So the word on the street is that Britney Spears is bipolar, hence her crazy ass behavior. Let me just say on behalf of the entire bipolar community that her craziness has less to do with her being bipolar than it does with her being from Louisiana.

Thank you. That is all.

UPDATE: Beyond Blue wonders if Britney’s publicist would rather say she has an addiction or bipolar disorder.

The Democrats had a phenomenal turnout in the Iowa caucuses last night, getting some 236,00 through the turnstiles, double last time’s turnout. The real news of the night though is that the Republican winner placed fourth overall.

If you take the number of Democratic voters and run them through the percentage of delegates won reported by the NYTimes, you get some interesting numbers.

We’re dealing with delegates percentages here, not votes, so this isn’t an exact science. But it can’t be far off. It will be interesting to see if this continues in New Hampshire, where voters can also cross party lines to vote.

I was cleaning out my mailbox from the holiday break earlier today, and someone had left a NYTimes article about the growth of the minyanim movement. The minyanim are small groups (20 to 200) of young Jewish urbanites who gather each week for self-led worship without the assistance or approval of any established synagogue. (I gather from the article that they’re a big deal here in Atlanta.)

I’m also fascinated by the emergent worship movement in post-evangelical Christianity. Emergents practice a future-ancient style of worship that retrieves ancient forms of worship and gives them a postmodern edge. (Think labyrinths and lots of candles.) Anything younger than five or six centuries seems to be suspect.

I’ve yet to go to a worship service in either tradition. (And self-organizing pagans may be yet another model to draw from.) And still I really want to see this put into practice by UUs.

Dan Harper is trying to start up an ongoing online conversation about “emergent Unitarian Universalism.” Dan captures the need very well:

Now it’s time for us to take the next steps. It’s time to let go of our dependence on the forty-year-old liturgical forms we got from second-wave feminism; and perhaps it’s time to question our basic Reformation forms of worship and become more aware that our Christian religious roots allow us to tap into a rich array of liturgical resources, dating back thousands of years. It’s time to let go of our over-dependence on hyper-rationality, and allow the possibility of trans-rational (yet not necessarily supernatural) ways of thinking and being.

To add your voice to the conversation, drop a line at Dan’s blog or write a blog post with the tag “uuemergence.”

New group here.

In the circles I grew up in, “Revival” meant a grand moving of the Holy Spirit. The lame walk, the blind see, the lost are found. God moves in mysterious ways, and the Holy Spirit at a Revival does New Things.

Revivals, in practice, are a series of evening worship services, one after another for several nights in a row. Participants sing the same songs they sang last year (more or less), hear the same sermons they heard last year (more or less), and sit in a sanctuary with the same people as last year (more or less).

And not the same as just last year. The same as every year going back to the year when God actually did do a New Thing. “Remember that year?” they think. “We’ve got to make that happen again.” Every few decades a real Revival happens, and the little revivals play off of it for decades, basking in its half-life glory.

We liberals have prayer meeting revivals just like the evangelicals do—we just call them protests. Once upon a time, Protests spoke Truth to Power. The captives were freed, the war ended, the public’s consciousness raised. The power of the people caused New Things to happen. And we have been trying to make the same thing happen over and over again.

Manufactured dissent is as real as fake authenticity. You can buy it and stick it on your bumper sticker. Or you can organize your little prayer meeting protest that speaks your little truth to either (a) a little power with no power to change things or (b) a Power who isn’t listening because your little protest has no power to make it do so.

A request of revivalists of both camps: Throw your revivals every year, just the same as last, but be honest about what you’re really accomplishing. You’re not making God do a New Thing, and you’re not speaking Truth to Power. You’re reminding yourself of what you’re about, which is a good and fine thing.

So quit acting list the rest of us are a hindrance to Revival or Social Justice because we don’t want to cry when you play funeral or dance when you play wedding. We know the songs too, and we remember the sermons. We just don’t want to rehearse the last New Thing over and over while we’re looking forward to the next New Thing.

Free because there aren’t any parking meters left. Because they’ve all been stolen.

City officials say crooks sawed off 546 parking meters this year —39 percent of all the meters in the city, at a total loss of $273,000.

Because it happens so often, the city does not report meter muggers to police, said Tenee Hawkins, spokeswoman for the Department of Public Works.

Now I wonder if more or less will be nabbed now that everyone knows they don’t do anything about it.

So is there any point in putting change in the meter? If they don’t even enforce the “don’t steal parking meters” rule, is it safe to assume they don’t enforce the “don’t park here unless you put money in the meter, assuming it’s still here” rule? Or maybe we should just put in 39% less money since that much is going to be stolen anyway? We could call it the “ATL DPW doesn’t give a damn, so I’m not going to either” rule.

And here’s the part where I point out that parking meters were invented in Oklahoma City. Oklahoman and proud!

(UPDATE: Apparently the DPW is a model of efficiency in more ways than one.)