{"id":2744,"date":"2005-09-05T23:06:13","date_gmt":"2005-09-05T23:06:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2005\/09\/tin-ears-club.html"},"modified":"2005-09-05T23:06:13","modified_gmt":"2005-09-05T23:06:13","slug":"tin-ears-club","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2005\/09\/tin-ears-club.html","title":{"rendered":"Tin Ears Club"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Everyone who opens their mouths these days are liable to win one, it seems. From the president&#8217;s hopes for Trent Lott&#8217;s rebuilt house <em>and<\/em> his high praise of &quot;Brownie,&quot; to his mother&#8217;s Marie Antoinette Moment (as Andrew Sullivan called it) to Senator Landrieu&#8217;s threat to punch somebody really soon, tensions are, naturally enough, running high.<\/p>\n<p>However, if <em>I <\/em>were giving the award, it would go to someone who has no excuse &#8211; after all, most of the others are under stress, under fire and under scrutiny. <\/p>\n<p>No, I&#8217;d give the award to the person who, touring the Astrodome, said:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<blockquote>\n<p><em>&quot;Why you&#8217;re the prettiest evacuee I&#8217;ve seen,&quot;<\/em> <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p dir=\"ltr\">Is it a contest? Does The Prettiest Evacuee win a prize? Like maybe her life back?<\/p>\n<p dir=\"ltr\">No&#8230;even , oh but <a href=\"http:\/\/www.macon.com\/mld\/macon\/news\/nation\/12567630.htm\">she can perhaps give them their Best Life Now&#8230;<\/a><\/p>\n<p dir=\"ltr\">Sigh. Such is life today&#8230;.as the linked article notes, today was dueling celebrity day at the Astrodome:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<blockquote>\n<p><em>&quot;Is that still Hillary over there?&quot; one woman asked another.<\/em><\/p>\n<p><em>&quot;No,&quot; the other woman responded, &quot;that&#8217;s Oprah.&quot;<\/em><\/p>\n<p><em>&quot;I thought Oprah was over there,&quot; the first woman said, pointing to another group crowded around someone.<\/em><\/p>\n<p><em>&quot;No,&quot; the other<\/em> woman replied, &quot;that&#8217;s Jesse Jackson.&quot;<\/p>\n<p><em>&quot;Oh,&quot; the first woman said, &quot;I thought he was gone.&quot;<\/em><\/p>\n<p><em>&quot;He was,&quot; the other woman said, &quot;but he came back.&quot;<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p dir=\"ltr\">And everyone prays&#8230;<em>please, keep Sean Penn away from us. Please.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Everyone who opens their mouths these days are liable to win one, it seems. From the president&#8217;s hopes for Trent Lott&#8217;s rebuilt house and his high praise of &quot;Brownie,&quot; to his mother&#8217;s Marie Antoinette Moment (as Andrew Sullivan called it) to Senator Landrieu&#8217;s threat to punch somebody really soon, tensions are, naturally enough, running high.&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2744","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v23.9 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Tin Ears Club - Via Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2005\/09\/tin-ears-club.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Tin Ears Club - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Everyone who opens their mouths these days are liable to win one, it seems. From the president&#8217;s hopes for Trent Lott&#8217;s rebuilt house and his high praise of &quot;Brownie,&quot; to his mother&#8217;s Marie Antoinette Moment (as Andrew Sullivan called it) to Senator Landrieu&#8217;s threat to punch somebody really soon, tensions are, naturally enough, running high.&hellip;\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2005\/09\/tin-ears-club.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2005-09-05T23:06:13+00:00\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"awelborn\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<!-- \/ Yoast SEO plugin. -->","yoast_head_json":{"title":"Tin Ears Club - Via Media","robots":{"index":"index","follow":"follow","max-snippet":"max-snippet:-1","max-image-preview":"max-image-preview:large","max-video-preview":"max-video-preview:-1"},"canonical":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2005\/09\/tin-ears-club.html","og_locale":"en_US","og_type":"article","og_title":"Tin Ears Club - Via Media","og_description":"Everyone who opens their mouths these days are liable to win one, it seems. 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2744","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2744"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2744\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2744"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2744"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2744"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}