Links to Your World, Tuesday August 11

Doctors baffled by Indian village of over 200 sets of twins.


“I’m so sorry to hear about your mother passing away. LOL. Let me know if there’s anything I can do.” --A note someone sent to a well-meaning friend who thought LOL meant “Lots of Love” (It means “Laughing Out Loud”--oops). “As text-messaging shorthand becomes increasingly widespread in emails, text messages and Tweets, people like Ms. Washburn are scrambling to decode it. In many offices, a working knowledge of text-speak is becoming de rigueur. And at home, parents need to know the lingo in order to keep up with—and sometimes police—their children.” (WSJ, about websites to help you keep up with online shorthand.)


NY Mag explains why conservatives like to appear on the Daily Show with Jon Stewart. Probably the same reason I (usually) like to watch him.


“John Hughes movies—the good ones, those five or six gems he wrote and directed in the mid- to late 80s, before he stopped directing altogether and became a producer and writer of hack comedies—persist in the collective memory of a certain demographic (say, anyone born between the Kennedy assassination and the Watergate hearings) as foundational texts of adolescence. Ferris Bueller's Day Off and The Breakfast Club were to the 1980s what Rebel Without a Cause or Catcher in the Rye were to the '50s. If that sounds grandiose, well, grandiosity has long been essential to the representation of teenagerhood: James Dean's lovingly cultivated sneer, Holden Caulfield's self-defeating purism, Judd Nelson's raised fist in freeze-frame at the end of The Breakfast Club. Each generation learns to express its alienation in the fashionable pose of its time. That the pose is an imitation doesn't make the need to strike it any less real.” (Slate)


“In truth, the only ‘Christian nation’ is the body of Christ as it is dispersed throughout all peoples and in all times. Confusion on this point has resulted in far-reaching consequences.” (John Calvin)


Bob Kauflin celebrates “Great is Thy Faithfulness,” which he calls “A Hymn For Ordinary Christians.”


ChristianHistory.net has a piece on Lottie Moon, the woman who inspired Southern Baptists to turn attention to international missions.


Facebook and text messages beat breakfast for most people, says NYT.


“There are two basic points about health-care reform that President Obama wants to convey. The first is that, as he put it in an ABC special in June, ‘the status quo is untenable’….Obama's second major point is that--to quote from the same broadcast—‘If you are happy with your plan and your doctor, you stick with it.’ So the system is an unsustainable disaster, but you can keep your piece of it if you want. And the Democrats wonder why selling health-care reform to the public has been so hard?” (From a must-read article in Time)


“No contemporary figure has done more than Apatow, the 41-year-old auteur of gross-out comedies, to rebrand social conservatism for a younger generation that associates it primarily with priggishness and puritanism. No recent movie has made the case for abortion look as self-evidently awful as ‘Knocked Up,’ Apatow’s 2007 keep-the-baby farce. No movie has made saving — and saving, and saving — your virginity seem as enviable as ‘The 40-Year Old Virgin,’ whose closing segue into connubial bliss played like an infomercial for True Love Waits.” (Ross Douthat in the NYT. Apatow’s movies are too raunchy for me, but, yes, “Knocked Up” is fundamentally a life-affirming film about 2 people who learn to take responsibility for the life they’ve irresponsibly created-- if you can squirm through the raunch to hear the message.)


“In a striking departure, the American Psychological Association said Wednesday that it is ethical -- and can be beneficial -- for counselors to help some clients reject gay or lesbian attractions….According to new APA guidelines, the therapist must make clear that homosexuality doesn't signal a mental or emotional disorder. The counselor must advise clients that gay men and women can lead happy and healthy lives, and emphasize that there is no evidence therapy can change sexual orientation. But if the client still believes that affirming his same-sex attractions would be sinful or destructive to his faith, psychologists can help him construct an identity that rejects the power of those attractions, the APA says. That might require living celibately, learning to deflect sexual impulses or framing a life of struggle as an opportunity to grow closer to God.” (WSJ)

I've posted the slide show I prepared from my trip to Zambia. Watch it here.