The following was written a little bit before blogs were invented. But I think these words apply quite well to how we should conduct ourselves when discussing things under "comments". Please read the following as applying directly to how we talk to each other online:

We no more give honors to fools than pray for snow in summer or rain during harvest.

You have as little to fear from an undeserved curse as from the dart of a wren or the swoop of a swallow.

A whip for the racehorse, a tiller for the sailboat— and a stick for the back of fools!

Don't respond to the stupidity of a fool; you'll only look foolish yourself.

Answer a fool in simple terms so he doesn't get a swelled head.

You're only asking for trouble when you send a message by a fool.

A proverb quoted by fools is limp as a wet noodle.

Putting a fool in a place of honor is like setting a mud brick on a marble column.

To ask a moron to quote a proverb is like putting a scalpel in the hands of a drunk.

As a dog eats its own vomit, so fools recycle silliness.

See that man who thinks he's so smart? You can expect far more from a fool than from him.

Like Glaze on Cracked Pottery, Dreamers fantasize their self-importance; they think they are smarter than a whole college faculty.

You grab a mad dog by the ears when you butt into a quarrel that's none of your business.

People who shrug off deliberate deceptions, saying, "I didn't mean it, I was only joking," are worse than careless campers who walk away from smoldering campfires.

When you run out of wood, the fire goes out; when the gossip ends, the quarrel dies down.

A quarrelsome person in a dispute is like kerosene thrown on a fire.

Listening to gossip is like eating cheap candy; do you want junk like that in your belly?

Smooth talk from an evil heart is like glaze on cracked pottery.

Your enemy shakes hands and greets you like an old friend, all the while conniving against you. When he speaks warmly to you, don't believe him for a minute; he's just waiting for the chance to rip you off. No matter how cunningly he conceals his malice, eventually his evil will be exposed in public.

Malice backfires; spite boomerangs.

Liars hate their victims; flatterers sabotage trust.

The above was written by Solomon and translated by Eugene Peterson. (Proverbs 26)

Wise advice for bloggers, eh?

E-mail forwards are the bane of my existence. Urban legends, fearmongering about missing children and Democratic politicians who want to eat them, political rabble rousing, mushy stories about little kids in Sunday School or grandfathers and ice cream cones, jingoistic screeds masquerading as patriotism, etc etc etc.
I hatessss them, my preciousss. And I always feel all Gollumy when I ask a relative or friend to:
a) not include me in their send to file for such things
b) at the very least place me in the BCC section of their e-mail's "To" field so all the hundreds of people they know but I don't won't have my e-mail address, or
c) do some quick research and learn that the story they're forwarding is not true.

I can kinda-sorta understand the sentiment that provokes one to pass these things along.
But for the life of me I cannot put myself in the brainpattern of the person who falsifies details or begins the lie. What's the compulsion?

Check this out.
This ginormous mountain lion was struck by a car in Arizona. The good folks at Snopes document several variations of the email forward in which people change the details to say the mountain lion was found in Arkansas, Virginia, etc.

Why? What's the point?
What rational person takes an e-mail and purposefully changes the place names so as to mislead others for something so stupid?
I get white lies, I get fudging details on "big fish" stories, I get lying for profit . . . I don't get the person who changes "in Tempe between 1st and 3rd Avenue" to "in Jacksonville between 4th and 5th Street."

According to The Mechanical Contrivium: Jared Wilson

1. The Aztec Indians of Mexico believed Jared Wilson would protect them from physical harm, and so warriors used him to decorate their battle shields.
2. In his entire life, Jared Wilson will produce only a twelfth of a teaspoon of honey.
3. Reindeer like to eat Jared Wilson!
4. Carnivorous animals will not eat another animal that has been hit by Jared Wilson.
5. The Jared Wilson-fighting market in the Philippines is huge - several thousand Jared Wilson-fights take place there every day.
6. The horns of Jared Wilson are made entirely from hair.
7. The moon is 400 times closer to the Earth than Jared Wilson, and 400 times smaller!
8. The international dialling code for Jared Wilson is 672.
9. Ninety-six percent of all candles sold are purchased by Jared Wilson!
10. Bananas don't grow on trees - they grow on Jared Wilson!

#'s 1 and 5 -- Total awesomeness.

#9 -- Awww, yeah. Ninety-six percent of all Barry White CD's too.

You try it.

I get the shaft from eBay buyers more often than I like. I think it sucks that eBay has removed the capability to leave negative feedback about buyers. How do you warn other sellers to beware non-payers or difficult customers?

