hee

From The Daily WTF message board:

Comment:	Sometimes I feel like the only person over 30 on the internet.
Reply:	I usually feel like the only person who is AND ACTS over 30. There are plenty of old farts on the internet. They're just all trying to hook up with teenagers on MySpace.

anglican stuff: living with differences

So ross_teneyck posted about more Episcopal Sturm und Drang. This got me googling. I loved what The New York Times quotes The Most Reverend Njongonkulu Ndungane (Archbishop of Cape Town) as saying on the issue of gay rights: “We need to make a distinction between issues that are fundamental to the faith and second-order issues. This is not a church-dividing issue.”

He said he could not understand why a debate over homosexuality had sidetracked what he saw as the church’s true mission in Africa: confronting AIDS, poverty, war and famine.

“I wonder if somebody could calculate how much money is being spent on these meetings, which deal with one issue and one issue only, when we have 48 million orphans?” he asked. “Whose agenda is this? Definitely in my view, this is not God’s agenda.” [...] ( The Church of Southern Africa differs from both ECUSA and other African churches in how it handles gay clergy and gay marriage. )

I would note that it's he's not just espousing the view that "we should tolerate America / Canada doing this bad thing until they come around". He's pointing out that it's okay to disagree on the "second-order" issues, that we don't all have to believe all the same things all of the time.

And that can be scary.

Especially since - as CS Lewis so rightly remarked in Mere Christianity - Christians not only disagree on their beliefs, but they disagree on how important their disagreements are :\

weird food fad

According to Crickler (uses Flash) the new culinary fad in Shanghai is the Chinese space sweet potato named "Purple Orchid Three"? Apparently it's bred from seeds that mutated while being carried on a Chinese spacecraft and is featured in desserts, salads, and so on.