This is from John Leo, of U.S. News and World Report fame. Filed under "strange but true.""Now sit, Ingvar, sit."Young women in Sweden, Germany, and Australia have a new cause: They want men to sit down while urinating. This demand comes partly from concerns about hygiene–avoiding the splash factor–but, as Jasper Gerard reports in the English Spectator, 'more crucially because a man standing up to urinate is deemed to be triumphing in his masculinity, and by extension, degrading women.' One argument is that if women can't do it, then men shouldn't either. Another is that standing upright while relieving oneself is 'a nasty macho gesture,' suggestive of male violence. A feminist group at Stockholm University is campaigning to ban all urinals from campus, and one Swedish elementary school has already removed them. In Australia, an Internet survey shows that 17 percent of those polled think men ought to sit, while…
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Typically, when strange but true news stories surface, there's a good chance it happened in California. I'm not sure of the exact odds, but they're pretty high. That's what makes this story so fascinating -- it actually happened in Memphis and not in San Francisco.A 60-year-old man is charged with paying a mother to have sex with her 8-year-old daughter. That alone is bizarre enough. But the man was scheduled to be arraigned in a Shelby County court ... and the presiding judge is his fiance! That conflict of interest was quickly resolved when all of the General Sessions judges in Shelby County recused themselves because of the relationship.The accused guy is an employee of the Shelby County's Sheriff's Department and used his fiance/judge as a reference when he applied for the job. Newspapers have reported that he was not only engaged to the judge, but they were living together…
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This entry is being posted from an "undisclosed" Starbucks location. I'll only say that it's somewhere in East County. I'm not sure if it's location, time of day, or just luck of the draw ... but I'm surrounded by some of the strangest collections of people ever gathered in one Starbucks. Even typing that doesn't seem very pastoral, but it's true. And if they knew I was a pastor ... they'd think I was the strangest one of all.
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Sometimes the Christian life is portrayed as a dry and dull routine of staying within the boundaries of what is acceptable to God. It’s seen as a lifestyle that limits rather than expands opportunities. To those on the outside (and a few on the inside), the life of a Christ-follower is viewed to bland and boring.Nothing could be further from the truth!The life of a Christ-follower is an invitation to follow him into the risky parts of life ... to serve those who are disenfranchised, to battle injustice, to dream up creative ways of communicating truth.The life of a Christ-follower is to be marked by a sense of adventure. Where will God take me today? Who will I have the opportunity to influence for eternity? What does God have in store for the next chapter of my life? What dream is God forming in my heart that he has the…
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The busy season is here. We have school, church, piano, and now softball has started. Take today, for example: 9 AM softball practice, an 11:00 bowling party, and a 4 PM concert at the Sports Arena. And it's Saturday ...
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