Someone got to Gospel-Driven Church today using the Google search phrase antichrist divorced.

Is there actually a belief of some church or tradition out there that talks about the antichrist being a divorcee? Or some Scripture reference I'm forgetting that says divorce is of the antichrist or something?

Of course, I am very delighted to know my blog turned up #1 in the search results, thanks to this post: The Antichrist Gets Divorced

(The surfer might have actually been looking for the very info I was highlighting in that post. It just seemed weird to see it as a search phrase.)

This is going to be the best Jesus book ever. Not only do I get to footnote scholarly discussions of the Gospels' similarity to ancient Graeco-Roman biography, I get to footnote stuff like this.

As seen on xkcd:

As some of you may recall, in June I posted a Thinklings interview with author and chess historian, J.C. Hallman.

Hallman is the author of two books: The Chess Artist and The Devil is a Gentleman.

If you'd like to learn more about Hallman's writings, visit his website -- jchallman.com.

Incidentally, if you go to his site, you can see that he linked back to his Thinklings interview. Here's a piece of that interview:

Both of your published books -- The Chess Artist and The Devil Is a Gentleman -- have a religious theme to them. What's your concept of religion in the world? Did you grow up in a religious environment?

Hallman: I started out Catholic but rejected it very early. Like when I was ten. As to my conception of religion in the world, it's something I articulated more in the second book, in which I explored a variety of religious movements, taking along with me the thinking of William James as a kind of guiding spirit. What I came up with, in terms of the big picture of religion, is that consciousness, human consciousness, comes with a significant attendant cosmological curiosity. That is, when we become conscious as people, we begin to get curious about big questions: why am I here, what is the nature of the universe, and so forth. All this is another way of saying that the side effect of sentience is a god-shaped hole in our psyches. Now that's Sartre (I think), but what James might add to it is that failing to satisfy that curiosity can result in a kind of profound sadness, even the tendency to reject life. So people are hardwired to find some set of answers that satisfies that cosmological curiosity. Fills the god-shaped hole. Very often that set of answers is God, but it can just as well be science's version of creation, the Big Bang (which some string theorists describe as quaint, it's so out of date), or organized Atheism, or Christianity, or Satanism, or chess, or literature, or whatever else satisfies you in terms of your personal quandary about the basic questions and mysteries of life. This is basically what we mean when we turn religion into an adverb and note that someone pursues whatever they pursue "religiously."

Click here to read the entire interview.

When you sign up for a Youtube account, you have to enter the characters depicted in one of those oddly distorted images. There's an out for those who can't perform that task for whatever reason. The link to that secondary option, right below the image, is marked: "Can't Read?"

Tony Morgan asks if podcasting is dead.

Interesting points to consider.

I was a latecomer to the podcast phenomenon (as I am with nearly all new technologies and innovations), and I still am not the podcast fiend some of my friends are.

I subscribe to probably 10 podcasts, but only listen to 1 or 2 a week. They are mainly sermon podcasts.

What is your subscription to listening ratio?

I'm in serious need of some new, pithy sites to add to my web-reading.

Not blogs. I read too many of those.

But are there any good sites out there that are somewhat offbeat, and that have new content daily, that you can recommend?

Currently I'm pretty stuck. I read Thinklings, of course, and the Bloogroll Posts link over at Out of the Bloo (which is a good aggregator of the latest writings by the posters in my Bloogroll). I'll also check out National Review online on occasion. Once Lost starts up, I'm sure I'll be reading forums and stuff.

But until then, I'm a bit bored with my web routines.

Let me know if there's a cool site or two out there that you can recommend.

Also, appropos of nothing, you should definitely check out this video. This is beautiful and simply amazing (thanks to Jen for pointing me to this one).

I wonder if that'll be the title of a book one day. I fear -- unless he's keeping meticulous records -- all of his correspondences will one day be lost.

Seriously.

On the other hand, it's not just him I wonder about (although he's the most likely Thinkling to reach fame through his writing), but I wonder about everyone's missives these days.

When was the last time you actually wrote a letter, sealed an envelope, and dropped it in the mail? If you're like most people I know, you don't do that. You email instead. You blog instead.

I guess it all comes down to whether or not you take the time to archive your digital files, and whether or not those digital files will be easily accessible twenty, thirty, fifty years down the road.

I'd love to peruse some of the emails Jared and I zipped back and forth to each other during our college days. But I didn't save them ...

Did you, Jared?

While looking into getting a web presence for my business, I started thinking about buying domain names for my kids. So I was intrigued to see this article, a version of which appeared in my local paper a few days ago.

