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My piece earlier this week entitled "Biting the Hand," about the PBS documentary Hand of God, is getting some attention, from no less than the film's director. (Okay, so I may have slipped a notice to the film's producer, but still...) The comments box also has a retort from someone who has had to endure the slings and arrows of hecklers while attending Mass at the cathedral in Boston.

FoxNews commentator Bill O'Reilly and Comedy Central's own Stephen Colbert have been sparring in the most recent news cycle. You can find two clips that bring the house down at Hot Air.

There is a fascinating piece on the historical role of the cantor at New Liturgical Movement. It should be required reading for everybody who waves their hands in front of Catholics on a Sunday morning and thinks they're doing them a favor. Also worth reading is a piece on historical models of the church musician by László Dobszay.

I have to move a couch tomorrow, an improvement over what I have now. It doesn't have a fold-out bed. But it's a "lazy-boy" type that has reclining sections. And it's also long enough that a grown man can fall asleep on it. That should come in handy for those nights I fall asleep watching a movie. I'm sure Paul will approve. He's such a party dog!

Some of you may remember that I'm studying JavaScript right now at the Art Institute. The professor is a software engineer from Haiti. He's a decent fellow, and explains things very well. But the subject is so damned dense that it's all I can do to focus. If you knew how many meds I was on, you'd know how tall an order that is. Right now I have a 3.8 GPA. I'd like to graduate with honors when this is over. I just might be thrilled with a "B" after this.

It's very cold across much of the USA these days. Not much snow, though, and I was getting reports of Scout units cancelling ski trips left and right. But the weatherman has been singing a different tune of late, and some of those trips are back on. Meanwhile, it's rechartering time again. This year, they're telling the unit commissioners that they have to visit their units to pick up the material (applications, rosters, hundreds of dollars in checks, that sort of thing), rather than conduct a central drop-off point. Apparently we don't look busy enough.

Art Buchwald died yesterday. He will be lauded by pundits and poets alike, especially here in Washington, where he was much loved. I can't say I followed his career very closely, but to me this longtime Georgetown resident is a symbol of a time when Georgetown was still Georgetown. The locals could see Art and his buddies, some famous and some merely remarkable, sitting in a local tavern or barber shop. I didn't know him, but I knew those who were cut from the same cloth. It's been fourteen years since I knew the city within a city as home, and I miss them all to this day.

And so it goes...