Sunday in Outer Blogness: A Day Late and a Dollar Short Edition!

Well it’s a day late anyway, and it’s short in the sense that my pattern-seeking brain had a little trouble finding a theme to the posts of Outer Blogness this week. I finally found a couple of little themes. The first was people sharing their favorite holiday music. The Urban Koda is throwing off Scrooge with tunes from Eric Cartman and others. Djinn provides a series of surprisingly soulful holiday favorites. And the London Gay Men’s Chorus sings us something seasonal.

The real surprise musical entry, however, was from Orrin Hatch!! Yes the Republican senator from Utah! He’s totally going rogue on the whole Christmas-is-the-only-holiday! crowd by writing a song to wish you a Happy Hanukkah!


Good for you Orrin! Unlike some other Christmas warriors, who got pissed off at the Gap for daring to mention Hanukkah and other holidays alongside the almighty Christmas — as though they were all joyful winter holidays that people celebrate during some sort of festive “holiday season” or something.

The other theme I found was sort of a “Who am I?” thing. G posted a provocative image about women’s work and identity. Hackman isn’t sure about wearing the label Christian because of some of the things it has lately come to mean. Interestingly, I see a little bit of a parallel with the label “Feminist”. Since women make up more than 50% of the worlds population — hence have very diverse needs and interests — you will find people calling themselves feminists while argue things that you totally disagree with. For me, I don’t think that’s a reason to reject the label “feminist.” Your mileage may vary, though. I was just thinking about this because of Michelle’s post on labels which has kind of an interesting connection with her earlier post on feminism that I linked to a couple weeks ago.

On a related note, there’s been some philosophical discussion of people’s relationship with religion and uncertainty: codependency, peace, purpose, and, well, more uncertainty.

OK, one more topic: sex. Is sex ed a health issue or a moral issue? This is one point where I feel like the faithful are living in some sort of parallel universe — so close to ours and yet completely reversed. (I kept wanting to comment on that Segullah thread, but I could hardly find a scrap of common ground to begin on…)

Lastly, I was disappointed by New Moon because some of the threads about it seemed to indicate that — as entertaining as the Twilight discussion can be — it’s not an endless wellspring. Now it seems like all of the possible points that can be made about it have been made. Several times. Then Kuri came up with an amusing new one! 😀

That’s it for this week. This (SiOB) feature is going to be a little irregular for the next few weeks (while I’m traveling across the US and Europe for the holidays and then moving back to Switzerland), so please bear with me. And be sure to tell your dad and mommika to have a Happy Hanukkah!