1. Arming yourself with the Bible
A minister, whose white color reflected his holy status, found himself without a pad of paper and too shy to ask his neighbor. He was armed with a pen, the agenda, and – thank God – the Holy Bible. God must have surely intervened, for without the Bible backing, the inspiring and non-prescriptive words of our panel would be lost. The Bible served as a great tablet, even if his pen may have slipped a time or two.

2. Praying, technologically speaking
When the Bishop popped out his iPhone to check notes during his opening panel, I figured the poor man had been up all night, and couldn’t remember the basic facts of his organization. Generally a wonderful speaker, he was just shy of inarticulate that day. Yet, when the Rabbi led closing prayers from his iPhone, I realized this must be a growing trend with religious leaders. Check the weather, google naked girls, write a sermon, see if you have any e-mail. All within a day’s work. I knew that iPhones were amazing, but can they supply me with spiritual counseling, or absolve my sins? I’ll take one please!

3. A great place to meet a date
My San Francisco break-out group had 20 activists sitting in a circle, 18 of which were female. While some of them were taken out of the running because their religious oaths prohibits copulation, and others hand rings on their fingers, others you could say were “up for grab”. With so much networking going on, there were no unattached non-ministers to pick up on socially-conscious chicks. It wouldn’t have been considered out of place in a basement where so many business cards were already changing hands. Boys, all you got to do is show up!

As a grammar snob, I believe punctuation is a very vital part of writing.  And while I recognize that many internet users have a hard time finding the shift button to capitalize (but oddly enough, not the caps lock button), and don’t even know what a comma is, punctuation is an imperative part of any decent internet experience.  Unless you’re on I Can Has Cheezburger.  Then it is excused.  Otherwise, I believe punctuation adds nuance and meaning to writing.

Famous and over-used example:
The panda eats shoots and leaves.
The panda eats, shoots, and leaves.  (Oh!  The blood and carnage!)

The Nebraska Supreme Court is currently hearing oral arguments on a case involving the the enticement of a “15-year-old girl”, who was actually a police investigator.  When he attempted to break it off in the two months before he met her, she responded with emoticons of angry faces and kissing.  The reason the Nebraska Supreme Court is hearing the case is because the jury was not instructed that they could find him not guilty if they believed the police investigator actually entraped James Pischel (the man who went to prison).

George Love, with Nebraska’s Attorney General’s Office, said the jury did not need instructions on entrapment because the emoticon is only a form of punctuation.  If we consider it to be part of government inducement, then an exclamation point must be part of entrapment too, Love said.

With my above example, punctuation matters.  A lot.  Because writing can often be vague, punctuation – and emoticons – really help clarify the meaning.  I know I’ve gotten more than a few text messages where a wink would have clarified the situation immensely.  Describing an emoticon as a punctuation should not diminish it’s impact, but strengthen it.  Also, in due respect to all of my English teachers, grammar and punctuation are really, really important.  Or maybe pandas are just really violent.

It turns out that Orwell kept a diary. And why not? Most everyone did in the pre-LJ era. Well, it seems that his Diary is being turned into a blog. Which I must say– that’s an awesome concept.

There are already projects to do online catalogs of famous people, so I hope that Orwell is but the first of many famous people who have their diaries turned into blogs. Can you imagine how cool it would be to read Jefferson or Franklin’s Diary updated daily? Modern technology being used to present history to modern lives: I love that.