Links! Butterfly effect, maternal guilt, a Christmas blog carnival, and more!

You remember the "butterfly effect" in chaos theory that was made famous by Jurassic Park? Here's a real-life case involving the Japanese tsunami and a turbine plant out in the boonies in Pennsylvania. I think I actually laughed out loud when I got to the "IT WILL BE TRUE for this test floor" bit.

I laughed even harder and longer when I read Simcha Fisher's "Maternal Guilt Cheat Sheet". A sampling:

THE OFFENCE:

You accidentally let slip a comment which implies that not every moment of childrearing is a profound and ecstatic dance of bliss, a sentiment which will undoubtably set the pro-life movement back forty years and do irreparable harm to your children’s souls, causing the boys to become pimps and the girls to become bitter, tank top-wearing Riot Grrrls who listen to Terry Gross and tattoo “I [heart] the culture of death” on their lower backs.

THE SOLUTION:

Remind yourself that, in order for your words to do any harm, your kids would actually have to be listening to you. Whew!

Anyone else notice that zombies are showing up a lot in popular culture these days? I'd actually been wondering why that was, and this is the first article I've seen that offers a plausible theory. (Warning: slightly gory picture at the top of article - easy to scroll past, but don't open it while little kids are reading over your shoulder.) I do wonder, though, if even though some of it is about the economy, as the writer suggests, if more of it doesn't have to do with our culture having no coherent idea of what the afterlife is like. (Suggestion to culture: convert to Christianity! En masse!)

Facing down the editing of the first book I intend to query, I've been trying to give myself a crash course in grammar. My education in English grammar could charitably be called eclectic and I really wanted a more complete - and functional - understanding of the topic. And look! Here's a free online class in grammar! I think I've found what I need, and I'm passing on the link just in case someone else out there is realizing that not only is she an English nerd, she's an ignorant English nerd. (No? Just me?)

Kerry is thinking of organizing a Nativity blog festival (for Advent and Christmas and Epiphany) and wants to know if anyone's interested. Go tell her you are so we can do it! I'm sleepy enough right now that I think my contribution will be, "Let's all be quiet with our eyes closed and spend the holy season praying quietly," but surely someone has a better idea and if the blog carnival goes forward I'll just be able to happily copy those of you with more energy. :)

Peace of Christ to you,
Jessica Snell

Links! reading, voting, writing & more! (like Austenland, Potter & ungrammatical vampires)

I'm sorry for the lack of posts, folks! I've been following through on my summer ambitions and doing lots of writing and cleaning. :D But here are some fun links, from the (not insignificant) time I've also spent reading:
Willa writes about having "landmarks" in the history of literature - those authors and eras you know really well, and muses about whether it's good to make a vast, shallow survey of literature or to really dig in to one particular area. (I think you probably need to do both - and she has a great Lewis quotation about how the latter will naturally lead to the former.)
Hey, this is why I vote for those "gutless, unreliable, ineffectual Republicans" too!
Oooh, Shannon Hale's "Austenland" is being made into a movie!
This interview with Jason Isaacs (who plays Lucius Malfoy in the Harry Potter movies) is great. An excerpt, when he was asked if he expected his character to take the journey he did:
I mean, most of us would run to the bookshop at midnight when the books came out, partly because we’re fans, and partly to find out if we had a job next year.
And I like this part where he describes how actors work:

Every single actor who plays a part that is on screen even momentarily can talk like this about their own characters, because you’re always there. You may not be speaking or the camera may not be pointing at you, but you create an entire life for yourself so that when the camera does catch you, you’ve got something to bring to the party.
It reminds me of all the work I do on my own characters' backgrounds. I need to know more about them than the reader ever sees, or they're not going to act like actual people when they're on stage (on page?).

And this is a helpful little collection of analysis on the Church and homosexuality. An excerpt, from Albert Mohler:
In this most awkward cultural predicament, evangelicals must be excruciatingly clear that we do not speak about the sinfulness of homosexuality as if we have no sin. As a matter of fact, it is precisely because we have come to know ourselves as sinners and of our need for a savior that we have come to faith in Jesus Christ. Our greatest fear is not that homosexuality will be normalized and accepted, but that homosexuals will not come to know of their own need for Christ and the forgiveness of their sins.

This is not a concern that is easily expressed in sound bites. But it is what we truly believe.
And an excerpt from John Piper:

What’s new is not even the celebration of homosexual sin. Homosexual behavior has been exploited, and reveled in, and celebrated in art, for millennia. What’s new is normalization and institutionalization. This is the new calamity.
"Normalization and institutionalization." A-yup. There's also a video at the link that I haven't watched. (Just to let you know. I'm sure you wondered.)


Finally, if you want a fun way to brush up on your grammar, try this site, where the Twilight books are picked apart, comma by comma, with a very sardonic hand. (Can you have a sardonic hand? Oh well.)