Reflections along the way.
NY Times tells the tale today of a Santa celebrating the season with Jewish families in Hollywood. Apparantly, Marie Loomis-Shrier, a Jewish lady, loves Christmas displays and fills her yard with lights, candy canes, snow, and Santa. Sitting on her porch, Santa exclaims, “What is this Hanukkah you speak of?”
What a treasure from Henri Nouwen’s Daily Meditation:
The marvelous vision of the peaceable Kingdom, in which all violence has been overcome and all men, women, and children live in loving unity with nature, calls for its realisation in our day-to-day lives. Instead of being an escapist dream, it challenges us to anticipate what it promises. Every time we forgive our neighbor, every time we make a child smile, every time we show compassion to a suffering person, every time we arrange a bouquet of flowers, offer care to tame or wild animals, prevent pollution, create beauty in our homes and gardens, and work for peace and justice among peoples and nations we are making the vision come true.
We must remind one another constantly of the vision. Whenever it comes alive in us we will find new energy to live it out, right where we are. Instead of making us escape real life, this beautiful vision gets us involved.
Hide your children, put away the pets! ABC reports that a new Barbie has some strange quirk: push her button the wrong way and she may call your child a slut! Yikes-a-hooty! I think your safer with a sock doll.
Celebrate advent and learn more about new web technologies at the same time. Check out hte Web 2.0 Advent Calendar. And while you’re at it, why not spend a little time with an Advent Calendar about Advent.
Also check out these advent calendars:
An Episcopal Diocese of Washington Advent calendar with interesting art, meditatins, and opportunities to help the needy.
Electric December offers a mutli-media advent calendar with dreams for improving our world.
Find out a little Christmas history at the New York Carver’s Advent Calendar.
Beliefnet offers an Advent calendar with meditations and interesting links.
if you’re like me, you’d rather leech onto someone else’s brainpower, than try to do too much figuring out yourself. Some when it comes to technology that allows me to create quite painlessly (from a mental sense), I’m on board! Like ning, openkracow is a open source site that shares code and make creating applications fairly simply. This site is focused on craiting masup. Pretty cool.
I’ve explored a few different social searching sites, but nothing really grabbed me or made me feel like I was missing something if I didn’t use them. Not sure if this one will be any different, but it has some interesting features. Searchles allows you to connect with other folks who are doing similar search and post those searches to a common pool. Sort of a social my delicious I guess. You can search tags and groups to find like minded searchers. And the idea behind it is that people may find potential networking parnters for business, creative projects, etc. I notice several business groups on their, so this might have some interesting possiblitites. Time will tell.
Uplay me promises to track your listening preferences and connect you with other people who listen to the same music. Could be interesting, could be freaky.
Spent a little time this morning tracking some of the new Web 2.0 sites, and I put a few posts of the one that sound interesting to me. First, MP3 Realm, a music search engine. You can search audio files and lyrics, create playlists, download files, save searches and more. It could be interesting. While it’s a different princicple than Pandora, ultimately the playlist stirs me to comparison. I think it would be interesting to mash the search capabilities with the music genome concept of Pandora.
Here’s neat little quote that Jimmy posted on the kidney transplant list:
Man is broken. He lives by mending.
The grace of God is the glue.
– Eugene O’Neill
Makes me think of a Dylan tune. I hope we’re all sticky today (and mend everything we touch).
I just posted this to Floydville. Here’s a sampling:
The songs we sing to celebrate this season carry profound messages of hope and possibility in the midst of dark nights and sometimes even darker days. One song that captured my heart last week is the familiar “It Came Upon a Midnight Clear.”
For many of us, the words of the first verse echo easily through our minds after years and years of singing:
It came upon the midnight clear,
That glorious night of old,
From angels bending near the earth,
To touch their harps of gold:
“Peace on the earth, goodwill to men,
From heavens’ all gracious King;”
The world in solemn stillness lay
To hear the angels sing.
This verse brings to mind the stories of childhood: shepherds in the field; Mary and Joseph in the stable; a glorious display of heavenly light as angels proclaim the good tidings of heaven. These images make me feel warm and safe—like the world is all right.
But the world is not all right. read more
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