Hat tip: Fr. Joseph Huneycutt

Yesterday, I left my iPod at work, plugged in, fully charged. It had been paused on a song (I can’t remember which one.) This doesn’t bother me, because leaving it allows the duty sonarmen to have some music to pass the time after everyone has gone home.

I arrived this morning to find it was on a game (my iPod has games?), unplugged, and the battery nearly depleted. I said to no one in particular, “I wish people wouldn’t play games on my iPod unplugged when the charger is right there!” A cow-orker spoke up rather angrily (as if being accused) and affirmed in as forceful a manner as possible that no one had messed with my excrement. When I tried to point out to him that iPods don’t play games and run down their batteries by themselves, he again, more forcefully, asserted that no one had messed with my excrement.

The mind boggles at the logic. Or perhaps he thinks raising his voice would make me infer that I have a ghost in my machine.

But why are so many stories about sports and religion so shallow? The fact is that sports have superseded religion in most areas as the dominant means for communal interaction. Athletes are much more popular than saints or religious figures. Team colors are donned much more fervently than liturgical colors. Sports arenas are viewed by many as places for worship and devotion — and, sometimes, as sanctuaries — more than cathedrals are. Fans may spend more time tracking their fantasy stats than they do studying religious texts. And there’s little question that religious feast days are being displaced by more important days (Superbowl Sunday comes to mind).

These are all aspects of an interesting sociological phenomenon. So when Major League Baseball contracts with a company to use team logos on urns and caskets, I wonder if Reuters’ reporter might get a comment or two from folks who could provide perspective.

Read more: GetReligion: Kicking the bucket through those great goal posts in the sky

The Extreme Diet Coke & Mentos Experiments:

What happens when you combine 200 liters of Diet Coke and over 500 Mentos mints? It’s amazing and completely insane.

See it at EepyBird.com – Extreme Diet Coke and Mentos Experiment.

Hat tip: Clifton Healy at “This is Life! Revolutions around the cruciform axis”

A Massachusetts correctional officer is being disciplined for showing the gay cowboy movie “Brokeback Mountain” to inmates at the state’s largest prison because his boss determined that the film includes content inappropriate for a prison setting.

Read more: Prison official punished over “Brokeback” screening – Boston.com

Church website

Clifton has an excerpt from C. S. Lewis that is quite apropos.

Christians think that God Himself has taught us how to speak of Him. …a child who has been taught to pray to a Mother in Heaven would have a religious life radically different from that of a Christian child….

It is fascinating that it is written, in the 1960s, in a theoretical tone.

The “Hail, Mary” (Ave Maria) combines Luke 1:28 and 42 with an ancient Christian prayer; hearing it ripped and rewritten as a prayer to “the goddess” creeped me out.

Hat tip: Paradosis

The writers of Holy Blood, Holy Grail are suing Dan Brown for plagiarism:

They say Mr Brown copied ideas in their book The Holy Blood and The Holy Grail.

“I have been shocked at their reaction. Furthermore I do not really understand it,” Mr Brown said in a statement.

Both books explore a theory that Jesus did not die on the cross but survived and had children with Mary Magdalene, and that their descendents survive.

I think this case only has merit because the original book is fiction to begin with.

Yet another reason why I voted for someone else.

Hat tip: DrBacchus

“I’ve collected for probably seven years now and nothing comes close to the way people react to it — their eyes pop out,” said Daniel Wishnatsky, a Phoenix currency collector who bought the bill in 2003 on the eBay auction Web site for $10,100.