distractions

Here's some neat stuff I've been reading, in lieu of doing schoolwork or finding a job:
Forgiveness is an inhuman quality
In praise of boredom
There are no athiests in foxholes...
The music of self-justification
All taken from Arts and Letters Daily, except for the one on athiests in foxholes.

Here's a baby named Urhines Kendall Icy Eight Special K. (h/t j-walkblog)

Life advice from Augustine, copied from the post on athiesm: There is another form of temptation, even more fraught with danger. This is the disease of curiosity...It is this which drives us to try and discover the secrets of nature, those secrets which are beyond our understanding, which can avail us of nothing and which man should not which to learn.

It sounds better from CCEL: In addition to this there is another form of temptation, more complex in its peril. For besides that concupiscence of the flesh which lieth in the gratification of all senses and pleasures, wherein its slaves who “are far from Thee perish,” there pertaineth to the soul, through the same senses of the body, a certain vain and curious longing, cloaked under the name of knowledge and learning, not of having pleasure in the flesh, but of making experiments through the flesh. This longing, since it originates in an appetite for knowledge, and the sight being the chief amongst the senses in the acquisition of knowledge, is called in divine language, “the lust of the eyes.” [..] Hence do we proceed to search out the secret powers of nature (which is beside our end), which to know profits not, and wherein men desire nothing but to know. Hence, too, with that same end of perverted knowledge we consult magical arts. Hence, again, even in religion itself, is God tempted, when signs and wonders are eagerly asked of Him,—not desired for any saving end, but to make trial only.

Curiosity can be a form of grasping, I guess. Augustine's a funny fellow.

The pictures are of the star nosed mole, one of my favorite animals. Some probably live in my backyard, but I've never seen one except in pictures. I think they look like flowers.


This is pretty much the coherence level that my brain has been at all day. It's a wonder I've managed to hold any conversations. Or maybe I haven't been successful at social interaction, and friends have just been kind to me.

In conclusion, I like star nosed moles.