God and Choirs

Today was the Berkeley Half Marathon. There were street closures galore, and in fact, the race course went along the side of our house. (We live on a corner lot, and the front door faces a cul-de-sac).

So Mark and I had to plan where to park last night, because the garage and front were blocked by the street closures, and we both had things to do today.

My Parish, St Marks Berkeley, is located inside the circular course of the Half Marathon, so getting there was going to be a challenge. The start and finish of the race was 4 blocks from Church, making it even harder to get from home to Church.

Not surprising, many of our parishioners skipped church because they couldn't get there from here. 

But even with these challenges, God's infinite love manifested itself in musical humor.  The final hymn was "Ye Holy Angels Bright."

I wonder if our Music director thought about verse 2 for today when picking the hymns?

Ye blessed souls at rest,
who ran this earthly race
and now, from sin released,
behold your Savior's face,
his praises sound,
as in his sight
with sweet delight
ye do abound.

Praise God from whom all blessings flow - humorous or serious.

Saints - yes I have thoughts on them as well

http://www.lentmadness.org/

Several years ago, a couple of seminarians in the Episcopal Church, tired of basketball, created a light-hearted diversion called "Lent Madness", in which they pitted brackets of saints who "competed" in internet voting, from a round of 32, to the Saintly 16, Elate 8 and Faithful 4.

The competition culminates on Wednesday in Holy Week when someone wins "The Golden Halo".

The creators of Lent Madness have now graduated and been ordained, but Lent Madness is still running strong.

I must confess, my favorite saint - Christina the Astonishing - whom I didn't even know until she competed in the first round - lost and this causes me to lose any personal interest in the holiest of holiest. :)

Today's competition is F.D. Maurice vs Julia Chester Emery. Check the web site for details, and think about what make a person holy and inspiring, no matter your personsal faith.

And check out Christina to see why I fell in love with her story. :)

Numbers without numbers

The frustrated mathematician in me always finds interest in comments about numbers elsewhere.

This was the winner for new years: How short a program can you write to print the new year without using 0 to 9 in your source code?

I'll admit I geek-cheated, and clicked the solutions without trying to solve the problem.

But there is a lot to learn just from studying others.

A belated happy new year to all.

I should be on Jeopardy!

I've been neglecting my blog. Partly because Mark's "Nutcracker Sweets" had me overwhelmed for most of December, and then I caught a cold over Christmas.

Tonight, I took the online qualifying test for Jeopardy!

Then I got home in time to watch Jeopardy!, and was sadly disappointed at how bad today's contestants were.  For the Final Jeopardy round, the topic was "The Titanic".  The clue was, "A member of parliament said 'The survivors owe their lives to this man', an Italian"

All three missed it - 2 Galileo's, and oddly, 1 Fermi. How can anyone who saw the movie, or any of the PBS documentaries last year miss "Marconi", the inventor of the wireless telegraph.

Sigh. With players like tonight, if I ever get on the show, I plan to outshine Ken Jennings.

Alex - are you listening?