Friday in the wild

Friday is the day that I highlight those blog posts that I found most interesting and were not otherwise featured, e.g. in the Christian Carnival.

From Theophilus at Notes from the Front Lines comes a blistering indictment of the marketroids who thought magazine-format Bibles were a good idea:

I guess I wouldn't be so disappointed by all this if I thought that all of it was being used for evangelism, if Christians weren't buying this stuff just to give to their neighbors and friends and people who had never, ever been inside a church. Then maybe, just maybe, I could buy into it. But I know that's not who's buying it, and I know that's not what it's being bought for. Christians are buying this drivel. We're marketing it, testing it, developing it and worst of all, buying it. We're buying it because the Bible, the Word of God that is living and active and sharper than any two-edged sword, that has had the power to transform lives for centuries, that is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, that somebody loved passionately and strongly enough to pen a 176-verse love song to it in Psalm 119, isn't exciting enough for us. And with our 15-hour work days, two-hour commutes, Bible studies, choir practices, kids' soccer games, teen retreats, MTV-mutated attention spans and keeping up with "24" and "Desperate Housewives," we don't have time for it.

[Read I Think I'm Gonna Be Sick . . .]

Conservative pundit Michelle Malkin chronicles some of the hate mail she receives constantly. Be warned: "I hope you get cancer and die" is one of the polite remarks. Four-letter words and vile stereotypes about Asian women abound. Don't believe all the lefty platitudes about equality; faced with an intelligent woman of a visible minority who doesn't toe their party line, their first reaction is to grab the sheets, hoods, and wooden crosses. For whatever reason, I've accumulated a fair number of Filipino friends over the years, and I'm offended on their behalf. Ms. Malkin would have been completely within her rights to post names and email addresses, and it would have done me a world of good to see some of these Neanderthals publicly humiliated. That she didn't, only proves that she has more grace than the entire population of liberal knuckle-draggers.

The Crusty Curmudgeon remains at #4 in Google searches on "crusty." And on that note, here's a first from the search engine front. The majority of search queries hit on the Crusty Curmudgeon seem to be looking for information on various literature. This kind is on the increase simply because the number of books I mention on the blog goes up with time. Every so often it is obvious that they are looking for my take specifically, for various reasons (searching on a particular turn of phrase I had used, including "crusty" in the query, or what have you.). But this week was the first time I've seen someone come right out and Google on "scott mcclare, canada." (I'm the only one.) Hello out there, whoever you are.