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I have a few requests in case anyone reading this blog can help. If you've been following my recent submissions and approvals for the Blackwell philosophy and pop culture series, you might have some idea of why I want some of the following information if anyone has it readily available. If you have exact quotes or specific scenes from the movies or issue numbers in the comics, that would be wonderful. I have a large number of X-Men comic books (mostly from the mid-late 80s until the early 90s, but I have reprints of older stuff too), but if it's easy for anyone to find some then it will make my work much easier in two weeks once I'm done grading and begin writing, so I can focus on the philosophy.

1. I'm looking for any instances in X-Men movies or comic books where any character or the narrator uses race-language or species-language to refer to mutants as distinct from humans. This includes when it's morally loaded but also when it's not. I'm interested both in Magneto's elevated view of the rights of mutants as superior beings but also in the factual claim that mutants are a separate race, sub-species, or species.

2. I'm also looking for instances where Magneto has given moral justifications for his questionable or immoral actions, again from the movies or the comic books. (I have no cartoon episodes to verify the information.) I'm interested in his attitude toward humans and the moral difference he sees between mutants and humans. I'm also interested in any general moral principles he might state in the process of explaining his reasons for doing things. Any specific descriptions of Magneto's actions as terrorist would also be nice or descriptions of particular actions he's taken that are morally questionable or outright immoral would also help me.

3. For those more wizard-inclined, I'm hoping to compile a list of seemingly-chance occurrences in Harry Potter, where something not under the conscious control of any character, i.e. lucky occurrences, are absolutely crucial for the major plot of the book to move along, particularly if Harry's success or the bad guys' defeat or frustration in their purposes hinges on it. I'm also looking for specific instances where any characters talk about issues related to destiny, the various prophecies, time travel and changing the past, free will, and so on. If you can give page numbers in the American paperback editions (hardcover for Deathly Hallows) or chapter numbers otherwise, that would be great. But even just mention of the events and how important they are could help me if it's something I haven't thought of yet, especially if it's a really big deal.

Whatever help anyone can offer is appreciated.

I wrote before that my proposal for a chapter on mutants and the nature of race was accepted to The X-Men and Philosophy volume and that I'd submitted three other proposals for two other volumes. I haven't heard anything one way or the other about my submission about The Hobbit, but I found out today that one of the two proposals I wrote for Harry Potter and Philosophy was accepted. They liked what I submitted about the limits of authorial intent, but they had a number of good submissions on that topic, and they decided they'd rather go with my proposal on destiny in Rowling's series, so they accepted that one. You can see the blog version of my initial thoughts on the matter here.

Before I even started graduate school, I hoped to be able to write popular-level philosophical discussions about questions that I thought needed serious philosophical reflection that science fiction and fantasy often raise, and I guess now I get to write about two topics I care a lot about in two fictional worlds that I've spent a lot of time in. These will be my first publications besides a book review (although it was a book review that made several substantive points, some of which I thought were genuine contributions to how to think about the issues). That means I need to work hard to submit some parts of my dissertation to journals pretty quickly to avoid giving the impression that I'm a lightweight when it comes to publication. Still, I'm glad to have the chance to contribute to these volumes.

Kevin Sam tagged me with this meme. I don't always get around to following up on these things, but this seemed like less work than the post I'm working on that I'd otherwise be completing right now.

1. What translation of the Bible do you like best?

I probably use the ESV more than anything else.

2. Old or New Testament?

Uh ... they're both the Bible. I spend more time in the Old Testament just because it's bigger and takes longer to get through.

3. Favorite Book of the Bible?

I can't name a favorite, but some favorites are (in one particular order) Philippians, Isaiah, Deuteronomy, Ecclesiastes, II Peter, and Habakkuk.

4. Favorite Chapter?

Again, I have to list several, but near the top would be Psalm 139, Philippians 2, II Peter 1, Genesis 50, Isaiah 10, John 17, Acts 17, Zechariah 14, and Genesis 5 (I'm not kidding about the last one, either; it's the key to a major theme of the book and of the entire Bible).

5. Favorite Verse?

Phil 3:12-14 isn't one verse, but it's one sentence that would be hard to break up.

6. Bible character you think you're most like?

Moses

7. One thing from the Bible that confuses you?

I don't know if it's really confusion, but one recent wondering that comes to mind is how the Ithamarites ended up with the high priesthood by the time Samuel was born given that the descendants of Phinehas the son of Eleazar should have had the high-priestly role.

8. Moses or Paul?

After my answer to #6, I can't resist saying Paul.

