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L’Osservatore Romano, the official newspaper of the Vatican, has redeemed two cultural sinners this week: Harry Potter and Oscar Wilde. Only days after deciding that the Chosen One of Hogwarts is indeed an exemplar of “the values of friendship, altruism, loyalty and self-giving” (rather than “a wrong and malicious image of the hero,” as the same publication declared last year), L’Osservatore ran a review of a new Italian book on Wilde that goes out of its way to praise the Irish author. According to the reviewer, Andrea Monda, Wilde “was a man constantly looking for the beautiful and the good, but also for a God that he never challenged, respected and who he fully embraced after his dramatic experience of jail, concluding with his communion in the Catholic church.”
Wilde’s deathbed conversion in Paris, where he spent the last three years of his life after serving a two-year prison term for sodomy offenses, is a much-debated aspect of his biography: Was it the last-ditch gesture of a sick and broken man, or the culmination of a lifelong fascination with Church ritual? (This testimonial from the priest who administered his last rites suggests that Wilde’s turn to Catholicism was a conscious and deliberate, if hasty, act.) But the fact that Wilde may have embraced the Church in his last moments doesn’t make it any less odd that, 109 years later, the Church should suddenly decide to embrace him. As long as Pope Benedict XVI continues to label gay marriage "pseudo-matrimony" and same-sex desire a “disordered sexual inclination which is essentially self-indulgent,” the Vatican’s eagerness to welcome Wilde into the flock rings hollow at best. There’s a Wilde epigram for every occasion; the one this news item brings to mind is, “One can survive everything nowadays except death, and live down everything except a good reputation.”
Photograph of Oscar Wilde courtesy of Wikipedia.
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If we are what we Google, then Google Hot Trends—an hourly rundown of search terms "that experience sudden surges in popularity"—is the Web's best cultural barometer. Here's a sampling of today's top searches. (Rankings on Hot Trends list current as of 9 a.m.)
No. 16: "Basking sharks." A 26-foot, 5,000-pound basking shark washed ashore yesterday on a Long Island beach, and Googlers want to learn more before their next ocean dip. Luckily the basking shark is harmless and eats mostly plankton. Still, according to a 1894 New York Times article, the first person to describe the shark "tried to prove that this was the species of fish which swallowed Jonah ... Jonah could have lodged quite comfortably in a shark's stomach, and it would have been easier to enter that organ than to squeeze his way down the small throat of a whale."
No. 53: "how long is the new harry potter movie?" One hundred fifty-three minutes, according to IMDB. This puts the Half-Blood Prince at just over the series average of 150.3 minutes per Harry Potter film. Those with small children and/or child-size bladders will be glad to hear that the proprietor of the invaluable Runpee.com (a database that tells you the best times in a movie to take a leak) is watching the film right now, according to his Twitter status.
No. 97: "pet airways." In-flight treats are the newest luxury available to America's already pampered pets. Pet Airways is a new pets-only airline, where dogs and cats fly coach instead of whimpering in the cargo hold. Yesterday marked Pet Airways' inaugural flight when a modified turboprop plane took off from Baltimore's BWI Marshall with about 40 cats and dogs bound for Chicago. Tickets cost $150 to $299 one-way, depending on the route, and a trip from New York to L.A. takes about 24 hours. "It's a niche market, no doubt. But the pet community ... they get it," said co-founder Alysa Binder.
Basking shark image courtesy Wikipedia.
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