Afternoon Links — 10.14.10

Mental Floss offers Ten of the Best Parents in Fiction and What Ten Classic Books Were Almost Called . The number one parent is Atticus Finch from To Kill a Mockingbird , and Bram Stoker considered The Dead Un-Dead for the book eventually published as  Dracula .

Joan Frawley Desmond reflects on the appeal of a villain like Gordon Gekko to young men. “Absent genuine masculine heroes – beyond athletic and entertainment icons – career-minded college graduates may give up the struggle to distinguish between virtue and vice, settling instead for a role model who has ‘made it’.”

If you really want to become rich, don’t pretend to be rich . The typical millionaire pays about $16 for a haircut, including tip, and three times as many lives in homes worth less than $300,000 than live in homes worth at least $1,000,000.

Belarus refuses to tell the mother of an executed prisoner is buried or let her give her son an Orthodox burial .

The “younger working class” has a ” striking inability to fit the middle-class ideal in family and religious life,” write two sociologists of the family, including one (W. Bradford Wilcox, who has written for First Things ). “It’s a worrisome development for their lifestyle and our culture,” not least because it makes their finding and keeping jobs harder.

The pope’s best pupils are bishops in Sri Lanka and Kazakhstan, as shown in part by the mode of receiving communion (kneeling and on the tongue)  they commend.

And finally, good news for unmarried male First Things readers: psychologists claim that nice guys usually get the girl in the end . At least if the girl of your dreams is dating a guy who read  Esquire or FHM .

Thanks to Kevin Staley-Joyce and Worldwide Religions News for some of the links.