Imagine that tree in South NJ, not Texas … From the Associated Press:
Christmas at New York City’s Rockfeller Center will feature a tree from New Jersey that its owners call a “miracle.”
This morning workers are cutting down the 72-foot tall Norway spruce on the grounds of Tree King nursery in Hamilton, which is owned by the Varanyak family.
The 8-ton tree will be erected over the ice rink on Friday.
Bill Varanyak told New York’s WNBC-TV the 77-year-old tree was planted after his parent’s used it as their first Christmas tree in 1931.
He says it’s “the miracle tree” because his late mother always said it would one day be on display at Rockefeller Center.
His brother, Bob, says they recently saw a blue bird in the tree and they believe the bird was their mother guarding it.
While the first official lighting was in 1933, the first Rockefeller Christmas tree was put up two years earlier by workers helping to build the complex during the Depression.

iMonk’s post and the ensuing comments are fascinating. I found reading them a real education. So many different aspects of the problem are illustrated ? from hypocrisy to style to individual spirituality to secularism to science to morality. Leave the church and the faith, leave the church, leave the faith ?
I?ve been reading the letters of Cyprian lately, written during an intense persecution of the Church ca. 250 AD. These are precipitating some serious thinking on the nature of the Church as the body of Christ.
It seems to me that to fail to participate in, commit to, and even to some degree submit to, a local gathering of the body is to walk away from the faith.

cas,
Nice story about the tree.

And on sports -
A disastrous end to a disastrous season…
Ted – hope you enjoyed the OSU game.

I know of three of those albums. Both the Anberlin and House of Heroes albums have been burning through my headphones since August. And the Jon Foreman EPs are fantastically intimate. Lovely music!
The rest of them? Who knows.

regarding the Women in computer science article:
An interesting article, but I wonder if anyone has considered how a traditional CIS/Applied Math degree appeals or doesn’t appeal to young women in terms of what motivates/inspires most women. The code-writer’s life tends to be solitary and abstract. By and large, women are more motivated by relational impact. This is not to say that CIS/App Math doesn’t have social/relational impact, but that level of involvement, I suspect, is not emphasized in entry level or even BS level course work.
I wonder if CIS was more integrated in applications that impact real people (Biomechanics? VR applications? Sociology/Statistics/Web research?) perhaps more women would be inspired to make thier impact in this field.