The Forbes Fictional 15. Santa Claus tops the list this year with Lex Luthor coming in a disappointing #4. Bruce Wayne holds at #8. Lucius Malfoy clings to the final slot.

From Galley Friend D.B.:

From today’s Washington Post:

Kennedy said in a statement yesterday that Alito “bears an especially heavy burden at the hearings in January to explain the growing number of discrepancies between his current statements and his past actions.”

“He told senators that he wasn’t involved in Thornburgh , yet a detailed memo was released [Wednesday] showing that he was,” Kennedy said. “In 1990, he said he’d recuse himself from all cases involving Vanguard. Yet he didn’t and has changed his story as to why six times. Its not the crime, its the cover up.”

It’s not the crime, it’s the cover up. Says TED KENNEDY.

Words fail me.

Excellent point.

Maybe Brendon Donnelly should stop publishing his work on a blog and start placing it with Nature or JAMA:

Scientists with clip boards and bunsen burners have proven that the Way of the Gun is the greatest movie ever made. And Ryan Philippe was at the heart of it. For the record, his name was Mr. Parker. His associate was Mr. Longbow. Why this guy isn’t a huge star is beyond me. He’s a great actor and apparently super dreamy too, considering he’s not that well known and still topped Pitt, Cruise and Depp. Are you listening Hollywood, or are you just gonna keep casting asexual droopy eyed freak Jake Gyllenhaal. The guy looks like a fucking hammerhead. Hes the only person alive who could play Admiral Ackbar with no-makeup.

Sign me up for the peer review.

Okay, fine. Now that it’s December I can no longer hold back talking about college hoops. Yes, this is when I attempt to turn this blog into one giant Hoya chatroom. So here goes:

In the first year of Coach John Thompson III, the Georgetown Hoyas, coming off their worst season since 1973, managed to win 19 games, including a couple in the Not-In-Tournament tournament. And while the two previous coaches were criticized for cupcake preseason schedules, the current coach should hear nothing of the sort. As JT3 told ESPN.com‘s Jeff Shelman, “The nature of our schedule is that we can have some tough times…. We realized that when we put it together. But at the end of the day, we have to be prepared for the Big East–and hopefully we will.”

That preparation includes more away games in December than any other school in the Big East, a trip this Saturday to Oregon, next Thursday at no. 12 Illinois, and a game against the Duke Blue Devils in January. Thompson knows his team cannot afford to take it easy against usual suspects like Bethune-Cookman, Marymount, and St. Leo’s–not in a Big East that now includes Louisville and Marquette, let alone UConn and Villanova.

“Our [long-term] goal is not to get to the tournament, it’s to win the tournament. But you have to take steps along the way. It’s a first step,” he tells ESPN. Compare those sentiments with (now former) GU athletic director Joe Lang, who just two years ago said it was “unrealistic” to expect Georgetown to make it to the Big Dance every year.

Of course, not everyone thinks a tougher preseason is the right way to go. One former coach called Thompson “a fool.” Nevertheless, says Thompson, “What other people think does not matter. It’s up to that group of people that’s in that gym right now.”

Besides that, the former coach who called him a fool happens to be his father.

Reuters reports on the ground-breaking face transplant operation that took place in France last Sunday. Naturally, there are ethical issues: “Did the patient give adequately informed consent to the procedure? Did she understand the risks and implications of the transplant?” asked one doctor. Adds an ethicist: “…it is likely that the families of the deceased donor may be exposed to images of the recipient and this is likely to present particular difficulties for them.” There are potential medical complications as well, such as if the body’s immune system rejects the new facial cells over time.

Not that any of this is new. A few years ago, law enforcement agents, investigating a bioterror plot in Los Angeles, actually managed to switch the face of one of its officers with that of a leading terror suspect. Unfortunately the terrorist awoke from his coma, secured the face of the officer, and wreaked all sorts of havoc until the two eventually faced off and shot the hell out of each other amid flying pigeons.

Christian Lowe, a good friend and a great reporter, has set up a blog called Nom de Guerre to chronicle his travels in Iraq, where he’ll be for the next several weeks. He knows what he’s talking about, he’s got a good eye, and his judgment is right on, so it’ll be very interesting to read his dispatches. You’ll thank yourself if you bookmark his page or, better yet, sign up for his RSS feed. Here’s a bit from his layover in Kuwait:

Today we’re doing a bit of last minute admin stuff — Rob’s buying a pair of “shower shoes” at the chi chi Burkenstock shop downstairs; I’m trying to convince him to buy the fruitiest ones they have so the Marines will make fun of him “yeah, the bright yellow ones look awsome! No No, they won’t think it’s wierd, man. Don’t worry…” (he he he)…And I’m writing emails and updating my contacts and stuff. We’ll repack our stuff (we had to cross-pack a bunch of gear to make the maximum weight requirements for our commercial flight) then meet with the military guy arranging our flight out. Supposedly we meet the KBR (contractor) bus tonight in the wee hours to drive to some American airbase here, then fly at “o-dark thirty” into Baghdad. Then we’re supposed to link up with another group at the airport who will load us onto a Mad Max-esque armored bus appropriately called the “Rhino” that will take us into the “Green Zone” where we’ll get our press credentials…then we are due to fly to Ramadi to meet up with the Marines on the 4th.

It’s going to be dynamite reporting.

Eve Tushnet has been writing some tough things about the Catholic Church and homosexuality. This post is a good place to start:

More crucially, one of the most beautiful and hopeful doctrines of the Catholic Church is the distinction between behavior and worth. You aren’t valuable because you have never screwed up, or because everything you do and believe is right. You’re valuable because you were created by a God Who loves you, Who cherishes you and longs for you. If you take every chastisement based on behavior as an attack on your personal worth, you are a) a Pelagian (believing people get saved because they’re so cool and special) and/or b) rejecting the possibility that God sees past your behavior, sees down to the core of you, wants you, loves you, but doesn’t ever agree that everything you do is right. God is not an idolater. God’s constant lament to His beloved is, “Baby, don’t be that way!”

A political and (more importantly) cultural movement has sprung up to convince those of us with strong (I guess the word this season is “deep-seated”; it’s the new black!) homosexual attractions that God couldn’t possibly want us not to act on those attractions. Because it hurts too much to give it up? Because it seems so necessary or central to our identities? If those are the reasons people resist, I guess I just want to remind them that people every single day embrace varying kinds of sacrifice–slow or fast, honored or humiliating–and if you want anything resembling a functioning culture (let alone a Catholic one) you need people who can say that “It hurts” isn’t an argument. Every functioning culture relies on a core of people who can accept that life, or God, or whatever they believe in, will ask them to do things they would never have believed possible; and they do them. Every day. Policemen and policemen’s wives; soldiers and soldiers’ husbands; saints and martyrs; pregnant women in desperate circumstances; everyone who suffers and whose suffering would be eased by just a little wrong action, just a small palliative sin.

But this post is really something of a marvel. For all my caterwauling about bloggers talking too much about themselves, this is the exception to the rule; it’s a simple, beautiful, and honest piece of witness:

I know I find it relatively easy to believe the Church about homosexuality, as vs. believing the culture in which I was raised, in large part because I never for a moment believed I was intrinsically good. I never believed that the fact that I really, deeply wanted something made that thing good. I found the Catholic understanding of the Fall–that we are neither good nor bad, but Fallen–astonishing and hopeful.

Read that again. It’s important.

This seems like a promising development.