(For the full-sized version, go here)

I use Digg regularly, and often find a lot of interesting stories there that I would probably never find otherwise. The principle involved is quite simple - users submit stories, other users vote on them (or “digg” them) and as they receive votes, they go up in rank, finally making it to the front page of the site, where they tend to grow more rapidly in popularity. The idea is that the most interesting stories to the user community rise to the top.

I’ve been thinking about this for a while, and wondering if there’s a way to carve this out in such a way that it serves the online Catholic community. I’m concerned, however, that the community may be too small, the focus may be too niche, and that the interaction could be less than stellar.

Case in point: Pickafig.com, which came out roughly at the exact moment I was bouncing the idea off of a couple of people on whether it would be worth doing a Catholic version of Digg. My take? It’s not an attractive site - the layout is cluttered, the design is blah, and every story gets like one or two votes. It’s also really, really narrow in its focus. I love Catholic stuff. I read it, I write about it, but I want more than that. I want a comprehensive look at life through a lens that incorporates Catholicism, political conservatism, and the like, but doesn’t filter out humor, movies, music or whatever other topics I feel like talking about.

Is there a way to do it better than Pickafig? I think so, but I’m just not quite there yet. My feeling is that for social bookmarking to work, you need a heavy emphasis on the “social” part, which requires an appeal to a sufficiently large group of people.

Maybe making something like this explicitly Catholic is going too narrow. I just see a wide open gap for Catholic Media 2.0 - there are lots of opportunities to branch out, and they needn’t all be explicitly Catholic or preachy. They just need to be the kind of place where a pro-life story or an article about Mass don’t get buried because the teeming mass of users are all atheistic anti-Catholic doobie-lovin’ fools.

After decades of coddling young children, Johnson & Johnson unveiled its new “Nothing But Tears” shampoo this week, an aggressive bath-time product the company says will help to prepare meek and fragile newborns for the real world.

A radical departure for the health goods manufacturer, the new shampoo features an all-alcohol-based formula, has never once been approved by leading dermatologists, and is as gentle on a baby’s skin as “having to grow up and fend for your g**damn self.”

“We at Johnson & Johnson have been making bath time a safe and soothing experience for far too long,” company CEO William C. Weldon said. “Years of pampering have left our newborns helpless, feeble, and ill-equipped for the arduous road ahead.”

“It’s time our children got the wake-up call that’s been coming to them,” Weldon continued. “It’s time they cried their precious little eyes out.”

Yes, there’s profanity,  but the concept was too funny not to link. (If it really offends you, may I suggest you buy a bottle for yourself?)

The story is weird enough on its own. The pictures, though, they elevate the thing to a whole ‘nother level of bizarre. I’m a big fan of the corpse’s neatly trimmed goatie, designer NY Yankees cap, and best of all, the quintessential Dolce and Gabbana specs. Choice.

College presidents from about 100 of the nation’s best-known universities, including Duke, Dartmouth and Ohio State, are calling on lawmakers to consider lowering the drinking age from 21 to 18, saying current laws actually encourage dangerous binge drinking on campus.

The movement called the Amethyst Initiative began quietly recruiting presidents more than a year ago to provoke national debate about the drinking age.

“This is a law that is routinely evaded,” said John McCardell, former president of Middlebury College in Vermont who started the organization. “It is a law that the people at whom it is directed believe is unjust and unfair and discriminatory.”

Other prominent schools in the group include Syracuse, Tufts, Colgate, Kenyon and Morehouse.

But even before the presidents begin the public phase of their efforts, which may include publishing newspaper ads in the coming weeks, they are already facing sharp criticism.

Mothers Against Drunk Driving says lowering the drinking age would lead to more fatal car crashes. It accuses the presidents of misrepresenting science and looking for an easy way out of an inconvenient problem. MADD officials are even urging parents to think carefully about the safety of colleges whose presidents have signed on.

“It’s very clear the 21-year-old drinking age will not be enforced at those campuses,” said Laura Dean-Mooney, national president of MADD.

Both sides agree alcohol abuse by college students is a huge problem.

