The Motivation

From a Wired article on Richard Branson, the "rebel billionare" head of the Virgin Group who wants to commercialize private space travel:

"Most of the Mojave crowd got the space bug as kids launching backyard model rockets or, like Rhutan, watching Wernher von Braun explain Mars missions on The Walt Disney Show. Not Branson. He became interested in extraplanetary travel watching Jane Fonda in Barbarella as a teenager. 'I saw it again when I was 21. I'd just been circumcised for health reasons, and I popped my stitches.'"

Two Interesting Articles

by this Malcolm Gladwell fellow: The Ketchup Conundrum and Smaller.

A Merciful God?

A couple of days ago I stumbled across a missionary's blog by accident and read this entry out of curiosity. There were so many things wrong with it, I didn't know where to begin, so I did what any normal person would do, leaving the following comment behind: "Hi, I stumbled onto your blog by accident. It's good to hear that God still has time to respond to prayers for new cell phones after all that heathen-smiting in South Asia."

My bud Alex did me one better by commenting, "One of my friends just died recently. Thanks for putting things into perspective." I thought his comment was super hilarious until he told me he DID have a friend die. Oh well.

Of course, I was itching to see what kind of responses we would get, expecting something along the line of "God only helps those who believe" or "God works in mysterious ways."

The only response I saw was, "Hi Gary, or is it 'Alex'... Why didn't you leave your real email or URL?" Then our comments were unceremoniously purged. Sigh, that's the problem with some of these people. They never want to hear anything different from what they believe in.