9. A teaching from the Bible that you struggle with or don't get?

I'm currently working on the fact that Paul can see the unknown God in Acts 17 as God, but he doesn't think someone believing a different gospel believes in the same Jesus as he does. He's got to be working with two different senses of "the same as", but I need to figure out what those two senses might be exactly. What's worse is finding the same phenomenon going on within one text in II Kings 17 with the syncretistic practices of the resettled peoples in the former northern kingdom counting as both fearing and not fearing YHWH.

10. Coolest name in the Bible?

Melchizedek is one of my favorites, but it's hard to resist mentioning Maher-shalal-hash-baz. I'm sure there are a few that I might like even more, but I won't be able to remember them now. Or is this a trick question, and it's supposed to be the tetragrammaton?

I have to tag five people, so here they are: Mike, Danny, Mark, Sam, and Nobody.

The eleventh Star Trek film is currently being filmed, and I wanted to express some desires (some perhaps more likely than others) of a few things I want to see in it. I've had three longstanding problems in Star Trek history, and all three of them will be relevant for this film. I've actually wanted to express these in a blog post since I first heard they were doing this (which had to have been at least a year ago), but I never got around to it until now.

1. There are supposed to be Klingons in it, according to rumors. This film takes place between the Star Trek: Enterprise series and the original series. There's always been a problem with the look of the Klingons. In the original series, they look like humans. Then they get those funny foreheads. in the movies It's much cooler, but they needed an explanation of why the look changed. Now until Deep Space Nine came along with their Tribble time travel episode, they might have been able to say that the original series just portrayed them poorly, and they always looked like what we've seen since the first film. But once DS9 revealed that Miles O'Brien didn't recognize the original-series-era Klingons as Klingons, and Worf revealed that something had happened that Klingons don't discuss in public, the franchise had to offer an explanation.

I'm glad to say that the final season of Enterprise did exactly that and did an excellent job with the explanation. Klingon DNA became altered to include human DNA in most of the population, and they projected a time period for how long they'd fix the problem that matches up with how long it took. So that one's taken care of. There is the problem that by the time of the original series the crew believed that no humans had ever seen Klingons. I haven't seen that quite explained yet. If Abrams has Klingons in a film with Kirk and Spock as young officers or cadets, then we'll need some further continuity explanations or some careful avoidance of any contact with the Klingons (which Enterprise was able to pull off a few times with Romulans that the crew never met, or at least never knew they met). We'll see if it works. They claim to be paying close attention to canon so as to avoid any problems.

2. The movie is rumored to contain time travel. I have a huge problem with Star Trek time travel that happens far too often, and I really don't want to see it in this film. Why are there all these episodes that never happened? Most of the time travel episodes end with something changing the past so that the entire episode never happened. Then why did we watch it? Why did they bother filming it? And if it never happened, why did they end up at a place where the events that never happened were able to cause the state things revert to when it becomes true that it never happened?

This, of course, is not something the creators of Star Trek can really do anything about. It's just the result of a really stupid view of time travel. If someone really could come up with a story to explain why all these people keep changing the past and experiencing effects of things that never happened, while retaining a plausible theory of time travel involving a fixed timeline, then I'd be overjoyed. I'm not holding my breath, and I certainly don't think J.J. Abrams is the one to do it. But if he stays away from this problem, I'll be satisfied enough, and if he doesn't do any past-changing at all, which is a metaphysical impossibility, I'll be very happy.

Amazon.com has a page reviewing J.K. Rowling's The Tales of Beedle the Bard, which she wrote out by hand, distributed four copies of to people important to her, and sold the fifth to the highest bidder (with the proceeds donated to charity), and the highest bidder turned out to be Amazon. Unfortunately there's no way to read these stories for yourself, since it's not (at least at this point) being published (and I know of no plans ever to do so. One of them, at least, is already present in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, and it plays an important role in the plot of that book, but the others are new (although I believe all the titles were mentioned in that book).

It consists of five short fairy tales told in the wizarding world of Harry Potter. A few elements of magic as Rowling conceives of it do appear, but mainly these can stand alone as simply good fairy tales. I was less impressed by "The Wizard and the Hopping Pot" (although it may be better as a story than the impression I get from the review), but the other four strike me as very well-conceived stories with excellent moral lessons, often with nice twists at the end, excellent ironies, and so on.

