EGAD

Rock

It's that time of year again; now that's its warm the plaza outside (onto which my lab's windows face) tends to host various musical acts during lunchtime. Today it's Generic Christian Rock, again. Now aside from the fact that it's usually just bad music (due to the inherent contradiction implied by attempting to rock as inoffensively as possible, I suppose), I have nothing against Christian Rock per se. However, I can't but note that we have one of these acts on probably a weekly basis, but I can't recall once having heard an analogous explicitly Muslim, Jewish, Buddhist, or whatever group out there.

As an aside, I would also point out that Christian Rock is not really a sufficiently descriptive term, since these groups are pretty uniformly evangelical Protestants. For instance, the closest thing I can come up with to a Catholic Rock group is U2, which isn't the same thing at all.

Delightful things from the Chicago Critical Mass list this week:

"The first rule of Pillow Fight Club is..." This came up because the Massers have noticed that the next pillow fight will roughly coincide in time and space with the start of the April Critical Mass ride. I wonder how they would react if a few hundred cyclists with pillows showed up.

Slate's unconventional economic columnist on staff makes the argument that the environmental costs of parking your car are even worse than the costs of driving it. Different (global warming versus chewing up public space), but worse per average car. Back when he started writing for Slate he began with a provocative article that he's now expanded into a new book that might be worth a read. In More Sex is Safer Sex he implores all you non-promiscuous (and conscientiously promiscuous) folks to get out there and have more casual sex. Monogamy gave us AIDS, apparently.