Friday in the wild - Feb. 4, 2005

Once again, Friday has come and it's time to do my weekly round-up of eye-catching blogginess.

One of my favourite "techie" blogs is the design-oriented Heal Your Church Web Site, which documents, and occasionally makes over, common design gaffes committed by church Web sites. Or, in this case, chruch Web sites, noting that there are literally thousands of Baptist "chruches" and those of other denominations who simply don't bother to spell-check the title of their pages.

Joni Eareckson Tada is a solid thinker, not merely an inspiring story of faith and courage. Cindy Swanson recently had the opportunity to interview her. Joni chimes in on the euthanasia debate and the movie Million Dollar Baby:

[P]eople with severe injuries like mine--It's expected that we need to go through a little depression, my goodness! My problem really wasn't my quadriplegia so much as it was the clinical depression, and that's what most people with disabilities, when they first get a bad medical report or first are injured, all people with severe injuries go through a time of grief and loss and depression. . . .

It concerns me deeply that now we live in a culture which capitalizes on that depression and reinforces to people like myself that "you're better off dead than disabled." That's unfortunate, that's sad, that is evil.

[Read My interview with Joni Eareckson Tada: The danger of "Million Dollar Baby"]

Remember the story I relayed about the German woman who, due to the unintended consequences of a legal loophole, might face termination of her unemployment benefits if she refused a job in a brothel?

According to the venerable Snopes, its voracity [sic] can't be determined:

We suspect this is another case where, like a game of "telephone," a story has been garbled as it has passed from one news source to the next, and somewhere in the rewriting and translating process what was originally discussed as a mere hypothetical possibility has now been reported as a factual occurrence.

[Full Story]

In addition, the most interesting thing that has gone on this week is the explosion of posts about televangelist Joel Osteen that started with Michael Spencer's challenge to the evangelical blogosphere to out Osteen. There's been a lot of interesting material posted on this subject since last Sunday. My own post on the subject was linked early from Boar's Head Tavern, my daily hits have doubled.

No amusing search results brought readers to the Crusty Curmudgeon this week., but I actually peaked at #2 yesterday on searches for crusty before settling back down today at #4, again.