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Here are some wince-inducing excerpts, characterized by interminable tangents and inane prose, from the 26th annual Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, a literary parody contest sponsored by San Jose State University. Winner: "Theirs was a New York love, a checkered taxi ride burning rubber, and like the city their passion was open 24/7, steam rising from their bodies like slick streets exhaling warm, moist, white breath through manhole covers stamped 'Forged by DeLaney Bros., Piscataway, N.J.'" _ Garrison Spik, Washington

Mark Steyn: A music book that's not muzak - Wilfrid Sheed's 'The House That George Built' moves from one memorable riff to another MARK STEYN | September 10, 2007 | "You can't receive all your inspiration from listening to old records," writes Wilfrid Sheed. "It's like receiving your fresh air in cans." I know what he means. Today, in 2007, we understand that It Had To Be You and The Way You Look Tonight and My Funny Valentine are great songs. They've been declared to be so, over and over. But I wonder if we'd have figured it out at...

An angry parent has blasted the East Penn School District for requiring its students to read books he said are "full of filthy vulgarity." Richard Jones of Upper Milford confronted the school board Monday about some of the books on his 15-year-old son's 10th-grade summer reading list at Emmaus High School, saying they're trash. Following its standard practice, the board limited Jones to three minutes and didn't respond to his criticism during the meeting. But later, board President Ann Thompson said, "We listened carefully and it is being investigated carefully."

Easter 2006 Easter 2005 Easter 2004 Easter 2003 Easter 2002     Easter 2001 Easter 2000          Easter Music    Holy Week 2006 Holy Week 2005 Holy Week 2004 Holy Week 2003 Holy Week 2002  EASTER MUSIC: Pontifical Musical Chorus of the Sistine Chapel Pontifical Institute of Sacred Music

Summer has always been old movies time for my daughter and me, and now that she’s 17 I can finally be pretty confident that we’re actually watching the same movie. When she was younger, this wasn’t always so. She was about ten, for instance, one hot evening when Rear Window was on TCM. As it happens, this wonderful old Hitchcock romantic thriller takes place during the summer. So when photographer James Stewart is temporarily laid up in a wheelchair because of some adventurous accident, spying on his Greenwich Village neighbors with his binoculars and zoom lens, all their windows are...

AMC: What makes a movie a 'classic'? You can actually sue a TV channel for sucking -- and win. That's the lesson of today's legal victory against AMC, in a breach of contract suit filed by Time Warner Cable (like EW.com, a division of Time Warner). Like some viewers who remember when AMC stood for ''American Movie Classics,'' the cable operator complained that AMC doesn't show classic movies much anymore. (These days, the channel just goes by the abbreviation ''AMC,'' as if to gloss over the word ''Classics,'' much like KFC, which doesn't want to remind anyone in our calorie-conscious...

The judge has ruled: "Look Who's Talking, Too," starring John Travolta and Kirstie Alley, just isn't a classic. After it changed its programming in 2002 to include more contemporary films, including movies like "Staying Alive" and the "Look Who's Talking" movies, the American Movie Classics channel was sued by Time Warner Cable for veering too far from its original format of classic movies. A ruling on July 8 by Judge Bernard J. Fried of New York State Supreme Court gives the Time Warner unit, which has 11 million subscribers, the green light to drop the station. A spokesman for Time...

Whenever someone predicts the demise of symphony concerts, reassurances come fluttering from every obvious quarter. The Association of British Orchestras (ABO) produces a wireless device that allows concertgoers to follow the music interactively. A record label pays a million pounds to a schoolgirl violinist. A big-name soloist announces that more people than ever are tuning into classics. As in any death foretold, these final rites will not affect the sad outcome. The Co-Co (for Concert Companion) that the ABO will show this weekend at its annual conference enables listeners to zoom in on the conductor’s sweaty brow or the deep...

NEW YORK - "Green Eggs and Ham" is an easy read. After all, the late Theodore Geisel, belovedly known as Dr. Seuss, wrote it after his editor challenged him to do a book in just 50 words. But have you tried to read it in Latin? Retitled "Virent Ova! Viret Perna!!" the Seuss classic has been rendered into Latin by Bolchazy-Carducci Publishers Inc. of Wauconda, Ill. The target audience is "people who took Latin in school and have fond remembrance of it, teachers and students who take Latin — and, of course, Seuss fans," Kelly Hughes, a spokeswoman for the...

I just came across a great website that I wanted to point out to Freepers. It is called Project Gutenburg, and it offers books free to download. Since they can only do this with books whose copywrites have expired, most books date from prior to 1923. However, there seems to be many great finds ready to be read. Here is a link to a zipped text file of all the titles, and here is one for the authors. The website also has an alphabetical listing along with a search function. I like anything that is free, so if you are...

SELMA, CALIF.--Victor Davis Hanson's grape farm here is 3 miles straight down Mountain View Road from the Sun-Maid raisin plant his vineyards supply. Orderly rows of Thompson grapevines, dry and bare in the chill of California winter, surround a modest, two-story gray farmhouse. Inside, black-and-white family photos stretch back five generations, evidence of a family clinging to this land since the railroad brought them from Missouri in 1872. There is no room for nuance here. With just 135 acres of vineyards, equivocation has immediate and very real consequences. Vines are tended properly, or grapes don't grow; fields are irrigated, or...

It is not so obvious that physical scientists need a liberal arts education, rooted in the study of language. They themselves assert that they have no time for it. They have insisted on the abolition of language requirements in almost every university graduate program in America. This development is directly related to the massive amount of fraud which now typifies scientific publication in this country. This scientific community has lost track of the historical and ethical roots of our civilization, the only civilization which has fostered the scientific ethic and considerable scientific research and discovery. Increasingly young men enter the...

  Who Killed Homer? They were supposed to keep the Greek and Roman flame burning. Instead, the authors argue, today's classicists have trashed their own field, squandering the legacy that shaped Western civilization and destroying a noble profession. by John Heath and Victor Davis Hanson Related Articles:Two professors defending HomerRelated Site: Classics on the web This winter, a new crop of PhD students in classics will troop off to academic conferences in search of teaching posts. These would-be professors of Greek and Latin have done exactly what they were told and read precisely what was assigned. Most of them...