General

As I'm sitting here at Starbucks, waiting for an appointment, there's a mom with two small boys dancing in the line at the counter. And then I notice the back of her jacket -- Irish Dance Team.

I'm blogging via email from the open mic at Cosmos. Up on stage is one of the freshest voices I've heard in a long time: Tommy Edwards. He's singing and playing a mandolin. He's got funky glasses and a stocking cap. And he rocks.

Those of you familiar with Andy Stanley's approach to preaching may recognize the "me we God you we" way of organizing a message. It's fleshed out in much greater detail in his book on preaching called "Communicating for Change." In fact, he uses the term "communicator" instead of preacher. Not a slight change in and of itself.Me = starting with a personal revelation or disclosure.We = finding common ground with your audience.God = bringing God's truth to your one point.You = applying your one point to the listener's lifeWe = inspiring a vision of what life would be like if everybody got it, too.

Over the past two days I've changed a headlight on my Honda, replaced two light switches, and fixed a broken track on a bathroom drawer. Fixing the light switches required me to make several trips outside to turn off the right breakers -- which I undoubtedly thought would be the wisest course of action. In the matter of 48 hours I've gone from techno-geek to all around handy man.

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…