links!

Drowning doesn't look like drowning. This was a scary read, but I'm very glad I read it. If you're going to be near the pool or beach with your kids this summer, you'll be glad you read it too.

I haven't used this site, so I don't know if it's legit, but it does look interesting: it's a site like paperbackswap, except it's for kids' clothes.

bearing blog is doing a series on St. Francis de Sales Introduction to the Devout Life. Both the book and the blogs are worth reading. I really, really, really appreciate her thoughts on needing to be "cheerfully interruptible".

A great article from First Things about Hamlet. It's good both as an aid to understanding the theological problem of the play and also good as a review of the new DVD version of the work staring David Tennant and Patrick Stewart. An excerpt:

Revenge, after all, was never a problem for the ancient world, as Homer’s Achilles and Seneca’s plays glaringly demonstrate, nor was suicide ever condemned as such. Consider Shakespeare’s Brutus in his Julius Caesar, who shares many of Hamlet’s traits: he is introspective, takes forever to make up his mind, and bungles the job when he finally decides to act. Yet at the end of the play, he commits suicide with no compunction whatever.

But Hamlet cannot follow that route, because Christianity forbids both suicide and revenge (Rom. 12: 17-21). Brutus might well have had only the vaguest idea of an afterlife. But not so for Hamlet, who knows full well that the Almighty has set “his canon ’gainst self-slaughter.” This idea of the afterlife “puzzles the will” and forces Hamlet to “lose the name of action.”

True enough, says Stephen Greenblatt in Hamlet in Purgatory, but Hamlet lived not just in the time of the Renaissance but also during the Reformation, which raises the issue of which version of the afterlife had been puzzling Hamlet’s will: the Protestant version, with its outright denial of purgatory, or the traditional Catholic one, which included a very elaborate heaven, hell, and purgatory, as we know from Dante.

This link from First Things talks about "dancing a short story" and has five wonderful clips from So You Think You Can Dance as examples of what they're talking about. Beware, the last one might make you cry at the end.

Um, this one might take a bit to explain. My favorite-ever entertainment writer is Linda Holmes. Though I discovered her first via her recaps of Survivor at Television Without Pity (under the pseudonym of "Miss Alli"), she now writes for NPR.  And she just received her own personal shoutout from the Man Your Man Could Smell Like. I just . . . to be frank, I'm just tickled pink on her behalf. Not that I have any right to be or anything, but as a fan of both Ms. Holmes and of Old Spice's brilliant ad campaign, I just love seeing the two come together.