Congratulations to Jimmy Davis for his work in the Worldview Church eReport, a newsletter from Breakpoint.org. He lists teh contents of the current issue on his blog, The Cruciform Life (which has a new address).

Sherry has managed to keep her head above water with How Right You Are, Jeeves. A natural, you might say.

And congratulations to Michael on the birth of Ransom Dunnington Lander. I saw a photo yesterday. What a cute kid. He says he’s going to name his second boy, Clive Staples Lander. Does your wife have anything to say about this?

Here’s a bit more from our archeology desk. Archeologist Daniela Agre and her team have found a complete, well-preserved chariot in Borisovo, a village in southeast Bulgaria. Several interesting things were found in the Thracian tomb, dated 1,900 years old.

Terry Teachout talks landscapes, Santa Fe, opera noir, and Willa Cather in these posts:

Scene Stealing

Scene Stealing II

Some used to say, “The treasures of wisdom are only to be found in Timbuktu.” Now researchers and scholars are rushing to preserve those treasures. “The French are developing a database, while the United States has donated a device to digitize the damaged documents. The Norwegian cities of Oslo and Bergen are training locals to become conservators.” They hope to capture the ancient wisdom before the ink recording them fades completely.

Thanks once again to reader Dale, who alerted me to the recent death of Pauline Baynes, illustrator for both C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien. He also sent this link to an entry on her from Brian Sibley: The Blog.

The Times Magazine as a piece on “several popular and well-known trolls who share their expositions and explanations of what they do and why.”

The article opens with an account of a child who killed himself, was honored by friends on MySpace, was dishonored by trolls online, and then dishonored by them offline. They started calling his parents’ home. They kept calling for year and a half.

How do you tell a whole generation not to waste their lives?

I suppose this is another reason the Internet is terrible place.

You can review candy, like “The Original Celebrated Altoids, Dark Chocolate Dipped Mints – Creme de Menthe” which I would not have know about had I not seen this post.

Because of technology, the word “copy” in relation to a document means something very different to us than it did to our ancestors. To us it means a photocopy or an electronic scan. But to past generations, it meant a second document done in pen and ink.

That would seem to be the explanation for the fact that the Civil War and Underground Railroad Museum of Philadelphia has had an original copy of the document outlining the terms for Lee’s surrender to Grant at Appomattox Courthouose for many years, and had stored it away thinking it was just a photostat copy.

Coldren said it had been glued to a cardboard backing and varnished, an apparent attempt to preserve it.

“Old photostat copies from the ’20s and ’30s are shiny like that, so this is why you’d think this is not a real document,” he said.

Full story here.

The British Library is bringing some of the world’s rarest books online, with the intent of giving as wide an audience as possible the most accurate experience of reading the real thing.

Full story here.

Users will need to use a software program called “Turning the Pages.” At this point, 20 rare books are available for study.

Today is my birthday. I am 58. How that happened, I have no idea.

It always irked me, when I was a kid, to see lists of “What happened on this day in history,” and to note that nothing very interesting had ever happened on my birthday, and that nobody very memorable had been born on the date.

Later, I thought better of it. July 31, it occurred to me, was a tabula rasa, a blank sheet of paper waiting for me to write my name across it, John Hancock-wise.

Until I learned that today is J. K. Rowling’s birthday.

Not only can I not be the most famous person born today, I can’t even be the most famous fantasy author born today.

And then I learned that today is Milton Friedman’s birthday too.

Never mind.