Being Mr. Kenny

This is a great idea. Here is a Firefox extension that filters out the comments on Youtube based on the following factors (which you can set):

• More than # spelling mistakes: The number of mistakes is customizable, and the extension uses Firefox’s built-in spell checker.
• All capital letters
• No capital letters
• Doesn’t start with a capital letter
• Excessive punctuation (!!!! ????)
• Excessive capitalization
• Profanity

I love the way it lets you filter out profanities, but that’s the last on the list. The first one is spelling mistakes, and then capital letters and punctuation.

Draws attention to the fact that most people are idiots online. Especially when they’re allowed to be anonymous. E.g.: Youtube Sunshine.

… pithy sayings from the blog of Mark Kenny.

It’s true though. Old people look back with such fondness on the war years. In Russia, old people yearn for the days of Stalin (somewhat incredibly).

We look back on hard times and remember them differently than how we experienced them at the time. It’s good to remember that if you’re unhappy. What, now, will you remember in a year’s time with a smile — and want to go back to?

This, from a serious circular email this morning about site safety.

I am in the process of purchasing some hats.

Taken out of context, it’s funny. Read it in a serious voice, like it’s a life and death situation.

By the way, never keep sentences like this in context. A sentence like this is like a diamond you find in a mine: you don’t keep the earth that you dug it from.

John 11

Lazarus has died, and Martha meets Jesus first.

“Lord, if you had been here, my brother wouldn’t have died.” It’s an accusation, an observation, a desperate cry of disbelief all at the same time.

Her sister, Mary, is inside. She is newly bereaved, still coming to terms with what’s happened. She hears that Jesus is here, and rushes out. In her grief and loss, she knows that Jesus brings hope. She falls at his feet, and says the same thing as Martha. And then, I imagine, she collapses in desperate sobs.

When Jesus sees her weeping, and when he sees the people who knew Lazarus weeping, he asks where they have buried Lazaurus, and someone shows him to the tomb. It’s now that Jesus weeps. He has been moved by everyone’s grief so far — moved as in gut-wrenched. The Bible simply says, “Jesus wept,” but the word in the Greek is more like “sobbed his heart out.” Maybe he falls to the floor with Mary.

His display of grief proves to everyone there that he loved Lazarus — really, really loved Lazarus, and that his death is like losing a part of himself.

I love this story. It shows the humanity of Jesus and the divinity of Jesus. In this story, they are one and the same thing. Jesus knows grief, but he knows hope, joy, peace, love and power. Even so, the grief is no less painful to him than it is to Martha and Mary and the people who knew and loved Lazarus.

Jesus tells Mary, “Your brother will rise again.” She replies that she knows he will rise in resurrection at the last day. Maybe this is something he has taught earlier — the resurrection of the dead. At the time there were different schools of thought, those who believed that there would be an afterlife, and those who didn’t. At any rate, it would have come up in conversation, after all Jesus was a religious leader, people would have asked him questions like this.

But Mary misses Jesus’ point. She thinks he is offering a platitude — “You’ll see him again in Heaven,” but he is saying more than that. Sometimes we can use belief in Heaven as an excuse for a dreary life now. We treat Heaven as a kind of cosmic 5 o’clock when we can finally clock off and go and do something we want to do instead.

Heaven is supposed to start now. This life is preparation for it. What are we delaying until Heaven? What part of life — passions, dreams, loves — have you decided will be fulfilled in Heaven, when really they are for this life?