Random

~ Crocs are creating static in a Swedish hospital and have been banned! Bummer. Nurses and others who work on their feet all day swear by them.

~ Canadian John Stackhouse, from Regent College in Vancouver, muses on the emergence of a "non-right-wing" evangelicalism in America, and the ruckus that has caused. I think he's rolling his eyes a bit -- and rightfully so.

~ Every tragedy has a secondary impact. For example, 9-11 further isolated the US from the rest of the world -- making our country very visitor-unfriendly. The VT tragedy, since the shooter was from Korea, will further feed the xenophobia. But it will also make people even more suspicious of others, regardless of where they're from, who are quirky (technical psychological term) and who don't socialize well -- which will further feed their quirkiness.

~ Helping to treat victims of the earthquake and tsunami in the Solomon Islands are physicians from Australia, Ecuador, France, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, and Taiwan.

~ What do we do if all the judges on the island have to recuse themselves from hearing a case because they're all closely related to people involved with the case. This would be one of those OOG ("Only On Guam") situations where 40% of the population (the portion of the population which controls the political system) is all related. Interesting conundrum.

~ Ted Haggard is moving to Phoenix and intends to pursue a graduate degree in counseling. That's a good thing. The people who feel they've been helped by counseling are often the most enthusiastic about becoming counselors themselves.

~ Among today's successes -- I caught up on all my grading AND got everything out of the Gmail "in" box -- all in the same day.

~ 7 @ 7 -- church seven days a week @ 7 p.m. What else do you do when you keep running out of room?

~ Consumers want XP back -- so Dell is again offering it as an option. I'm running Vista on this machine, and while it's not perfect, Vista has been a lot less problematic than the XP which I have running on several of the machines with which I work. I don't get it.

~ There was a new release of Ubuntu yesterday.

~ The Chinese have made the world's first artificial snow fall. Sick. Very sick people.

~ We're running out of Sundays. This Sunday is "Creation Sunday" and "Crime Victims' Sunday" and "Family and Friends Sunday" and... I suspect that if we'd get away from being "issue" oriented and refocused on the gospel itself -- the issues would get addressed with a lot more enthusiasm.

~ BTW, the gospel text for this Sunday is John 21:1-19.