Merry Christmas Eve! Hopefully you are sipping coffee and eating some sort of pastry you’ll have to work off in the new year. I’m in Toledo today enjoying time with the family and some great conversations – deep things, you know, like the correct pronunciation of “GIF” (as in the motion files you’ve been texting back and forth). We finally found the answer (h/t Alex Wenzel – Parris Payden might want to take note!!!).

Because these important conversations have taken up so much of my time…there are only a few articles to share today…enjoy!

There’s a lot going on half-way ’round the world in India this week. Mass “conversions” of Christians and Muslims to…Hindu. Though its sounding like they were forced for political reasons.

San Fran PSA stretches Webster’s definition of idiotic. 

And Joe Carter over at the Gospel Coalition blog has a great (and practical) blog called ‘How to Change Your Mind’. Sounds a lot like this post from a long time ago…

The cyber attack on Sony got more attention this week when **suddenly** most of North Korea’s internet crashed (the whole country). Sounds like the police state is back up and running as of this morning (to some degree), so all is once again roses in that asian bastion of communist utopia. Was Korea’s hack of Sony (and subsequent threats to American theaters) an act of war? The President says “no“, others disagree – you decide…

Did Peter Jackson ruin Tolkein’s world in his recent ‘Hobbit’ series? The latest edition of the series (and Jackson’s work) received positive marks from some, but others don’t like what Jackson has done and go so far as to say that he “must be stopped”!

And for some deeper thinking – this article is a few weeks old and I just not got to reading it. It’s called ‘3 Ways Not to Use Greek in Bible Study’ – best part:

“Nevertheless, a problem arises when people mistakenly think that a word’s etymology tells them ‘what it really means.’ We can see the fallacy of this notion clearly in our native English language. For example, the wordnice comes from the Latin root nescius, meaning ‘ignorant.’ But no one but a fool would respond to your calling them “nice” by saying, ‘Oh, I see what you really mean! You’re saying I’m ignorant! You and your veiled Latin insults!'”

Lastly – the New York Times actually printed something interesting today. They have an infographic (of sorts) of the top Christmas gift searches from Google by city. Note that Columbus folks seem obsessed with Buckeye “gear”…shocker

Enjoy your Christmas!