Just the 2 appendices alone would make it worth the money. In the first, the history of the making of KJB is reviewed--not through the rose-tinted yawn-worthy hagiographic lenses of KJBOism but each translator fairly sized up and presented. In the second, several translations are compared along the KJB on Isaiah 14:6, and the results, surprising perhaps to KJBOs, are helpful in parsing the Hebrew and the LXX.

So glad I finally got a used copy off Amazon!

Well, I got what I asked for. This game is waaay too hard for my brain. I can't calculate stuff on both sides of an inequality while trying to coordinate my arms to reflect that inequality. So they rate my brain like 200 years old.

Good for my grade-school kids, though. Young people need to be challenged while I save up for my place in a senior's home.

You can't go wrong with this set of two batteries you can use as spares.

Charge them up and stuff them in your pocket or camera case, and you're good to go!

It's passed my kid's test so far--took a close-up of the ridges on his fingertip. And I definitely like the zooming function in movie mode.

However, the CD's pretty much useless to me as I"m on a netbook. If it's even available, I don't see anything on the CD or start-up papers on downloading the files from the Canon website. It also bothers me that the battery/SD Card cover and the HDMI/mini-USB cover feel flimsy. The "grippy" skin of my black model feels positively weird--I'm sure it's good for picture taking with oily hands.

O well, at least my kid's optimistic about it--thinks it's "almost as good as" an IXUS he's used before. So maybe I'll like it sooner than later, hopefully before I drop or break it, as I'm seemed cursed to do.

The skin is nice, the standard netbook features okay (SD card reader, M450 chip, 1GB RAM, stuff), and battery life acceptable (about 8 - 9 hours). But my expectations of ruggedness from friends' claims of such in Kandahar, which were dashed in two areas: Bluetooth and adapter plug. To extend the battery life, I disabled Bluetooth early on, but now that I need it, it's nowhere to be found. The adapter plug is a joke for something riding on a Kandahar rating--a tiny, delicate needle-like cylinder that keeps slipping out of the hole in the side of the netbook, causing charging to be intermittent. I found it best to put the netbook in a safe corner and make sure the pin is stable and well-supported. What happened on my second charge came as a shock when the netbook crashed suddenly due to a complete draw-down on the battery--while I thought it was charging. Fortunately, it started back up when the achilles heel was discovered.

Right now, I've lost my Google Toolbar in Firefox, but that's probably not related.

Having gone through an ACER and a Toshiba netbook, I'd love this little number by ASUS more if not for those two things.

Author M. Young pulls together the evidence concerning James I's alleged sodomy and leaves it to the reader to decide.

one letter, by King James himself to Robert Carr in 1615, complains about a number of issues, including: "I leave out of this reckoning your long creeping back and withdrawing yourself from lying in my chamber, notwithstanding my many hundred times earnestly soliciting you to the contrary." (Young, p. 43)

Villiers, on anticipating his return to England from his Spanish posting, told King James: "I cannot now think of giving thanks for friend, wife, or child; my thoughts are only bent on having my dear Dad and Master's legs soon in my arms." (Young, p. 47)

while King James did write about sodomy as a "horrible" crime in his Basilikon Doron, "Sex with subordinates was a prereogative of patriarchy, and James was the chief patriach of the whole realm." (Young, p. 48) "James could have been perfectly earnest in condemning sodomy while simultaneously engaging in what we today would call homosexual behaviour" (Young, p. 49)--because the "legal definition [of sodomy] was extremely narrow. It specified only one sex act between men, anal intercourse, and excluded all other genital sex acts." Furthermore, as James is said to be "a notorious hypocrite where swearing and drinking were concerned; he could simply have been the same where sodomy was concerned." (Young, p. 50)

Did James play the hypocrite, preaching one thing fr one side of his face while whispering something else to his favourites? Perhaps no one will ever know on this side of heaven. It won't hurt to read Young's arguments and decide for yourself.

The perfect counterbalance to his Church: Why Bother?, this Yancey work ranks up there with his Disappointment with God. It challenges us to be like God in gentle compassion, humility, generosity, and vulnerability, and is full of useful anecdotes and quotes in this regard.
If read with an open mind, it could change one's life towards missions, evangelism, and simply Christian living. The usual caveats about Yancey's openness to Roman Catholicism and liberal theology apply. Take it for what it's worth!

I've read through almost all of Yancey's stuff in the past month, and this book is it--Disappointment with God is his theological tour de force that put it in no fuzzy terms that:
1. God isn't obligated to reincarnate Himself and perform tricks just so that we will respond in faith;
2. Even if He did, it is unlikely that most people would respond in faith, as was evident in the lives of miracle workers like Moses, Elijah, and Jesus Himself;
3. God wants us to respond to Him in faith, faithfulness, and love--even if it means 400 years of silence from Him, as in the Intertestamental Period.
Although not everything in this volume is welcome (e.g. Yancey's apparently uncritical acceptance of Roman Catholicism), the author succeeds in demolishing the foundation of many a Word-faith health-and-wealth theology and putting our centre of focus squarely back where it belongs--the Supreme God.

Can anyone think of a more mixed collection of biographies than this book presents? The chapter on MLK Jr will be a shocker to anyone growing up, as Yancey did, in an all-white church or Bible college in the South. MLK, the putative Communist agent, womanizer, Liberal theologian, and overall troublemaker and disgrace to genteel Christianity, is given a thorough makeover and rehabilitated as a truly Christian hero.
Yancey's portrayal of Protestant turncoats like G.K. Chesterton reflects his tendency elsewhere of citing Roman Catholic icons with approval and not pointing out the sheepskin of the Romanist church and the disease of both that tree and its fruit (Matt 7:15-23).
It is ironic, therefore, the book should be named Soul Survivor. I recommending staying with Yancey's better works, especially Disappointment with God and What's So Amazing About Grace, both available at Amazon.com.