Many of the things I appreciate about her books seem to be in these stories as well, especially in "The Fountain of Fair Fortune" and "The Warlock's Hairy Heart", which serve as illustrations of what great virtue and its opposite, respectively. The latter tale strikes me as something Edgar Allen Poe could have written. It's impressive that she managed to turn her title "Babbitty Rabbitty and her Cackling Stump" into what's not just a plausible story for such a name but a fun romp illustrating a nice moral lesson. "The Tale of the Three Brothers" is, of course, not new to those who have read the seventh Harry Potter novel, but it is a great fairy tale in its own right, and that one we can actually read in its published form (which apparently differs in a few details from the handwritten version in this work).

I really wish these end up being published so we can all read the actual stories. Until then, I do appreciate having the Amazon reviews. I'm glad they ended up with the fifth copy.

What if the show 24 had been made seven years earlier with the technology of that time?

It's pretty funny and brings back a lot of memories of what things were like. I just realized that my students in 1994 were the ages my kids are now and would therefore have almost no memories of the technology of that time.

The other day I set out to make a burrito wrap with whatever ingredients I could find. I spread a little sour cream on it, put some ham lunch meat laid over that, sliced some Colby-Jack cheese to put on top of the ham, and topped it off with some of Sam's homemade cranberry sauce spread over the top. When I told Sam, she didn't have any problem until I mentioned the cranberry, which led simultaneously to incredulity and disgust. But it was really, really good. I even went and made myself another one. The next day when we had some rice in the fridge I added that to the mix and had a few more.

It reminded of me of the times I've found myself running out of cream cheese in the middle of making a bagel sandwich. What I do then is spread peanut butter on the rest of the bagel before putting the ham and cheese (ideally provolone) in the middle. Oh, and it's almost always a blueberry bagel unless it's near Christmas (when it's sometimes cranberry). It's nowhere near as good as the cranberry ham and cheese wrap with sour cream, particularly the version with rice. But cream cheese, peanut butter, ham, and provolone on a blueberry bagel has got to be tasted to be judged. Feel free to call it disgusting once you've had a few bites.

Christianity Today is conducting a poll about people's favorite religious satire website. I encourage voting for The Holy Observer.

Gary Cleland reports on a strategy at winning Rock, Paper, Scissors. [hat tip: Geekpress]

Apparently the advice assumes your opponent knows that most people choose rock and that your opponent accordingly chooses paper to beat your rock, so you should choose scissors.

But how many people engage in that reasoning? You might as well conclude that your opponent would choose scissors on the above reasoning and then choose rock or that your opponent would add in that iteration and then choose scissors to beat the opponent's paper. It's ridiculous. The only way this will work is if you have real empirical evidence about how much reasoning of this sort certain kinds of people engage in and some ability to figure out which category your opponent would be in. But no one can do that. It's true that it's not quite a game of chance, just as poker isn't. But that doesn't mean there's any rational way to win.

Of course, what you really ought to do is not play Rock, Paper, Scissors at all. It's much better to play Rock, Paper, Scissors, Spock, Lizard.

It's time for another low-effort post listing off the multitude of license plates I noticed last month. It would have been on the high end even without a trip to New York City and Baltimore at the end of the month, but I got a few rare ones added during those travels.

U.S. States: Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, West Virginia, Wisconsin

Other U.S.: District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, U.S. government

Canada: Manitoba, New Brunswick, Ontario, Quebec

There are nine U.S. states that I didn't see any license plates from in December. I saw one of them on January 1 in a supermarket parking lot and another this morning on my own street.

Missing from previous two months: I saw Montana in November and North Dakota and Utah in October. Those were the only three October and November had that I didn't see in December. So there are six U.S. states that I didn't see in any of the three months I've chronicled so far (although one of them is already in January's list, so there are really only five I haven't seen since I started doing this).

Additions not in previous months: Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Kentucky, Nebraska, Nevada, Puerto Rico, US government, Manitoba, New Brunswick

The Holy Observer has posted its Church Sign of the Month Christmas Special 2007.

The latest edition of The Holy Observer is up.

A week ago, I posted about J.K. Rowling's views on destiny, taking my starting point from this interview that she gave a few weeks ago. I ended with the thought that Rowling's own interpretation of what was going on wasn't the best interpretation of her actual text. That raises questions, however, about how an author might not interpret her own work correctly. She created it, after all. Does authorial intent have no bearing on these kinds of questions? [As with the previous post and the interview, there may be spoilers in this post, so don't read it if you don't know how the series concludes and want to find out in chronological order as the author intended it.]

