* Ronald Knox and Sherlock Holmes
* And speaking of which, everyone should always read some Ronald Knox on April Fool's Day. I recommend Reunion All Round.
* The history of the art of diagramming sentences. I always enjoyed diagramming, myself, although it is pretty clear that the English language exceeds the bounds of any strict method of diagramming.
* Jason Zarri on Singer's "Famine, Affluence and Morality"
* This post, and the comments thread, on the Korean fear of fan death is something I found completely fascinating.
* Sandra Rose calls attention to the worrisome phenomenon of emergency room profiling.
* Evelyn Waugh comments on Joseph Heller's Catch-22.
* Joe Heschmeyer recovers a missing question from Aquinas's Summa Theologiae, on the important subject of zombies.
* I mentioned before that the Coptic Pope of Alexandria is chosen by a mix of election and drawing a name out of a hat by a blind child. It turns out that the Church of England has decided to determine its next Archbishop of Canterbury by Twitter. No, seriously; this isn't an April Fool's Day joke.
This actually reminds me of one of the very best episodes in that excellent series, Yes, Minister (actually, the second season, Yes, Prime Minister), "The Bishop's Gambit," in which the PM Hacker has to determine who to recommend to the Queen. The Church Commissioners provide him with two recommendations: Canon Stanford, the favored candidate, who is a modernist (and thus doesn't believe in any of the major doctrines of Christianity), and Dr. Harvey, who is a fervent Christian but also a disestablishmentarianist. And things move on from there. It's the ultimate send-up of the Church of England. One of my favorite bits of dialogue:
Sir Humphrey: "The Church is looking for a candidate to maintain the balance."
Master of Baillie College: "What balance?"
Sir Humphrey: "Between those that believe in God and those that don't."
On the plus side, as the article notes, the Twitter component will likely give John Sentamu, the current Archbishop of York, an edge, which is possibly good because he doesn't seem to be either a modernist or a disestablishmentarianist. Of course, Sentamu is also more outspoken than Williams ever was, but he is also in some ways very stereotypically Anglican; at the same time, while he used to be popular among liberal Anglicans, as Brendan O'Neill notes, he has lost a lot of that due to his position on gay marriage.
