House Building Blog

Our friends, Matt and Katie, have a blog that documents the process of building their new house. It's really cool. If you're planning to build a house, this might help show you what you're in for.

Their house is almost done, and it is beautiful!

The Yard Up Close

 
 
 
  

Tough Verses of the Qur'an: 9: 123

Qur'an 9: 123 in the Pickthall translation:

Qur'an 9: 123 in the King Fahd Complex translation:

-------------------
Tough Verses of the Qur'an Index

Tough Verses of the Qur'an: Introduction
Tough Verses of the Qur'an: 2: 216
Tough Verses of the Qur'an: 9: 123
Tough Verses of the Qur'an: 9: 29
Tough Verses of the Qur'an: 5: 33
Tough Verses of the Qur'an: 24: 2
Tough Verses of the Qur'an: 47: 35

Bush and Colbert

I've only seen the clip on Hot Air, and of course that's edited, but it does look like Bush was funny and charming while Colbert kind of fell flat. Colbert's Valarie Plame joke made me laugh though:

[Referring to Joe Wilson] And of course he brought along his lovely wife, Valarie Plame. Oh my God! Oh what have I said! I. . . gee-minetee. . . I'm sorry, Mr. President. I meant to say he brought along his lovely wife, Joe Wilson's wife.

Inspiration

Ever read anything that compels you to write? Sandkings, a novella by George R. R. Martin, does that for me. I love this science fiction story of man playing God. It inspires me to work on my fiction writing every time I read it.

United 93

Best per screen average as of Friday's estimates.

UPDATE: I saw it Saturday night. Great movie. Great telling of a story about heroism and our nation waking up to a war we hadn't acknowledged.

Blogger Profile

I'm finally posting a profile on Blogger. Sorry to all you 1300 people who checked it already and found nothing there.

Atlas Shrugged Movie

I don't know how you would fit it into one movie, but I would love to see it.

Tough Verses of the Qur'an: 2: 216

Qur'an 2: 216 in the Pickthall translation:

Qur'an 2:216 in the King Fahd Complex translation:

There is a footnote:

This is the footnote referenced:

---------------
Tough Verses of the Qur'an Index

Tough Verses of the Qur'an: Introduction
Tough Verses of the Qur'an: 2: 216
Tough Verses of the Qur'an: 9: 123
Tough Verses of the Qur'an: 9: 29
Tough Verses of the Qur'an: 5: 33
Tough Verses of the Qur'an: 24: 2
Tough Verses of the Qur'an: 47: 35

A Mud Pie a Day. . .

Bao Bao likes the taste of mud and began eating it as a 7-year-old. She soon found that if she didn't have her daily mud ration she wouldn't feel well.

Considering how inexpensive dates could be, she must have many suitors.

Stop Talking About Oil Companies and Learn Your Economics

I was happy to see this link roundup on Instapundit.

Geese on the Street

I went home for lunch and came upon this:


My husband called while I posted this to let me know that they have been corralled back to a pond.

ADDED: For those who would like to see the goslings up close, a tighter crop:

Da Vinci Code and Common Ignorance

The following quotes from regular people were provided in answer to the question: "What do you think of the historical claims in [The Da Vinci Code] - did you take them as gospel, or are they pure fiction?"

The book was hugely enjoyable. As far as I can see, the claims in the book are just as likely to be true as those in the Bible.
Jane, Essex, England

If so many people believe it to be true, then how can it be fiction?
Steven Stone, Sheffield

The facts speak for themselves, as the saying goes, there's no smoke without fire.
Spencer Paynter, Dudley West Midlands UK

I'm starting to feel quite outnumbered, but I for one have found many of the facts from Brown's book even more credible after reading some of the rebuttal books. Most of the evidence on either side seems circumstantial, and I lean toward Brown's assessment of the church as historically biased against women, one American atheist's opinion.
Matty Schwartz, Brooklyn, NY, USA

I especially like this one:

The claims in the Da Vinci code are just as plausible as the claims in the Bible. No modern christian has actually seen God, or Jesus, in the flesh, and yet they can claim their beliefs as truth. Why should the same not apply to the book? The trouble is, religious zealots are too closed minded to accurately question their own views.
Rob Stone, Stafford, UK

That outlook would make it awfully hard to study history.

