Other Upcoming Post

...About Jo's wedding. I'm really sorry to take this long, Jo, but you may rest assured that you are not by any means the first bride who's had to wait a bit for my entry (though your wait is the longest, unfortunately). This one's pretty much at the top of my list - I may try to do it this week.

In the meantime, whether we have cause to be concerned or not (I know that that question will probably not be answerable for at least another decade), if you're curious about the amount of cell phone radiation entering that part of your body you may value the most (that would be your BRAIN), I've been poking around online, since I've been with Verizon long enough now to qualify for a free new phone, looking for radiation-level info. Some sites do the work for you, culling the information together from the manufacturer's websites; that's the type I went for. You can look someplace like here or, if for whatever reason you'd rather hear it from a technogeek (assuming your phone is new enough to still be on the market, which mine is not, so I looked on the other site), here (if you go there, the info you want is probably within the links to the left side of the screen).

Intermission, the Latest, Plus Bandwagony Seven Quick Takes

One: So this post and the last one are marked "Intermission" because at some point I really am going to write up a post, or more likely pair or trio of posts, explaining an important thing about orthodox evangelical Christianity: that what looks, out of full context, like modern-day Christians picking and choosing groups that they want to approve and disapprove of is, at least when we're talking about Christians trying to be both sincere and intellectually-honest, not what's going on (though, believe me, it makes sense that so many people have mistaken it for that). In other (though incomplete) words, the Bible doesn't say about slavery, and probably doesn't say about women, what non-Christian people commonly think it does, which hopefully will throw some light on why the Christian world has made some of the changes it has over the last couple of centuries, but why practicing-GLBT leadership in the church is still not a bus we're willing to catch. And I'm going to try to break that behemoth of a topic down for general understanding, and there may even, God willing and if I'm really on my game, be a little bit of humor. I sure hope so, anyway. All of this at eleven, by which I mean, whenever I actually write the post(s).

I'm hoping that will partly serve to answer the entirely fair question of why evangelical Christians aren't, essentially, the moral equivalent of racists.

Two: By the way, the reason it's going to take me so long to ever get to those posts is because I'm probably going to have to research them if I want to answer them with as much precision as they deserve. And considering that this will be my first semester with sixty students, that will probably happen only in dinks and dunks. I plan to blog more often in the meantime.

Three: Another thing I'd like to do this fall: follow football better. People here look surprised when they catch me listening to ESPN Radio and the like, but I've backed the Buffalo Bills since about first grade (which made me something of a young bandwagoner, since it was Rochester and the Jim Kelly era, but I think I've made up for it in the years since then!), and back in junior high and high school, I was all up in the NFL. I read my dad's copies of Sports Illustrated and the Democrat and Chronicle's "Monday Morning Quarterback" section and Leo Roth's and Sal Maiorana's columns, and I watched NFL Primetime every Sunday night, and in eighth grade I had a Doug Flutie jersey (and ate Flutie Flakes, oh yes I did) and talked Bills with Steve Cleere in Earth science class. Then I went to college and my attention wavered because Sundays became about many other things (among them InterVarsity, APO, and sleep). So now it's seven years later and, though I've done a pretty decent job of following the playoffs over the past couple of years, I still have a somewhat skewed understanding of which teams are supposed to be best and worst (as in, "Wait...are you sure it wasn't the Chargers that went 1-15 and the Rams that went 13-3 last season?"), and half the names I know have retired or switched teams. So I'm gonna try to get back into the regular season. We'll see how it goes.

Four: Speaking of Rochester, I still mourn losing my access to the best public-library system I have ever known. Binghamton isn't horrible, but it just doesn't begin to compare. And interlibrary loan is not free here.

Five: Speaking of reading, I am suddenly, after a lifetime of going at books more or less one by one, turning into one of those people (coughAlbertcough) who tries to read about 2349340955 of them simultaneously (or, in my current case, about seven). My chief literary interest at the moment, though, is David McCullough's 1776, which, if I haven't mentioned it, is not to be confused with the Broadway musical. I am not one of those people who usually finds military strategy interesting (the intricacies of battles and locations and the like, that is), but I have always thought the Revolutionary War pretty intriguing, maybe because history classes do a better job of connecting it to specific interesting figures (it's also one without cultural awkwardness connected to it, so I think teachers come at it more enthusiastically), and McCullough has succeeded in making even the strategy worth reading about. When I get done with this, I'll at some point start in on his biography of John Adams.

Six: I've been doing these quick takes instead of any of the things I should be doing. Among them: finishing up my church work; planning some more lessons; maybe trying to find a decent pair of black dress shoes (current pair has a hole in it, albeit a small one). The semester starts Monday. I will, come September (when Andrea takes over my church job), have more lesson-planning time than ever before in my life. And I will need it, for I sure didn't do much this summer. I mean, I did a lot of reading, and that'll certainly help. But I didn't do a lot of specific lessons.

Seven: Has it been a dry summer? I feel like mostly it has. I hear that makes for a particularly-brilliant fall. May it be!


If you'd like more or want to officially post your own, go check out Jen Fulwiler's site.