A Couple of Quick Links

I am going away - again - and I really need to pack in between school lessons and activities. But my Hobbit-ness is kicking in big time. So I am going to try hard NOT to post much.


However, there are a couple of things that I wanted to pass on in case you did not see them on your own.

• Maureen Wittman gives us homeschoolers an apologetics lesson in this post. (I liked the shy one, especially, since I was so painfully shy as a child that I would not say hello to people I knew from school when I was out with my mother. I'd HIDE behind her!)
• Regular Guy Paul linked to a post by The Mom at Shoved to Them (the awesome explanation of this blog title is in the subtitle to her blog). She tells of her own experience with RU-486, which came when her unborn daughter died in utero. I can't imagine that this was an easy post to write, but if it gets into the hands of one person who changes his or her mind about Mifeprex, it will have been worht it. Thanks, Mom, for sharing your experience with us all.
• This post (pointed out by newly-over-the-hill Jay Anderson) describes the real significance of 9-11. Interesting read, especially the foodstuffs that came of the victory over the Muslim Turks:

The Battle of Vienna was marked by culinary inventions:
1. The croissant was invented in Vienna to celebrate the defeat as a reference to the crescents on the Turkish flags.

2. The first bagel was made as a gift to King Jan Sobieski to commemorate the victory, being fashioned in the form of a stirrup, to commemorate the victorious charge by the Polish cavalry.

3. After the battle, the Austrians discovered many bags of coffee in the abandoned Turkish encampment. Using this captured stock, Franciszek Jerzy Kulczycki opened the third coffeehouse in Europe and the first in Vienna, where, Kulczycki and Marco d'Aviano adding milk and honey to sweeten the bitter coffee, thereby invented the cappuccino, so named after Blessed Marco because of the Capuchin’s brown hood.

• Of course, when we are dealing with a culture that holds a grudge to this day over the Crusades (which we lost, people), it is too far-fetched to think that this is one reason for those attacks? And, if it is, could October 7 be another possible date for retribution?
• Jean at Catholic Fire has been keeping us updated on the Miller Beer boycott. (Please do not click this link with children around - the Folsom Street Fair, which is full of debauchery, is discussed here.) I know my dad has been a Miller drinker for ages, but he's boycotting, too.
• Wesley J. Smith has a few links, too, on the success of stem cell research - the adult sort of stem cells.

There are probably more, but that's it for now.

Everyone be good today!