The Fray on network do's ... and don'ts.

Cheesily Blonde: Jack Shafer's hilarious appraisal of the concrete blondes who deliver the news has generated all kinds of responses, ranging from the defensive to the confessional. Then there's historyguy, who finds Shafer's visual exercise puerile and uninteresting:

"many female newscasters lie about their true hair color every time they appear on television"

Yeah, and they also lie about what their skin looks like by wearing clothing. The male anchors do that too. And everyone lies by using studio lighting.

The male anchors lie about their true facial appearance every time they appear on television shaven. except Wolf, who lies by trimming neatly.

Next in the series: radio broadcasters lie by editing out their stutters and hiccups! Print journalists lie by letting editors and spellcheck software improve their prose beyond its natural state!

Shafer, find a real topic next time.

As a Mom of two blonde kids, omnibus1reader finds Shafer's potshot at the fair-haired to be off the mark, anthropologically speaking:

People of usually Nordic extraction who are blond are not necessarily using it to some advantage over others. It is just a trait. If your ancestors lived in the frozen north, they would have perished from rickets if they had been dark — unless — and this explains the Inuit and those, like Catherine Zeta-Jones who are various forms of "black Celtic" (she is black Welsh, my mother's father called himself black Irish): the reason for the color difference has to do with access to the sea and access therefore to vitamin D in mostly fish livers and such…

You have to have practically transparent skin to let the sun in, such as it is, in some latitudes, so that your body can make vitamin D. Or as George Carlin put it, you have to be iridescent.

This isn't to say that omni doesn't have issues with the blonde brigade:

If there's anything annoying about the Fox women and their MSNBC competitors, it is their soap opera voices and tacky Banlon cleavage.

Though departing fray editor is a closet Weather Channel junkie (and an Atlanta native to boot), he's not quite sure what's going on here with NarcoRepublican. Meanwhile, scout29c laments that once "the internet can handle the bandwidth for all the bloggers to have live feeds … we will all have to get better pajamas."

Models of Spiritualism: Though this thread in Faith-Based Fray begins with Fritz_Gerlich's posting of Leon Wieseltier's scathing review of Daniel Dennett's new uber-rationalist Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon, the post launched a more personal examination of religion—highlighted by Theodore_Geisel's post here. Though TG confesses to "having very few institutional-religious bones in my body," he has sought out some answers on religion's fragile relationship with functionalism at a Talmud class on Mercer Island. His revelations are intriguing, as is Fritz's response here.

Canadian Bacon: No Slate FRC correspondent has topped bacon's coverage of the Canadian hockey team's roller coaster ride in Turin. Check out his post-game analysis here.

Bright Lights, a Bit Shitty: There's little action in Books Fray on Blake Bailey's review of Jay McInerney's new kinda-topical novel, The Good Life. But Ted_Burke steps forward: