Crowded Platform

Metro Center. With the possible exception of the Smithsonian Metro stop on a summer weekend afternoon, this is the most crowded I’ve ever seen a Metro platform.

Photo taken with a Palm Zire 71.

Multiple Pipes

I’m not sure why, but there is something strangely disturbing, in a dark and Geiger-ish way, about the arrangement of all the dryer exhaust pipes in the laundry room.

Photo taken with a Palm Zire 71.

Rhizomes

An amusing caption at an educational exhibit on plants in the National Botanical Garden.

Photo taken with a Palm Zire 71.

Unwanted Irony

I’m still recovering from a mild virus that hitched back with me from the Philippines, and my lungs have been giving up their dead for about a week now. Last night, I cracked open a bottle of store-brand Tussin syrup (cough suppresant) and quickly chugged down two teaspoons. A few drops took the wrong route, however, and left me hacking and coughing for about five minutes afterward.

Pomography

Speaking of postmodern Christianity, Alex Arnold has a series of posts on just that topic.

(And a side note: when you write “postmodern” as its hip abbreviation, “PoMo,” be sure to capitalize that “M.” With some fonts, “pomo” looks just a bit too much like another word.)

Allusionism

Garver demonstrates intertextual relations via Scripture viewed through the lens of modern allusion. I’m not a big fan of “postmodern” Christianity with its insistence on over-sacramentalizing popular culture, but the illustrated intertextualization is an excellent demonstration of Scripture working similarly within its original context: referencing culturally relevant motifs of the day to present a familiar picture of God to his people.

To make a tenuous connection, I’ve been reading Josh Stiffdrink’s (PG-13!) ruminations on creationism lately, and he has a case for reading Genesis 1 as an inspired adaptation of Egyptian creation mythology for the sake of the Israelites, who had just been recently Exodusized from slavery under Pharaoh. Now, I myself am a fencesitter on the issue, constantly vaccilating between young-earth creationism, theistic evolution, and everything in between; but if we are to make the argument that Scripture must be read in context (e.g. that we draw upon popular apocalyptic symbolism of the early First Century rather than today’s Middle East headlines in our interpretations of John’s Revelation) shouldn’t we apply a similar filter to our readings of the Genesis creation story? Would such a filter necessarily lead us to an old-earth view of creation?

Followup: I could have phrased that last question a whole lot better; Josh’s comment hits the mark: “I think if you followed the interpretation I put forth, you wouln’t try to use Genesis to figure out how old the earth is. Period.”

Deconvolve This

“diffract fluffy dodecahedron

bolshevist heretofore fondle astronaut

compulsory biracial germantown

covert eskimo material

b</bluefish>u</deconvolve>y<bismuth>

amen”

Welcome to spam’s new can: “hash-busting”: long strings of randomized words which spammers send to try and confound your mail application’s spam filters. Joke’s on them, of course. Mail filters don’t just hash out specific words, they also check other indicators, like header info, linked images, and word patterns. (Word patterns like, oh, say, hash-buster strings?) And the more junk the spammers use to embed their pitches, the less likely that these pitches will be understood by those poor people who still believe them. Hopefully this is where the strategy self-destructs.

Random text strings found from a Filipino cult group whose mailing list has been completely overrun with spam.

Related: Filmgoerjuan, “banned CD” spam, and the moral decay of society.