Happy Birthday Planet Earth!

Don't you just hate it when you miss an important anniversary? I do have an excuse though - try as I might rushing about the place, I could not track down six thousand birthday candles.

In the 1650s, an Anglican bishop named James Ussher published his "Annals of the World," The book, now published in English for the first time, is a favorite of homeschoolers. It's the history of the world from the Garden of Eden to the fall of Jerusalem in AD 70 and in it the bishop calculates the creation of the earth happened on Oct. 23, 4004 B.C. – making it exactly 6,010 yesterday.

Ussher's arrival at the date of Oct. 23 was determined based on the fact that most peoples of antiquity, especially the Jews, started their calendar at harvest time. Ussher concluded there must be good reason for this, so he chose the first Sunday following autumnal equinox.

Well thank goodness for that - there's a robust method behind the calculation, for a minute I was worried that it may be nonsense.

Anyhoo tonight I'll be raising a glass for the planet. Happy birthday old girl!

An Ode

To the original Zombie. All part of a fun day at the Toronto Zombie Walk. Check out the fun here

Flickr: Photos from littlemissknit

Blogged with Flock

l33t haxors pwn Coulter

Oh for the long gone time of my youth when our family were amongst the vanguard of 'home computer' owners, mainly because dad convinced mum that buying a BBC model B with the £300 he would save by doing so would act as an incentive to give up the smokes. (Nice one dad, a textbook example of blokenomics)

Not for us a Sinclair or Commodore games machine, the far more worthy BBC Micro was a serious device for learning about programing BASIC and controlling one of those perspex turtles with a felt-tip pen inside.

Perhaps our parents hoped my brother and I would become computer experts, we certainly entertained fantasies of becoming hackers and controlling ICBMs a la War Games. The reality turned out for most of us to be far more prosaic - we all use computers everyday with differing degrees of competence to do stuff.

But it would have been worth any number of late nights learning code to be able to hack Ann Coulter's website like this person did dammit.

Jesus ♥s Halo

Evidently, Christianity is suffering from a bit of an image problem.

It used to be, says David Kinnaman, that Christianity was both big and beloved in the U.S. — even among its non-adherents. Back in 1996, a poll taken by Kinnaman's organization, the Barna Group, found that 83% of Americans identified themselves as Christians, and that fewer than 20% of non-Christians held an unfavorable view of Christianity. But, as Kinnaman puts it in his new book (co-authored with Gabe Lyons) UnChristian, "That was then."

Barna polls conducted between 2004 and this year, sampling 440 non-Christians (and a similar number of Christians) aged 16 to 29, found that 38% had a "bad impression" of present-day Christianity. "It's not a pretty picture" the authors write...Kinnaman claims that however defined, the number of non-Christians is growing with each succeeding generation: His study found that 23% of Americans over 61 were non-Christians; 27% among people ages 42-60; and 40% among 16-29 year olds. Younger Christians, he concludes, are therefore likely to live in an environment where two out of every five of their peers is not a Christian.

What's the solution? Let 'em play Halo in church.

Far from being defensive, church leaders who support Halo — despite its “thou shalt kill” credo — celebrate it as a modern and sometimes singularly effective tool. It is crucial, they say, to reach the elusive audience of boys and young men.

Witness the basement on a recent Sunday at the Colorado Community Church in the Englewood area of Denver, where Tim Foster, 12, and Chris Graham, 14, sat in front of three TVs, locked in violent virtual combat as they navigated on-screen characters through lethal gun bursts. Tim explained the game’s allure: “It’s just fun blowing people up.”

I'm sure Jesus would agree.

Christ! Where do we park?

With four kids under twelve, family outings can be some expensive shit. So, when possible, we look for things to do on the weekends that are fairly cheap. One of the cheapest, ostensibly, is the ubiquitous town festival. In the summer time, that usually means has-been seventies artists, a "Taste of (insert town name here)", and perhaps a death-mongering carnival.

Fall festivals, on the other hand, tend to be more focused on our agrarian past. Foods and crafts rule the day. This past weekend, our destination was the Apple Fest in Long Grove. Long Grove is a kinda pointless little tchotchke mecca, in the wooded, tony far Northwest suburbs. If jars of apple jalapeño butter are your thing, that's where to go. And if jars of apple jalapeño butter are your thing, you need a better thing.

Coming in to town, we had to wait 10 minutes to pull in to the only available parking lot. There was an attendant at the entrance, who was stopping each car, collecting their parking fee, and directing them where to park. One attendant. Not terribly efficient. When we finally got to the front of the line, the attendant greeted us, "Hi, the Long Grove Community Church has donated their parking lot for the weekend, please park anywhere you'd like." No fee. Taking the hint, "Can we offer a donation?" "No thank you. Jesus loves you."

Ok. Jesus loves me. But needed me to wait in line for 10 minutes to tell me. But I guess I shouldn't look a gift-parking lot-savior in the mouth. As we left the lot, a young boy, stationed near the sidewalk, asked, "Would you like a bottle of water? it's free!" A church elder, standing behind him, shouted excitedly, stepping on his line, "Like Christ's love!"

The Fest was not suitably festive. And our area was burning in Hellfire yesterday. So we didn't stay for long. Certainly not long enough to break the seal on our Jesus water. I threw the bottle in the fridge when we got home. It wasn't until a little dew condensed on the plastic that I noticed that Christ's love for me, in liquid form, was best consumed before 08/07/2007.

LOLTheist

Because LOLcats plus Religion Equals High-larity!