More Coverville Countdown 2007

Coverville just released numbers 24-17 of their countdown of best covers....

I was excited to see the song I nominated as number 22 -- Blake Morgan's version of Paul McCartney's "Maybe I'm Amazed". I was also happy to see Copper Box's version of Pink Floyd's "Comfortably Numb".

Google Earth adds Google Sky

Have you recently upgraded your Google Earth program recently? They have now added sky maps. There is a button on their top menu bar which flips it around.


The image of Polaris (center) on the left was generated using this (you can click to enlarge). Each of the blue dots in the image can be clicked to reveal photos taken by the Hubble Space Telescope.

Now, if I could just remember the constellation names.

More on God's Warriors

My guess on the common thread for the program "God's Warriors" was nearly right.

Part 1 was God's Jewish Warriors which concentrated on the struggles around the West Bank area in Israel. Here the common thread is they believe when they fully control Israel, the Messiah will return.

Part 2 was God's Muslim Warriors which looked a lot at the terrorist activities but also tied into the chain-reactions that Israel and the US have "caused". The militant Muslims like Bin Ladin believe that the presence of our troups on their soil defiled their land. Muslims also believe, however, in a coming Messiah. This Messiah is the grandson of Mohammad. One of the more touching parts of this segment was the desperation felt by the Palistinations due to being forced into what they call "apartheid".

God's Christian Warriors was part 3. The first hour concentrated on the link between conservative politics and the Christian Right. It highlighted Jerry Falwel, his last interview before his death, as well as serveral others in that movement. Again, the issue of apocalypse showed up as the show talked about churches who are helping to fund illegal West Bank settlements.

I thought the series was well done, fairly well balanced

Warriors, the war and the Peace

Tonight, I started watching a series on CNN call God's Warriors. Tonight is God's Jewish Warriors, tomorrow, God's Muslim Warriors and Thursday, God's Christian Warriors. Since I am only 20 minutes into th show, I can't tell you much what it is about but I will try and report more later. I do, however, sense an interesting common thread -- Apocalypse.

The history behind this is that for some time now, I have been thinking a lot about the Kingdom of God and what that might mean. (The link pulls a list of all mention of that phrase in the Bible).

The really odd thing about this was 2 weekends ago when Marj and I went to see The Bourne Ultimatum. The movie is an action and violence packed adventure telling a story of cover-up and deception (I guess you can't cover-up without deception). About half way through the movie, I was struck by the difference between "The Kingdom Under Heaven" (the kingdom of God) and the "Kingdom of this world"(Satan's domain), even if only a fraction of what was being done in the name of patriotism in this movie was true.

Shortly afterward, while still watching the movie, these thoughts started running through my head: "The Kingdom of God is like..." followed by various analogies from Jesus' words.

In spite of Christiane Amanpour's assertion, are these people really God's warrior?