Eric of Evangelical Underground is taking nominations beginning today through January 1 for the 2006 Evangelical Blog Awards. Go here to see the categories and last year’s winners.

Title note:

The earliest recorded use of this phrase appears to be by Sir John Fortescue, Chief Justice of the King’s Bench, in his 15th century work, De laudibus legum Angliæ. It was used by several authors later, notably Cervantes, Christopher Marlowe and John Donne.

In Much Ado About Nothing, Shakespeare gives Dogberry the line ‘comparisons as odorous’. It seems he was using this ironically, knowing it to be a misuse of what would have been a well known phrase by 1598/99 when the play was written.

From The Phrase Finder

On November 14, 1851, Herman Melville’s novel Moby Dick was first published in the U.S.

I must admit that I never finished Moby DIck. Well, I finished it, read the end, but I skipped a lot in the middle. The chapter called “The Whiteness of the Whale” just didn’t do much for me–an entire chapter on whiteness. I’m sure I missed something very important and enlightening there, but I just couldn’t manage it.

Have any of you read Moby Dick? Can anyone tell me why you like it if you do?

Subtitled “The Wonderful Ingenuity of Nature,” this book is right down Engineer Husband’s alley. The author, Samuel Alibrando, has been “writing articles about nature for 10 years in a small local paper for foothill residents in central California.” Engineer Husband also enjoys doing things to get people, especially kids, excited about science. So Mr. Alibrando and Engineer Husband have a lot in common. I, on the other hand, am not a science person at all. But Nature Never Stops Talking gave me some new thoughts about science, philosophy, and common sense that were well worth the time spent reading.

The book itself is a compilation of some of Mr. Alibrando’s columns with bridge material and extra information added to flesh the book out–not filler, mind you, but rather Alibrando’s Laws, and Ripples and examples of how those laws and ripple effects work out in real life. The book is divided into sections: Earth and Space, Scientific Properties, The Small Stuff, Beginnings, Plants and Trees, Insects, Specific Creatures, DNA, and The Human Body. The final section is called “Yeah, What About That” and has to do with a hodgepodge of ideas concerning evolution, design, nature, population and . . . . well, a conglomeration of other stuff. So here’s a sampling of the new-to-me ideas that I got from reading Nature Never Stops Talking:

1) Alibrando’s Law #1: To exist, a thing must first begin, specifically. And for living things that reproduce sexually, there had to be two firsts, a male and a female, at the same time and in the same place. Think about it. One squirrel can’t reproduce squirrels by itself; there had to be two squirrels, one male and one female, in the same place at the same time with the same number of chromosomes to make more squirrels. So how do evolutionists get that particular miracle to happen?

2) The more complicated a design, the more brains it takes to put it together. So can anyone reading these words create, ex nihilo, out of nothing, a tree or a raccoon, or even an amoeba? Can you even put one together if I give you the raw materials?

3) If a population doubles within a generation, or about every 40 years, then calculating backwards to 0, it would take about 1500 years for the population of humans to get from where it is now to 0 –or 2. Throw in plagues and wars and whatever else you can think of, and you still don’t get few enough people and limited enough reproduction to fill millions–or very many thousands– of years. So what happened?

So if you’re interested in these kinds of questions and this kind of common sense thinking, you should dip into Samuel Alibrando’s Nature Never Stops Talking. You might find yourself asking a few more questions and thinking a few more wonder-filled thoughts. I’m planning to read it out loud to the urchins at the supper table.

This book was given to me as a gift by Mind and Media for the purpose of review. You can purchase a copy of Nature Never Stops Talking: The Wonderful Ingenuity of Nature by Samuel Alibrando from any of these bookstores.

That C.S. Lewis had marital relations with his wife is hardly shocking. That he may have had a sexual relationship outside of marriage before becoming a Christian is believable. However, where’s the evidence, either in the article or outside, for this headline in the London Times?

The 30-year affair with a married woman that Lewis’s Christian disciples prefer to ignore

Nonsense.