Edith Schaeffer on St. Louis in the mid-1940s:

"St. Louis - with its Forest Park - a wonderful park with rolling ground, trees, a lake, an art museum on top of a hill, a complete zoo, and a marvelous and constantly changing greenhouse where large trees andbasic plants remained, but where flower displays were a kind of succession of 'shows' fitting the season - was to be our home city.  St. Louis - with its Kiel Auditorium and emphasis on symphony concerts, with its lovely big downtown stores (before shopping malls began), when errands could be done so efficiently and one could have special luncheons or a refreshing 'bit' (a salad and an iced coffee) when meeting someone for conversation - was to open new doors for us.  St. Louis - where 'city homes' were solid red brick or stone, on tree-lined streets, some of the more affluent 'private streets' with their magnificent old wrought-iron gates taking one back to another period of history...St. Louis - a city with two universities, medical colleges, and especially good private schools, enormous hospital complexes some very successful business as well as Roman Catholic seminaries, and the Lutheran Concordia Seminary; a city with a wide cross-section of people form the country-club set to the underprivileged - was to be an education for us, in some new ways, as well as a challenge!  St. Louis - called in travel guides 'Gateway to the West' as it stands on the Mississippi River, which connects a fantastic range of places form Minneapolis to New Orleans - was to be our home city, and, as far as we knew, it was to be for a lifetime."

from Francis Schaeffer: An Authentic Life by Colin Duriez (for my Cross-Cultural Communications class)

The Bleeding Heart Show - The New Pornographers

SEVEN STANZAS AT EASTER by John Updike

Make no mistake: if he rose at all
It was as His body;
If the cell’s dissolution did not reverse, the molecule reknit,
The amino acids rekindle,
The Church will fall.

It was not as the flowers,
Each soft spring recurrent;
It was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddled eyes of the
Eleven apostles;
It was as His flesh; ours.

The same hinged thumbs and toes
The same valved heart
That—pierced—died, withered, paused, and then regathered
Out of enduring Might
New strength to enclose.

Let us not mock God with metaphor,
Analogy, sidestepping, transcendence,
Making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the faded
Credulity of earlier ages:
Let us walk through the door.

The stone is rolled back, not papier-mache,
Not a stone in a story,
But the vast rock of materiality that in the slow grinding of
Time will eclipse for each of us
The wide light of day.

And if we have an angel at the tomb,
Make it a real angel,
Weighty with Max Planck’s quanta, vivid with hair, opaque in
The dawn light, robed in real linen
Spun on a definite loom.

Let us not seek to make it less monstrous,
For our own convenience, our own sense of beauty,
Lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are embarrassed
By the miracle,
And crushed by remonstrance.

(thanks to Mary)

Google Earth Dead Pixel

"Preceding the lenses of the Google Earth satellite photo session, the Dutch artist Helmut Smith charred a small portion of grass. Genius!"

from Wanderlust

Airstream Driver - Gomez

Girl In The Tower - Benji Hughes