A few easy pieces

• Madonna's latest gimmick is apparently suspending herself from a giant glittering cross while singing (hat tip: Drudge report). I call it a gimmick instead of an "outrage" because it's hard to see why anyone should care if an enormously wealthy entertainer wants to become slightly more enormously wealthy by comfortably suspending herself from a giant cross. Are there any other career "shock the buorgeois"-style performers who haven't been suspended from a cross by now?



• Al Gore's latest book is apparently going to be titled "The Assault on Reason" (hat tip: Evolutionblog). The title is immensely humourous given that it is being penned by the career politician who infamously "reinvented" his public personality on a yearly basis. Perhaps Gore could do his readers a service and include the definition of the word "is" in his preface.