May 22nd, 2009
If you’re a foodie and/or a beer geek that lives in Alabama, you may know about this already. Just in case:
Alabama - up until today - had some of the most antediluvian beer laws of any state in the union - the size of bottles was limited, as was the ABV percentage of the beer that was sold. Today, the activism of the folks over at Free The Hops finally succeeded in getting Alabama’s beer laws changed.
This has been an ongoing saga for a few years, now, but hopefully this means that we’ll start to see more high-gravity beers in Alabama. Quite a few world-class beers - Belgian Trappist Ales, and the like - are now legal to sell.
Posted in Food and Drink | No Comments »
April 2nd, 2009
One of the fairly new developments with which the last few generations of humans have had to contend is being part of a society in which there is more information than any one person can reasonably be expected to absorb. If you think about it - in terms of human history - this is actually a fairly recent development. If you lived in the year 1700, for example, you could conceivably read everything that had ever been published on a topic like, for example, chemistry, before you tried to embark on a career as a chemist. That doesn’t work anymore: if a student of chemistry tried to read everything that has been published on chemistry, there’s no way to finish reading everything in just a single lifetime. In addition, it’s a pretty safe bet that in chemistry (in addition to a host of other subjects), new material is being published at a fast enough rate that even if you set out to read all the material that was published after the date that you started reading, not only will you not be able to keep up, but you’ll get farther and farther behind.
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Posted in Philosophical Meanderings | 8 Comments »
March 24th, 2009
I haven’t been carefully observing evangelical Christianity for long enough periods of time to categorize myself as a keen observer of trends in the church. However, in the short period of time that I’ve actually been watching, I’ve seen a few movements within the church that propose - to put it mildly - some striking changes with regards to theology or the way the church operates. The examples that most easily spring to mind are (a) the house church movement, which has been around for awhile, and the (b) emerging and (c) emergent church movements - now (correctly) categorized as two separate movements. For purposes of this discussion, we can get away with oversimplifying our description of the emergent/emerging movements by suggesting that they are embodied, respectively, by Mark Driscoll and Brian McLaren. Both of these movements are still (relatively) new on the scene.
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Posted in Theology | 2 Comments »
March 12th, 2009
Those of you that know me are probably aware that I play mandolin in Slipjig, a local Celtic band. On a fairly regular basis, we do various shows in the local area - like local bands anywhere, we play at various pubs and coffee shops, with the occasional wedding reception or party thrown in for variety and for the sake of getting another gig. Like most local bands, I’m sure, some of the stuff we play is a lot of fun, certain other events are not.
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Posted in Philosophical Meanderings | No Comments »
January 15th, 2009
This is the first post in a new category that I’m attempting to make some sort of regular feature here. For lack of any truly imaginative ideas, I’m calling this section “Travel Stories,” and the basic idea here is that I’ll recount interesting things that have happened to me. These are the sort of stories that I would have a tendency to tell while at a party, or (even better!) while sitting around a campfire during a hiking expedition somewhere in a national park.
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Posted in Travel Stories | 1 Comment »