If it’s Sunday, it must be time for another eye-roller from the Paper of Record — this time, not from the Magazine, but from the SundayStyles section. Look: Not a parody. Here’s the lede:

Ronnelle Adams came out to his mother twice, first about his homosexuality, then about his atheism.

It’s hard to imagine a better one-sentence Times lede than that one. Well done! The piece is even more hathotic than the lede suggests. Turns out the piece is about black folks who are atheists, and whose families find their godlessness hard to take. Lo, this is pretty close to a perfect New York Times story. The only way it could be improved, by the NYT’s standards, is if it included a component about elderly secular Jews who live next door to the gay black atheist’s in a fabulous Manhattan apartment building, and who take him in over the holiday season as surrogate parents because his Christian family makes him feel rejected.

(You think I’m being too snarky? A Jewish friend whose spouse works at the Times told me that in terms of page views and most e-mailed, the most popular stories tend to be pieces that have to do with Jews (and Israel), homosexuals, and real estate. “The Times knows its audience,” said my friend. No doubt.)

UPDATE:More First World Problems, as chronicled by the NYT SundayStyles:

Uniqueness seems to be a primary motive and has spurred an unspoken competition among parents to find the most original names, said Laura Wattenberg, author of “The Baby Name Wizard,” a guide for selecting a name. “Parents thinking of a baby name will type it in and say: ‘Oh, no, it’s taken. There are already three others with that name.’ ”

But too little research can backfire, too. Deborah Goldstein, 43, and her partner, Gabriella Di Maggio, thought they had chosen unique names for their boys: Levi and Asher. To be sure, they checked the Social Security Administration’s list of most popular baby names. Neither was in the top 100.

“I did not want them to have names where there were 15 in their class like I was,” Ms. Goldstein said. “There were a lot of Debbies back then”

But shortly after the couple moved to South Orange, N.J., in 2006, they had a rude awakening. While waiting at an ice cream parlor, they heard a woman shout “Asher!” at a different boy.

“It was two other Jewish lesbian moms with a child of the same name,” Ms. Goldstein said. Google had let her down. “It didn’t tell us it’s a unique name unless you move to a neighborhood outside New York City where other trendy Jews are moving, too.”

Oh, my valve.

Saw this today — “Carnival Evening” by Henri Rousseau — at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and was knocked flat. The mystery!

UPDATE: I was still thinking about this painting tonight, when it occurred to me why it moved me so much. This scene symbolizes the way I move through life: as a partygoer who finds himself decontextualized (sorry to use that clunky word, but I can’t think of a better one) feeling very much out of place, on the way home, in the deep wintry woods under a full moon, with all the beauty and the danger and the mystery therein. Interesting to think about how art doesn’t explain, but reveals.

I have an essay in the Dallas Morning News about how my sister Ruthie’s death and the response of my hometown community caused me to rethink my priorities, and plan to move next month back to where I grew up. If you’re a DMN subscriber, you can read it behind the paywall. If not, well, regular readers of this blog will have heard most of it. I’m grateful to the News for giving me a chance to write about this for a newspaper audience on Thanksgiving weekend.

You know what you need? You need some Morris Day and the Time. You’re welcome.:

On Thanksgiving Day, I promised the kids we could go see “Hugo” the next afternoon, and bought tickets online. I forgot that the LSU-Arkansas game would be on TV Friday instead of Saturday. Yoink! But I’d already spent the money, and made a promise, so I kept up with the game via iPhone during the film (which, let me say, is a terrific movie — my boys loved loved loved it, and so did I, though it was a bit over five-year-old Nora’s head; please go see it).

Anyway, I missed a great display by the LSU offense. It’s probably for the best that I wasn’t watching Tyrann “Honey Badger” Mathieu’s 92-yard touchdown run, which turned the game around, in a local bar; I would have had a seizure and torn the place up. LSU is undefeated in regular season play for the first time since 1958. Can’t tell you how happy I am that we’re going to be back in the Great State when LSU plays for the national championship. Which it no doubt will.

Presenting the creepily but brilliantly named Palantir, a computer program that allows the intelligence services to comb every available database for information about terror suspects:

Since its founding in 2004, the company has quietly developed an indispensable tool employed by the U.S. intelligence community in the war on terrorism. Palantir technology essentially solves the Sept. 11 intelligence problem. The Digital Revolution dumped oceans of data on the law enforcement establishment but provided feeble ways to make sense of it. In the months leading up to the 2001 attacks, the government had all the necessary clues to stop the al Qaeda perpetrators: They were from countries known to harbor terrorists, who entered the U.S. on temporary visas, had trained to fly civilian airliners, and purchased one-way airplane tickets on that terrible day.