So what does authorial intent contribute to the story when the text itself can be interpreted in several ways? Can an author determine that a character is, for example, gay even if the text itself doesn't make that clear? Can an author declare the character's motivations even if the text itself doesn't make them clear? This arises in the interview when it comes to the motivations and moral character of Albus Dumbledore in his various machinations in the war against Lord Voldemort.

I say the author can declare the intent of the character, even if the text doesn't, but I know some people make the text fundamental rather than the author. But even if that's right, it doesn't follow that everything an author says in interviews after the fact are canon. There's a debate over whether Dumbledore is a bit too manipulative. Apparently Rowling herself thinks so, judging by this interview, while many fans don't (or at least think he's less so than she seems to think; I'm one of those fans, by the way).

She can tell us what a character did and what the character's motivations were. She doesn't, however, have the power to determine whether those actions and motivations count as manipulation or whether they are immoral. Whether the word 'manipulation' applies is a matter of linguistic fact, and authors of a fantasy world can't determine by themselves what the word 'manipulation' means in English.

By the same token, whether what Dumbledore does is wrong is a matter of moral truth. Whatever determines morality (and views on that abound), it's certainly not authors of fantasy novels by themselves. I can't just write a novel where killing innocents for fun is morally ok. That can't be part of the stipulation within the novel. I can write a novel in a world where people think that, but I can't as an author make their beliefs true. I can write a novel whose characters speak a language slightly differently from English, where the word 'manipulation' means something different from what it means in English, but that doesn't change what we who speak English mean by the word when we apply it to those characters.

So there's room for debate over whether a character really is manipulative even if the author takes a side on the issue, and the same goes for whether what the character did (whether you call it manipulative or not) was morally wrong.

Have you ever heard of chessboxing? [hat tip: GeekPress] Neither had I. I'm not sure what would motivate someone capable of competitive chess to put themselves in a position of diminishing that capacity so easily, but I guess some smart people are pretty stupid.

J.K. Rowling did an interview recently with a Dutch newspaper, and it included (among a lot of other things) her thoughts on destiny and free will. (For those who care about spoilers, you might not want to look at the interview or read the rest of this post.)

I have to confess that I'm a little disappointed in her response. She's very smart and well-informed about intellectual matters. But I have to wonder if she presents a false dilemma on this issue, and I'm not even sure the view she expresses here fits well with the books she wrote.

Your books are about the battle between good and evil. Harry is good. But is Voldemort pure Evil? He is also a victim.

He is a victim, indeed. He is a victim, and he has made choices. He was conceived by force and under the influence of a silly infatuation, While Harry was conceived in love; I think the conditions under which you were born form an important fundament of your existence. But Voldemort chose evil. I've been trying to point that out in the books; I gave him choices.

So far so good. It's important to distinguish between being forced into good or evil because of what happens to be true about your conception and making choices. This still doesn't say anything about the metaphysical status of free will. A libertarian will hold that these choices can't be caused by prior events if they're to be free, and a compatibilist will allow that they might be caused by prior events while still being free, because the distinction here is between being forced into something no matter what your own choices would be (merely because of the circumstances of your conception) and making choices (which doesn't yet say anything about whether those choices have explanations and if so what the explanations are).

But where she goes from here is what I find problematic: 

Check it out. There are some great articles this time around, including J.K. Rowling's pronouncement that Aslan is also gay, Christmas church shopping, and progressive Christian leaders who believe letting women preach but not drive.

Mare sure you don't miss the advertisement for the next installment in the Matt Damon Bourne series.

The latest issue of The Holy Observer is now online. This may well be the first time it's had a church sign based on a real one. I thought this version was better than the real one, though.

After a very long hiatus, the Holy Observer has a new edition. In case you're unfamiliar with the Holy Observer, it's a Christian online news parody site much like the Onion. If you're unfamiliar with the Onion, I'm not sure there's a lot I can do to help you other than to tell you to check it out at some point. But check out the Holy Observer first.

It's hard to keep pace with new technology, but sometimes something new appears on the scene that you just have to take notice of. The new Advanced Programmer's Computer is one of those. The Chat Room Keyboard is simply catering to idiocy, and this one would have been helpful when I was running Windows 95. But nothing beats the Ergonomic Keyboard for Pirates. I'm not sure I understand this one or this one, though. [hat tip: GreekPress]

Update: This one's a little more serious than some of the ones above, but the very name suggests otherwise: Keyless Ergonomic Keyboard.

