Follow the comment thread of the NYT article about gender imbalances that seem to indicate a habit of sex selection among certain ethnic groups. It's a good X-ray of several national obsessions. I'm not sure all the participants come out looking good. But that is the way of comment threads.

I have never known until recently that in suburban America, a child's First Communion is followed by her/his sharing with her/his friends chocolate cross lollipops. I must confess that this is the greatest invention in the history of Christianity, the summation of all the historical, corporeal, and libidinal perversities in the public imagination and theological debate about this sacrament (or the making of it into one). Really, how can one imagine a better way to illustrate to your child the cross with the body of Christ as a historical and libidinal objet petit a?

According to Nicholas Kristof, if you'd be willing to slap your father in the face, you must be a liberal. According to me, if your father's a liberal, you won't have to.

Though I've said mean things about essentialism before (hey! joke!), I opened Essence the other day and was happy to see an article about Michelle and Barack Obama that made sense. Here are two people who are more than each other's match (if that doesn't sound illogical), who have differing but very great strengths, who talk to each other, who evidently enjoy being together, who don't feel a great compulsion to act out gender roles (Michelle was for many years the higher earner, and you don't see Barack whining or overcompensating). For all the talk about Defense of Marriage that has been spouted in this country over the last few decades, this is the way to do it: show an example of what a strong marriage between strong people can be.
Normally, in this country when you talk about “defending marriage” the move is a punitive one. Cut gay folks out of it. Make it harder for non-gay married folks to divorce. Or, as happened in a very weird Science Tuesday article in the NYT, fantasize about a pill that would reduce your partner's inclination to be attracted to someone else. The punitive attitude betrays a feeling of inferiority and a forced quality in the standard American marriage which make it hardly seem worth defending. If you want to defend it, first give it a purpose and a value.

... this week, goes to the guy who holed himself up with an arsenal of automatic weapons and shot three policemen in a standoff because he was worried that the Obama administration would take away his guns. That's showing them!

Think the world has gone crazy and you need some new words to describe it? Might want to look through Schott's Vocab, a blog dedicated to “A Miscellany of Modern Words and Phrases.”

A few examples to whet your appetite:

Twitturgy: Religious Tweeting. (Twitter + liturgy.)

Recession Beard: Credit-crunchy facial hair.

Nomunication: The in vino veritas approach to business communication prevalent in Japan.

A friend wrote me that she has just adopted a whale from the Ocean Alliance. I attach a whale song which she sent me. It sounds mystical, as if it came from Moby Dick himself. The person who recorded the song said that it comes from a master singer back in the 30's who has probably got killed by now. These days, the whales don't sing so well, she says, as their master singers die out. (Real whale song, or imitation? Those in the know, please explain.)

I'm a fan and therefore follower of the White House Blog (set your newsreader to http://www.whitehouse.gov/feed/blog to follow along). The latest post reveals President Obama's completed March Madness bracket, with the teams filled in in his own hand, no less.

General Observations: Obama's picks are generally pragmatic and conservative (mainly top seeds, few upsets). He displays his thought process (question marks here and there, some choices crossed out and changed, including the overall victor). He also writes in all caps. Do with that what you will.

I spent last night watching two Elvis Presley's films, Blue Hawaii and Girls, Girls, Girls. I love Blue Hawaii. You hear all the King's classics and the film has no pretension of having any narrative: great postcard cinematography, 1960s Playboy pinup aesthetics, horrifying editing, marvellous songs and youth energy! Girls, Girls, Girls, in a way, is similar, but it brilliantly camps up the Oedipal structure of a classical Hollywood film. Elvis is a son of a boat-maker. According to the back story, he and his father finished the most perfect boat for a ship owner and the father died on the day of its completion. In the film, Elvis's dream is to save enough money to buy the boat (which now functions as the corpse of the Father). He gets a job driving it. Because of his obsession about repossessing the dead body of the Father, Elvis has a difficult time entering any romantic relationship. The only time he can relax himself is to be in a place called Paradise Cove, where he has a surrogate family from China (the “Orient” thus functions as a mother substitute par excellence). The boat is then bought up by a sex maniac and an alcoholic, who becomes Elvis's boss (the anal father). Elvis meets a girl who turns out to be very rich (he doesn't know that she is rich at first). She buys the boat “for him.” Upon knowing it, of course, Evlis is infuriated, and he seeks refuge in the Orient (Paradise Cove). The girl tries to run after him, but the only one who can drive the boat is the the anal father. Of course, the anal father tries to rape the girl on the sea (but how can he as an anal father?). Elvis comes to save the girl. Eventually, Elvis, the girl, and the Chinese father are all saved on a little motor boat, and the girl orders the now re-castrated anal father to drive the dead Father (the boat) back to the harbour, while she and Elvis would spend an evening in Paradise Cove. At this point, they ritualistically circle the dead Father's boat and hit it hard, thus triumphantly killing the already dead Father and entering normative heterosexual relationship. Finally, on Paradise Cove, Elvis sings a final number with beauties from around the world dancing his famous twist, luring him with their almost unclothed (with the exception of American women, who were dressed like well-behaved college girls) bodies. Elvis looks at his now mother substitute, and the mother substitute nods with approval when he twists his pelvis violently, thus showing off his now fully potent phallus. We can perhaps ask two Žižekian questions here: Why should the Father be killed twice, and why should the anal father join the dead Father (by driving Him back to the harbour and be abandoned from Paradise)? What does it say about an international audience, probably below the age of 30 and primarily female, being satisfied by this onscreen ritualisation and camping up of the most classical narrative mechanism of Hollywood cinema?