Read the rest of them. (You have to scroll past the news story.)

I don't fault Brown for writing fiction, but I do fault literate people for taking fiction as fact.

Making Catholic University Websites More Catholic

Via A Catholic Life. The Cardinal Newman Society has a campaign to remove links to pro-abortion choice groups from the websites of Catholic universities. Looks like it's working.

Tough Verses of the Qur'an: Introduction

The Qur'an has some tough verses. For some, these verses advocate violence; for others, they require special interpretation.

For all of the Internet-based discussions about such verses, it seems as though much relies on conjecture, and rarely is the actual Qur'an consulted. Therefore, I thought a series of posts with these tough verses might be helpful.

For each verse, I will scan in two English translations from the copies of the Qur'an I have available:

Translation by Mohammed Marmaduke Pickthall published by Penguin Books

This is the paperback version I used in college.

Translation by Doctors Muhammad Taqi-ud-Din Al-Hilali and Muhammad Muhsin Khan published by the King Fahd Complex for the Printing of the Holy Qur'an.

This is a beautiful hardcover version given to me by a Muslim friend while I was still an atheist.

Verses will be offered without commentary. You may add your own in the comments section of each post.

The use of translations is admittedly limiting but unavoidable. It would be impossible to have much of a discussion at all if everyone was required to learn Arabic before engaging in it.

Tomorrow: Surah 2:216
---------------------------
Tough Verses of the Qur'an Index

Tough Verses of the Qur'an: Introduction
Tough Verses of the Qur'an: 2: 216
Tough Verses of the Qur'an: 9: 123
Tough Verses of the Qur'an: 9: 29
Tough Verses of the Qur'an: 5: 33
Tough Verses of the Qur'an: 24: 2
Tough Verses of the Qur'an: 47: 35

Yellow Birds

Detail from a picture in the living room.

The Undoing of Unity

Convert Provocateurs, posted on Pontifications, calls for humility and "eschatological perspective" when Evangelical, Catholic, and Orthodox believers are tempted to set polemics against one another.

I often wonder how much has been lost due to Christian divisions. So many gifts would be brought together if all were united. The division of Christ's church is a great shame.

Of course, then again, I might be particularly wishful for unity given my current position of not knowing where to go.

17th Carnival of Homeschooling...

...is up.

New White House Press Secretary

"My job is to make decisions and his job is to help explain those decisions to the press corps and the American people," Bush said, with Snow and McClellan at his side in the White House briefing room.

Bush also joked with reporters: "Tony already knows most of you and he's agreed to take the job anyway."

Good choice. Who better to articulate the President's ideas to the public than a guy who spends every day talking to the public about politics and does so very successfully?

A liberal think tank, the Center for American Progress, circulated a sampling of Snow's opinions, restricting the observations to those critical of the president.

Shouldn't that make liberals like him more?

Immigration Protest Monday

There's going to be an immigration protest in town on Monday. I'm hoping to take pictures.

Contradictory Convictions

Ah, what confusion! I find myself fully convinced to become a Catholic. Then at once I am fully convinced to remain a nondenominational evangelical. What alternating conviction! What contradiction!

What was it C.S. Lewis wrote in Mere Christianity about waiting in the hall?

Sea Glass

When You Want Functional at a Luxury Price

This table, which resembles an industrial reel, costs $6,600.

I would want a discount for buying a tree that wasn't turned all the way into a table. But I would be $62,000 wrong.

High Oil and Economic Growth

An alternate take on the effect high oil has on growth: high oil doesn't necessarily slow growth. An interesting observation:

And although $70-plus crude oil sounds expensive, consider the fact that adjusted for 2006 nominal personal income, crude oil prices would have to rise to $186 a barrel to match the 1980 peak. By this measure, today’s prices remain inside one standard of the mean going back to 1959.

Butterfly Up Close

I really like taking pictures of things up close. I think I'll make this a regular thing on the blog.