Sean at myelectionanalysis makes great use of a Harry Potter reference in his reflection on the Ames, Iowa strall poll, speaking of Sam Brownback's taking third place and Mike Huckabee's coming in second:

I know a lot of people think that his third place showing is enough to keep him in the race. I’m not so sure. He threw everything he had into Ames, and still came up short. I think donors who are considering Brownback are going to look long and hard at him, then turn to Huckabee. One of them needs to exit quickly though, as neither can live while the other survives.

This is such a nice appropriation of pop culture that I had to mention it here, but I think it's accurate too. Huckabee and Brownback are marketing themselves to those who because of some intellectual vice (ignorance, too comfortable accepting lies without checking them, inconsistency in who to trust) see Romney as a pretender to the pro-life label. Huckabee could be a contender, but if Brownback is taking much of his support he's not going to have a chance. Brownback doesn't have much of a chance if Huckabee steps out, but the same is not true in reverse. So on the assumptions of those who wrongly fail to recognize that Romney is the best pro-life candidate (which is all that's driving the Brownback campaign at this point), Brownback ought to get out.

According to Wikipedia's article on the Dragonriders of Pern series, Anne McCaffrey says to read Dragondrums before The White Dragon, even though the publication order (and presumably the order she wrote them) is the reverse. Does anyone know if she really did say this, and can it be substantiated? Wikipedia usually requires citation for such claims, but I see none about this claim.

You scored as Marcus Aurelius, Your attention to duty even when the going gets rough has earned you the identity of Marcus Aurelius. A philosopher-emperor, he used Stoic musings to steel his resolve against a hard lot in life. You know few years of peace, and believe the only final answer to the empire's problems is a complete conquest of Europe. Despite this, you are probably one of the most human and thoughtful emperors in the history of mankind. Hail Caesar! Marcus Aurelius 75% Augustus 68% Claudius 61% Nerva 57% Hadrian 54% Antoninus Pius 54% Tiberius 54% Trajan 50% Nero 43% Vespasian 39% Commodus 39% Domitian 36% Vitellius 36% Caligula 14% Which Roman Emperor Are You? created with QuizFarm.com

The final Harry Potter novel is due out tomorrow, and most bookstores are treating that as one minute past midnight tonight. Our copy will be arriving by mail tomorrow, because we did the Amazon preorder deal, which should save us some money over buying it in a bookstore.

I thought I'd record some predictions as to what will happen in the seventh book before my predictions could be tainted by actually seeing the book. Since some may read this who haven't read through book six yet, I'll put the predictions in an extended entry to leave the front page free of spoilers for earlier books. 

I have some substantive things to post on, but I think it would be foolhardy for me to create too many new posts for people to keep commenting on when the comments have been occupying too much of my time already in the last few days. So instead of posting any of what I've been working on for the last couple days, I'll post something completely frivolous that I forgot to mention a while back.

Rajjilicious at Wildebeest's Wardrobe has jumped the gun a bit and announced some forthcoming books, including two by me. I didn't know I could write that fast, but apparently I'll have these done by next year.

My favorite is #3. It makes me want to edit an anthology of women philosophers' works, including papers by Hilary Putnam, Shelly Kagan, Marian David, Lois Hope Walker, Hilary Kornblith, and J. Leslie Mackie.

What would you describe as the typical Disney family model? Jae Ran Kim points out how frequently the main character of Disney movies has either an absent or dead parent (or two absent or dead parents), among other unusual anomalies that should be surprising for a line of children's entertainment. I think the only one in her pretty long list to have both parents raise her ends up a cross-dresser.

This isn't necessarily a criticism. This particular story device often simply makes for a good story. But doesn't it seem excessive for Disney to be so overwhelmingly like this? Or is this more common in children's stories in general than we notice? Since we generally don't notice it with Disney, maybe that's so. But why don't we notice it, if we don't?

We saw Spiderman 3 today. It was easly the best of the trilogy, and it gave the impression that Sam Raimi had been hanging on to some of what he did in this from the very beginning. I came away thinking the moral message was the sort of thing a Christian would write to try to motivate some of the less common and less popular elements of Christian ethics. As far as I know, Raimi isn't a Christian, but the influence of Christianity on our culture, as waning as it is in general, is felt very clearly in this film. See Rick Mansfield's excellent review for more.

Update: Sam has further thoughts in a very different direction (with some spoilers).

From an actual church sign: "Hurting people loved here"

I count at least six disambiguations given in the post and the comments, most of them not good.

