7/1: What I Accomplished Today

1. Guess how we did at Puzzle Day? You're right; we came in second. Ptuey, ptuey, ptuey.

2. Went to Costco again to get the things we forgot yesterday.

3. Read for Arthur.

4. Watched the last episode of Studio 60. Just as well they wrapped this sucker up; Jordan and Danny are together with the baby, and Matt and Harry are together, and everything is just delightful.

The only character on this show who hasn't been seen a gamillion time before on prime time television, Harry, went a little specious near the end. I haven't read Christopher Hitchens' new book God is not Great, but I've read several reviews of and excerpts from it, and I've read quite a few of Hitchens' Nation columns, and while he is at the opposite end of the religious spectrum from the Harriet character, obviously, they both enact the same logical fallacy: they both easily dispatch positions that are too simplistic and vacuous for any actual human being to hold. I think probably the most interesting discussion of this tendency is Karen Armstrong's The Battle for God; her discussion of how the essentially Sacred and the essentially Secular share no starting points, so they share little vocabulary or common ground, should be required reading for anyone who ever plans to discuss faith with someone whose religious views differ from the reader's own. Anyway, Harriet began to ask some genuine probing questions of God as the Night from Hades became more and more harrowing--but indications are that, since every little subplot in the world except Lucy getting to go to Germany with Tom (see, it literally was "in the world") turned out happily, the possibility for her genuine engagement with the complexities of 21st-Century Fundamentalist Christianity is probably null. Too bad.

We watched other stuff on TV, but I don't remember what it was.

5. Got the Human Paladin to Level 30. Started the Level 25 Draenei Shaman. This sucker hadn't even started the Defias Brotherhood sequence, so I'm feeling like a huge regression is taking place here.