Links! work, stories, weight loss, epic fantasy, & more!

Anne Kennedy waxes wonderful about work - in all its repetitive monotony - and about the "very very few things . . . . that we do one time only for complete lasting satisfaction and joy."

Lars Walker writes about the Apologetic of Story (that's part one, and part two is here) and why - except for the witness of the actual lives of the saints - it is story that most compellingly convinces us of the truth of the gospel.

Betsy Barber writes about the Tale of Two Daughters in the gospel of Mark. I liked these two parts especially:

. . . she reaches out, and touches Jesus’ clothes and immediately the flow of blood stops and she feels in her body that she is healed of the disease. . . . Touching Jesus should have made him unclean, instead the touch made the woman clean! . . .

and then in regard to Jairus' daughter:

We are told in Numbers 5 that touching dead bodies defiles a living person. But again, the holy power differential flows the other way with the Lord Jesus.

(Hi, Mom!)

(The author is my mom.)

(Okay, I'm done with parenthetical statements; onto the rest of the links.)

This article explains why Ravelry is so awesome. It's the perfect cross-referencing. It really, really is.

Over at Learning As We Go, read about a huge study from the New England Journal of Medicine and what does and does not (statistically) lead to weight maintenance.

Annnnnnd, this is why I'm in favor of continuing to protect the second amendment. A story of a family fighting back against a home invader.

A guest blog by the awesome Elizabeth Moon on the subject of epic fantasy. I found this part particularly interesting:

Transformation, in epic, is as much bigger than the “growth” the usual story protagonist manages as the epic challenge is greater than the problems of ordinary characters. Transformation goes deeper, affects more of the character. At the end, the once lumpy and awkward caterpillar in the confining chrysalis breaks out, and has that triumph…but is so changed that it’s rare for an epic hero to go home and live a quiet life–sit by the fire, grow a few vegetables, settle down with the family, bore the grandchildren with familiar stories.

Frodo couldn’t. (Sam could, and that’s particularly interesting since without Sam, Frodo wouldn’t have been successful. Tolkien was showing something very, very interesting about character in that.)

Become An Email Jedi In 7 Steps. Love it! (Using it, too.)

This dance routine made me tear up; it's just beautiful. The story line is that they're two statues who can dance at night, but that have to become still once the sun rises, and it's a bit of a love story, and it's just amazing:

links!

Drowning doesn't look like drowning. This was a scary read, but I'm very glad I read it. If you're going to be near the pool or beach with your kids this summer, you'll be glad you read it too.

I haven't used this site, so I don't know if it's legit, but it does look interesting: it's a site like paperbackswap, except it's for kids' clothes.

bearing blog is doing a series on St. Francis de Sales Introduction to the Devout Life. Both the book and the blogs are worth reading. I really, really, really appreciate her thoughts on needing to be "cheerfully interruptible".

A great article from First Things about Hamlet. It's good both as an aid to understanding the theological problem of the play and also good as a review of the new DVD version of the work staring David Tennant and Patrick Stewart. An excerpt:

Revenge, after all, was never a problem for the ancient world, as Homer’s Achilles and Seneca’s plays glaringly demonstrate, nor was suicide ever condemned as such. Consider Shakespeare’s Brutus in his Julius Caesar, who shares many of Hamlet’s traits: he is introspective, takes forever to make up his mind, and bungles the job when he finally decides to act. Yet at the end of the play, he commits suicide with no compunction whatever.

But Hamlet cannot follow that route, because Christianity forbids both suicide and revenge (Rom. 12: 17-21). Brutus might well have had only the vaguest idea of an afterlife. But not so for Hamlet, who knows full well that the Almighty has set “his canon ’gainst self-slaughter.” This idea of the afterlife “puzzles the will” and forces Hamlet to “lose the name of action.”

True enough, says Stephen Greenblatt in Hamlet in Purgatory, but Hamlet lived not just in the time of the Renaissance but also during the Reformation, which raises the issue of which version of the afterlife had been puzzling Hamlet’s will: the Protestant version, with its outright denial of purgatory, or the traditional Catholic one, which included a very elaborate heaven, hell, and purgatory, as we know from Dante.

This link from First Things talks about "dancing a short story" and has five wonderful clips from So You Think You Can Dance as examples of what they're talking about. Beware, the last one might make you cry at the end.

Um, this one might take a bit to explain. My favorite-ever entertainment writer is Linda Holmes. Though I discovered her first via her recaps of Survivor at Television Without Pity (under the pseudonym of "Miss Alli"), she now writes for NPR.  And she just received her own personal shoutout from the Man Your Man Could Smell Like. I just . . . to be frank, I'm just tickled pink on her behalf. Not that I have any right to be or anything, but as a fan of both Ms. Holmes and of Old Spice's brilliant ad campaign, I just love seeing the two come together.