July 2011
157 posts
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Marvel Comics (owned by Disney): 1 and Jack Kirby...
Most of you have seen a Marvel movie: Captain America and Thor are new; Ironman, Hulk, the X-Men and the fantastic Four have been around a while. Jack Kirby had a lot to do with all of the Marvel universe as a key player in Marvel years ago. His heirs tried to take on Disney (who bought Marvel in 2009 for $4.0 billion; yes billion) to reclaim the work of Kirby but lost their case. Kirby was...
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“We, like Peter, remember our boastful promise: “Though all men shall...”
– Spurgeon, Morning and Evening, reflecting on Peter’s denial of Christ.
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Beer Drinking Patterns Around the World--Somebody...
Here’s a neat article on beer drinking, somehow triggered by all the news about the debt ceiling crisis. Whatever. The interactive graphs alone are worth the read. Like growth in total beer consumption in billions of liters since 1965. Or how much beer do the Irish really drink. It’s from PBS and quite a good piece. Cheers.
Has all the talk about the debt ceiling left you...
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3 Ways to Keep Your Data With You At All Times →
It always happens: When traveling for business, you always forget to send yourself an important file or drag a presentation onto your flash drive at the last minute. The result? Frantic phone calls to a distant office or rummaging through old files to find a replacement.
John Biggs of the NYT has taken to moving almost all of his active files to cloud services and, in some cases, he even...
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Grab Your Wallet: Fox to Limit Next-Day Streaming...
In an earlier post (HERE), we warned you that the glory days of internet television were coming to a close. More signs that the happy days are drawing to an end. Oh boy.
For a few years, fans have been able to log on to Hulu.com or Fox.com to watch what they missed on television the previous night. For most viewers, doing so is about to get a lot more difficult.
Starting Aug. 15, the Fox...
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Good podcast to listen to with a long look at...
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Ways to help: the famine in Somalia
Universal Giving have compiled a list of direct ways you can help those affected by the famine in Somalia.
Give $25 to support a student in Somalia
Give $25 to help a child suffering from malnutrition
Give $30 to sponsor an orphan in Somalia
Provide life-saving relief to drought victims in East Africa
Give $50 to feed a child for a month
Give $150 to feed a family for a month
Give to Read...
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“We create our own reality.” Not so funny now, is... →
What follows is from the Jay Rosen blog; read more HERE.
Ron Suskind in the New York Times, October 17, 2004
In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn’t like about Bush’s former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House’s displeasure, and then he told me something...
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“Take care that thy faith is of the right kind-that it is not a mere belief of...”
– Charles Spurgeon, from Morning and Evening, reflecting on 2 Peter 1:5-6 and some of the building blocks for our life in Christ.
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Writers you need to know: Roger Angell
Roger Angell has been a contributor to The New Yorker since 1944. Read more about him and his baseball books HERE. To me, his best work is his writing about baseball. No one does it better, The flavor and texture of his writing, the style and the insight into the game, the details and the keen eye, all blend together for some writing that is enjoyable and as satisfying as a great meal. His...
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A win for owners, players -- and lawyers
Interesting quick analysis on winners and losers in the new 10-year agreement between players and owners. Be happy, football fans. Four months of not knowing what in the world was going on for some goofy owners and their 1,900 employees is over. You can get back to wondering if Green Bay is really that good. Read the story HERE.
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Hulu, Billed as Tomorrow’s TV, Looks Boxed In
I like Hulu, even Hulu Plus. But it is not nearly as cutting edge as we hoped for. Now that the networks (who control Hulu) sort of have us right where they want us, the Hulu leaders are thinking through their collective wallets. So, TV will not be free or endless, instead it will be limited and cost you money. And I won’t even get into the fears about restricting bandwidth so that the...
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Everything you need to know about the debt ceiling... →
Well, maybe not everything, but here is a Washington Post story that will give you the Cliff Notes so to speak. Good place to start to get up to speed on the debt ness before the bell tolls on August 2.
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Life lessons here, my friends. And there are the...
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Just Plain Stupid. Period. From the MILK BOARD?
In the “what were they thinking” department, MSNBC reports as follows (entire story is HERE).
California milk producers have yanked a widely criticized ad campaign that poked fun at premenstrual syndrome and the way men supposedly suffer from the monthly cycles of their wives and girlfriends.
“Over the past couple of weeks, regrettably, some people found our campaign about...
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In a word: A ride that was Olympian and simply...
You may not care about or watch much cycling, but the Tour de France hit an all-time high on Stage 18 Thursday, one to rival any great sport achievement. On a day when the Tour finished at the highest point in it’s history and featured insane mountain climbs (the riders climbed more than 4,500m of vertical distance), a rider named Andy Schleck made history. With 60 km to go, he took...
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FUSED 2011--We Are Here.
We made it. After a near miss on the flight from Lexington to Atlanta, and with some great help from Delta (our pilot actually got us permission to move our landing gate from Terminal D to Terminal E so we were closer to our Dublin flight) and a 15 minute hold that only God and the Diamond Medallion folks could swing, we made it to Dublin.
