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Tuesday, March 19, 2013

Links to Your World, Tuesday March 19

Here's a wi-fi enabled toaster that burns the day's news on your morning toast. You're welcome.

 

YouVersion's Bible app has been "downloaded by 83 million unique devices. Four million new users are installing the app each month. The Bible app is in 215 languages, 450 different versions, and collectively users spend more than 3 billion minutes reading scripture on the app monthly." (story)

 

"Jim Gaffigan works clean. He resists profanity. He doesn't rip celebrities with crude insults. He won't reveal everything you didn't want to know about his sexual urges and private parts. At a time when comedy is as filthy as it's ever been—the industry euphemism is "edgy"—Mr. Gaffigan, working clean, has become one of the hottest comedians in the country" (WSJ). You can tell in the piece, though, that he's ambivalent about being recognized for this. "'Clean' and 'family-friendly' are supposedly these positive attributes," he says. "But I sometimes feel like it's an asterisk next to my success, or whatever. Maybe I'm being sensitive. I just want to be known as funny. I mean, when you hear about a family-friendly restaurant, you know it's going to be horrible."

 

"If you’re selling anger and scorn against conservative Christians, the market is hot....There is a growing genre — call it Progressive Christian Scorn Literature — about the scorn progressive Christians have for conservative evangelicals. It seems to be celebrated on the Left as a kind of righteous comeuppance for the Christian Right, and it wins the applause of the Left for the Christian Left. But it’s wrong and it needs to be called out. It’s neither winsome, nor loving, nor constructive, nor right. It will not improve our witness because it’s soaked through with bitterness and rancor." Timothy Dalrymple's entire post is worth reading.

 

Jim Aley hits the nail on the head for those of us about to lose Google Reader:

Serious RSS users aren’t into it for the luscious jpegged beauty. RSS feeds, taken straight, are a wall of text. That’s useful when you want to let news wash over you, to scan screenfuls of headlines without waiting for extraneous pictures to load. When I want to absorb a lot of information fast—which is to say, always—I don’t have time for Flipboard. I want exactly what Google will be taking away from me this summer.

 

Where to get free music and books for your mobile devices.

 

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