. Great music, which is why Wolf Blitzer needed to shut up about the “president at noon” thing. He said that about every fifteen minutes.

5. The preachers did a great job. And I say that as a woman who doesn’t generally believe what they do.

6. I liked Obama’s nomination acceptance speech better than this one–the former was longer and more specific.

7. Obama said “forebearers” instead of “forefathers.” Right on!

8. Am glad that Obama mentioned that some people didn’t have faith (a shout out to the atheists), but he only mentioned a couple of the “major” religions. Would be pissed if I were Hindu.

9. Atheists need to come out of the closet. When Julia Sweeney “lost” her faith, her father said he wishes she’d come out as lesbian instead, because that was “socially acceptable.” We need to fight for the right to be a humanist/naturalist (even if we aren’t–we need to fight for the rights of others in the land of the free.)

10. Bush looked a little pissed when Obama said some things that went against Bush’s policies.

11. Obama is President! Woohoo!