Kansas Guild of Bloggers Holiday Edition

Now that Christmas is over and I have roused myself from my turkey induced stupor, it's time for another edition of the KGB.

First up is a post with a new vocabulary word for me from the Angry Astronomer, Jon Voisey. The word is pareidolia and it refers to the seeing sacred images in mundane things-seeing the Virgin Mary in cheese sandwiches, that sort of thing.

Jon observes that:

"... the Church doesn't even acknowledge such false idols. Instead, the church encourages its followers 'to see the face of Christ in the homeless, the poor, the destitute and the immigrant.' My, wouldn't it be nice if its followers actually lived up to such ideals?"

Update! there is no "h" in "Jon". Also he has posted elsewhere on his blog about pareidolia.

Of course that's what this season is all about, ya think? Just to remind us, Bruce Alderman at It Seems to Me has some good commentary on the Christmas story was conveyed by the Gospels of Matthew and Luke. He notes that what we think of as the Christmas story is based on these two stories which we have mashed together. Bruce notes:

"Remarkably, the two gospels share almost no details in common, other than the miraculous conception and the birth in Bethlehem. What I want to do in this two-part post is to look at each birth narrative on its own, because I think they each have things to tell us, and sometimes the details can get lost when we try to conflate the two stories."

Lots of posts about travel and place. Blogmeridian has gone south to Austin, the City of Armadillos. I guess he is not aware that Armadillos are heading north, even up to Illinois and of course Southern Kansas. So maybe if he looks John can get his Armadillo fix and stew if he prefers right here while he is walking along the river with Scruffy. Not everyone has gotten to travel, She (AKA California Girl) finds herself in a funk being stuck alone for Christmas, but at least she's posting more recently...this is good. Over at Happy in Bag there is a nice post about those limestone hitching posts that are common in the older parts of Lawrence, less so in Kansas City where Happy is. He's even uncovered a museum dedicated to limestone hitching posts, the Post Rock Museum, right here in Kansas!

Joel Mathis has a couple of posts about radio and his new favorite station 96.5, here and here. Of course not all of the commenters agree with his choice. Personally it's NPR or nothing over here, but we respect Joel's choice of radio.

Over here we love scones but have never made them...but I can't wait to try Lady Gunn's recipe for cranberry cream scones. Rather than food, EMAWKC, has a lump of coal for us, or rather for those people on the East Coast who are upset at building coal fired power plants in Kansas. Speaking of resources and Kansas, Josh reminds us that Kansas is the world's major producer of helium.

"Helium is extracted from natural gas wells, and the first major terrestrial supply of helium was found in Kansas in 1905. An oil well in Dexter, Kansas produced a gas plume that didn't burn. KU chemists took samples of the plume back for analysis, and determined that it was 12% helium. In 1907, Ernest Rutherford and Thomas Royds determined that the helium nucleus is the alpha particle."

I've been pretty quiet aside from grousing about Senator Brownback (see also the WE Blog), but I was intrigued at all the coverage Komodo dragons have gotten over the holiday-I guess because of the headlines about virgin births in these lizards and you might check out my post about that here. Oh and that reminds me of the latest Phill Kline adventure as discussed by J.D. over at Evolution next step where he has some advice for conservatives.

Finally, getting back to Christmas, both Gwynne at the Shallow End posts on those inflatable Christmas displays in her post Christmas Cheese. Oh and I went over to the Prince of Thrift to see what tips he had for getting out of Christmas debt, but found that Brownback has upset his ambition to have a complete collection of campaign pins from every Kansan who ran for president or vice president. He shouldn't be too hard on himself and would be pleased to know that I did not use my credit card once this Christmas.


Next week's KGB will be at Blog Meridian. Remember, if you are not in KGB, and are a Kansas related blogger just go on over to http://3oclockam.blogspot.com/ and look for the kgb map in the right hand column and join!

Put yourself on the kgb's Frapper map while you are there.

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