Did I overshare? Have some links.

Not a joke. I repeat, this is not a joke.

It got really quiet last week, after I put up that last post.  Maybe I should have given that one a bit more forethought, at least before sharing it on Facebook.

Oh, well, what’s done is done.  I’m putting together a link salad post, trying to make it up to you.

Vision Forum is going to stop selling Elsie Dinsmore books.  If you have no idea what I’m talking about, or why I think that’s good news – you have never lived in conservative homeschool world.  My blogger friend Karen Allen Campbell explains it all for you.  Prepare to be creeped out by what some people consider appropriate fiction for children.

Have you seen the Cheerios commercial featuring the interracial family?  Did it strike you as a bold move in promoting the purchasing and eating of Cheerios?  Me, too.  But it turns out that there is a crack team of highly trained racists policing the internet day and night, making the world seem completely hopeless.  Here’s one sharp, poignant response Meagan Hatcher-Mays at Jezebel, but fair warning – it’s got strong language.

I wrote a review of the movie What Maisie Knew, which opened last weekend.  It’s such a good movie!!!!  Onata Aprile will break your heart.  But if you’d like a bit more detail to entice you to the theater, read my review at Zeke Film.

Articles about body image are so very common, but these two are well worth your time – especially if you’re a mom.  Kasey Edwards writes on what our daughters learn from us in her piece When Your Mother Says She’s Fat, and Allison Tate writes The Mom Stays in the Picture.  Guilty as charged on both counts, but I’m setting a goal of having my picture taken with each of my children this next week.  I’ll do my best not to delete them.

Apparently it’s never to early to teach your children just how scary other Christians can be.  I’m a monster!  At least that seems to be the lesson of the spectacularly titled:  Help, Mom!  There are Arminians Under My Bed!  (photo at the top of the post).  Readers at Spiritual Sounding Board were inspired to imagine their own Calvinist childrens books, which led to this.  I’ve got my own suggestions:  “Charlotte’s Web of Pelagianism”, “Alexander and His Terrible, Horrible, No-good, Human Depravity, and “Cloudy with a Foreordained Certainty of Meatballs”.  Anyone else want to play?

Patrick Stewart:  best Star Trek captain ever, and based on this clip, a truly decent guy.  God bless him.

Finally, I love Ira Glass and This American Life.  I stumbled, happily, on some clips from an interview that Jim Henderson did with Glass and it confirmed why I like him so much.  In one of the clips Henderson observes that Glass has a “capacity to be nonthreatened” by those who are different than he is – a rare thing!  In another clip, when explaining why Christianity is usually treated so graciously on This American Life, Glass (himself an atheist) says that he is intrigued by Christians.  I wish more people were like this when it comes to communicating with those who are “different” – not threatened and adversarial, but interested and willing to listen.  There’s more where these clips came from….