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Last Sunday

We don’t get snow here in the Bay Area - frost is all we get when it becomes cold - like last Sunday morning.

Later in the day, we had a little Christmas get-together with our friends from our sons’ school.

  
The dads……………………………….. the moms.

And the kids.

New Comment Spam

All throughout the week, I’ve been getting a new kind of comment spam. It’s not the kind that advertises the latest online casinos, or pushes pills or anything like that. Rather, it links to legitimate sites that are quite popular - but nothing else. The aim seems to get bloggers to blacklist these legit sites in some sort of retaliatory gesture. Weird.

Surfing at Night

This simple trick to conserve an iBook or PowerBook’s battery power turns out to be good for other purposes, like making things more readable in direct sunlight. By applying this hint, the screen’s colors get “inverted,” not unlike a negative. I found this to be quite useful when surfing in bed at night. Since the large white areas on my screen become black and the type becomes white, there is less luminous glow. It makes for easier reading in the dark and it becomes less of a bother to my wife, who is a light sleeper.

Narnia

We saw “The Chronicles of Narnia” on opening day. I liked it. The Emmy Award-winning animated adaptation from the ’70s had more of an emotional impact on me, however. The book, even more so. This review sums up what I feel about the movie. Prior to watching “The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe,” I selectively read negative reviews only, perhaps to allow the movie to prove them wrong. But their criticisms were mostly fair and on-point. I don’t understand those writers, however, who object to the use of a lion (in the book and movie) as a symbol for Christ. They’re just plain clueless.

Conversations

On Saturday evening we headed to Dublin for a party at a friend’s house. It was a great get-together complete with a hilarious White Elephant gift exchange. At one point in the party I braved the chilly air with the smokers outside (although I’m not one myself). Our conversation turned to Christianity somehow. One of our long-time friends mentioned how most of her family are followers of Christ and how they fervently pray for her. Although they don’t condone her homosexual lifestyle, they are non-judgmental towards her and love her dearly. She says she herself is a believer in Christ. She says she acknowledges what the Bible says about her lifestyle but she has a hard time letting go, especially of her current relationship.

Quite a frank admission.

The book or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust in them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things–the beauty, the memory of our own past–are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshipers.

Happy Birthday, Mr. Lewis.

Shadowlands comes highly recommended in this post at Rhesa’s blog. I saw it a few months ago on DVD. The 1993 movie stars Anthony Hopkins as C.S. Lewis, the Oxford don and writer, and Debra Winger as Joy Gresham, an American fan of his whom he weds in a marriage of convenience. He realizes his deep love for her when she becomes terminally ill. The film got a 100% Tomato Meter Rating. Do check it out.

On a related note, I regret missing the PBS special The Question of God which aired last September. It compares C.S. Lewis’s deep religious convictions to Sigmund Freud’s scientific skepticism. I wonder where I can rent the DVD?