Entertainment of the day: hand painted signs

[via xblog]

[email fragment] Here are links to the KCRW performance by Josh Ritter, the singer-songwriter I was telling you about last night. I think it's a 35-minute set of songs with an interesting interview in the middle.

[realaudio]
[realvideo]

[email fragment] Here are links to the streams (windows media high bandwidth) of three of the Urbana talks I liked best. If for some reason they don't work, here's a link to a page with all the Urbana webcast offerings in every format and flavor.

"Cross-Cultural Conversion", Ray Aldred (42 minutes)
(A First Nations (i.e. Canadian Native American) minister)

Biblical exposition: Luke 10, David Zac Nyringiye (37 minutes)
(the Ugandan IFES missionary who I met briefly after spending 2 weeks in Nairobi helping Paula transcribe one of his talks)

Biblical exposition: Luke 26:34-50, David Zac Nyringiye (about 35 minutes)

[email fragment] I've still, thanks God, kept up with my voracious reading, listening to lots of great music, and watching quite a bit of TV (soccer, "Friends", "The West Wing", "This Old House"). I've also been trying to teach myself Spanish -- did some lessons and vocab and am now reading novels (I just finished Cien Anos de Soledad and am now early into Carlos Fuentes' Los Anos con Laura Díaz). I still only understand maybe forty percent of what I read, but it seems to be enough to follow the basic plot and make out the general scenery. I liken it to swimming underwater -- it's blurry and you can't breathe, but what fun!

[email fragment] Is it snowing much in your neck of the woods? It's absolutely beautiful up here -- probably six inches on the ground, and everything wonderfully hushed and quiet. This week's the first time since I've been here that there's been snow that stayed on the ground for more than a couple hours. Highly preferable to cold rain, I think.