Over the past week there’s been a quiz going around LiveJournal (and I assume the other sites as well) all about the Bible. The quiz kind of annoyed me, not so much because it was too easy but because the answers were easy to deduce via a process of elimination. Being a nerd like I am, I made my own Bible quiz and called it SWORD DRILL!!! even though everyone knows this is not actually a Sword Drill in the way we understand it. Still. SWORD DRILL!!! is a great name (yes, the exclamation points are necessary) and possibly would be a great name for a band, though the phallic implications are probably too great for me to actually appreciate the term in that context.

Anyway, to the readership of this blog I expect this quiz will be quite easy. But as for the infidels on the other sites… we shall see. We shall see. Oh, sure, Mr. Never-Been-To-Church can get 93% on the other quiz, but THIS ONE? WE SHALL SEE.

The above is my score. I got 100% because I wrote the quiz. Please do feel free to do the quiz and post your results here in the comments or on your own blog or on your Match.com profile or whatever.

I can’t believe I didn’t post this! It wasn’t until my brother mentioned his desire to post about it that I remembered. So I’m beating him to the punch.

I went to church on Christmas Eve morning (it always seems like such a good idea. Then once the service starts I find myself in deep regret) with the aforementioned brother. When we went out to the parking lot after, we (OK, Mark) discovered this exact tableau on the asphalt:

In case you can’t read the fine print, the text on the kazoo reads “Jesus Loves Me.” And yes, that is a yellow condom.

So I work at a university, right, and my office is near the (incredibly tiny) Muslim Students’ Association room. (The room is tiny, not the MSA.) I was in the washroom and I walked in on a woman, who was wearing hijab, with her stockinged foot propped up awkwardly against the sink. She kind of startled, and I picked a stall and went into it and by the time I was finished she had hurried out.

I felt like saying, look, it’s OK. I know you have to wash your face, hands and feet before you pray. Don’t worry about it.

Speaking of hijab, the last time the topic was on the news, they were discussing whether burqas should be outlawed in Canada. They played some listener calls and there was a student from my university who called in saying, “I don’t have a problem with burqas, there are people who wear them here at the university.” No, you idiot. There are no burqa-wearing women at our university. They wear hijab, that is, modest clothing that covers their arms, legs, and hair. Headscarves and long sleeves are NOT the same thing as a head-to-toe garment that renders a woman’s face invisible and field of vision extremely limited. JUST SAYING.

Speaking of Muslims, today is the premiere of a new sitcom here in Canada called Little Mosque on the Prairie. It’ll be on in half an hour, I guess I’ll watch.

In other news, First Church of Suburbia’s associate pastor resigned on Sunday. This allows me the momentary joy of clinging to the notion that perhaps they might hire a woman to replace him!

Today my friend Jane left for Switzerland, where she’ll be for a week before she continues on to Uganda, where she’ll work for a year setting up mobile clinics in the northern part of that country (the part right next to the Sudan). For real. She’s a nurse, and having known her for 19 years, I’m completely confident this is the thing for her to do. I’ve always thought of her as being independent and fearless, and that’s what you have to be to do something this incredible.

The NGO she’s working for is a well-established one that’s very invested in keeping their employees happy and healthy (and, well, alive), so I have high hopes she’ll be able to stick out her contract.

While I personally don’t relish the idea of needing a military escort to get to work, in a lot of ways I envy her — how amazing to have the skills and ability to do something that will actually make a difference (as trite as that sounds).

Well, here it is, a new year. Wacky! I enjoyed myself at the annual house party I attended, though not as much as previous years ’cause we got a massive snowfall the day before that kept some people away from the party. Parties are really all about the people. Even if your party has fresh vegan wontons, accordions, vintage vinyl and ancient Egypt scenes made of gingerbread, as this one did.

I had to go back to work on the second, which is far too early if you ask me. You need more than one day to recover from NYE, even if you’re not nursing a hangover but rather just the effects of a late night and too much sugar.

In other news, Brother Mark is getting ready for his final semester of college. He’s TA-ing a course on the Emerging Church, too, and will be delivering several lectures. To that end, he has requested loans from my personal library, namely Steve’s favourite, Cages of Pain and any books on feminist theology I might have. Toward that end, I gave him just one, the superlative Under the Tree of Life: The Religion of a Feminist Christian by Gail Ramshaw, about which I have waxed rhapsodic many a time on this blog (run a search).

I hope you all have had a good start to your new year!