Economics Rap?

This is by far the strangest thing I've seen online in a good long time:

NFC Championship

I'll be cheering loudly for the Vikings while watching this weekend's NFC Championship. While I'm hoping it will be a blowout win for the purple-and-gold, this article presents a compelling (if schizophrenic) case for why I'm likely to be disappointed, and this should be one of the best games of the season no matter who you cheer for. Watch it!

Thank you, Massachusetts

The (I hope) demise of healthcare reform causes me to do a happy dance.

Sacrelicious!

This video is hilarious!

Not Just a Geek - A Lutheran Geek!

For reasons that shall remain mysterious to the internet, I was reading The Augsburg Confession today. While doing so, it occurred to me that it would be really handy for me to have an e-book version of The Book of Concord. As I have a Kindle, I checked the Amazon Kindle store. For reasons known only to Augsburg Fortress Publishers, there exists a Kindle Edition of Sources and Contexts of The Book of Concord, but not the book itself.

I then decided to use my google-fu to try to track down a public-domain text document version of it. After all, the texts are all over 400 years old, so there must be a translation into English that's public domain by now, right? Project Gutenberg? Project Wittenberg? (Heh. I SEE WHAT YOU DID THERE!) Anybody? Bueller? No dice. Unfortunately, nobody wants to provide an e-book or a text document. Only online html or a crappily formatted .PDF. Am I deterred? No sirree! I had a somewhat open afternoon, and decided that, gosh darnit, if an e-book version didn't exist, I was going to create one.

Long story short, bookofconcord.org has a public domain (html) edition online, published in 1917 as a celebration of the quadricentenary of the Reformation. I proceeded to strip the entirety of The Book of Concord, page by page, into a text file, downloaded MobiPocket Creator, created suitable tags to generate a Table of Contents, and built the missing e-book.

Lutheranism, welcome to the 21st century.

All it's missing is a cover image. If you want a copy of either the text file or the .PRC file (MobiPocket - for my Kindle), let me know.

Somehow I'm Unsurprised

Ugh, Packer fans.

Interesting/amusing link roundup

1) Phil, this one's for you: In Search of the World's Hardest Language.

2) The dumbest moments in the tech world during the last decade.

3) Christmas pranksters FTW.

4) Awww...

5) I want one of these. Frankly, I wish I invented it.

6) Unintentional hilarity.

7) A great synopsis of Ford's Edsel debacle.