GraniteFriends,

Thanks for checking back even as we take an unscheduled blogging hiatus for a few days. Sometimes life gets busy, news gets slow, our interest is occupied elsewhere; it seems so far this week we’ve been on blog vacation (which fits, given Memorial Day weekend and the holiday chaos it brings stateside).

In the meantime, I’ve been debating Brian McClinton (of the Humanist Association of NI) on the issue of American military power and the war in Iraq, over at our good friend William Crawley’s BBC blog Will & Testament. See Brian’s comment 7, to which I responded with my own comment 9 (follow the conversation from there on that page for more).

I’ve been arranging my guest schedule on the show, which is looking good, and been helping the radio station test a live web stream of the show (if and when that becomes permanent, we’ll provide a permanent link to it here).

And I’ve also been finishing house-building, dealing with our kitchen and its granite countertops, which aren’t very common back in the UK. Granite is pulled from the earth, sorted according to country of origin, colour, clarity etc., cut into slabs by diamond blade, polished and set under our toaster, coffeemaker and kitchen knives (I was showing my dad a granite sample on a videochat the other day when he wondered aloud, “How do they put all those nice blue and green chips in there and make them sparkle like that?” I explained to him that it came out of the ground that way – God did it during creation, or, geological processes over billions of years formed it from magma – it’s natural, and wonderful. The greatest advantage of a granite countertop: walking into the kitchen and slapping your hands down on some cold, hard stone. Fantastic. The greatest disadvantage: when little kids walk into your kitchen and slap their heads into the cold, hard stone. Ouch).

Well, we’ll be back with more shortly. Meantime, check the Index for your favourite articles by title, browse by category on the right, search your own keywords on the left, or subscribe here so you don’t miss anything coming up.

Have a great week!

John