Best Of The Fray

Solomon Needs New Writers 

Subject: Judgment Questioned
Re:The Good Word: Who Gets To Be ‘Solomonic’?
From: Rhoen
Date: Mon Aug 27  5:52 p.m. PT

The Solomon story always made me wonder, “What were they thinking?” The divinely inspired writer of this story seemed to have an incredibly unique situation in that there was a woman who claimed … that the baby was hers, then sat there like a brain-dead bump on a log when the king threatened to slice the child in half. What kind of childish fantasy world did this biblical scribe live in if he thinks that only the true mother would protest such a treatment? Both of them would have been screaming like banshees. The point of the story may have been to promote asking God for inspired wisdom and guidance, but this example of wise thinking can only impress tiny little children.

[Find this post here.]

Subject: Mirrored in the Music

Re:Culturebox: Rock On, Geezer!

From: The Wandering Void

Date: Wed Aug 29  2:51 p.m. PT

Wasn’t rock born out of a kind of dissatisfaction with middle-of-the-road postwar thinking? The listeners wanted to listen to some cut-loose, hard-driving music and feel the freedom of it. If we’re not getting that feeling now, maybe it’s not the musicians (of any age) who are underperforming. Maybe it’s us.

[Find this post here.]

Subject: Talk Is Good

Re:The Breakfast Table: Alfred Gingold and Helen Rogan

From: Thrasymachus

Date: Tue Aug 28 3:36 p.m. PT

The ambiguity of the reparations debate is what I like most about that entire issue. Whether reparations ever get paid or not (I suspect that they won’t), to the extent that national attention gets focused on this issue, we’ll be talking about basic moral issues. Any serious discussion … will involve questions of duty and obligation, culpability, history, values, rights and wrongs. In short, it will be (finally!) a public debate worthy of a democratic nation. Whatever conclusions we reach … it seems likely that we will be better for having thought about these matters in depth.

[Find this post here.]

Subject: Japanese Hero

Re:Sports Nut: Japanese Zero

From: Richard Baxstrom

Date: Sun Sep 2  9:51 p.m. PT

I notice that many of the other posted comments [in the Fray] chalk McGrath’s critique up to anti-Japanese bias. This is unfair, but I do detect a kind of snobbery in the article towards the kind of game Ichiro brings with him from his years in the Japanese League. Ichiro excelled in the relatively unselfish strategy-and-speed approach to baseball, and he is showing that this style can get results in the American game as well. Ichiro certainly doesn’t do it alone, but he puts a lot of pressure on opposing pitchers and defenses and gets across the plate more than anyone else in the league.

[Find this post here.]

Fray Notes:

The most active Fray of the week was on the “Sports Nut” article on baseball player Ichiro. Huge numbers of people came to tell the writer he was wrong. What else can we say? Except that sports articles always get the most one-sided Frays: Nobody bothers much to see both sides of the issue.

Readers also had fun with the item on the word “solomonic” (in “The Good Word“; scroll to the end to read the Fray Notes), though there was less criticism. There were a lot of very erudite posts, digging into biblical history and other matters.

Ananda Gupta—one of the best posters on the Fray, but elusive; he never went for volume—finally got a star. He started making more posts (we think it might be something to do with the football season), and we were able to grab him for long enough to give him his reward. Try here for the start of a really excellent thread on moral equivalence featuring Gupta and another recent new star, Yukon.

Meanwhile, Claude Scales didn’t let us down (see last week’s “Best of the Fray“) and produced a haiku in honor of his star here. Paul Bennett was equally appreciative of a checkmark and started a very interesting thread on what it all means and how to get more of them—great post from MOH here. And Donjon8 had excellent advice  aimed at new stars, but really applicable to everyone in the Fray: “Don’t get a big head … or fat fingers.”