Some people claim there's no discrimination against Catholics. Not true even in "civilized" Scotland, where a player was penalized for making the Sign of the Cross.

Thanks to Mark Shea for the link.

I really like this guy.

As often happens, I'm up in Dupont (WA) for work today. Flying up this morning on the Intel shuttle, I went from being below the overcast to being in the beautiful bright sunshine. It was a really amazing sight -- bright sunshine, cloud deck underneath, and then sticking up through the clouds I could see Mt. Hood, Mt. Adams, Mt. St. Helens (complete with wisps of steam/smoke trailing from it) and Mt. Rainier. Awesome!

I've been thinking about this whole Israel-Hezbollah thing for a while, and on Friday this hit me..

Situation: Country with big army is victim of dastardly terrorist attack. Country decides to take out the terrorists by attacking them and the country that hosts them.

If "Country" above is "United States" world cheers and supports you when terrorists = "Al Quaeda" and host country = "Afghanistan."

However, if "Country" is "Israel", terrorists is "Hezbollah" and host country is "Lebanon", world is horrified and country is pressured to end the fighting etc.

It seems pretty hypocritical. If we have the right to defend ourselves in that situation, so does Israel. I'm not a big fan of Israel in general, I think they've often gone way overboard and have treated the Palestinians pretty shabbily. That doesn't mean they don't have the right to defend their country against terrorists who rocket their country from a neighhboring country that can't or won't stop the terrorists.

This is pretty cool, there's a website for Opus Dei blogs. If you'd like to know more about Opus Dei than the image portrayed in Da Vinci Code, check it out.

Miscellaneous stuff...

Wednesday was my 4-week anniversary of going to Pilates class. So far, so good. It's still kicking my butt, but things are improving and best of all I don't have a major problem (so far!) with either motivation or making time for it, so that's good. I think it's a good balance for my skating and should help me feel better in many ways.

Marie and I have gotten really into watching "So You Think You Can Dance" on Fox; but, with last week's dismissal of Allison and this week's loss of Ivan, I'm seriously bummed. I wanted each of them to win and I really enjoyed watching them dance together. *sigh*