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A few links

A few links and I'm out for the night. Gwinkle has a funny look at the holiday season. Tip: Johnny Dee. Trudeaupia reminds Canadians of a sad anniversary. Red Ensign fans take note. And a follow up on family matters from Policy Review, a site that is frequently worth looking over. The article is by Mary Eberstadt and it tries to understand today youth through their music. Eberstadt's conclusion (Tip: Tiger in Winter):
... there is no escaping the fact that today’s songs are musically and lyrically unlike any before. What distinguishes them most clearly is a the fixation on having been abandoned personally by the adults supposedly in charge, with consequences ranging from bitterness to rage to bad, sick, and violent behavior. And therein lies a painful truth about an advantage that many teenagers of yesterday enjoyed but their own children often do not. Baby boomers and their music rebelled against parents because they were parents — nurturing, attentive, and overly present (as those teenagers often saw it) authority figures. Today’s teenagers and their music rebel against parents because they are not parents — not nurturing, not attentive, and often not even there. This difference in generational experience may not lend itself to statistical measure, but it is as real as the platinum and gold records that continue to capture it. What those records show compared to yesteryear’s rock is emotional downward mobility.

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