What the – Okay Samurai just switched to a gray background.

Odd, because it better matches Chris Glass’ blog as well as an upcoming redesign for this blog.  I chose a gray background because I think it makes the content pop better – your eye gets drawn to the images and colors in the content, not the background of the blog.  I also like gray better than total white, which does use whitespace but makes the content get lost in a sea of white (like WordPress, in my opinion).

An interesting trend in web 2.0 design, I guess.

Serra Boston is now online: http://www.serraboston.org

More to come.

Last Thursday I had the pleasure of going to a “Theology on Tap” at Bad Abbott‘s in Quincy, MA, to hear Cardinal Sean O’Malley offer a few words for young adults. The Cardinal gave an excellent speech and Q&A, which covered his early priesthood, the need for courage and discipleship, the need for Catholic community, and quotes from Graham Greene and St. Augustine.

The local media coverage of this event (check out WBZ’s coverage here) tended to simplify the Cardinal’s excellent talk – “Cardinal Sean goes to local bar, tells kids to turn off the TV and go to Church.” While it’s impossible to condense all of the Cardinal’s speech into a single sound bite, I think the media tended to portray the event as Cardinal Sean’s attempt to simply “revive attendance at Church” (as Keller says in the clip above). Most of the media didn’t mention that a lot of the young adults were already pretty dedicated to the church and asked some excellent and thoughtful questions, rather than being surprised at a cardinal in their local watering hole.

I was fortunate to sit in the front row, and I took a few video clips of his speech. Here are some links:

Intro: http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docid=5817752200747168297&hl=en

Speech: http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docid=-2718382783437944078&hl=en (Speech is about 40 minutes long but is excellent)

Q&A 1: http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docid=5417439106441473392&hl=en

Q&A 2: http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docid=-3159251886096866001&hl=en

Q&A 3: http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docid=-1238687512562623979&hl=en

Q&A 4: http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docid=902358379646954255&hl=en

Q&A 5: http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docid=-4574755861908795577&hl=en

Visit Cardinal Sean’s blog for other great photos and video from Cardinal Sean. I especially like his pictures of the Orthodox churches in St. Petersburg.

The fountain at the Christian Science Center was on tonight, and flowing twice as high as usual.

Here’s a photo of Tidal, a CD from Fiona Apple that I used to own.  It came out before mp3s and music sharing hit big; I bought it for the single “Sleep to Dream” and enjoyed “Criminal.”

Those two songs bring me back to sophomore year; playing as background music while writing 3 to 5 page papers due the next day.  It’s a somewhat melancholy tune that brings on a mellow mood, but tends ot get lost in the other 3000+ songs in the collection.

Bought for $18, now selling for a penny on Amazon.  I ripped three of the songs off the CD and later donated it to Goodwill.

Godspeed, Fiona.