The first edition of Who Reads What is up. Now I need sleep, I have a breakfast meeting at 6:45.

- Peace

Give Peas a Chance

I laughed out loud.

- Peace

amazon4God? Who Links Amazon?

It dawned on me today that I have half a meg of info about how people in Who Links Who link to Amazon.com (and it's various national variants) and I thought I'd try an experiment, what are the top listed books / items on the minds of blogs4God's 1000 or so bloggers?

I counted the number of unique sites where the book was found, and here's what I found.

7 : Rick Warren: The Purpose-Driven Life: What on Earth Am I Here For?

4 : adventures in missing the point
4 : The Emerging Church

3 : John Eldredge: Wild at Heart: Discovering the Secret of a Man's Soul :
3 : A Cry of Stone
3 : Reclaiming God's Original Intent for the Church
3 : Joshua Harris: Not Even a Hint
3 : The Divine Conspiracy
3 : C. S. Lewis: The Screwtape Letters

After that it's a wack of 2s.

Right now I only work with URLs that match the 'ASIN/some number' patern somewhere in the URL. I know Amzon has some other formats, and I'll work on picking those up as well.

I plan on listing the source web sites in true WLW fasion. It would also be fun to pull more book info from Amazon and inclue that in the list.

So what do you think: Is this worth working on?

Angella has posted some of the tributes to Tooker Gomburg on their web site: Greenspiration. From
Farewell, Tooker

He convinced Edmonton engineers to adopt a scheme whereby a small city investment was used to pay for energy efficiency retrofits to an energy hog of a hockey arena. In this brilliant plan, the arena's yearly savings in operating costs were then applied to the city's second-worst energy hog, and so on. The entire program, save for the modest initial investment, was to be financed exclusively through savings.

Now that's smart.

I posted my memories of Tooker earlier this month.

- Peace

Import Tuner: Honda Stalks Wild Game

Honda has joined up with Thumbworks to put out Element Surfing, an arcade game you can play on select mobile phones that puts the spotlight on Honda's wacky Element SUV.

Just on cell phones, pity. This is Honda's second go at placing the Element in a game, the first was SSX 3 . Though in SSX the Element was in the background as a sponsor, it sounds like the new game puts the box wonder at the center of the action. Honda's been doing some imaginative marketing of the Element.

- Peace

Good Question: Incarnate Forever - Christianity Today Magazine: What is the scriptural and theological support for the teaching that Jesus, the God-man, remains eternally incarnate?
Answered by J.I. Packer.

- Peace

CFCN: Standoff ends peacefully

A three hour standoff in the city's south west Sunday afternoon ended peacefully.

Just after 2 p.m., the man called 9-1-1 saying he barricaded himself in the house in the community of Millrise and had a weapon.

Police surrounded the home and started negotiations. The man came out on his own and was taken to hospital for treatment.

Police say they have been to the same house before. The man had been drinking at the time of the standoff. No weapons were found in the home.

We watched this happen from out back window. The house in question is across the ally from us. There must have been twenty cops. I saw at least 8 SWAT team members, tons of other officers, a K9 unit and they had an amulance standing by. The news report only mentions one man. But we watched officers take another man who came out of the house an hour before.

CFCN played a clip of Kim talking about watching the cops take the guy down.

- Peace

Reverend Joyleaf told me about this great ad: I Feel Great. Too funny.

- Peace

LeadershipJournal.net - Catching The Passion Wave
Mel's movie caused a cultural wave, and we chose to ride it.
By Rick Warren

I think it's great that Rick's Church has been able to ride the wave of the passion. But what bugs me is it was all organized by his church. Why aren't the people of his church taking friends to see interesting movies and talking about them on a regular basis? Maybe surfing is the wrong metaphor, maybe we need to think like sailors who can tac into the wind, using not just Christian culture, but all culture to draw people to Christ.

I saw the passion on Friday, with a friend who is very interested in Jesus and it had a powerful effect on her, but as we talked afterward I realized the breadth of influences on her, her daughter who reads her Bible every night, American in laws who talk about their conversion, A Christian couple who welcomed her to Canada and helped her family with the transition to a new country. Personal witness and love are way more powerful than a movie. That got lost in the Passion outreach hype.

- Peace

Who Said?

a word to the wise to the young artists - without spiritual guidance too much freedom can lead to spiritual decline

- Peace

I had my first Kispy Kreme yesterday. A new Krispy Kreme is opening in Calgary, and somone delivered two boxes of their Doughnuts to our floor. There was much excitment. I warmed my dohnut in the microwave, as instucted by the Krispy Kreme devote in our group. It was warm, sweet, and melt in your mouth good. And yet I was a little disapointed. While it was good, much better than the recently revamped Doughnuts at Tim's, it wasn't as good as fresh Mrs. Dunsters Doughnuts from Fredricton. Hmmm whole weat dougnuts...

- Peace

Return of the Jedi King

I finally saw Return of the King with Mike on Saturday. It was good, though not as strong as Fellowship, better than Two Towers. I think they'll hold together better, when viewed in an all day marathon.

In the batel of Gondor, I was reminded of the batel of Hoth. I'm sure scale of the Oliphants was influenced by the scale of Imperial Walkers. The sceens shot at the top of city had a definate Star Wars feel as well, more so than Ep I or II. Too bad we couldn't get Peter Jackson to do Episode III.

