Snow? What snow? It’s a late-late fall fake-out. Today it’s in the 50’s, but the sun is out and the sky is postcard-blue. We’re all supposed to believe that this is winter, and then scream like frightened children when the real thing hits. Yep, been there.

Well, it’s too pretty of a day to stay inside for too long, even with the cold still keeping me down, so I’ll hit the blogosphere again and then find some reason to go on driveabout. (Why yes, my husband is out of town so there’s no one to enforce work ethics on me. How did you guess?) There’s all kinds of fun to be had in the Ortho-blogosphere:

• Oh shoot. I might have to read Ann Rice’s new book, though as I said here, I didn’t think I would. (Thanks to Orthodixie for pointing that out. And for correcting the name in the blogroll, even though I never noticed the mistake either. :-) )
• I get caught up in Erica’s adventures as an Orthodox catechumen attending BIOLA. I don’t have the opportunity to find out what the Protestant state of mind is these days, but this experiment with comparative religion is painful to read. It sounds like a germ of a good idea that just got bogged down with political correctness long before anybody could actually learn anything from it. But then, it’s a very difficult thing to try to be civil about. The fact is, Islam and Christianity are in opposition to each other. They can’t both be true, and fundamentalists on both sides think the matter is too important to just drop it in the interests of harmony or ecumenicalism. And as Erica points out, the Protestants don’t make major points by “forgiving” the Muslims when they don’t know what they’re forgiving. Read up on the hagiographies of new martyrs from Greece, Turkey and other Muslim-dominated countries — THEN forgive. (I couldn’t link to OCA’s pages of new martyrs’ hagiographies — but if you go here and enter “new martyr” into the search field, it comes up with pages of them.)
• Fr. John’s transcription of this speech by Churchill is timely and thought-provoking.
  

  During the first four years of the last war the Allies experienced nothing but disaster and disappointment. That was our constant fear: one blow after another, terrible losses, frightful dangers. Everything miscarried. And yet at the end of those four years the morale of the Allies was higher than that of the Germans, who had moved from one aggressive triumph to another, and who stood everywhere triumphant invaders of the lands into which they had broken. During that war we repeatedly asked ourselves the question: ‘How are we going to win?’ And no one was able ever to answer it with much precision, until at the end, quite suddenly, quite unexpectedly, our terrible foe collapsed before us, and we were so glutted with victory that in our folly we threw it away.

  Four years. Worth noting. Not one month, like the Gulf War. Not several months, like the time to liberate Afghanistan from the Taliban. We can be grateful for these easy victories without allowing them to make us forget that those are recent aberrations.

• From Orthodoxy Today, the NCC is suddenly feeling all inclusive-like after the Antiochians left several months ago. Phooey. Tell them to take a hike. (Original rant here.)

Well, that’s all I can get to today. With any luck, I’ll still be sick tomorrow and can finish up.