Shames (Three Different Ones)

Here are three links to make you more disappointed in your fellow man.

First, with a hat tip to John Cole at Balloon Juice, is a Christmas decoration for the "there's a war on Christmas!" crowd.

Cole puts it well:

In all seriousness, I guess you can’t expect people who reject evolution, who think the world was created 6,000 years ago, and who think Adam and Eve roamed the world with dinosaurs to know anything about basic American history, can you?

Next, via Andrew Sullivan, we have a head-slappingly inane piece of exercise equipment.



Words fail. Buildings tumble. The ground opens wide. I'm hopeful that the looming depression will kill this thing dead, for the sake of the species and for civilization.

Finally, found originally on Joe. My. God., The New Yorker spends some time with Prince and discovers that along with his conversion to Jehovah's Witness, he's not so cool with the gays:

He pointed to a Bible. “But there’s the problem of interpretation, and you’ve got some churches, some people, basically doing things and saying it comes from here, but it doesn’t. And then on the opposite end of the spectrum you’ve got blue, you’ve got the Democrats, and they’re, like, ‘You can do whatever you want.’ Gay marriage, whatever. But neither of them is right.” When asked about his perspective on social issues—gay marriage, abortion—Prince tapped his Bible and said, “God came to earth and saw people sticking it wherever and doing it with whatever, and he just cleared it all out. He was, like, ‘Enough.’ ”

Prince's spokesbots have claimed that he was misquoted or taken out of context. But Coates points out that the New Yorker fact-checkers are famously stringent. Also, the quote is remarkably specific, and seems to include its context. Super-disappointing. Way more than when I found out Beck is a lifelong Scientologist. Disappointing that the guy responsible for some of the most perfect pop music in the last 30 years, much of it highly popular in dance clubs, which figure in some way, as I understand it, into gay culture (I mean, I guess), is a total phobe. I'm reminded of when my music history prof. in college (himself of Russian Jewish heritage) got to Richard Wagner: he implored a separation of the music and the man. Just because Wagner was in some ways a horrible person doesn't make the Siegfried Idyll not beautiful or the Prelude to the third act of Lohengrin not stirring. With that in mind, I present some of the great work of an idiot with backwards views on homosexuality:

Watch more Purple Rain videos on AOL Video