Hot Air and Cheap Technology

I like this new venture by Michelle Malkin.

Cheap technology = more people with the means to do audio and video production. Awesome.

"I am offended not by cartoons, but by more mundane things..."

like beheadings of civilians, cowardly attacks on public buildings, suicide murders, murders of Catholic priests (the latest in Turkey!), burnings of Christian chirches, the continued persecution of Coptic Christians in Egypt, the imposition of Sharia law on non-Muslims, the rapes of Scandinavain girls and women (called "whores" in your culture), the murder of film directors in Holland, and the rioting and looting in Paris France.

Sent to the Muslim Students Association at Michigan State.

There's more.

Albino Ivy?

This ivy is actually a pretty large plant. None of the other leaves are like this. For the last two years, I've thought that these leaves were getting ready to die and fall off, but they seem fine.

The Yard Up Close and After Rain

Do Retired Generals Want Rumsfeld In or Out?

Brain Shavings has a helpful visual representation.

Found via TKS where there is more analysis of the issue.

No Pulitzers for Non-Treason

Hilarious.

/hat tip to my Dad for pointing me to the link

Cardinals for Condoms? Maybe. Maybe Not.

I posted about Cardinal Martini the other day. But now there are new developments in one of the issues he made statements about.

Rome - The Vatican is expected to permit the use of condoms for AIDS patients, according to an interview with a high-ranking cardinal published Sunday.

The Vatican is currently working on a document on the subject that would be published soon, Vatican 'Health Minister' Javier Lozano Baragan said in an interview with the Italian daily La Repubblica.

The Roman Catholic Church has up till now strictly prohibited the use of condoms even in marriage for AIDS patients and HIV-infected people.

Observers in Rome suggest that a Curial cardinal such as Baragan could only make a statement on a such a sensitive theme when it had been first agreed upon with Pope Benedict XVI.

'It is a very difficult and delicate topic,' said Baragan, considered a close confidant of the pope. 'It was Benedict who demanded an examination of this special question of the use of condoms by AIDS patients.'

However the cardinal did not provide details on the Vatican's new rules.

"Expected to permit" is basically meaningless coming from the media, but it will be interesting to see what is decided.

American Papist has more.

UPDATE: I am tired of seeing the issue portrayed by the media as being about condoms in general. Obviously the Catholic Church isn't going to start advocating for the use of condoms outside of marriage. The issue is specifically about condom use by married couples in which one of the partners had HIV/AIDS. Why can't the media get that?

The End of a Great Blog

Craig of I Am a Stegosaurus has deleted his blog and signed off. It's really too bad. The writing on that blog was great.

Perhaps it will resurrect somewhere else. Or maybe the author will write a book. One can hope.

Short Memories? Willful Ignorance?

Shouldn't this have been all over the news?

And really, it's not only this. I'm on Laurie Mylroie's email list, and she often sends out reports that illustrate ties between terrorism and Saddam's regime.

Soon after Operation Iraqi Freedom began, I actually had someone argue with me that Iraq had no ties to terrorism. Only a few short months before that, Saddam had been making public announcements that he would pay suicide bombers to carry out attacks. His announcements were shown and discussed on the news.

Why are people's memories so short? Why all of the willful ignorance?

End of the Screedblog?

I am getting worried. Is Lileks' Screedblog over? No posts in over a month? Say it ain't so. . .

Guess I'll have to stick to The Bleat.

Shameful

She should be in jail.

3rd Season of 24

We're now in the middle of the third season of 24 on DVD. I love it, but there is one thing that has really gotten on my nerves this season: David and Wayne Palmer are supposed to be brothers, but they look nothing alike. There is no way that the two of them could be such close relatives. To get around this annoyance in my mind, I'm going to assume that one of them is adopted.

I love this show. Back to the marathon. . .

Add a Photo to My Blog?

Hmmmm. Maybe.


I don't have many photos of myself though. I look kind of stern in this one.

Music, Math, and God

The whole house and garden are one vast obscenity. It bears a sickening resemblance to the description one human writer made of Heaven: "the regions where there is only life and therefore all that is not music is silence."

