• Otis's Stupid Girlfriend
  
  Bad news about the girlfriend of my gay friend Otis: Scarlett Johansson has signed a record deal and may have an album on the shelves by next year.
  
  This puts Scarlett on the list of actors and models who've recorded groundbreaking, awesome, enduring music. I, for one, can't imagine going more than a week without listening to the work of musical geniuses such as Minnie Driver, Naomi Campbell, Eddie Murphy, Paris Hilton, John Travolta, William Shatner and Leonard Nemoy, Jamie Foxx, Lindsay Lohan, Tony Danza, Jennifer Love Hewett, Joey Lawrence, Hilary Duff, Bruce Willis, Patrick Swayze, porno star Tracy Lords, Russell Crowe, Gwyneth Paltrow, Billy Bob Thornton, Tracy Ullman, Kevin Bacon, Juliette Lewis, Robert Downey, Jr., Steven Segal (really, and his album cover is priceless), Peter Gallagher, Keanu Reeves's and his rockin' band Dogstar, Corey Feldman, and, of course, David Hasslehoff. Whoo hoo. Yay.
  
  What's worse, this empty blonde is recording an album of TOM WAITS material. Tom Waits, of course, is one of the best songwriters ever.
  
  If Scarlett even attempts a single song from my favorite Tom Waits album, Bone Machine, I will track her down and smack her.



• Beauty Is In The Eye Of The Marketer
  
  I also saw this great video at Otis's blog:
  




• Positive Political Ads
  
  Hot Air gives props to a few political ads that are not only positive but actually try to be harmlessly funny. Political ads, of course, usually turn into a mud-slinging competition. Right now in Virginia there's an extremely ugly battle going on between Senator George Allen and his challenger, Jim Webb. It might, in fact, be the nastiest political battle I've ever seen. It's nice to see a few ads that aren't blatant smear campaigns. And it's nice, too, to see my current favorite politician (Maryland's Michael Steele) in the mix as well.



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• Who Shouldn't Christians Pray For?
  
  One of the most difficult and challenging passages of the New Testament is First John 5:16, which reads as follows (or thereabouts) in most translations:
  
  

  If anyone sees his brother sinning, if the sin is not deadly, he should pray to God and he will give him life. This is only for those whose sin is not deadly. There is such a thing as deadly sin, about which I do not say that you should pray.

  
  
  So, then, we shouldn't pray for certain sinners?
  
  As is often the case, there is much lost in the translation.
  
  Jimmy Akin analyzes the passage from the point of view of a Catholic apologist, and helps me make some sense of it:
  
  

  This verse is notoriously difficult for people of all theological stripes to interpret, and one of the reasons for this--at least in the English-speaking world--seems to be that it does not come over into English that smoothly, leading translators to fudge a bit of what the Greek says in order to better fit the idiom of our speech John does not literally refer to someone whose sin is "not deadly." That's an attempt (a guess, really) at what John meant by the Greek phrase he used (mE pros thanaton).
  
  My own thought is that the verse is easier to understand if you stick with a more literal translation…

  
  Read the rest of Jimmy's thoughts at this link.

Labels: Media, Michael Steele, News, Politics, You Tube

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