It seems a lot of parents are having the same thought-- buy your kids domain names, and do it now, while the virtual real estate is still available.

A small but growing number of parents are getting domain names for their young kids, long before they can do more than peck aimlessly at a keyboard.

It's not known exactly how many, but the practice is no longer limited to parents in Web design or information technology.

They worry that the name of choice might not be available by the time their babies become teens or adults, just as someone claimed the ".com" for Britney Spears' 11-month-old son before she could.

The trend hints at the potential importance of domain names in establishing one's future digital identity.

Think of how much a typical teen's online life now revolves around Facebook or News Corp.'s MySpace. Imagine if one day the domain could take you directly to those social-networking profiles, blogs, photo albums and more.

There is the question-- how much will a .com name matter in the years to come? Will it be the online equivalent of telling people your name is your mailing address, or will the practice of manualling entering domain names eventually fade to obscurity?

There's no guarantee, though, that domain names will have as central a role in online identity. After all, with search engines getting smarter, Internet users can simply type the name of a person into Google.

"Given the pace of change on the Internet, it strikes me as a pretty impressive leap of faith that we're going to use exactly the same system and the same tools ... 15 to 20 years from today," said Peter Grunwald, whose Grunwald Associates firm specializes in researching kids and technology.

I haven't bought domain names for my kids yet, but I'm thinking about it-- especially since they're getting almost to a point where they can use the computer independently. I also thought about trying to buy the domain name for my daughter's first and middle names, since she'll eventually get married and drop her last name. Unfortunately, somebody already has it. But I checked her website, and she looks really old. So maybe I can backorder it.

Anybody out there who has done it or is thinking about it?

Swedish Woman Gets Superfast Internet

She is a latecomer to the information superhighway, but 75-year-old Sigbritt Lothberg is now cruising the Internet with a dizzying speed. Lothberg's 40 gigabits-per-second fiber-optic connection in Karlstad is believed to be the fastest residential uplink in the world, Karlstad city officials said.

In less than 2 seconds, Lothberg can download a full-length movie on her home computer - many thousand times faster than most residential connections, said Hafsteinn Jonsson, head of the Karlstad city network unit.

Jonsson and Lothberg's son, Peter, worked together to install the connection.

The speed is reached using a new modulation technique that allows the sending of data between two routers placed up to 1,240 miles apart, without any transponders in between, Jonsson said.

"We wanted to show that that there are no limitations to Internet speed," he said.

Peter Lothberg, who is a networking expert, said he wanted to demonstrate the new technology while providing a computer link for his mother.

"She's a brand-new Internet user," Lothberg said by phone from California, where he lives. "She didn't even have a computer before."

His mother isn't exactly making the most of her high-speed connection. She only uses it to read Web-based newspapers.

I need help, because I give up. I've been doing Internet searches for three hours straight trying to find particular pieces of information I didn't think would be so hard to find. I'm turning up nothing, so now I'm turning to you, dear readers, in the hopes one or more of you may be able to help me with a bit of research for my novel.

If you are more of a search engine wizard than I am or happen to be some sort of human trivia storehouse or just happen to know the answers to any of the questions below from personal experience or something you've read, etc., I'd be ever so grateful.

1. I'm trying to figure out how long a cruise between Cancun, Mexico (or any port on the east side of Mexico, really) and Caracas, Venezuela would take. This could be an actual passenger cruise ship or a cargo ship like, say, an oil tanker. If there's difference, it makes no difference to me; either one will do. I've even tried just finding the distance by sea and then finding out how fast a cruise ship travels in order to piece those two bits of info together. No dice on any of it.

2. I'm trying to figure out how long it would take to drive from Guadalajara, Mexico to Naco, Mexico (or any town on the Mexico-Arizona/West Texas border). How long would it take to fly that distance?

3. I have learned that in the winter, the Arizona desert can drop below freezing. How hot does it get during the day then?

I know these are shots in the dark, but any help would be appreciated. I'm not a stickler for perfect authenticity; like Stephen King has said, an author only needs a little bit of research to be dangerous. I basically want to approximate accuracy here. I don't care if it's exact, but I don't want someone reading the book who knows their stuff to suddenly say, "Hey, it doesn't take four days to drive that distance!" and slam the thing down in disgust.

... briefly, to these other places. (Not all of the links are to blogs.)

Out of the Bloo knocks it out of the park with an exposition of Romans 12:10.

No theory of the atonement?

The Movie Answer Man defends himself from defenders of Deuce Bigalow and Jessica Simpson.

Jeff Spiccoli goes to Iran. Where's Team America: World Police when you need them?

