I don't write very long posts

I love that this is my longest in four weeks.

Will I break 30 posts for the month of August?

YES!

Other Things Mitch McConnell Might Say Throughout History

August 2008: "Nothing makes me more angry...than the suggestion that America does not already have the finest health care in the world" - Mitch McConnell

Feb 1692-May '93: Nothing makes me more angry than the suggestion that Massachusetts doesn't already have the fairest judiciary in the world

1491: "Nothing makes me more angry than the suggestion that anyone could possibly sail west to the Indies!"

July 19, 1969: "Nothing makes me more angry than the suggestion that any human being will ever set foot on the moon."

1919-1933: "Nothing makes me more angry than the suggestion that America does not already have the most liberal alcohol policy in the world"

July 3, 1776: "Nothing makes me more angry than the suggestion that there's anything wrong with the King's rule in the Colonies."

Oct 23, 1929: "Nothing makes me more angry than the suggestion that America does not already have the best financial system in the world."

1859: "Nothing makes me more angry than the suggestion that America does not already have the most free people in the world"

more to come.

I have brought peace to the biblioblogosphere!!

James McGrath and Jim West have buried their long-standing feud right here at If I Were a Bell, I'd Ring. The apocalypse can commence!

I have a fool-proof plan to make you a millionaire!!

but i'll need to tell you about it tomorrow.



[Via Radley Balko]

Who am I more likely to believe?

Nobel-prize winning economist vs. JT

Well-played, Amazon

New Mac OS X is one cent less than their threshold for a shipping discount.


And, in case you're wondering, no, that link will bring me no money.

A Rift in the Biblioblogosphere

Apparently, James McGrath doesn't read Jim West. Scandal!

"Whatever Happened, Happened" and the double-endedness of time

turns out even if time could run in reverse, there'd be no way of recording it.

Thanks, Steven L.

You've really outdone yourself this time.

"Is Conservapedia supposed to be satire?"

That's the question I typed into Google this morning after being dumbfounded by this article (HT: Doug Chaplin). "Surely," I thought, "nobody really takes this seriously."

Can we get a dilettante post from Jim, please?

That is AWESOME!!

[Via DF]

600 bottles of wine on the wall...

Take one down, pass it around, slightly less than $1 million worth of wine on the wall.

Hey, Post-Docs

Why haven't I heard more about this in the biblioblogosphere?

Whatever Happened Happened

I haven't seen The Time Traveler's Wife, so I can't vouch for its quality. But apparently, it follows the rules of time travel particularly well. This is interesting to me inasmuch as it doubles as my favorite explanation for LOST.

Strange Maps

I have a feeling Jim would love this one.

That Word Doesn't Mean What You Think It Means

Fruit.

[via kottke]

That's unfortunate

For the Dallas-ites: Regent Highland Park Village theater is closing. I can't say I went there frequently, but it was a nice little theater, and it had a gelato shop on the first floor. It also doubled as (in my opinion) the hardest theater to sneak into in Dallas.

A Note of Caution

This post is about LOST, and therefore is (1) uninteresting to those unwashed masses who don't like LOST and (2) spoilery for those valiant souls who are working their way through the first five season in order to be ready for the greatest television event of all time.

Every two days there's some new LOST casting news that has people up in arms. People need to calm down. There was no way Season 6 was ending without a flashback to the original Flight 815, with as many cast members returning as possibly could. The fact that the pilot will cameo in Season 6 doesn't mean that the whole timeline has been re-set and nothing that happened the last 5 years happened anymore.

10 Questions with Dan Wallace

Up at Rob Kashow's blog.

Quick Word Trick

Not sure how I'd never discovered this before, but if you need to replace all normal quotation marks (") with smart quotes ( “ ” ) in Word, you can do it by a simple (and kind of absurd) find and replace:

FIND: "
REPLACE: "

Enjoy!

Parallel Sahidic NT

John Dyer has updated his Bible Web App to include the Sahidic Coptic NT!

What!?

Maybe a Trekkie can explain this to me, but I don't get it.

New Journal Alert

Early Christianity (it is what it sounds like). Text available online, but not openly.

[Via Euangelion]

Clayboy Interrupted

Mark points out that Doug's URL isn't popping up what it's supposed to. Hopefully he'll be able to get that fixed/host his blog elsewhere in the meantime...

yet his days shall be an hundred and twenty years

Really interesting article on the limits of human aging.


[Via Kottke]

love, love SOMEONE, love THE CHURCH

Great stuff by Frank Turk lately on the Church.

this is insanely frightening

it's only a matter of time.

Funny People

As he always does, Roger Ebert makes for an interesting read on Funny People, the new Judd Apatow film, and this accompanying interview.

Finally, an important question to tackle

Ranking the Harry Potter books and movies. I'm a few days late on this one. My list differs a bit from Doug's:

Films

• Prisoner of Azkaban
• Order of the Phoenix
• Half-Blood Prince
• Goblet of Fire
• Sorcerer's Stone
• Chamber of Secrets

Doug is right in that the best director of the series delivered the best movie. I also take issue with Jeremy's criteria (partially, adherence to the structure/content of the novel), while at the same time am mystified with his judgment that the most recent movie was more faithful to (and more sensical with respect to) the book. The most recent movie invented whole scenes that didn't occur in the book! Additionally, I cannot imagine someone walking into this movie, having never heard of or seen Harry Potter, and being able to make any sense of it whatsoever (Roger Ebert agrees). In that way, I think Prisoner holds up particularly well: it is the only film (or book) that has a standalone plot almost completely independent of Voldemort.

Books

• Half-Blood Prince
• Prisoner of Azkaban
• Sorcerer's Stone/Deathly Hallows
• Goblet of Fire
• Order of the Phoenix
  
• Chamber of Secrets

The top two slots could quite easily switch for me, but I feel like that may have more to do, at this point, for my love of the movie than the book. I've ranked Sorcerer's Stone so highly because I remember that wonderful feeling of falling to this completely new world and discovering so many little things about it. I think the first two books probably get a bad wrap because of the first two movies: carbon copies that really don't bring anything to the table on their own. I've ranked Deathly Hallows so low because of those interminable sequences in the middle with Hermione and Ron fighting all the time.

It'll be interesting to see the seventh book as two films. It is quite a long book, but surely they could cut enough out or compress enough of the horcrux journeys to deliver a single movie. I'm guessing the decision was more financially-driven than artistically. What's more, I worry about how much the first of the two will suffer from a bridge effect. Half-Blood Prince was bad enough in this respect: though the book didn't feel like it to me, the movie felt like the early stages of a chess match. It was merely an exercise in pushing the pieces to where they needed to be for the good stuff to begin. We shall see.

BSC 44

it's up.