Another Saturday morning trip around the Internet! But first, riddle me this:

How does a snail keep his shell shiny? He uses snail polish.

What do you get when you cross a giraffe with a hedgehog? A very tall toothbrush.

Why do mermaids wear seashells? Because B shells are too small and D shells are too big.

Why to railroad workers have extra-keen hearing? Because they have engineers.

In the old days, why were manicurists used to build gallows? Because they are experts with hangnails.

Alright, alright… on to the linkage!

1. Jason Clark has the first review of Rob McAlpine’s new book, Post-charismatic? (Available in the UK only so far). This is an important conversation — of the a weak pneumatology in the emerging church, Eric Keck says, “The Emerging Church is asking its congregation to be girl scouts without giving them the cookies.” I love that quote, I nominate it for best of the week.
2. Wouldn’t it be great if Google image search had one of those neat Apple-ish interfaces that make you feel as though you’re flipping through photographs? Oh, wait….
3. Senseless signage
4. Six months ago, I asked a question about understanding your MBTI types in the context of spiritual disciplines. Or something along those lines. As it turns out, Stephen Said has some ideas along these lines.
5. A documentary titled “Lord, Save us from Your followers” — oh, yeah.
6. And on that note, FriendlyAthiest.com: 20 Things That Christians Do in Church That Annoy Me… “Pastors ask questions with obvious answers. ‘Who here believes the Lord is going to save them today?!’ I think the people in church are going to say ‘yes.’ Call it a hunch.”
7. This is groundbreaking — prolonging the lives of the “Red Shirts” has something to do with Captain Kirk getting “involved” with one of the local women. Hey, this is important — “13.7% of Kirk’s crew died during their three-year televised mission. 73% of the deaths were Red Shirts.”
8. Dave Paisley recommends a site that will tell you the best and worst seats on any type of commercial aircraft, listed by airline. Very cool, it’ll tell you which seats have a few extra inches of legroom (because a few inches can be quite a lot), which window seat oddly doesn’t have a window, which ones don’t recline or have nonstandard trays and which seats have their television screens unusually placed.
9. Christian ice-breaker games? Oh, I have some bad ice-breaker game stories from the CLB. The best (worst) was in a small group setting with five couples who had known one another for ten years and another couple who had been in the church for about two years. Because the newly “formula-ized” program for these home groups included an ice-breaker, the group leader was doing them. Normally this consisted of a general question that everyone would answer… this particular week, the question was to tell about your first kiss. Fairly quickly and before it was even my turn, I refused. Most of the group followed suit in a bout of sweet mutiny.
10. NNCC: Attractional AND Incarnational Church Planting — putting them together is ambitious; Dave DeVries’ post includes comments from a panel discussion.

11. the only kind of power most Christians see making an actual difference in the world is political power, which is why so many Christians think it’s their job to grab as much of this kind of power as possible. And so we find ourselves in the tragically ironic position of being a profoundly broken Church, doing little of what Jesus did and little of what he told us to do, while being obsessed with fixing government, which is something Jesus never did or told us to do.

    Maybe shooting to be like Jesus is too much of a stretch for us right now. But perhaps we could set our sites on Bono?

    “Lord, fix us, for we are profoundly broken.”

    Great quote from A Bono Looking Church? (via Lucas Land)

12. “We’re just a ‘G’ rated version of the world,” she said. “And I can’t be a party to it anymore. Our idea of being evangelistically bold and counter-cultural is bringing people into this building. But once we get them here, we don’t offer them anything different from what the world offers. We certainly don’t love and forgive each other and we don’t build into each others’ lives. I don’t think this is the way we’re supposed to do church. The secular world is doing a better job at loving people that we are.”

    My friend went on to say, “Here’s a quote from a Korean leader: ‘When I encounter a Buddhist priest, I meet a holy man. When I meet a Christian leader, I meet a manager.’”

    Read more…

13. Do you know anyone who’s reading The ‘Fortune Cookie’ Bible?
14. “The trial of Pastor Jones” — Tithing is a theft of Truth
15. Church signs — not funny this time, just stupid. Small Church’s Obama Sign Causes Big Controversy (via via Lucas Land)
16. Brant Hansen imagines If Jesus had a Blog
17. I confess to not owning an iPod. But if I did, maybe a cool skin would be in order. Have I been under a rock? I’d never heard the term “Steampunk,” but I really dig some of the designs.
18. The IMonk’s faculty of blogging

So we come to the end of another Veterinarian’s Hospital. Tune in next week when you’ll hear Dr. Bob say:

DR. BOB: I think he’s got rail road sneeze.

NURSE PIGGY: Rail road sneeze?

DR. BOB: Ah-choo-choo!

Errrmm, yeah. More links next week. ;^) And between now and then I’ll try to come up with some insightful thoughts of my own…