Author: Glen

Merry Christmas!

It’s Christmas Eve and I’m off to bed, so have a merry Christmas. The well-known words of Isaac Watts express my sentiments best:

Joy to the world! the Lord is come:
let earth receive her King;
let every heart prepare him room,
and heaven and nature sing,
and heaven and nature sing,
and heaven, and heaven and nature sing.

Joy to the world! the Savior reigns;
let us our songs employ,
while fields and floods, rocks, hills and plains
repeat the sounding joy,
repeat the sounding joy,
repeat, repeat the sounding joy.

No more let sins and sorrows grow,
nor thorns infest the ground;
he comes to make his blessings flow
far as the curse is found,
far as the curse is found,
far as, far as the curse is found.

He rules the world with truth and grace,
and makes the nations prove
the glories of his righteousness,
and wonders of his love,
and wonders of his love,
and wonders, wonders of his love. 

Now I’m off to have visions of sugarplums dance in my head.

The Greek New Testament Online

I just ran across a most remarkable online Bible study tool: the Greek New Testament browser. If you ever want to do some serious study this site will be pretty helpful. I can’t say enough good things about this site’s elegant interface and solid content.

Hat tip to the two excellent blogs who brought it to my attention: the New Testament Gateway and the Bible Software Review.

On A Cool Tangent

Yes it is our anniverary (as well as Jayne Zickafoose’s birthday), yet I still find time to blog. I’m such a romantic.

I just noticed that a friend of ours, Earl Creps (UPDATE: Earl also has a blog: RSS feed here), has been nominated to host one of the cohort groups at the Emergent convention in San Diego.

Although they misspelled his name.

Anyway, I just thought that was cool.

And to stave off any marital-counseling comments, Paula and I have been having a perfectly wonderful anniversary and are in the process of getting ready for an evening out.

Too Pooped To Party

Paula, Dana and I just returned from our Christmas pilgrimmage to Louisiana. And we’re all exhausted.

It was a nice visit, and Dana behaved like an angel on all the flights, but it’s nice to be back in our own home with our own wireless interenet connection and our own weather and our own timezone.

Oh, and our own beds. Dana has already become reacquainted with hers and Paula and I will soon ambush ours.

Christ, Christmas, and Credit Cards

Randy Jumper, an old friend from grad school, just posted a wonderful piece from NPR.

Excerpt:

I’m not fighting the commercialization of Christmas; that fight was lost ages ago. What I’m after is more radical: Disentangling Jesus entirely from this blight on his good name. I’m out to change the bumper sticker from ‘Keep Christ in Christmas’ to ‘Free Christ from Christmas.’

Heresy? Well, compare Christmas with Martin Luther King’s birthday. On his birthday, nobody ever pays any attention to his birth. Instead, it’s ‘I have a dream’ and his impact on society. We mark Dr. King’s birth by focusing on what he said and did as an adult. Christmas, by contrast, has no time for what the adult Jesus said and did. Christmas keeps him safely shut up as a baby in the manger, where he can’t make his usual noise about people repenting and living a godly life.

…

I’m not proposing that we cancel Christmas. I know, the economy would collapse without it. Fine. Keep the gift-giving and the jingle bells. Let’s just subtract the remaining Jesus element from it and move that over into Easter. Call December 25th Solstice. Call it Retail Day. Call it Holiday Number Nine. I don’t care, just leave Christ out of it. He was not born to be the patron saint of fourth-quarter earnings.

Merry Christmas, Nina!

You know those white elephant gift exchanges–the ones where you bring a gag gift and it goes into a pool and everyone picks out a lame gift at random and then opens it in front of everyone?

Well, they just did that at UNC Chi Alpha, and they caught the funniest gag gift I’ve ever seen on tape. See what Nina got for Christmas! (a 40 second movie in Windows Media Player format)

It’s not obvious on the video, but the gift is indeed a live rat.

My commendations to Brad Novosad for his most excellent discipleship of these students in the ways of merriment.

Thanksgiving 2004

Thanksgiving was quite wonderful.

My brother Greg visited (and we played through Halo 2 on co-op–he had the same reaction I did to the abrupt ending), we had a ton of students over for Turkey Day itself, my friend Anthony got XBox live and we gamed together, and I bought a 200 gig hard drive for under $50. Gotta love those Fry’s “day after Thanksgiving” specials…

Anyway, given my new abundance of disk space I decided to install Linux. I did it once in college and enjoyed playing with it. I expected much the same experience (namely a few days of fighting with arcane and needlessly obscure configuration files), and I have to say I’m blown away by how far it’s come. I downloaded the Fedora Core 3 distribution and setup was a snap. Fedora auto-detected everything (including my sound card and network configuration) and installed a very nice graphical interface called Gnome. 

And to top it off, it kept all my existing information intact so that my computer will now boot either Windows XP or Linux at my whim.

How cool is that?

Ouch.

I was out of town all day yesterday and got back late enough that I didn’t bother to check any sports scores. I had had some intimation of the rude information that awaited me in the San Jose Mercury News sports section (owing to an ill-timed consolation call from the Chi Alpha leader at Berkeley).

So we lost Big Game. Again. And we lost Big Game big. Almost as badly as it has ever been lost (although outranked by our 1930 41–0 romp over Cal).

I think the proper attitude is conveyed in Mark Purdy’s column:

Oh, it could have gone worse for Stanford on a windy, blustery afternoon. But only if a tree had fallen on The Tree.

Cal’s 41–6 victory Saturday was so awful, Stanford fans spent the second half leaving in droves — in luxury cars, actually, but in drove-like formation.

Heh. It’s a game we lost, but it’s only a game.

Of course, had we won I’d be singing an altogether different tune about the relative importance of squashing one’s rivals like bugs. But we didn’t win, and so I adopt the more rational attitude. 🙂