Dr. Platypus

I’m always getting files at work in DOCX format. For those of you who aren’t tech-savvy, DOCX format is something Microsoft invented to force everyone to upgrade their Microsoft Office Suite to add a bunch of features they don’t really need. Instead, I use Zamzar. It quickly converts DOCX into plain old DOC, which lets me get on with my work. It is also useful for other kinds of file conversions: images, video, music, etc., although I’ve never had occasion to use it for those purposes.

You can sign up for paid service, which gives you faster service, online storage, and no ads, but what they offer for free is sufficient for my needs.

Commenter Peter Kirkpatrick has shared the following poem/meditation based on something I mentioned in my inaugural post at this blog: when the first platypus specimens arrived in England, scientists there thought the creature was some sort of hoax. Nothing like that could actually exist in nature! It laid leathery eggs like a reptile, it had the bill and webbed feet of a duck, and it was covered with fur and suckled its young. Thanks, Peter!

1799.
A specimen platypus
lands in the probing hands
of a British scientist.

Webbed foot, duck’s bill, mammal’s body?
Not possible.
So begins the autopsy;
searching for telltale stitches.

Today,
if I were stitching together
a platypus heaven,
I’d start by remaking the Sahara,
gloriously golf course greened,
lavish storehouse for continents.

I’d design a slumless Calcutta,
watch her children play without care,
her men give an honest day’s work in return
for a day’s justice and dignity.

I’d recreate countless lost species of animal.
Whales would spout water,
splash flukes with impunity.
The dodo would no longer be food for a cliché.

I’d make every man a hero,
every little girl a beautiful princess.

I’d add one last thing.
A museum of relics (lest we forget):
an assault rifle,
a hospice bed,
a divorce certificate…

I’m beginning to see
why it’s so hard to believe.

Nicholas Carter: “Blogging: a great pastime for the elderly“:

Did you see that new Pew study that came out yesterday? It put a big fat exclamation point on what a lot of us have come to realize recently: blogging is now the uncoolest thing you can do on the Internet. It’s even uncooler than editing Wikipedia articles or having a Second Life avatar. In 2006, 28% of teens were blogging. Now, just three years later, the percentage has tumbled to 14%. Among twentysomethings, the percentage who write blogs has fallen from 24% to 15%. Writing comments on blogs is also down sharply among the young. It’s only geezers – those over 30 – who are doing more blogging than they used to.

I am such a blogger.

Update: This comment from Norman Geras requires reading and re-reading:

[Reading] tends to be more fun when the writing that you’re reading shows evidence of some reading by the writer. If there’s reading in the writing, reading can be riotous. It can be rolling-in-the-aisles rantabulous; rosy, red, rudely robust and rollicking. It can reap and rebel and renew; roam and refresh; react and reflect, recollect, reconnect. Writing without reading can be rotten – really really rotten.

The Student Academic Services office at Cal Poly has put together a page of Notetaking Systems that I have added to my Resources page. I’ve also duplicated the handful of study skills links there on my Classroom page.

I’ve added two new blogs to my blogroll in the “Heart” category:

Prayer 365 by Michael Ruffin, pastor of First Baptist Church, Fitzgerald Georgia, featuring a new prayer for each day of the year.
Reflexionary by Robert Creech, a former pastor and currently professor at Baylor University in Waco, Texas, with reflections on the readings of the Revised Common Lectionary—two weeks out for the sake of sermon preparation.

I’d love to read the grant applications for some of these.

Glorify him!

I love mine, but I also agree with Robin Parry:

You can love your theology all you like but your theology will never love you back.

… or LXVIII for you Latinophiles. It’s posted at Doug Chaplin’s Clayboy blog, and it is well worth a look.

Tim Challies’s review of Karen Armstrongs The Case for God:

It is a rare occasion that I find it difficult to point out any redeeming features in a book-when I struggle to find a single positive to write in a review. Unfortunately Karen Armstrong’s The Case for God is one of those books-one that is so monstrously bad, so hopelessly awful, so wretchedly miserable, that it took concerted effort just to finish it. Heck, even the cover stinks-a pile of religiously-significant books hovering at a strange angle over a plain background. I tell you what: I will concede the font. The book is set in Granjon, a very nice, classical font that is very consistent with the earliest Garamond type faces. It is classy and classical but without being antique. But that is as good as the book gets.