Category: Curios & Humor

Arthur of the Ancient and Illuminated Seers of Bavaria (who says it’s okay to blog this) writes:

Amongst other things, I enjoy reading murder mysteries, especially those from the golden age of the English whodunnit in the 20s and 30. Recently I’ve been reading up on the lives of some of those authors and I came across something rather surprising.

Of the five great authors of the English golden age, Agatha Christie, Margery Allingham, Dorothy L. Sayers, G.K. Chesterton and Ronald Knox, all but one (Christie) were Catholic!  Indeed of those three (Sayers, Chesterton and Knox) were also serious authors on philosophical matters and theology.  Okay Knox was primarily a theologian who dabbled in mystery writing, but you get my drift.  🙂

I’m not sure exactly what that means, but I found it interesting.

I’m not sure what it means, either. It could be random chance, but . . .

. . . Jack Chick might take it as evidence that Catholics just have murderous tendencies.

. . . Some psychologists might take it as evidence that British Catholics have murderous thoughts, given how much they suffered persecution from the British Crown and how much alienation they suffered in British society.

. . . I might take it to mean that there’s an intellectual streak in Catholicism that results in its authors liking intellectual puzzles and this tendency then manifesting in literary form (the murder mystery being a familiar form of intellectual puzzle in fiction).

What’s your explanation for the phenomenon?

A piece back we had a post about a church building made out of Legos.

Here’s another, similar thing, though there are a few differences.

These are explicitly Catholic churches–parishes–and there’s more than one of them. The gentleman who makes them does one per year.

Pictured here is the inside of this year’s (2006’s) Lego parish.

The gentleman who does them writes:

I’ve been reading your blog for a bit now and thought I would share something that I do every year from Christmas to Easter.

http://www.brickshelf.com/cgi-bin/gallery.cgi?m=kc8wzm

The link above is to the galleries that I have set up for the Lego Church Project.

It’s pretty much a Parish done up in legos. LCP06 is the current project that I have built.

HERE’S THE LINK TO THIS YEAR’S LEGO CHURCH.

AND HERE’S THE GALLERY OF PREVIOUS YEARS.

Y’know, even made of Legos, some of these look more conducive to worship than some of the parishes out there.

I happened to see this while I was shopping today at the San Diego Mitsuwa Japanese market, where I had gone in pursuit of tofu & shirataki noodles. This isn’t either one of those, though.

Sorry for the poor picture quality. I only had my camera phone with me, and it looks like I got it a little too close to the camera.

Answer to what the mystery food is tomorrow.

Michelle here. Virtually.

The photo is an image of me, but what do you think this picture itself is composed of? Would you believe it’s text from the Bible? Although my sister told me how she created this, I’m not a computer geek, and so all that really stuck with me is that she played around with the image, taken from an original photo, on Photoshop. You can also see the image at her blog, Once Upon A Time….

GET THE POST.

Okay. Cute photo of the day.

Take a look at this picture of three baby hedgehogs:


Feel free to caption this one.

Incidentally, a characteristic of the human species is that they seem to find baby hedgehogs cute and like to take lots of pictures of them.

HOW ELSE TO EXPLAIN ALL THE DIFFERENT PICTURES OF CUTE BABY HEDGEHOGS AT GOOGLE IMAGES?

Robert Kagan is a foreign policy expert who wrote a very nice little book a few years ago in the run-up to the Iraq War called Of Paradise and Power, which I read and which I thought explained a lot about the disconnect between Europe and America and about the state of thinking in the European ecclesiastical hierarchy when it comes to going to war.

It’s worth your while to read as a exploration of the two mindsets.

Also worth your while to read is his article, "I am not a Straussian," which is one of the funniest things I’ve read in some time.

I meant to blog it when it came out a month ago, but I forgot and a chance encounter with the word "Straussian" yesterday brought it to mind.

I re-read it, and it hasn’t changed in a month: It’s still hilarous.

ENJOY.

Reason #1957346 to get yourself a post office box:

If you live on one of the streets below, named among the wackiest street names in the United States, no one who mails you letters will know.  (If you know of a wacky street name in your area that did not place in the contest, feel free to add it to the combox.)