Epidemic: Telling someone you'll be praying for them and then never actually doing it. Also called "lying."

When I was a kid I saw the terrible movie Alligator on TV and it freaked me out. Interestingly enough, Alligator was written by John Sayles (who also wrote another aquatic danger-themed dud Pirahna), now one of my favorite filmmakers (Lone Star, Eight Men Out, Men With Guns, among others). Anyways, this humongous alligator captured in Texas freaks me out.

A Letter to Young Artists Injured by the Church

Intellectuelle Samantha dealt with false accusations of child abuse. Scary.

Is Satan already bound? We touched on that idea a bit in our recent Book Club discussions of Hoekema's The Bible and the Future. Now the Jollyblogger presents a brief explanation of this curious tenet of amillennialism.

Researchers creating life from scratch? Call me when they do it out of thin air.
Btw, this seems like another good place to plug the recent box office disaster The Island. I think me and Jerry Bruckheimer's family are the only ones that saw it. It's a dandy of a popcorn action film, a bit of Logan's Run mixed with Coma, and it's a mystery to me how it's unabashed pro-life theme made it out of Hollywood.

Macy likes Arthur's "About Face" game at the PBSKids website.

There are updates at both Mysterium Tremendum and Shizuka Blog.

salguod offers good advice regarding your e-mail's BCC feature:

If you're going to send these emails on to your entire mailing list, by all means use BCC instead of the To or CC fields. I went through my copy of the MS email tracking message and found 108 email addresses. If I was a spammer, I just found 108 new victims. By using BCC, you only annoy your friends with useless hoaxes without exposing them to a spam risk.

I'll go one better. Even if you're sending out a "friendly" group e-mail, but the recipients don't all know each other, use the BCC feature.

I get e-mails all the time from friends and family who aren't really forwarding stupid urban legends or sappy stories but are actually sending along news, photos, prayer requests, or family updates. That's why it's so hard to tell them I'd prefer all the people they know (but I don't) not have my e-mail address. When you don't use the BCC feature, you're basically sharing my e-mail address with strangers without my permission. It doesn't matter to me if you know them; I don't.

Not using BCC also (I think) opens folks up to virus spreading. The way some e-mail programs work, if you send a group e-mail out just using CC, some recipients end up with strangers' email addresses in their address book or contact file. Then, if they get a virus, they can end up sending it to complete strangers. All because you didn't BCC.

And it's just good manners.

I will soon be redesigning our church's website and I'm looking for inspiration. Consider this a challenge for you to impress me with the wonderment that is your church website! Or if you like the site of a church that you've never set foot in, that'll work too. I will also accept suggestions about what you would like to see in a church website (yes, I'm covering all my bases).

Ever heard of a googlewhack?
From the latest issue of Entertainment Weekly*:

What may sound like a web-based hitman service is actually a game in which you type a two-word phrase into the popular search engine seeking to find one and only one hit in return. It's harder than you think.
"Dork Turnspit," "Pomegranate Filibusters," and "Hydroids Souvlaki"? All Googlewhacks. "Prosthetic Vassal"? Nope -- it yielded about 40 sites.

Googlewhacking might have remained obscure but for British comedian Dave Gorman, who became obsessed with the game while procrastinating on writing a novel. Following a drunken New Year's Eve wager, Gorman, 33, set out to meet the owners of 10 Googlewhacked websites, including a Columbus, Ohio, prog-rock enthusiast whose site (mysteriously) includes the words ammonite and googolplex. Gorman traveled over 90,000 miles in eight weeks, producing enough material for an Off Broadway show (opening next month) and the book Dave Gorman's Googlewhack! Adventure (Overlook, $24.95).

I thought this sounded like fun. And how hard it can be? So I gave it a few whirls to see how close I could come to a Googlewhack.

felonious muenster -- Whoa. 18 sites. Better try again.

supralapsarian thyroid -- Hmm. 15 hits.

misanthrope Coulier -- Oo, 2 sites. Getting close!

clandestine transubstantiationism -- Eek. Zero sites. Went too far.

pleiades underdog -- Yikes. 111 sites. I stink.

octagonal dispensationalism -- Bingo! 1 hit.

Of course, now that I've blogged all these phrases on this site, I may have thrown my Googlewhack out of, um, whack.

You play! It's fun!


* EW article not available online.

"We've all heard that a million monkeys banging on a million typewriters will eventually reproduce the entire works of Shakespeare. Now, thanks to the Internet, we know this is not true."
-- Robert Wilensky, quoted in Reader's Digest