Crunchy Con

"Pop pop pop," goes the sheetrock.

"Groan groan groan," go the walls.

"Eeerk, eeerk, eeerk," go the 94-year-old windows in their frames.

"Crash boom kerplonk," go the bricks falling out of the decrepit chimney and into the firebox below.

"No es bueno," goes the foreman on the work crew, explaining to me what just happened with the chimney.

Yes, folks, this is foundation repair week chez Dreher. You can make a fortune in the Dallas area doing foundation repair, given the clay soil in these parts. Thank heaven we have a pier-and-beam foundation, not a slab. I can't tell you how weird it is to spend an afternoon with your house literally moving under your feet. No offense to my Golden State readers, but if this is a super-gentle version of an earthquake, you can have California.

Via Doublethink, why do the Chinese call this ultramodernist building "Big Underpants" -- and why does that make the state so angry? The hilarious graphic after the jump shows that it could be worse.

Are patented seeds the harbinger of the Beast? One farmer thinks so.

Well, it's formal now: the Episcopal Church has schismed, with four breakaway conservative dioceses forming a new Anglican province. Here are excerpts from the Times story I found rather revealing:

It would also result in two competing provinces on the same soil, each claiming the mantle of historical Anglican Christianity. The conservatives have named theirs the Anglican Church in North America. And for the first time, a province would be defined not by geography, but by theological orientation.

"We're going through Reformation times, and in Reformation times things aren't neat and clean," Bishop Robert Duncan of Pittsburgh, a conservative who led his diocese out of the Episcopal Church in October, said in an interview. "In Reformation times, new structures are emerging."

Bishop Duncan will be named the archbishop and primate of the North American church, which says it would have 100,000 members, compared with 2.3 million in the Episcopal Church.

And:

Bishop Martyn Minns, a leading figure in the formation of the new province, said of the Archbishop of Canterbury: "It's desirable that he get behind this. It's something that would bring a little more coherence to the life of the Communion. But if he doesn't, so be it."

Bishop Minns, a priest who led his large, historic church in Fairfax, Va., out of the Episcopal Church two years ago and was subsequently ordained a bishop by the Anglican Archbishop of Nigeria, said in an interview: "One of the questions a number of the primates are asking is why do we still need to be operating under the rules of an English charity, which is what the Anglican Consultative Council does. Why is England still considered the center of the universe?"

No matter where you stand on the matter, that is a remarkable, remarkable sentiment. What Bp Minns is saying is, "Like it or lump it, Cantuar, we're doing what we want to do." Besides that, he's asking the reasonable but revolutionary question: If the overwhelming majority of the world's Anglicans live outside of England, why do they have to worry what England thinks?

The Church of England Without England. Crazy times we live in.

And if so, why is it not being reported in the US media, though it was in the Telegraph? That's what Marshall Herskovitz wants to know. Excerpt:

Who were those doctors quoted in the original Telegraph story, and why did they know so much about the bodies if they had been persuaded not to examine them? Why isn't CNN (particularly apt as Christiane Amanpour promotes her new series on those who've tried to stop genocide) trying to find out? Terrorists targeting Jews is nothing new, but torturing them in front of their children certainly would be. Game-changingly new.

I cannot escape the feeling that -- for whatever reasons, and I am truly at a loss as to what they would be -- this lack of coverage (or even curiosity about the story) is absolutely intentional.

Well, the Jerusalem Post quotes an Indian doctor by name saying the Jews' bodies showed no signs of torture. Anybody know anything further?