Music and silence--how I detest them both! How thankful we should be that ever since our Father entered Hell... no square inch of infernal space and no moment of infernal time has been surrendered to either of those abominable forces, but all has been occupied by Noise--Noise, the grand dynamism, the audible expression of all that is exultant, ruthless, and virile--Noise which alone defends us from silly qualms, despairing scruples and impossible desires. We will make the whole universe a noise in the end.

-- demon Screwtape in The Screwtape Letters (Letter XXII)

I was listening to The Screwtape Letters read by John Cleese while I was on the treadmill today, and this passage made me pause to wonder about the association between music and the divine. I am not one particularly given to music; I prefer audiobooks and talk radio to CD's and MTV, so I do not usually feel that association intrinsically the way other people do. But there are times when I can "feel" that association, and there is another reason that I think it is valid:

Music is ordered noise. It is math.

I remember writing in a journal as a teenager and fixed atheist, "God doesn't exist, but if he did, he would be made of math." I remember thinking that thought with a great sense of clarity. Perhaps God was especially close to me in that moment, pressing in to work on turning my heart. I don't know. But I do think that that thought had some truth in it. Not that God is made of math, but that God made math, and that math is the foundation of all God's physical creation.

At the heart of every science, at the heart of every description of the universe, at the heart of every observed law of nature, there is math. It is everything. To make a very crude metaphor: it is the operating system on which the whole network of physical reality is based.

And so then it makes sense to me, the association between music and the divine. Music is math, and math is the closest we can come to describing the mind of God in reference to creation without bringing in explicit talk of the spiritual realm.

That's pretty impressive. Maybe I should appreciate music more.

The Roamin' Roman

Found via Amy Welborn, The Roamin' Roman documents the adventures of an American Catholic student in Rome during a year abroad. Great pictures. Like these:

Cardinal for Condoms

Advocates condoms to prevent AIDS. The opening of the story is a bit disingenuous:

A senior Italian cardinal who was one of the front-runners to become pope after the death of John Paul II, has said it is acceptable for Catholics to use condoms to prevent AIDS, a major break with the official position of the Vatican.

That makes it sound as though his views are especially authoritative in the Catholic Church, but that's not really the case as far as I can tell. He was a leading candidate among the liberal wing of the Catholic Church, but was there ever any serious chance that a liberal would be made Pope after John Paul II, media-driven fantasies aside? Plus, there is this:

Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini, the former archbishop of Milan and the head of the Roman Catholic Church's liberal wing, said in an interview that legal abortions and the use of frozen embyros to produce children were also acceptable.

Abortion legalization? There is no way this man was ever going to be Pope. And this:

But it is rare for such a high-level Church official to voice views on such subjects in such an open fashion.

Is it really? I thought it had become fashionable within the liberal wing.

How Does Someone Fall for This?

A man going door-to-door, pretending to be a doctor, and offering free breast examinations. I feel bad for the women who fell for it and were assaulted. At the same time, however, how in the world does someone fall for that?

"Ma'am, I'd like to feel your breasts as a free, public service."
"Oh yes, come right in."

Brit Hume

I rarely watch television, but I am a huge Brit Hume fan. I think he's being accurate when he calls the Grapevine the best two minutes in television. Plus, I love the panel on his show. The members mesh together perfectly.

Given all of the above, I was excited to see a profile on Hume in the WaPo.

A Saint for Modern Secular Liberalism?

An excellent bit of writing today via The Anchoress. Judas, A Saint for Our Seasons at American Digest. Snips:

WHEN IT COMES TO DISCOVERING new ways to cheapen the human soul, the "professional intellectuals" of our society have cornered the market. So it was last week when, timed carefully to cash in on the Easter holiday, the "serious" editors of National Geographic chose to release their gleanings from a sheaf of rags and call them "The Gospel of Judas."...

This dark thrill of denigration has the immediate benefit of pleasingly confirming them in their own Church of Zero, and the secondary benefit of being much, much safer than, say, sticking it to Islam, a faith that enforces its demands for respect with bombs and beheadings, and whose central message to all cowards is "Don't mess with Muhammad."...

It was n