Kevin Rudd cricket commentator

I am doing my favourite trick at the moment: reading, blogging, watching India (147/6) bat on Channel 9, and listening to the ABC commentary on ABC Local. This last fifteen minutes Prime Minister Rudd has been guest commenting, not too badly either for a first effort… He has a really good manner in such informal situations.

Two contrasting Christmas posts

But they are both very good in their different ways.

Marcellous has gone way back in Ghosts of Christmas Past, a really good post. I was interested in this:

D is opposed to Christmas.  It offends his communist past and secular present; he objects to its quasi-establishment of a religion which is foreign to him.  I try to tell him that Christianity was only grafted onto older festivals, and that it fulfills many of the functions of Chinese New Year (where family reunion is a very important element).  My account above shows this, at least by those elements of reunion which I have singled out.  D still objects that the Chinese tradition may have superstitious origins but is not theistically religious.  That is a tricky point for the drawing of even negative analogies because as far as I can gather the role of deities in Chinese religion/beliefs of the supernatural is quite different from the Western tradition.

See where I am coming from…

If you visit my Classified Links page (WordPress) under Faith and Philosophy you will find much that inspires or interests me these days. Among the items listed is Radical Faith and at the top you will discover Richard Holloway, "a retired Anglican bishop [of Scotland, who] has become known for his radically trenchant views on official Christendom." His Doubts and Loves and Godless Morality really do inspire me. Even Richard Dawkins looks on him fairly kindly.

At the end of Doubts and Loves Holloway cites Walt Whitman:

AFL for peace in the Middle East

It’s one of those human interest stories (this one in the sports section) that you might just pass over, but I regard it as really significant: Teamwork goes for goal: peace.

More on the amung.us widget

I also mentioned this yesterday. Since then I have applied it to all my bits and bobs on the Internet and the results are quite fascinating, especially the live map which shows within seconds who is reading what. The captures below were taken a few minutes back. They show something fairly typical: a constant stream going to the various English/ESL bits especially.

Further to H in Indonesia

The person who turns out not to be the mystery spammer from Indonesia contributed this to my post on OzPolitics on the Bali Conference:

A compilation applauds UN Global Warming and Climate Change Conference 13th by UNFCCC at Bali, Indonesia 3-14 December 2007 (UNFCCC COP 13 - CMP 3, MOP/COP 3 events).