Weekend Update 12-25-2010

Ho ho ho! Merry Christmas! I hope that everyone is having a wonderful day today! Now on to the links and short thoughts from the past week.

The latest Glory to God podcast, You Never Pray Alone, is less than fifteen minutes long, but packs a lot into those minutes. The individual is preeminent in modern thought and consideration and that permeates much of modern Christianity. There is little room left for our common humanity. One great line from the podcast: The Church is what salvation looks like, as troubling a thought as that might be. And on this Christmas day, I also want to share Fr. Stephen’s blog post, The God Who Became Small.

I was appalled that House Republicans blocked the Child Marriage Act, a piece of international civil rights legislation that passed the Senate by unanimous consent. Just when I think they might have hit bottom, they manage to find new depths to which to sink.

And  Politifact has selected the Republican catch-phrase, a government takeover of health care, as the lie of the year. Of course, they only got away with it because such a large portion of our population seems willfully ignorant and disconnected from any meaningful sense of reality. Lies and propaganda are nothing new in politics, of course. But when half your population is gleefully drinking the koolaid, your country is in a dangerous place.

This article reminds me that I need to get Droid Wall or some similar iptables firewall installed and working on my Android phone soon. I don’t tend to use a lot of apps, but I would like to know what they are really doing.

CBS ran a PSA on celiac disease.

One of my first computers was a Commodore 64. (I cobbled together custom wiring for a used RGB monitor at one point, had a disk drive, and (since it only read one side of disks) had a punch so I could modify disks so I could flip them over and use the other side. A whole group of us used to gather around the monitor with one person ‘driving’ on the computer to play Bard’s Tale. Now a company is making a modern PC simulating the original C64. I would be lying if I said I wasn’t tempted — even though I really have no use or need for another PC.

RIPE has published a handy-dandy IPv6 subnet card.

Sweet! I had no idea my Dad’s cookbook was reviewed in Texas Monthly back in the late 70s. I have copies of it and it’s still my first source when I want to cook Indian food. Google really brings buried things to light! My Mom’s play that year was also reviewed in Texas monthly. (I do remember that review.) Though the review was mixed, I was one of the four children in the chorus praised by the reviewer. I liked the play. Maybe my family had more to do with the development of the Montrose area art scene than I imagined.

The research on celiac disease continues to develop. In this article it seems like metabolic changes are in place before any villi damage occurs.

This Christmas Day, Fr. Thomas’ podcast, The Incarnation — Do We Really Believe It?, seems like a good listening choice.