J.K. Rowling regularly speaks against this sort of thing. It's one thing to photshop women as a matter of course to increase their bust size and thin their waist. Not that it's not immoral with adult women, but it seems to me to be a completely different matter to do it with someone who is underage (just turned 17, probably 16 when she took the picture) who is portraying someone even more underage (15 at the beginning of the movie, 16 at the end).

Several of the commenters have already made this point, but I'll make it again here. If whoever was responsible for this perverse act doesn't think Emma Watson is attractive enough to teenagagers as she is, then our culture's standards of beauty have become even more warped than I had thought (and I've long thought them to be pretty twisted). We already tell girls in too many ways that they're not good enough unless they look like Emma Watson. Now it turns out even Emma Watson isn't even good enough as she is.

Update: More here. I've also now linked above to Rowling's own rant against this sort of thing.

Update 2: Warner Brothers claims that they didn't authorize this. They've asked IMAX to remove it from their site. 

A friend of mine told me last summer that he was going to make a film. I thought he had in mind something like the home video movies my brothers and I made with some friends when we were in high school. We had:

• a murder mystery involving a Mr. Thurmafer (I don't remember if we had a name for that one, but I thought the character's name was funny)
• Alabama Smith
• Ken the Barbarian (which involved some hokey wooden swords and shields)
• Ken the Destroyer (which we managed to get some real medieval swords and armor for, not to mention a real ATV for the knight's ride-by slaying of the documentary commentator)

Then there were the fake commercials:

•  the product that could start with the skinny, little wimp (me) and end up with my brother (who at the time worked out quite a bit and was on his school wrestling team)
• a Volkwagen commercial where the car that's supposed to stop just before it gets to the two engineers with white robes and clipboards doesn't manage to stop in time
• Foundationland, which made foundations for houses but advertized itself with stock used car sales pitches; we filmed it in the foundation of a house that someone was in the process of building in the neighborhood next door
• two with a character named Gil Isuzu who had a sickly evil smile, wore really loud colors on his shirts and ties, and was trying to sell wide-body trucks big enough to hold three wide bodies (with an arm hanging out the back that he hadn't intended to be shown)

Our friend who engineered the whole thing went on to get a degree in film, but I wouldn't exactly say we were making real films. It was some kids having fun.

It turned out my friend wasn't talking about something like that. He was making a real film, using real film equipment with something on the order of a serious film budget (at least serious for an indie film). He told me he was thinking along the lines of Napoleon Dynamite and Nacho Libre in terms of the kind of humor. He's calling it Whip Cracker, and he's not putting out very much information about it yet (even I know only a little more than what's available online), but he has a trailer up in YouTube. So check out the Whip Cracker trailer, and if you like it give it some good ratings.

Uncomfortable Questions: Was the Death Star Attack an Inside Job?

The latest Veggie Tales video, Moe and the Big Exit, tells the story of the exodus from Egypt in a Western setting. The whole thing is pretty funny, but one of my favorite moments is at the very end, when they list the ten commandments as they might have been given in the old West:

1. Y'all have no other gods b'fore Me.
2. No makin' idols.
3. When y'all use my name, y'better mean it.
4. Lay off the trail one day a week.
5. Mind yer ma and pa.
6. No killin' folks.
7. Dance with who brung ya.
8. No swipin'.
9. No lyin'.
10. No hankerin' for things that ain't yours.

Go to Google Maps, enter "Boston" and "London" into the search boxes for directions, and then look at the results. Pay close attention to the step-by-step directions. [hat tip: Eugene Volokh]

In celebration of Fred and George Weasley's birthday, Mugglenet has posted their first impressions on reading advanced copies of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, the much-awaited seventh and final book in the series. Assuming you've already read through book six, I can say that there are no serious spoilers here.

I was going to post something substantial today, either the next post in the Theories of Knowledge and Reality series or what I've been wanting to put together on inerrancy and infallibility, but last night I became what can only be described as violently ill. I'm much better now, but that just means I'm not violently ill anymore. I think it was the pizza I ate at the dissertation workshop I was commenting on yesterday, since no one else in the family is sick, and we've all been eating the same foods otherwise.

But it's nice in times like these to see things like this. [Hint: you can alter the URL, and it gives accordingly altered results.]

Maybe I'll feel better enough later on to post something else, but I'm not having an easy time motivating myself to do anything of much import.

I'm not sure how I missed this, but it's one of the most intelligent (not to mention one of the funniest) parodies I've ever seen of anything.

People (almost certainly college students with too much time on their hands) have come up with a version of Quidditch that you can play without magic, with some pretty creative ways to try to capture some things in the original that require magic to do. They've got leagues and everything.