Pet peeves
“Assuming your pet is a person in fur clothing?
“It’s wonderful that most people adopt pets into their home as full-fledged members of the family. However, while most pets adapt incredibly well to living with people, many people forget they are still animals. Keep in mind that pets tend to think in different and often much simpler terms than we do.
“They aren’t walking around all day plotting how to get back at you for leaving them at home while you go to work or to punish you for what you have or haven’t done for them lately. Accusing an animal of being spiteful or stubborn does a great disservice to them and tends to create a barrier to a healthy relationship.
“So, the next time your dog digs in the yard, consider that he is probably doing so because it is fun for dogs and he’s probably bored, not to punish you and ruin your newly planted yard.”
— Andrea Arden, writing on “Top Mistakes Pet Owners Make,” May 1 for MSNBC.com
Not Jay Leno
“Cartoon Network has devised a new custom promotional opportunity for movie studios that stars a pair of puppets.
“The concept, which comes out of the network’s ad sales promotions marketing group, features two puppets named Jib and Crash. The pair will interview celebrities on the set of their films and feature exclusive sneak peaks of upcoming movies in content that will air as interstitials during commercial breaks on Cartoon Network.
“The first movie to be featured is Warner Bros.’ ’Speed Racer,’ opening May 9. Jib and Crash will introduce a 90-second exclusive sneak peek of the film Sunday preceded by 45-second on-air spots featuring the puppets promoting the exclusive trailer.
— Kimberly Nordyke writing on “Carton Network Taps Puppets,” May 1 in the Hollywood Reporter
Cultural jihad
“What has not been widely recognized is that the Ayatollah Khomeini’s 1989 fatwa against ’Satanic Verses’ author Salman Rushdie introduced a new kind of jihad. Instead of assaulting Western ships or buildings, Khomeini took aim at a fundamental Western freedom: freedom of speech. In recent years, other Islamists have joined this crusade, seeking to undermine Western societies’ basic liberties and extend Shariah within those societies.
“The cultural jihadists have enjoyed disturbing success. Two events in particular — the 2004 assassination in Amsterdam of Theo van Gogh in retaliation for his film about Islam’s oppression of women, and the global wave of riots, murders and vandalism that followed a Danish newspaper’s 2005 publication of cartoons satirizing Muhammad — have had a massive ripple effect throughout the West.
“Motivated variously, and doubtless sometimes simultaneously, by fear, misguided sympathy, and multicultural ideology — which teaches us to belittle our freedoms and to genuflect to non-Western cultures, however repressive — people at every level of Western society, but especially elites, have allowed concerns about what fundamentalist Muslims will feel, think, or do to influence their actions and expressions. These Westerners have begun, in other words, to internalize the strictures of Shariah, and thus implicitly to accept the deferential status of dhimmis — infidels living in Muslim societies.
“Call it a cultural surrender.”
— Bruce Bawer, writing on “An Anatomy of Surrender,” in the spring issue of the City Journal
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