U.S. Government aid pledged to Indian Ocean disaster relief: $35m
British Government aid pledged: £15m ($29m)
The disaster has left five million people without adequate water, food or sanitation. The Disasters Emergency Committee - www.dec.org.uk - is an umbrella group of UK aid organisations which include ActionAid, British Red Cross, Oxfam, Christian Aid and TearFund.
The scale of the destruction and loss of life is beyond comprehension.
There is very little comment so far among Christian bloggers. Bene Diction uses his journalistic resources to summarise the disaster and list agencies that through which we can give aid. Richard Hall’s thoughts are with those who can only weep. Gutless Pacifist is angered by anti-Muslim sentiments.
The claimed pagan origins of the Christmas festival and its customs are a perennial of source of seasonal debate. I think that the origins of a festival are irrelevant — what matters is the meaning of the occasion for those who celebrate it today. If Christmas is an orgy of conspicuous consumption and hedonistic pleasure, then it’s a pagan festival. If it’s a time if thanksgiving and rejoicing for the gift of the the Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, then it’s a Christian festival.
Today’s BBC Radio 4 Thought for the Day is a hilarious take on school nativity plays, with an salient punchline. (RealAudio version)
This is wonderful: css Zen Garden: Geocities 1996 Style (best viewed with Netscape 3.0…).
Wired: The Geek Guide to Kosher Machines
Since he was hired seven years ago, Ottensoser has helped nine companies design Sabbath modes for more than 300 types of ovens and stoves, and dozens of refrigerators. When the feature is enabled, lights stay off and displays are blank; tones are silenced, fans stilled, compressors slowed. In a kosher fridge, there’s no light, no automatic icemaker, no cold-water dispenser, no warning alarm for spoiled food, no temperature readout.
William S. Lind: Understanding Fourth Generation War [via J Robb]. When your only tool is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
Steven Waldman at beliefnet: Understanding the truth (and lies) about liberals and conservatives — a good antidote to the stereotypes that abounded following the US election.
The Register: US netizens: white, wealthy and full of it - shock!
For a decade governments have tried to cajole the real world into jumping into cyberspace, with grants and promotions to adopt internet adoption. Perhaps what was needed instead was a drive to persuade techno utopian bloggers to join the real world.
Linked to more than 27,000 excess deaths across the continent, the temperatures of summer 2003 which were possibly the highest in Europe for over 500 years are blamed on human activity in a UK Met Office report.
I’ve just about decided to give up blogging, as much by default as anything else– I just don’t get enough time at the family PC, and when I do I usually can’t be bothered. Despite this, I keep collecting links to things that pique my interest, with the result that I have 37 draft unpublished posts, most of which are too topical to be worth posting now.
Here’s a few of them:
I’ve always been fascinated by unusal words and their origins; World Wide Words is a nice site dedicated to “international English from a British viewpoint”
Mike Power’s MrPower Squared is the blog of a British Christian with a nice sideways view of the world.
What kind of homepage do you have set? — - MozillaZine Poll Talkback. I had always set my homepage to a blank page, until I saw in this discussion that you can configure Firefox to open with a blank page, but also set a URL for the Home button (in my case, to Google).
BBC NEWS | Magazine | 101 years in 101 words
Oh well, it’s bedtime. More of the backlog to come… I haven’t quite given up yet.