Well, I found out Monday that I passed my Biblical Language Exegesis exam back in January. Hooray! I don’t know yet what my scores were. I’ll update this once I get the exam back. In the meantime, what matters is that I passed.
Here’s something I didn’t know.
Martinez owns a small family farm and produces a high-quality coffee, but none of his beans carry the Fair Trade label. His farm isn’t part of a cooperative, a Fair Trade non-negotiable that disqualifies small, independent farmers, larger family farms, and for that matter any multinational that treats its workers well. “It’s like outlawing private enterprise,†says former SCAA chair Cox, who now serves as president of a coffee consulting company. “What about a medium-sized family-owned farm that’s doing great, treats their employees great? Sorry, they don’t qualify.†In Africa, many coffee farms are organized along tribal, not democratic lines. They’re not eligible either, a problem that has prompted some roasters to charge cultural imperialism.
We have Fair Trade at the coffee kiosk here on campus. I should ask around to see how widespread my lack of knowledge is.
There’s a whole article about Fair Trade at Reason.
I just upgraded WordPress to 2.0.2. It’s a security upgrade, so if I knew what XSS was I’d probably be breathing a lot easier now. But upgrading went very smoothly.
I took advantage of the confusion to move the blog from its old site at buzzword.org to its own shiny new domain here. Just doing my part for namespace congestion.
I lost my themes and plug-ins, but that was (more or less) deliberate. I’ll fix that in my copious spare time.
About two weeks ago I started getting spam from Russia. But this isn’t your regular spam. This is spam returned by Russian mail transfer agents, with apologies, because it couldn’t be delivered:
(click on picture for bigger view):
I picked up Batman Begins for $11.96 at Sam’s Club the other day and w00t! it’s the best Batman movie ever.
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During reading week I watched the pilot episodes and six subsequent episodes from Season 1 of Lost. It’s an okay show, and if I watched TV in real-time (over the air) this is the sort of thing that could nibble away at your weeknights until you realized you had none left. But. I watch TV only when I’m exercising on my elliptical trainer, and never broadcast, only DVD. (“Fortunately, I am immune.” -Spock)
The Star-Ledger has a story about one of the guys in my Abraham class last summer.
An inmate at the Albert C. Wagner Youth Correctional Facility in Burlington County was strangled late Thursday and his body found under another inmate’s bunk, authorities said yesterday.
…
Schweitzer, of Easton, Pa., was sentenced in June 2003 to 8 1/2 to 10 years for sexually assaulting a 2-year-old girl in Phillipsburg the previous summer.
…
It has been nearly two years since an inmate was murdered in a state prison.
(My emphases in bold.)
It seems to me that 8 1/2 to 10 is too short for that crime, and death at the hands of another inmate (after two years “inside” hoping nobody found out what your crime was) is too much.
Pray for his family and whoever killed him. Pray also for the victim of his crime and her family.
Charles Hodge has his own website now.
I’m taking a class called “Theology in Service to the Church.” Its subject matter is the practical theology of Charles Hodge, the most influential American theologian of the 19th century, and Karl Barth, the most influential Reformed theologian of the 20th century.
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A couple of weeks ago we went to a Cub-Scout event aboard U.S.S. New Jersey down in Camden. It nearly got cancelled due to the blizzard, but the indomitable spirit (plus prepaid registration fees) saved the day. Here’s a view from the fantail looking up toward the gangway. Note the Vulcan-Phalynx guns amidships.
There was a big conference here a couple of months ago about how terrible torture is. I wouldn’t be surprised if Abu Graibh and Guantanamo came up, if the posters promoting it are any clue. I wonder, though, if anything came up about torture in Iraq before the war. Consider this report about the trial of Saddam Hussein:
The documents revealed some unbelievably terrifying facts about the Dujail massacre; can you imagine that when orders were given to execute the 148 “convicts” the prison authorities executed only 96 of them. Why? Because the remaining 48 “convicts” had already passed away during “interrogation”!! What kind of interrogation was that killed one third of the suspects?!
How many Torture seminars were there here protesting Torture in Iraq between 1979 and 2003? (Kudus to Belmont Club.)
Update: even worse things at Michael J. Totten’s site (not especially graphic).