The runners-up, in descending order from tenth-place to second-place in the contest:

• Tater Peeler Road in Lebanon, Tenn.
• The intersection of Count and Basie in Richmond, Va.
• Shades of Death Road in Warren County, N.J.
• Unexpected Road in Buena, N.J.
• Bucket of Blood Street in Holbrook, Ariz.
• The intersection of Clinton and Fidelity in Houston
• The intersection of Lonesome and Hardup in Albany, Ga.
• Farfrompoopen Road in Tennessee (the only road up to Constipation Ridge)
• Divorce Court in Heather Highlands, Pa.

And the winner for the wackiest street name was…

**DRUM ROLL**

• Psycho Path in Traverse City, Mich.

GET THE STORY.

Living on Psycho Path might be a lot of fun on Halloween, but I’d hate to live there year-round.

DAYBYDAYCARTOON.COM

Michelle here.

As part of my reading on parenting, I get regular alerts from Mothering Magazine, a magazine that takes an … uhm … rather eco-friendly view of parenting. It’s got some good stuff in it, but basically it’s the parenting magazine on newsstands for the All-Natural Trail-Mix and Granola Crowd. I was amused by this notice of an upcoming chat channel guest at the magazine’s web site:

"Hathor the Cowgoddess lives in the middle of urban sprawl with her dearest super-husband and three wee and wise kids. She has had an unassisted birth in the middle of her 700 square foot apartment, she breastfeeds on demand and in public, she shares sleep, maintains constant contact and unschools. Not only does she do all of this, she does it with grand style and verve. With extravagant and outrageous behavior. And with her trusty sidekick baby in a sling.

"Hathor is the completely true product of the imagination of Heather Cushman-Dowdee, an outraged (because she might look distracted but she is paying attention!) mama who has done almost all of the above (that part is autobiography) … except for the part that she totally makes up (those parts are wishful thinking). The raucous exploits of Hathor and her family are produced in comic form on the web and printed in many, many zines and magazines and books, too."

SEE THE ANNOUNCEMENT.

So, who is Hathor the Cow Goddess really? (Not counting her Egyptian mythological namesake.)

GET THE SCOOP.

And, for a bit of balance in the "lactivism" debate, see THIS COLUMN by Betsy Hart.

(JIMMY ADDS: You’d never guess that Hathor was a cow goddess from the way she appears on Stargate SG-1!)

A flight path of a UFO tracked by the Air Force in the 1950s?

Good guess!

But wrong.

In actuality, it’s the track path of a one dollar bill that was first picked up by the system on March 15, 2002 in Dayton, Ohio and then tracked through fourteen additional sightings.

It was most recently sighted on March 26, 2005 in Rudyard, Michigan.

It travelled (at least) 4,191 miles in 3 Yrs, 12 Days, 17 Hrs, 25 Mins at an average of 3.8 Miles per day.

How was it tracked?

By a secret government transmitter placed in all paper money since the 1950s that needs to be reported to Agent Fox Mulder of the X-Files?

Good guess!

But wrong.

It was tracked through a free, volunteer web service known as WheresGeorge.Com, which a bunch of friends who thought it would be a hoot to set up a site that lets people track the movements of the money in their wallets.

(Fox Mulder might still think they were agents of the shadow government, though.)

Here’s how it works: They set up a database that allowed people to enter the serial numbers of the dollar bills in their pockets, along with the zip code of where they are. Many then wrote "Where’s George.Com" on the bills and spent them. When the bills later came into the possession of others, they saw the note, logged in to Where’s George.Com, and entered a new bill sighting, allowing the bill to be tracked. Users also could leave notes about how the bill came into their possession.

The above bill, for example, was once received as part of a tip at a Sonic restaurant, given in change at a McDonalds and a Jack In The Box. This bill has a rather–er–colorful history, as it was also received in winnings at a racetrack and then found on the floor of something called the Penthouse Key Club in Dallas (I don’t know what that is, but it doesn’t sound wholesome).

This bill is something of a superstar, not for those reasons, but because it’s the most sighted bill currently on file.

READ ITS PROFILE HERE.

If you’re interested,

TRACK YOUR OWN CURRENCY AT WHERESGEORGE.COM.

If you’re Canadian,

TRACK YOUR CURRENCY AT WHERESWILLY.COM.