A Sound of Sheer Silence

#9:  "The Bends" by Radiohead (off of The Bends  (1995)) The knee-jerk Radiohead album to pick in any 90s retrospective is 1997's OK Computer , the album that convinced people that Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood and the rest of them were geniuses.  The problem is . . . I don't really like OK Computer .  It feels like a transitional album between normal "rock band" music and the truly weird and amazing Kid A (2000).  "Karma Police" is a good song, but listening to the rest of it always me think of the other, better Radiohead material that came later.  Part of it, I think, is because I got into weirder, more experimental Radiohead stuff late (as in the last five years or so), so I sort of absorbed it all at once, rather than as it came out. By contrast, I liked  The Bends , the album that came before OK Computer , right from the time it came out.

Despite the fact that this is my third post in a week about the Synod on the Family, I find that I am not all that engaged in what is going on in Rome.  I don't really care one way or the other.  Part of that is that I am skeptical anything of substance coming out of this Synod, but my ennui  is much deeper than that.  It's taken me a while to figure out what has been turning me off to the Synod, but I think I have figured it out.  And, like all good insights, it came to me in an unexpected place--listening to the radio driving home yesterday. When I get bored with the stations on my satellite radio in the car, I often find myself turning to EWTN radio.  It's kind of like picking at a scab--I know I shouldn't do it, but I can't help myself.  Anyway, the topic was pornography, and they had a bishop on talking about some document he had recently written about the topic.  I am sure this will come as no surprise, but the bishop took the position...

No one will ever mistake me for a ladies' man, or some sort of Cassanova.  My track record with women has been, on the whole, not very successful.  I am 36 years old, and I am still single.  I would like to think that, in general, I am OK with this reality, but the truth is that I sometimes struggle coming to terms with this.  Despite the fact that I have wonderful friends and an amazing family, there are definitely times that I feel lonely.  There are also times when I look at being single as a failure, a black mark, a sign that I am somehow flawed and broken and defective.  That is not a pleasant feeling. Before he ended the lives of six people on Friday, Elliott Rodger took to Youtube and posted a video manifesto.  I won't link to it, because I am uncomfortable with supporting in any way what he did.  But I read a transcript of what he said in the video.  He basically claims that he is going to shoot a bunch of people, especially women...