33 Things: The Week’s Amusing & Intriguing Links

You know…I just don’t feel like writing an introduction. So shoot me!
(Oh, but do check out the top 100 films.)

1. It’s rare for a company to admit to child labor, much less do their own investigation — let’s hope systemic solutions will quickly follow.

2. How to use that most feared of all punctuation marks – the semicolon.

3. The Hurt Locker has suffered bad press, but is subject to only one of many Oscar smear campaigns.

4. Never forget that God is watching.  And so is google.

5. Hillary Clinton and Mother Teresa: Perhaps it’s time for Mrs. Clinton to finish the great work she started.

6. Michael Hyatt – CEO of Thomas Nelson, the world’s largest Christian publishing company – thinks we should embrace Google books.  Were it anyone other than Google, we might agree:

“I came to the meeting skeptical but left convinced that Google has already addressed most of my major concerns. Based on the information Google provided to us—and with thanks to Tod Shuttleworth for his excellent meeting summary—I believe authors, agents, and publishers should embrace Google Book Search rather than fear it:

7. Google Book Search creates greater book awareness. Google, the most popular search engine by far, helps put books in front of people who might not have thought a book could be an answer to their query. They are, after all, using Google to find something. As authors, agents, and publishers, we believe books are a great place to find an answer. However, if they don’t show up in the Google search results, consumers are will seek their answers elsewhere.”  Click here to read the rest of Hyatt’s reasoning. 

8. Wired Magazine, on the iPad.

(HT: Todd Shuttleworth LINK: http://www.todshuttleworth.com/*)

9. Don’t you wish your wedding invitation was hot like theirs?  Invitation as video game ala Super Mario Brothers:

(HT: BoingBoing LINK: http://boingboing.net/)

10. Francis Cianfrocca on the End of Easy Fixes:

And the biggest problem of all is how our children are educated. They’re all learning the old-fashioned Sixties view, formulated best by Howard Zinn, of an American society founded in its soul on injustice and oppression, rather than freedom and shared prosperity. Our children are taught to fight against our society rather than to take a responsible place within it. For them, American history begins (and nearly ends) with the struggles over slavery and women’s rights, not in the colonization of the New World and the revolution against England. This is going to be very difficult to change.

11. Mitt Romney’s 12 Hour Flip Flop

12. Every 10 Year Old (Boy’s!) Dream

13. But I by Backword Steps would Move

And on and on the list could go, showing how the roots of modern debates are sunk deep within the soil of ancient philosophical reflection.  It’s not that one shouldn’t study the modern debates.  Quite the contrary, I’ve suggested we should begin with the modern debates.  It’s simply that by moving backward toward the Greeks, we can show how our current questions and disputes are in important ways an echo of even more basic questions and disputes that have been going on for centuries. The point of drawing the students’ attention back to the foundational issues, then, is not to dismiss the moderns, but to help our students see that, as Aquinas (echoing Aristotle) once remarked: “a little error in the beginning leads to a great one in the end.”

14. TMCM: Productivity Gone Too Far

15. Income Inequality and Your Brain

16. So….um, Leno is back.

17. Trade as One offers daily blog posts explaining the connection between our purchases of normal products and slavery around the world, as well as pointers for how to swap your regular purchases for more ethical choices.

18. What do John Edwards, Tiger Woods, and the Wolfman have in common? Jeffrey Overstreet knows.

19. SPU’s Response to the Academy Awards reminds us of The World That the Oscars Forgot.

20. Best movie post EVER: Image Journal’s top 100 films of all time. Read ‘em and weep, AFI!

21. Downright Lovecraftian: “blood” waterfalls in Antarctica.

22. Battlestar Galactica cubits for sale.

23. Making Coraline Cookies.

24. God pairs up with Star Wars for Power Turbo Boost!

25. Twelve Tips on Making a boss mix-CD. (‘boss’ as in ‘friggin awesome!’)

26. So long as 33 Things has an ongoing ‘clock’ motif…

27. You’ve always looked and modern art and scoffed, “Psh. I could do that.” But is it as simple as you think? NYC’s MoMA gives you a guide to viewing modern art.

28. We’re 21^st Century Evangelicals: It’s Time to Reclaim the Evangelical Social Justice of the 19^th century that we lost in the 20^th. But How? An Evangelical Manifesto, written by great modern Christian thinkers such as Os Guinness and Dallas Willard, presents some profound ideas:

“To be Evangelical is to be faithful to the freedom, justice, peace, and well-being that are at the heart of the good news of Jesus. Fundamentalism was world-denying and politically disengaged at its outset, but Evangelicals have made a distinguished contribution to politics—attested by causes such the abolition of slavery and woman’s suffrage, and by names such as John Jay, John Witherspoon, Frances Willard, and Sojourner Truth in America and William Wilberforce and Lord Shaftesbury in England.”

29. How the Past dreamed of the Future.

30. Mars…in Florida?

31. Earth photos live from the International Space Station.

32. Humanitarian Video Gaming.

33. I’ve just been discussing this with my professors, actually: Making sure your life does not become your profession (especially in academics!)