Because I'm a bad graduate student...

I'm posting here rather than working on my dissertation. It's amazing just how many ways there are not to write your dissertation! The universities should offer a degree in it!

So, the new priest (see all the boo-hooing about losing Fr. Albert below) seems pretty good. There's something really familiar about Fr. Patrick, but I just can't put my finger on where I might know him from.

Everywhere I go right now, there's all sorts of buzz about the new Crunchy Cons book. I'm not linking to it and I won't talk too much about it until I've read it, but the whole thing irritates me. Look, we're crunchy cons by every definition (except the ones with Grateful Dead requirements), but this category just seems to be a new gloss on an old phenomenon: paleoconservativism or traditionalist conservativism. Mr. PL and I have talked quite a bit about this lately and it just seems to us to be a category for people who are conservative, but are also desperate to be cool (where cool seems to mean liked by aging hippies). Plus, all the buzz seems a bit artificial, almost as if some bright ad man has started up some conservative internet street teams to get the word out. Not very crunchy, if you ask me.