There is absolutely nothing sensible about a 21-year-old drinking age. In our country, 18 is the age of majority, and upon attaining that age come many rights and responsibilities. And 18-year-old can vote for the president, be drafted into the military (if male, and a draft is re-instituted) and if charged with a crime will be charged as an adult.

So why is that same individual who can pull a lever to elect the leader of the free world or carry an M-16 into battle considered too immature and foolish to drink a beer?

In part, it’s because we’ve created a monster. In addition to the manufactured condition of sustained-adolescence we’ve done such a good job encouraging in this country, raising the drinking age has gilded alcohol with all the glamor of a taboo, making it a rather dangerous proposition to now do the sensible thing and fix the law to reflect justice.

I don’t know enough about the history of this oddly-prolonged holdover of prohibition, but I’m given to understand that in countries where consumption of alcohol is cultural and arbitrary age-limits are not artificially imposed, problems of abuse by a certain age demographics drop off. (No, I didn’t trouble myself to look for statistics. Feel free.)

At the heart of this, though, is an unhealthy fear of alcohol itself. Culturally speaking, responsible drinking begins at home. Children with parents who teach them how to exercise temperance and who do not unnecessarily stigmatize the fruits of fermentation will, in my estimation, be far less likely to wind up with a high school DUI or have their stomachs pumped after a college frat party.

The practical questions of whether a change in the law could be implemented without a national binge on the part of high school seniors remains open.

Students of history will always find the month of August a little ominous. In August 1920, the Red Army invading Poland (led by neoconservative hero Leon Trotsky) nearly captured Warsaw and spilled into central Europe, whence it might well have conquered a prostrate Germany, Austria, and Hungary — just for starters. The heroic Polish defeat of the Soviet forces will always be known in that land as the “Miracle of the Vistula,” since the battle raged in the octave of the Feast of the Assumption, and many Polish soldiers claimed that they saw Our Lady appear over the battlefield, which spurred them on to fight.

It was on August 25, 1939, that Adolph Hitler sealed an alliance with Joseph Stalin to jointly invade the very same Poland — a country that had relied on empty promises of protection from faraway England and France, and defied his demands for territory.

On August 6 and August 9, 1945, our country became the only nation in history to use atomic weapons — on cities, not on armies — to end the war begun six Augusts before.

It’s easy to forget that all these appalling Augusts have their origin in August 1914, when a series of diplomatic blunders, crossed signals, and bureaucratic mechanisms (such as interlocking alliances and automatic mobilizations) set loose the monsters that would rage for the rest of our history’s bloodiest century — when more civilians were murdered by governments, the numbers suggest, than in every other century of recorded history combined. Unlike the Second World War, whose brutality can be blamed on the sociopathic hatreds of a single man, the First began in a welter of confusing claims and counterclaims over disputed territory, demands by ethnic minorities for autonomy, and crackdowns by central governments. Then followed appeals by those minorities to neighboring Great Powers, which set off a chain reaction as other Great Powers stepped in to “safeguard their interests” and “contain aggression” on the part of rival nations.

In other words, the First World War started in the same way that the Russian-American War of 2008 might well begin. It ended with the destruction of three of the regimes that had entered it, 40 million casualties, a bankrupt continent, and the replacement of fairly benevolent monarchies with ideological dictatorships.

The comments on this one should be lively.

For Mass today we went to Old St. John’s in Silver Spring (also known as Our Lady, Queen of Poland).

This parish has the distinction of having been the first parish of a certain Fr. John Carroll in 1774, who later became Archbishop John Carrol, first Bishop of the Catholic Church in the United States in 1808, in the See of Baltimore.

There is also a marker for Daniel Carroll, brother to John Carroll, who was a Founding Father of the United States, a member of the Second Continental Congress, and a signer of both the Articles of Confederation and the Constitution - one of only four men to hold that distinction.

We usually only have occasion to make it to this parish on holy days, because they have a morning Gregorian Rite Mass, whereas most of the other Masses in the old rite are held later in the evenings.  Today, I brought my camera so I could get pictures of the kids after Mass, and I got some nice shots of Sophie in particular as she explored the cemetery.