Wow:

And yet, when you read the Gospels, you find something very strange. Jesus barely mentions marriage. He never married. He demanded of all his disciples that they abandon their own families and wives, without even saying goodbye. He was openly contemptuous toward his own mother and father in adolescence and early adulthood. His fundamental response to adultery was forgiveness of the adulterer and suspicion of the morally superior. His contemporaries must have regarded him as illegitimate, since he was conceived out of wedlock. So this illegitimate, single man who broke up family after family, whose closest female friend was a childless former prostitute, who scandalously stayed alone in the home of two unmarried women, who offended every family value of the time … has been turned into the chief architect of “family values!”

How you like them apples?

Since my colleague decided to bring it up, I discovered a terrific site for anyone who spent time on the Jersey shore and either had enough courage to visit Brigantine Castle or is still traumatized by the commercials. (I would be in the latter.) Enjoy.

This story about a Great White shark attack at the New Jersey shore makes an obvious error:

Great whites are not uncommon off New Jersey. Bob Schoelkopf, director of the Marine Mammal Stranding Center in Brigantine, said he believed great whites frequently come to Brigantine Bay to give birth in the spring.

Obviously the Great Whites are drawn to Brigantine not by an urge to spawn, but by the evil pull of that town’s famous haunted castle.

Galley Friend L.B. sends along this Washington Post story on grade inflation, a subject about which I’m quite conflicted.

On the one hand, my undergraduate career was somewhat hampered by attending a university which did not truck much with grade inflation–my graduating class’s mean GPA was something near 2.70, meaning that one could graduate in the top 10 percent of the class and still be barely at a 3.5.

Many is the time I’ve cursed grade inflation and the grade-grubbing runts who chase after it.

But on the other hand . . . what good are undergraduate grades, anyway? The only use they really have is as a metric for graduate school admissions (any employer who cares about your undergrad grades isn’t worth working for) and here grade inflation makes sense. As a for instance, take medical school.

Med school admissions are conducted on nearly a straight by-the-numbers points scale made up by combining an applicant’s GPA and MCAT scores. So a 3.98 from Southwest Saginaw State or Goucher College counts for much, much more than a 3.45 from, say, Harvard or MIT.

I don’t know about you, but I’d rather have the girl with the 3.45 from MIT doing my triple bypass.

So at the elite universities, they’d be crazy not to grade inflate. If Harvard were to start throwing around C’s, smart high-school students who wanted to be doctors (or lawyers) would be doing themselves a real disservice by going there. In order to continue attracting the best students, elite schools must–and should–inflate grades.

And if the elite schools inflate grades, then chances are the crummy schools will, too. But that’s okay. Because if all colleges have roughly the same obscene level of grade inflation, then GPAs cancel each other out, and grad school admissions will become more a factor of test scores–which are standardized, and a much fairer (if still imperfect) indicator of academic success.

There are other arguments for grade inflation, too–which I won’t get into here. I’ll merely say that college isn’t what it used to be and for the outrageous fees being charged by institutions of higher learning, one could reasonably argue that parents aren’t buying “education,” they’re purchasing a fungible documend. And a retailer who sells that document but mars it with bad grades doesn’t really understand the business they’re in.

Remember, it was the colleges themselves who decided they were in a business–and not a public service–when they began charging as much as the market could bear for their product. It’s no accident that grade inflation tracks nicely with the inflation in the cost of a college degree.

Because I’m a moron, I mistakenly noted last night when The Inside debuts–it’s TONIGHT, at 9:00 p.m. on Fox. Not on Thursday.

If you were looking for more reasons to watch, showrunner Tim Minear also has the amazing Jane Espenson and David Fury working on the show with him. Throw in a fat guy and a tree and it’s Christmas.

Meryl Yourish has a fascinating interview up with Darth Vader. Since the Darth Side is closed for business, we need all the Vader we can get these days:

MY: So what else did Lucas get wrong?

DV: I have never in my entire life-until now-ever uttered the word, “Yippee.” When Qui-Gon bought me out of slavery, I believe my words to Watto were more on the order of “[bleep] you, you stinking sack of [bleep] [bleep] [bleep]!”

MY: Whoa, family blog here!

DV: Edit it out, you [bleep].

MY: Lord Vader, how did you come to the dark side of the Force? What was it that really turned you bad? Was it truly your inability to find a good anger management class?

DV: Oh, don’t be ridiculous. The Sith Lords are no darker than your average Republicans.

You may have forgotten (because Fox executives haven’t given it nearly enough ad support), but The Inside premiers on Fox Wednesday night at 9:00 p.m., eastern.

The Inside is the brainchild of Tim Minear, who’s only one of the five best minds working in television today. If Minear’s track record—Angel, Firefly, Wonderfalls, doesn’t inspire you, well, go back to watching Yes, Dear.

So go. Make an appointment for The Inside, Wednesday night at 9:00 p.m. est. Great TV still exists, despite Fear Factor. You won’t be disappointed.

Not to be a killjoy, but Amnesty International has been peddling it’s anti-Americanism since the outbreak of the Iraq war in 2003. That April their website proclaimed: “Iraq: Fear of War Crimes By Both Sides.” The “war crime” Amnesty International feared from the United States? The coalition’s targeting of one of Saddam’s state-run TV stations. Said AI’s Claudio Cordone, “The bombing of a television station simply because it is being used for purposes of propaganda is unacceptable.”

That AI release about the “war crimes” being comitted by both sides spent five paragraphs on American “attrocities” and four sentences denouncing Iraq actions (which included shelling civilians and having Iraqi soldiers dressing in civilian clothes in order to carry out surprise attacks).