Polemics

There's something to get every head scratching today....

The New York Times has done it again, reporting on that which we didn't know we needed to know. Today's news: the latest Newberry Award winning children's novel The Higher Power of Lucky is embroiled in controversy. The word scrotum appears twice on the very first page. Yup, you read that right. Twice. It's used three times more within a page. Would it have been less problematic if the scrotum had waited until page two to appear?

Let's see, what else is going on in the literary world? Here's an interesting book: Letter to a Christian Nation. This book is a response to the response author Sam Harris got after his previous book. He's got a bit of an axe to grind. See if you can figure out what the previous book was about, and what the complaints centered on. Letter begins...

Thousands of people have written to tell me that I am wrong not to believe in God. The most hostile of these communications have come from Christians. This is ironic, as Christians generally imagine that no faith imparts the virtues of love and forgiveness more effectively than their own. The truth is that many who claim to be transformed by Christ's love are deeply, even murderously, intolerant of criticism. While we may want to ascribe this to human nature, it is clear that such hatred draws considerable support from the Bible. How do I know this? The most disturbed of my correspondents always cite chapter and verse.

As outrageous as this opening paragraph is, the end there kind of makes me chuckle. And since we're talking outrageous today, check out this list of "outrageous" media comments from 2006 (the ever-polemical Ann Coulter is well represented in the list). Or here is a list of webpages that have been tagged (labeled) as "outrageous" by del.icio.us users. Thoroughly useless but kinda amusing. Enjoy.