- Peace

Visiting Mike and Carol in Edmonton. Listening to Mike play nobody's fault but mine and a couple of his ow tunes. He's playing his Johnson Steel guitar, or as I keep calling it the Dire Straits guitar. Course Mike is pointing out the guitar on the album cover, is by a different company. Musicians are so picky.

- Peace

EASTERN ORTHODOXY THROUGH WESTERN EYES

- Peace

Flickerings Epic Survey of Jesus Movies
From La vie et la passion de Jesus Christ to The Passion of the Christ By Mike Hertenstein.

My personal favorite Jesus of Montreal

Jesus of Montreal features a small theatrical troupe who are asked to "freshen up" a traditional Passion Play held annually at a local shrine. As in Kazantzakis's The Greek Passion, the Gospel story blurs into their daily lives, as the actors become echoes of the characters they play.

If you rent Jesus of Montreal, make sure to get the French with subtitles version. The transition between French and English is a huge part of the sub text, and the dubed English version just kills the movie.

I've also enjoyed the recent Gospel of John, going through the entire book of John in three hours, I had a fresh sense of how John focused on the question, Who was Jesus?

Mike's list includes: Monty Python's Life of Brian

The Gospel according to Monty Python goes thusly: Brian of Nazareth falls by accident (and most literally) into the role of prophet, and the people follow him despite his best efforts to shoo them away. Everything he does is interpreted as wisdom or a miracle by the slavish, worshipping crowds. No doubt the religious-epic genre was crying out to be satirized, and sharply; and this film is sharpest with the occasional dead-on parody of 50s-style Biblical drama. The satire is helped by the use of leftover sets and costumes from Zefirelli's Jesus of Nazareth, and a soundtrack complete with those angelic "oohohhoohs" that always seemed designed to provoke a Pavlovian response in viewers, a great argument in favor of a mock-religious film about thinking for oneself.

Meanwhile, Jesus of Nazareth shows up in a brief cameo, in a famous bit where the back of the crowd mishears the distant preacher as saying "Blessed are the cheese makers" (though a liberal-interpreter hastens to note that the reference is not to be taken literally, but applies to any manufacturer of dairy products).

- Peace

Why The Passion 'outreach' was all hype, and I didn't fall for it by Brian McLaren.

Thanks Jordan and Amen. Course it's nothing Steve Taylor hasn't said before, see: Easy Listening

How did we strike it rich?
Kissing up to the powerful

How did we make our pitch?
Satellites by the towerful

Why do you young people have to go and get caught up in a radical phase?

- Peace

Wired has a brief write up on Freezepop one of my favorite bands from Fequency and Amplitude. It's about how Freezepop has used the net and games to grow it's fanbase.

- Peace

Some blogger puns from Ian's Messy Desk.

- Peace

Tooker Gomberg dead at 48

I knew Tooker for our time at CJSR back in the early 90s. Tooker did a weekly environmental news show. He was Edmonton's best known radical environmentalist.

Memories of Tooker

A dance party at the garnish community center. Tooker brought a big box or organically grown BC cherries to share. And Tooker was among a group of guys, all of us with our shirts off who danced on the deck in a heavy summer rain.

Learning to do bike maintenance at a free training session put on by Edmonton Bicycle Commuters - a group Tooker passionate in promoting.

Eating hole wheat pancakes at the Alberta Legislature for a bike commuter rally.

A friend got me to do sound for an evening of performance art at EcoCity. As things were wrapping up I played The Violet Burning cd Strength. Tooker's life partner, Angela was moved was by the words I am my beloved's, and he is mine..

Helping to put together signs for Tooker first scuffle election company. Of course the signs were recycled from Tooker's previous campaign

The scandal when he was elected and refused to wear a tie to the swearing in ceremony.

And how he didn't understand the fuss when he showed up at a black tie Caribbean Community event in his every day clothes. Tooker wasn't cut out to be a career politician. I'm not sure that's a bad thing.

When unofficial bike lanes were painted overnight on Edmonton streets, people just knew Tooker was behind it. And too his credit some of the un official lanes did become designated bike lanes.

After he lost he re-election bid Tooker left Edmonton, to go on his Greenspiration! world tour. And I lost track of him. He'd pop up in the news from time to time. He ran against Mel Lastman for mayor of Toronto and came in second. And then this mornings headline.

I've spent some time catching up with Tooker via goggle.

Thinking about Tooker I can't help but wish I was as radical a christian as he was an environmentalists. Tooker's life was about figuring out how to get people to change they way they live so we can clean up the planet. I wish I spent that type of energy trying to figure out how to love.

- Peace

I fixed a bug with Who Links Who where two blogs of the same name would get only one entry page, of just one of the blogs.

So now Dappled Things and Dappled Things each have their own listings.

BTW Dappled means "all things counter, original, spare, strange"

- Peace

If Cat & Dogs could blog

REAL TECH SUPPORT

Esben:4-5 years ago the helpdesk, where I worked at the time, got this request from a user: Could he please have a copy of the internet on a 3.5' floppy disk because his PC at home did not have a modem...

classic.

- Peace

The Blue EP by Spy Glass Blue, you can read my review over at the Phantom Tollbooth. [scoll down... way down]. BTW I had the pleasure of meeting Scattered Few / Spy Glass Blue front man Allan Aguirre at C-Stone 2003 .