An organization like the CIA or FBI can have thousands of different databases, each with its own quirks: financial records, DNA samples, sound samples, video clips, maps, floor plans, human intelligence reports from all over the world. Gluing all that into a coherent whole can take years. Even if that system comes together, it will struggle to handle different types of data—sales records on a spreadsheet, say, plus video surveillance images. What Palantir (pronounced Pal-an-TEER) does, says Avivah Litan, an analyst at Gartner, is “make it really easy to mine these big data sets.” The company’s software pulls off one of the great computer science feats of the era: It combs through all available databases, identifying related pieces of information, and puts everything together in one place.

Depending where you fall on the spectrum between civil liberties absolutism and homeland security lockdown, Palantir’s technology is either creepy or heroic. … “It’s like plugging into the Matrix,” says a Special Forces member stationed in Afghanistan who requested anonymity out of security concerns. “The first time I saw it, I was like, ‘Holy crap. Holy crap. Holy crap.’ ”

Well, it says something about my own double-mindedness about this topic that I am both grateful for this technology — because it will keep us safer — and terrified of it, because if the US government ever decides that I and people like me are the enemy … . It’s inventor tells BusinessWeek that Palantir’s function is “to protect the Shire.” That’s true, and admirable — as long as it remains in the hands of Gandalf, not Saruman. Good luck with that.

I’d not checked in on American expatBrian Kaller’s wonderful blog written from rural Ireland for some time. Just now, though, I saw that Brian had commented here, so I had a look at what he’s been writing recently. I love this short piece he wrote on Halloween, in which he talks about the relationship between our Christian holidays and the equinoxes. Excerpt:

My more devout friends back in the USA resent hearing the astronomy behind, say, Christmas or Easter, believing it distracts us from “the reason for the season.” I understand – they are flooded by a culture that exploits holy days to sell people more things they don’t need, and they want to protect their children’s innocence and preserve the day’s meaning. I get it.

In purging their lives of the shopping-mall culture, though, they inadvertently throw out some of their oldest traditions. The holidays celebrate the cycle of creation, and the religious commemorations were placed there because of the season, not the other way around – the birth at the turn of the year, the Resurrection at the season of new life. The seasonal markers do not supercede the holy days, but precede them, forming the architecture of our years.

Last year, Brian wrote a good piece for BQO, my old online magazine, about how the Irish have the deep skills and sensibility to endure austerity. Excerpt:

But even the newfound excess [in Ireland of the Celtic Tiger years] was frugal by American standards. The Irish use less energy per capita than most Western European nations, and half of the energy per capita as the average American. Personal savings remain much higher in Ireland than in the U.S. Personal debt has increased, but only because so many acquired new mortgages in the last decade.

More significantly, few people here saw the boom as normal or permanent. No leaders announced grandiose plans for a 21st-century Irish Age, or invested their new wealth in forming a global empire. As religious as Ireland has been, no one decided that Ireland was now the chosen nation of God. In short, the Irish did not react as many of my own countrymen did to the rising economic fortunes of the U.S.

Most Americans don’t imagine themselves to have lived through a boom of their own, but they have — just one that has lasted a human lifetime, so few people now remember frugality. The current crisis has left many Americans feeling helpless and outraged: this isn’t supposed to happen to us. The Irish make no assumptions, and now that lean times have returned, any Irish person older than 30 remembers how to live through them.

John Carney at CNBC says there are signs that European banks are beginning to undergo a run. Excerpts:

Right now, according to sources I spoke with in Europe, there isn’t much of a sign of retail customers withdrawing funds. But hoping that customers don’t notice what is happening to every other source of bank funding is not exactly a strategy for stability.

The Economist reports that bank funds are hemorrhaging out of Europe via the bond and money markets, and that there are now signs that corporations are withdrawing their money from European banks. Not good. Not good.

Business Insider has a list of 20 banks that will be “crushed” if the PIIGS (Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece, and Spain) go belly up. “Crushed” isn’t hyperbole, either, not with the figures in play here. Some very big names, too, including Deutsche Bank, Barclays, and Credit Agricole.

Behold, a war of all against all, to obtain two-dollar wafflemakers from Wal-mart. As if the Hobbesian hell of this scene weren’t frightening enough, there’s the greedy fat woman’s butt crack, mooning you for almost the entire video. Is this a great country, or what?

(H/T: Minkoff)