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• Sex and the College Girl Excellent 1957 Atlantic Monthly article that gives a glimpse of the dating life of a college girl in a pre-sexual revolution, pre-birth control pill and pre-legal abortion era.
• Unhook from casual sex’s high cost - Quad-Cities Online Although a bit alarmist about the “hook-up culture” and the demise of dating, this article lays down the very real physical and emotional toll of casual sex on today’s youth. Predictable comments follow.
• Were ‘cursed’ rams the first biological weapons? Biological warfare by Hittites 3300 years ago
• Police: Staten Island ‘Ninja Bandit’ Strikes For 18th Time Will the Wu-Tang Clan do something about this?
• Giant Israeli flag breaks world record for largest in world - Haaretz - Israel News Flag was made in the Philippines (commissioned by a Filipina businesswoman).

We had an earthquake with a magnitude of 5.6 at 8:04 p.m. this evening. Here’s the quake’s seismological data from the U.S. Geological Survey website, where one can track quakes in real-time (well, almost) in the Bay Area.

The epicenter’s just south of where we live. I was in the kitchen washing dishes when the bay window started to shake. The kids ran for cover under the dining table. The shaking ended after several seconds. Everyone’s fine and nothing broke or fell off the shelves.

Here’s the earliest news report from the San Jose Mercury News. It includes reactions from the local populace soon after the article was posted.

(But of course, Twitterers like Mark and I got our reactions up on the web even more quickly. Heh.)

Update: My tweets get included in these posts (one, two) by someone who tracked Twitter posts about the quake immediately after it happened.

The San Jose Mercury News reported yesterday that a local man died after falling into a vat of acid. But why, oh why, did the Mercury News staff choose to place a photo from the Body Worlds 2 exhibit right beside the article?

Writer Madeleine L’Engle is dead at 88. She wrote children’s books but she also often wrote about her Christian faith. According to this article, the price of her writing candidly as a Christian “has been steep. She has been perceived as too worldly by some conservative Christian audiences and too dogmatically Christian by some secular audiences.”

Here is an interview of Ms. L’Engle from 1979 by Christianity Today.

• Alfred H. Peet, 1920-2007 Peet’s Coffee & Tea founder passed away August 29, 2007
• An Inconvenient Fact Co-founder of Greenpeace takes issue with the scare tactics in Leo Dicaprio’s anti-forestry movie “11th Hour.” He says that “trees are the only abundant, biodegradable and renewable global resource.”
• FilmStew.com • Charles Darwin’s Day Off Ben Stein takes on Darwin??