Diary, Curious News
Until a few weeks ago, I was an innocent virgin as far as the brave new world of fertility clinics was concerned. Now I am thinking about quitting my day job and becoming a professional sperm donor. Granted, I don’t have the brains of Albert Einstein or the athleticism of Roger Federer. But the first is dead and the second is presently too busy playing tennis to spend his days filling test tubes with genetic material. That leaves me to fulfill the wishes of infertile couples all over the world. In former times only sultans could father 170 children; now anyone who is deemed a genetically superior human being by a fertility clinic can become the biological father of hundreds of children. But after reading the facinating story about fertility clinics in a recent issue of the NY Times (see below), I am a bit worried about 200 children knocking one day on my door, asking me to babysit my uncountable number of grandchildrenMy Sperm as Big Business
Diary, Astute Observations
I always found it curious that fundamental Christians preferred in large numbers Republicans over Democrats. After all, the core values of the democratic party seem to be much more in tune with Christianity. At least one evangelic pastor woke up recently and remembered that Christians are supposed to support peace and not war. Read this interesting Op-ed piece in the NY Times of January 20, 2006.Is Christianity Compatible with Republican Values?
Diary, Astute Observations
What makes it so difficult to interpret how people in former times have thought about the human condition is that words change their meanings over time, sometimes morphing into the exact opposite of what they originally meant. As I just learned by reading in ‘The Economist’ a review of “Happiness: A History, ” the word “happiness” has changed its meaning considerably. I didn’t quite realize until today that if God wants speaks directly to people or at least their prophets, he or she has to master the idiom of a given age. To come across as really cool, God could walk up to a woman today and say, “Hey man, what’s up.” If God had done this two thousand years ago, a woman would likely have replied: “Almighty, I am sorry, but you are mistaken. I am a woman and not a man!”Happiness Through the Ages
Diary, Astute Observations
Adam Kirsch in his Dec 5, 2005, review in the New Yorker of Juliet Barker’s new biography Wordsworth: A Life writes that Woodsworth believed that the soul, uncontaminated by wealth and unperverted by extreme poverty, is essentially good; more, that it is part of a universal frame of goodndess, which can also also be glimpseed in mountains and rivers, animals and plants. Sin and death have no dominion over this goodness, which lies just underneath the surface of things, always ready to receive us. To support this interpretation, he provides these lines by the poet: ‘Tis Nature’s lawWilliam Wordsworth on Good and Evil
That none, the meanest of created things,
Of forms created the most vile and brute,
The dullest or most noxious, should exist
Divorced from good—a spirit and pulse
of good,
A life and soul, to every mode of being
Inseparably linked.
Diary, Astute Observations
DANIEL MARK EPSTEIN explains in the WSJ review of “The Power of Movies” what happens when we are at the movies. Seduced, disturbed, beguiled—something strange and compelling happens when we watch a movie: When my daughter was four years old, we took her to see “The Wizard of Oz.” She emerged from the darkness transformed: For the next half-year, we had to set an extra place at the table for the Scarecrow, who had become her constant friend. The girl had gone so deeply into the world of the movie we wondered if she would ever return. Her experience had a certain resonance for me. The first movie I ever saw was “Hans Christian Andersen,” starring the golden-haired Danny Kaye. Since then I have never seriously considered any career other than the writer’s trade. If my first movie had been “High Noon,” would I have wanted to be a gunslinger? Or “The Red Shoes”—would it have made a ballet dancer of me?Transfixed in the Cineplex
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