Confessions of a Liberal Puritan

I've already received the best Christmas present a teacher could have. The following note was appended to the last essay on her final exam by one of my students:

Thank you for being a teacher who genuinely cares for her students. You’ve helped me in ways that you’ll never know!! I have enjoyed the class, and have grown in faith and in knowledge. May God Bless you! Merry Christmas.

I finally saw the movie "The Prestige" last week (because I wanted to use up a free movie pass before I forgot about it and because it's got Hugh Jackman, after all, and I'd just caught the end of "Empire of the Sun" on AMC that morning and had been reminded of what a cute kid Christian Bale was), and although I wouldn't say it was badly done, I can't say that I enjoyed it. At all.

In fact, I felt badly in need of some sort of psychic shower, afterwards, to remove the mental "ickyness" left by the fact that none of the major characters in this film (the men, anyways) turned out to have anything remotely close to a full soul of their own, judging by the casual cruelties and general lack of empathy they displayed toward everyone else.

*mentally shudders*

Call me a "sissy", but . . . all I can say about the characters played by Jackman and Bale and even Michael Caine and David Bowie was, in the end, "Ewwww...!"