As “Wallace”:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0108598/ would say, “Happy Birthday, Chuck!”:
bq. Nearly 450 Christian churches around the country plan to “celebrate the 197th birthday of Charles Darwin”:http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-0602110101feb11,1,287350.story on Sunday with programs and sermons intended to emphasize that his theory of biological evolution is compatible with faith and that Christians have no need to choose between religion and science.
My symptoms of a meme virus transmitted by “Taylor McKnight”:http://gtmcknight.com/log/archives/2006/02/01/fantastic_four.php:
Four Places I’ve Lived:
* Charleston, West Virginia
* Milwaukee, Wisconsin
* La Jolla, California
* Hillcrest, California
Continue reading
This is a placeholder for a bit I’d like to write about an “article on standardized education”:http://www.thememoryhole.org/edu/school-mission.htm.
Here’s another strange blog artefact. I’ve mentioned before how “odd searches bring people to this site”:http://www.globalspin.com/mt/archives/000496.html. One of the popular search terms has been *tiananmen*, which leads searchers to a “brief note commemorating the 1989 massacre”:http://www.globalspin.com/mt/archives/000327.html. It consistently gets 300 or so hits per month, while other top search terms average 20.
When Google started “censoring searches from China”:http://www.boingboing.net/2006/01/29/googlecn_tibetans_pr.html, though, that number exploded. Traffic to the site has tripled in the past few days, with 5000 searches for tiananmen landing on that bit of a page. Apparently, “tiananmen square”:http://www.google.com/search?q=tiananmen+square was used as the most obvious query Google is blocking.
The strangest part of all this is that I can’t even find that page in the Google search results. Think of what the traffic might be if it showed up on the first page…
A group of Georgetown law students responded to a shill session by Alberto Gonzales in the best way possible: “they turned their backs on him”:http://insomnia.livejournal.com/652389.html. The protest is being downplayed by some media outlets, but it warranted a mention in the “Washington Post”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/01/24/AR2006012401593.html:
bq. Gonzales’s appearance, which was part of a three-day White House campaign to defend the NSA program, was punctuated by a silent protest from more than a dozen students who turned their backs to Gonzales, who continued to speak without acknowledging them and did not take questions afterward.
bq. Five of the students wore black pillowcases over their heads — an apparent reference to the mistreatment of U.S. detainees overseas — and held a banner roughly paraphrasing Benjamin Franklin: “Those who would sacrifice liberty for security deserve neither.”
I hope this beat continues long enough to influence the elections this fall.