It was a great first day with COOL weather (we were 45...
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Interesting: Some good folks in Franklin,...
Ran across the Got Your back web site. It’s a group out of Tennessee that sell shirts with a Toms Shoes like twist. Buy a shirt, and they buy a uniform for a school aged child. While most of their work is in Kenya and Haiti, I was a bit surprised to see that they also identified rural Kentucky as a mission field. Good food for thought for those of us just up the road in Lexington who...
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Number of children raised by someone other than...
More tough news for families, and more importantly children. Definitely food for thought for those of us who work in student ministry. Here are excerpts from an article in the Herald Leader. Read the entire story HERE.
The number of children in Kentucky being raised by someone other than a parent went up significantly in nearly every county from 2000 to 2010, new U.S. Census figures show.
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“We’ve been warning, almost day in and day out, of the growing calamity of the...”
– Jeffrey Sach, United Nation’s chief adviser on the Millennium Development Goals, on the drought in the Horn of Africa. The U.N. declared a famine in two regions of Southern Somalia, Wednesday.
Lesson plan and multimedia resources from PBS NewsHour Extra on the drought.
(via newshour)
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Hey Buddy, Watch Your Language: Here are phrases...
The BBC ran a piece recently on “Americanisms” that for the most part butcher the English language. And then they invited our British cousins to write in with the Americanisms that drive them nuts. Here’s part of the list; read the entire list of 50 HERE. Then go spruce up your vocabulary.
“I could care less” instead of “I couldn’t care...
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Dominique Strauss-Kahn meets Spiderman
When Dominique Strauss-Kahn, former head of the IMF, was arrested for sexually assaulting a hotel worker, he was considered a flight risk. What that means is he had the money and connections to head back to France and never stand trial in the States. At his bail hearing, it was agreed to leave him under house arrest (in a very nice Manhattan luxury apartment) provided he would wear an ankle...
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Crouching Tiger, Flying Murdoch
The Murdoch who may have emerged in the best light from the grueling question-and-answer session in the British Parliament on Tuesday was not Rupert Murdoch or his son James, but his wife, Wendi.
It was Mrs. Murdoch, 42, who lunged across the hearing room to defend her husband when, after about two hours of intense questioning, a protester stormed the witness table, trying to hit Mr. Murdoch, 80,...
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Pregnacy is not a disease, but insurers may be...
In a never ending debate on whether national health policy should reflect the social conventions of the day, Washington wants to make insurers pay the entire cost of contraceptives—no co-pays— to help slow down the number of unwanted pregnancies. Excerpts (in italics) are from the New York Times; read full article HERE. A leading medical advisory panel recommended on Tuesday that all...
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Superman and Lois Lane Break Up; Who Will Be There...
From ComicsAlliance: DC Comics Co-Publisher Dan DiDio teased a “reexamined” relationship between Superman’s Clark Kent persona and Lois Lane in the relaunched DCU earlier this month, leading many to imagine a relationship that either hasn’t happened yet or didn’t manifest into marriage. Today at The Source, DC confirmed that Superman’s ‘Action...
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Beatlemania!! All you need to know to make a great...
This one goes out to my daughter Rachel; she truly has inherited her Dad’s love of the Beatles. Rock on, Rachel.
School of Rock is in session. If you don’t know the Beatles, you just don’t know Rock and Roll. Period.
In addition to simply being one of the top DJs anywhere, Terri Hemmert of WXRT (93.1 Chicago), the best radio station on the planet, she is one of the true...
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Let's Get Together and Chew the Fat: the Nautical...
Mark S. Longo over at Mental Floss has found nine phrases we use everyday that trace their roots to nautical terms. I enjoy finding out why we use phrases like “slush fund”and “chew the fat.” Here is an excerpt from his story. Read all of it HERE.
The Vikings, Columbus, the Pilgrims … they all arrived here by ship. So it stands to reason that some of the phrases...
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WatchReally amazing video from NASA.
More than 13 years ago, the Cassini satellite punched through the Earth’s lower atmosphere riding atop a U.S. Air Force Titan IV rocket. Six years later, after traveling 2.2 billion miles to the outer rings of Saturn, the craft’s Visual and Infrared Mapping Spectrometer (VIMS) began transmitting images of Saturn and its moons.
The images—each taking more than...
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WatchThe entire Harry Potter saga in five minutes, for you of the microwave generation.
And a great final review and send-off by Time’s Richard Corliss HERE.
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NPR Music now on Tumblr →
Happy to report that NPR Music is now on Tumblr HERE. Head over to listen to great music and great interviews. All free, and all good for your ears. Enjoy.
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News of the Weird (meaning the world is about to...
There are days I think stuff like this is funny. Then there are days I just want to go home—my eternal home, folks. Take a look and laugh or cry; your choice. The entire story and more photos HERE.
