Over at b4G, MeanDean has put together an excellent Porpoise Driven cache. My thoughts on that here.

Carl Olson (of Da Vinci Code fame) emailed to say thanks for the Da Vinci post, and to clarify that he is a Catholic of the Byzantine variety, and therefore kisses icons rather than statues. Big difference, I’m told. I have corrected the entry, with my head hung in shame at my lack of attentiveness to these manifestations of religious diversity. Forgive me.

(Title of this post from a Yeats poem, which I first read when I was a little boy. It was the example text for a lesson in BASIC, in which I used the PRINT command to output the poem in the shape of a lamp.)

Over at HipEx (cool abbreviation, eh?), Karen is writing about Attraction and relationships: part 1, part 2. (Nice to see that Ben is back in action, too.)

Earlier this year, as I began a tender friendship with the lady who would eventually catch my heart, HipEx’s Male and Female issue was a beacon of wisdom and guidance, especially the perspectives on Josh Harris (1, 2). It’s a constant source of frustration to me that the common terms for a boy-girl relationship, “going out” and “dating,” are such superficial terms, but “courtship” — actually my preferred term for what Amy and I are in — carries so much religious-cultural baggage that to say we are “courting” is more awkward than just telling everyone that “we’re seeing each other,” or the even more ambiguous “it’s us now.”

She’s my girlfriend, and after half a year of being together, we’re considering the possibility of marriage a bit later on in life. What do you call that?

Oh yeah, Dordting!