how now brownpau
Hey, why don’t we all go visit our local McBaptist for worship and window shopping? (link from Jim)
I can see the advantages of having these megachurches around in terms of community and employment, but remember: there’s a reason Jesus visited the Temple with a cord whip and not a purse full of silver pieces: “Make not my Father’s house an house of merchandise!”
This Apache .htaccess baby just made my URL life a bit easier. Try visiting any page on my domain without the “www.” prefix and you’ll see what I mean.
One of the questions I’m asked most when people find out I’m from Manila is, “Is that where Manila paper comes from?”
I never really thought of it, so I did some info-hunting, and found this: Manila paper is made from Manila hemp, which is indeed grown mainly in the Philippines; not the city of Manila strictly, but yes, from our country. It is not really hemp, but a fiber from a tree of the banana family, which we know more familiarly as “abaca.”
$paulo = array(
'head' => 'hurts',
'stomach' => 'making weird noises',
'fingers' => 'hangnails',
'mind' => 'sleepy',
'thinking' => 'Why does Mozilla carry inline text properties over into table cells?'
);
I still didn’t understand OOP for PHP this morning, but I decided to take the plunge and start writing a class for a website navigation interface, using a series of arrays to print out a tabbed multilevel menu. And as I went along, suddenly all the concepts fell into place, and I understood! Learning by doing really is the way to go.
Onward, then, to the next struggle: making practical use of multidimensional associative arrays without losing the very essence of my being in the convoluted, obfuscated mazes of nested values and variables.
Looks like a nice time to be a Filipino farmer: a police raid on underground insurgents claiming to be farmers turned up — among other things — two .50 caliber machineguns, an M1 Garand rifle, and three 12-gauge shotguns; weapons which even Filipino communist rebels and Muslim extremists would have trouble getting their hands on. I wonder if this could be related to that US air transport which was fired on by anonymous attackers over Northern Luzon a few months ago.
What was that?
Can you hear it?
That faraway sound?
I think I’m hearing X-Files echoes from Christianity Today! ;)
Reflections on the X-Files series finale…
“I want to believe that the dead are not lost to us, and that if we listen to them, they can give us the power to save ourselves.”
So says Fox Mulder at the end of the X-Files, and Scully responds with a smile, “Then we believe the same thing.” Mulder thumbs the cross hanging from her neck and says, “Maybe there’s hope.”
I have problems with that. Christianity is not by any conservative stretch “the dead telling us we can save ourselves,” but rather the Living One telling us that it is He who saves us, not by our own merit or effort, but by His own mercy, love, and sacrifice. And our salvation is not a physical, material rescue from a 2012 alien invasion — or even from other earthly woes like poverty or war — but a redemption from our own sin and its wages. The whole point of redemption in the Christian context is that a heavenly righteousness is imputed to us by faith and not by works. Because we as imperfect humans are too fallen in our sin to save ourselves, Christ has, on the cross, executed and finished the propitiatory work of saving us, and that salvation becomes available to all solely through God’s grace.
So where does that leave the conclusion of the X-Files? Somehow a point is missed with Mulder’s vague reference to Christianity as the transcending truth which he comes to believe. What comes next? Now that it has given hope, what kind of hope is given, even without taking into account the Christian outlook? Are we still talking about “hope” in the face of an upcoming alien invasion and a pervasive government conspiracy — or is this an X-Files insight into the triumph of humanity’s sense of hope, which transcends even those otherworldly threats?
<cliche punchline>
Or is the truth… still out there? (cue X-Files theme)
The X-Files series finale left too many loose ends hanging, and seemed to have lost all of the show’s original mystique. I was left somewhat annoyed and dissatisfied, and unsure as to whether I would be able to enjoy a movie if the creators decide to make one. More commentary on MeFi.