Paul O'Donnell: October 2007 Archives

Madonna has been a constant presence in Britney Spears' life at least since Madge gave Britney her very first kiss from a girl back in 2003, the year Madonna appeared on the Brit-hit "Me Against the Music." Now it looks like she's giving her tips on ticking off the Catholic League. In two photographs illustrating the liner notes of Britney's critically acclaimed new album, "Blackout," the Southern Baptist-raised singer is shown slinking into a confessional with a handsome young man dressed like a priest. Britney herself is hardly dressed.

In response, the League's Bill Donahue released a bit of boilerplate sensitively noting Britney's alleged inability to raise her own child--that's how to make converts, Bill--and suggesting the photos are a shameless bid for publicity.

Halloween is a hell of a way to deal with our fear of life beyond the grave. Funerals are the opposite: our attempt to grasp the enormity of death by making it serene and beautiful. In either case, death is a problem for the living, not the dead.

That's the simple but necessary and beautifully made point of "The Undertaking," a Front Line documentary airing tomorrow night on PBS.

Pick the two celebrities, any two, you'd consider least likely to have had a youthful romantic hookup. Got 'em? I can beat that.

This week's New Yorker magazine excerpts Steve Martin's memoir of his early days in comedy, "Born Standing Up"; in it, Martin reveals that his first sexual experience was with a young fellow performer named Stormie Sherk, "later to become an enormously successful Christian author and proselytizer under her married name, Stormie Omartian." That "plththth!" sound you hear is veteran observers of the Christian publishing market spraying their coffee.

Omartian, for those who don't follow the Christian publishing industry, is the author of series of books on living life through prayer, beginning with "The Power of a Praying Wife" and including "The Power of the Praying Parent," in which she tells of anointing her son's room with oil to ward off evil spirits that might have entered it through a video game." That sounds more like a Steve Martin gag than a former girlfriend.

Anyone wanting to see America's religion at work might tune into HBO tomorrow evening for the documentary "Run, Granny, Run," chronicling the unlikely 2004 campaign of a 94-year-old New Hampshire woman named Doris Haddock for a seat in the U.S. Senate. Haddock first made her name in politics in 1999, when, as Granny D., she walked from her California home to New Hampshire to protest what she believes is a corrupt campaign-finance system. She walks for the Senate campaign as well, greeting people along the way with a determined but kind respect and carrying a bright yellow flag on her shoulder, and looking like nothing so much as a Buddhist monk. Only Haddock's god is democracy.

It's especially cruel to hear that Imus is back in the middle of my local public radio station's pledge drive. After being hounded off his morning radio and cable TV slot for referring to Rutgers University's women's basketball team in ugly terms, Don Imus is reportedly returning to New York's WABC, and the temptation to take up with the "shock-jock" again is especially acute now, when all serious discussion on the airwaves is being pre-empted by morning hosts wielding unctuous cheer to bleed us for cash. Imus's show was a refuge, offering cranky debates on politics, education, religion and foreign policy with presidential contenders, sitting senators, historians and newspeople. He got me through several fundraising weeks, not to mention that series on rice farming. I'll be sticking out the fundraising drives from here on, however.

October is for Halloween, and playoff baseball. Yesterday, the AP told a tale that suits both. This Spring, an old bronze plaque turned up in a storage room at Jacobs Field, the Cleveland Indians' home stadium, commemorating former Indians shortstop...

The New York Times reported Sunday on the upstart Asylum Films, which has been churning out films it calls "mockbusters"—though schlockbusters might be a better word. Their low-budget movies imitate box-office hits, mostly in their titles. Their "Transmorphers" made a...

The last time I saw Jars of Clay live the highlight of the show was lead singer Dan Haseltine's obstreperously slurping impression of a coffeehouse barista steaming milk—the bane of the moody, acoustically inclined band's existence and, at that time,...

It's great that we now have a teen sitcom about a Pakistani Muslim exchange student who changes the lives of his host family in small-town Wisconsin. Now all we need to finish the job of promoting understanding about the Muslim...