Check out this story about a guy named Herman Libshitz who couldn’t get the email address he wanted because of Verizon’s policy that email addresses and usernames not contain profanity.

Alright folks. I’ve been listening to “Wait, Wait: Don’t Tell Me” this morning, and I’ve narrowed down the dumb news stories of the week to two. Now you have to pick: Which is dumber:

A sales supervisor who used waterboarding to motivate his sales team (not a joke).

or

John McCain’s compaign trying to pass off Rachel Ray’s recipes from the Food Network website as “old time McCain family classics”

You choose

I was listening to NPR this morning, and heard an interesting story. Apparently, the Dr. Seus book “Horton Hears a Who” has always been associated with the abortion debate. The premise of the book is that an elephant discovers that a whole world of “who’s” live on a dust speck that he discovers, so he devotes himself to defending it, often repeating the mantra, “A person’s a person, no matter how small.”

According to NPR, at the preview of the movie recently, people began to yell when that line was spoken in the movie, and there were protesters outside. It looks like there’s going to be a lot of talk about the issue while the movie is popular.

I’m actually really excited about that. When I got married, Steph made me study up on birth control, and the differences in how they work. I learned that planned parenthood actually changed their definition of conception several years ago to make their agenda work. It was discovered that many forms of birth control affect the lining of the uterus and make it difficult for a fetus to attach to it and grow, so they changed the definition of conception to be the moment when a fetus attaches to the uterus, rather than the moment when an egg is fertilized to be come a fetus.  So Horton’s line, “A person’s a person, no matter how small” is pretty powerful.

I’m excited. This should make for some interesting dialog!

As a sidenote: I’ve had several conversations about this topic with friends at work recently, and it seems like many people are interested in this topic and are afraid to ask about it/talk about it. If you fall into that group, there’s a fantastic teaching about birth control by Mark Driscoll that you can download for free from iTunes here. You can also watch the video for free at MarsHillChurch.org. Click on the link for “Religion Saves, and 9 other misconceptions.”

So, it’s no surprise that I’m a geek. And as such, I often listen to NPR.

And I enjoy it.

A lot.

So much so, that I actually download podcasts of some of my favorite shows in case I can’t catch them in my car, which is where I usually listen.

One show in particular is called Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me. It’s a funny news show/quiz game/comedy hour. They basically make fun of everything that happened in the news throughout the previous week. One segment of the show is where they give you three seemingly ridiculous stories, and the guest has to guess which one of the three is actually true.

Today’s theme for this segment was Mr. Rogers, with facts taken from the Mental Floss page about him, and I learned some crazy stuff about the dude.

Here are a couple of my favorite facts that I learned about about Mr. Rogers:

Even Koko the Gorilla loved him
Most people have heard of Koko, the Stanford-educated gorilla who could speak about 1000 words in American Sign Language, and understand about 2000 in English. What most people don’t know, however, is that Koko was an avid Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood fan. As Esquire reported, when Fred Rogers took a trip out to meet Koko for his show, not only did she immediately wrap her arms around him and embrace him, she did what she’d always seen him do onscreen: she proceeded to take his shoes off!

He Made Thieves Think Twice
According to a TV Guide piece on him, Fred Rogers drove a plain old Impala for years. One day, however, the car was stolen from the street near the TV station. When Rogers filed a police report, the story was picked up by every newspaper, radio and media outlet around town. Amazingly, within 48 hours the car was left in the exact spot where it was taken from, with an apology on the dashboard. It read, “If we’d known it was yours, we never would have taken it.”

The sweaters.
Every one of the cardigans he wore on the show had been hand-knit by his mother.

The Word
Mr. Rogers was an ordained Presbyterian minister.

Read the top 15 facts at MentalFloss

Friends, family, complete strangers — it is with all the humility that I can muster that I would like to announce that I have won the lottery! I have won 900,000 british pounds in a lottery in some foreign country that I’ve never heard of and never entered.

Just read this email that I just got:

You have Won ( 900,000.00 GBP)

We happily announce to you the draw of the Uk Lottery Intl Inc
programs held on the year of 2008 in London. Your e-mail address
attached to ticket number: 56475600545 188 with Serial number 5388/02 drew
the lucky numbers: 31-6-2613357, which subsequently won you the lottery in
the 2nd category. You are therefore, been approved to claim a total sum of
£900,000.00 for the month of January 2008 lottery win promotion which is
organized by UK NATIONAL LOTTERY INTL INC .Every month.CLAIMS PROCESSING
LOTTERY AGENT CONTACT INFORMATION

Name:………………………………………
Address:…………………………………..

Sex:………………………………………….
Loation:…………………………………….
Phone:……………………………………….Rev Dr Giller Jackson

Can you believe it? Now I know it’s dangerous to share my personal information with strangers, but it’s ok in this case. I know that because this is from ‘Rev‘ ‘Dr’ Giller Jackson.

I can trust a man who’s a reverend and a doctor, right?

And you want to hear the kicker? I just looked in my spam box, and I have won 5 other lotteries, plus I apparently owe the Nigerian Revenue Service a crap load of money in taxes.

…I better get right on that.

There’s a great story on the NPR program ‘Fresh Air‘ that I listened to last night on the way home. It’s about these kinds of scams and stuff. Check it out.

Been a busy, busy week, and I’m not keeping ye ol’ blog up as much as I would like to…

Here are a few links you may be interested in with all your Christmas free time…

A physicist explains that Santa basically has 34 microseconds to visit each house.

50 people were killed and 80 injured in a suicide bombing at a mosque this morning. (What are you stressed about again? Oh, right, Christmas bills…)

A key source for rumors about Apple products has been shut down after a nasty lawsuit.

I found the Uzbek national anthem on this page, and it’s practically a missionary prayer for the country! (A lot of the rest of the info on the page is inaccurate though…)

I’ve been listening to a lot of NPR when I’m on the road, and some of the segments are so good that I’ve been listening to the podcasts while I work. Last night, there was a show called ‘Fresh Air’, and the guest is a professor at Baylor University that is trying to digitize every single black gospel recording between 1945 and 1970. They played a lot of really old stuff during the show, and I realized that most of modern music comes from Gospel… It was a really good educational experience. You can download it for free from iTunes here