Birds, bees, and guinea pigs

Most days, the route I take to and from the church takes me past one of our town’s pet shops; and for the last while, one side of their sign has been advertising “BABY GUINEA PIGS & STARTER KITS.”  Maybe it’s just me, but wouldn’t a starter kit for a baby guinea pig be a mommy and daddy guinea pig?Just wondering.

Random thought stuck in my head

With all the messiah language that’s been floating around Barack Obama—how fitting is it that his chief of staff will be called Emanuel?I swear, you just can’t make this stuff up.(Further thought: here’s hoping he’s also called a wonderful counselor . . .)

That’s the Internet for you

I’m moving and thinking very slowly today, trying to steer chains of reasoning around the sharp headache that keeps flickering behind my eyes; I had a couple posts I wanted to work on today, along with sermon work and some other things, but nothing’s happening very fast.I do want to mention, though, something that amused me last night. I have to admit, I didn’t watch the debate—I already had a headache, and figured I could catch up with it later—so I was bewildered, sometime after 9:30, to get up and check my blog traffic and find it going clean through the roof. Turns out, when John McCain made his comment about Barack Obama’s overhead-projector earmarks, that hordes of people pulled up Google and went looking; and for whatever reason, when you Google Obama overhead projector or some variant of that, my post “Barack Obama as overhead-projector screen” from this past July is right there near the top. It’s just a short post that has nothing to do with the earmarks Sen. McCain was talking about—rather, it’s a brief comment on a remarkable column by the redoubtable Shelby Steele—but there you go: that one post got more hits in half an hour last night than the whole blog had gotten over the previous week, as one person after another checked it out. I do hope most of those folks kept going on down their search lists (as I did, with one of them) to find the information they wanted on Sen. Obama’s earmarks. (If so, they might also have found a link to this piece on Sarah Palin’s record on earmarks, which is much stronger.) As it is, though, I’m reminded of a complaint I’ve heard a time or two before that the problem with Internet searches is that they lack serendipity. The usual comparison is to looking a word up in the dictionary, and all the other interesting words you run across while you’re trying to find the one you want; supposedly, the precision of our Internet searches means that people don’t experience those accidental discoveries anymore (which may be a good thing or a bad thing, depending). Offhand, though, I don’t think we’ve gotten to that point. My blog bears me witness.

“A little nonsense now and then is relished by the wisest men.”

So said Willy Wonka, anyway (though I’m not sure if he said it in the book or only in the movie). Anyway, for some random reason I looked up this site that a friend of ours back in Bellingham introduced us to almost a decade ago, and was surprised to find it not only still up, but updated. (I suppose I shouldn’t have been.) It’s by no means deep, but it’s amusing for a little while, if your sense of humor tends toward the goofy. If it does, and you want a grin or two, you might want to go check out Dancing Paul.

Palin rumors and Palin facts

I was pleased to find, today, a good comprehensive list sorting out all the things that have been said about Sarah Palin. Yes, she’s not perfect; yes, there are people who don’t like her (many of them Alaskan Republican politicians); yes, there are things to criticize about her and her record (since she, like any of the rest of us, is a sinful human being); but no, overall, the attempts to hatchet her down don’t stand. And yes, the list offers its compiler the chance for some wonderfully snarky comments.HT: The Anchoress