Hi, y'all! I am SO GLAD I took today off work! I got home from Vegas last night at like 11:30, didn't go to bed right away, and am now lounging. I need to do some errands, including going to the Post Office, although I have no idea what was sent to me. Hmm.

Hooray for Dylan MoonBone!!

And boo for bad hospital experiences.

A Wired photo-essay on steampunk: [link]

Remember that steampunk keyboard? It's here - along with a beautiful monitor and mouse (that looks like a telegraph key). But perhaps even cooler is the steampunk laptop: Closed. Open.

Also, a fully-functional computer based on the ones in the movie Brazil [link] And,

What could be more absurdly great than a spot-on reproduction of an old telegraph sounder that taps out web headlines from RSS feeds? How about one made of lightweight aluminum for airship duty? Both are the bench work of Jake von Slatt. The sounder pictured is based on traditional designs, but von Slatt couldn't resist the temptation to create a more whimsical version cut from aluminum. On his website, you can watch a video of it as it pounds out headlines from craigslist.

[link]

There was a fuss a while ago about a little girl who wanted to take communion but couldn't take wheat - her parents got special rice flour wafers ... and the priest refused to use them, said that if she didn't take the wheat wafer, it wasn't communion.

I remember that case. The priest said that just having a sip of the wine was fine, she didn't need to also have a wafer for it to count as communion, but her mother said it wasn't "appropriate" for a little kid to have wine. (I vaguely recall one of the newspaper articles saying that there's something in the Catholic church that says a communion wafer must contain wheat -- the church offered one that had a tiny bit of wheat but was otherwise rice, and the mother said no.)

Ailleann, the Monday after Father's Day must be TMI day. I just spent a half hour hearing more than I ever wanted to know about our new cleaning lady's custody situation and former marriage. Hell, I don't want to know some of what I heard about friends' lives, let alone those of aquaintances.

Oh, and in the hippy church I grew up in, they had a loaf of bread and a choice of wine or grape juice. All of us kids had some phase when we were 12 or 13 of trying the wine, because we were so "grown up," but going back to the grape juice ASAP.

Hell, I don't want to know some of what I heard about friends' lives, let alone those of aquaintances.

Wrod. Explicit description of child abuse is, unsurprisingly, NSFW.

All of us kids had some phase when we were 12 or 13 of trying the wine, because we were so "grown up," but going back to the grape juice ASAP.

At my synagogue, all the pre-bar/bat mitzvah kids would go up to the front of the synagogue and drink those little tiny cups of grape juice after kiddush on Friday night. (There's a complicated reason why an adult is supposed to say that prayer and a kid is supposed to drink the wine/grape juice, but I can't remember it right now.) Saturday mornings, though, everyone is supposed to drink it, and so they just had the little cups of Maneschevitz. When I was a kid, they'd just let us each have the tiny cups of wine, but when I was 11, the synagogue got a new rabbi who went crazy with making sure that kids under 21 only had grape juice. Everyone (including all our parents) just rolled their eyes at him.

I don't think I've ever had communion where it wasn't grape juice. I've seen the tiny cups though.

All of us kids had some phase when we were 12 or 13 of trying the wine, because we were so "grown up," but going back to the grape juice ASAP.

On Passover night ("Seder"), you're supposed to have four cups of wine. Of course, grape juice is completely fine, and most of the grownups don't drink full four cups of wine (especially if they wanna stay awake until the end), but have at least some of them be grape juice instead. However, most kids will try to sneak as much "forbidden" wine as possible, and hope the parents wouldn't notice what their cups hold.

A couple of years ago I caught a thirteen years old cousin trying to do that. I promised to not tell his parents and let him continue with the wine, in one condition - that he doesn't neglect drinking lots of water while he's at it. The following morning he got up as if he didn't drink anything out of the usual the night before.

At my church (which is military chapel, a sort of nondenominational Protestant), they have wine and grape juice in the little shot glasses. They use white wine, so you can tell the difference.