Someone once wrote that God takes care of fools and little children. He surely also has a soft spot in His heart for at least two recumbent tandem bicycle riders, as proven by the events of this morning.

MLB and I set out on our usual Saturday morning bike ride, enjoying the relatively cool and calm weather. We headed out on our usual route, which winds through about three miles of residential streets before leaving the city limits on the service road of a well-traveled state highway. As we were passing through the last few blocks of housing, we spotted another recumbent rider. He was going the opposite direction but made a u-turn and pedaled to catch up to us.

Now, while we're always happy to visit with folks about recumbents, we actually prefer riding alone or riding in the company of friends. This morning, we were engaged in a conversation and didn't really want to interrupt it to make small talk with a stranger, even if he was a kindred 'bent spirit. So we kept up our pedaling cadence and made him work to catch up with us. We exchanged a few pleasantries and he observed that we were in a bigger hurry than he was, and he dropped back.

We didn't feel badly, because we immediately overtook another cyclist -- another recumbent cyclist, no less -- and he and the first fellow seemed to be riding at the same speed. Surely they would be able to converse to their heart's content.

If you want to know what Michael Moore has done in "Fahrenheit 9/11" without actually giving him your money, go see "The Village."

Writer and director M. Night Shyamalan has fabricated a film that is intellectually and emotionally dishonest, at its core, and has done so with a clever and gifted hand that toys with the audience, sometimes letting it in on the joke but most often being intentionally obscure. End the end, the joke is on us, in that the obscurity is hiding nothing that we care about.

I can't tell you anything about the plot or the premise, both of which depend all too fragilely upon the innocence of the viewer. The bright spot of the film is Bryce Dallas Howard, who is often mesmerizing as a blind-but-sighted (if you know what I mean) young woman. She's Ron Howard's daughter, of course, and the resemblance to her more famous father is striking. But Ron would never have made a movie like this.

I had hoped for so much more from Shyamalan, one of my favorite directors, and the feeling that he was sitting in the back of the theater snickering at us made it all the more disappointing.

My blogger friend Dawn Eden has left on a "Chesterton Pilgrimage," a 10-day tour of England led by American Chesterton Society president Dale Ahlquist. This is Dawn's first extended vacation in six years and I suspect that she'll return with some fascinating stories.

In the meantime, her blog layeth not fallow, as she has invited her mom and stepdad to fill in as guest bloggers. They've agreed to do so, and you should see what they're sharing with us: nothing less than their life stories! Each day, we get to see a glimpse into the pasts of a couple of very talented, intelligent and articulate people who, like Dawn, are Jews who claim Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior. It makes for compelling reading, painfully so in places; you'd do well to check it out.

I am somewhat concerned that Dawn doesn't quite have the hang of this vacation thing, though. In today's update (no permalink), she is reported to have been pleased to find that the Continental Airlines flight to England provided reading material in the form of "The Weekly Standard" and "The National Review." Well, whatever sparks your plug, but for me, a transcontinental flight enroute to a 10-day vacation is the perfect time to break out a tawdry paperback novel, preferably of the sci-fi or punk-hacker genre. Perhaps Dawn feels the need to stay sharp around her fellow GKC pilgrims.

No, the subject line is not a phone number...but it is a quiz, albeit a rather easy one.

Rob over at Snippets has returned to blogging after a month-long sabbatical, and he's uncovered a wonderful site called Word Count. This website shows the most commonly used 88,600 words in an unusual graphic format, ranked by their frequency of use. From the site:

WordCount is singularly British, and thus is sadly lacking in some of the more important vocabulary of Texas. I could find no reference to "ya'll," "fajita'" or even "honcho." And, really, when was the last time you used the word "lorry" (#5766) in a sentence, other than as a misspelling of the country singer's name? Nevertheless, it's great fun for anyone who enjoys wordplay. Rob has suggested a couple of ways to use the site in "games" mode; use your imagination and you'll find yourself wasting copious amounts of time chasing down trivia that only a blogger could love.

I'm not really trying to turn the Gazette into a photoblog, but I have to share a picture that shows a different side of our environment than we're accustomed to seeing.

As Abbye and I were taking our morning constitutional, I noticed three delicate... somethings... growing in the corner of a lawn. I returned a few minutes later with a camera. I wanted to capture their image before they become victims to a lawn mower.

I apologize for the lack of sharpness; my digicam doesn't excel in macro mode, or, perhaps, its owner doesn't. The "blooms" are penny-sized in diameter, and sit atop a thin 1" stalk that appears succulent in nature.

I have no idea what these "flowers" are. The first thing that came to my mind is their strong resemblance to the tiny invertebrates that inhabit coral reefs in the Caribbean. I suspect they are some form of fungus and have sprung up due to the abnormally wet weather we've had lately. If any of my local readers can identify them, please do so in the comments.

I've added four new Abbye photos to the display at right. These images are from her early period, when she was still sorting out just who, exactly, was in charge. (That question was answered quite some time ago, by the way.)

Of course, since the photos are displayed in random fashion, you've got a 1-in-26 chance of seeing a new one. So keep hitting that reload button!

I don't think I've yet shared with you some photos from a camping trip to Fort Davis, Texas. I had almost forgotten about them, as they are about six years old, but they came to mind for some reason over the weekend and I tracked them down.

We were staying in my parents' trailer at a campsite in the Davis Mountains State Park. Each afternoon and evening a parade of wildlife would come down from the surrounding hills and migrate through the park, looking for handouts. My dad was an easy mark, with his bucket of corn brought for just such purpose. We sometimes got more than we bargained for, as you can see below.

At one point, we looked out the window to see a herd of 12-15 javelinas (aka "Collared Peccary") noisily chowing down on the corn scattered in our "back yard."

Javelinas are so ugly that they're almost cute.

They're not exactly the intellectuals of the animal kingdom, however. This one was trying to figure out how to get at a few kernels of corn on the picnic tabletop. He never succeeded.

Other visitors to the campsite included racoon, skunk and deer. This is a great shot of a deer trying to figure out what manner of creature Abbye is. I'm not sure what Abbye is focusing on, or whether she'd even noticed that the deer had wandered up. She was intrigued by the deer, sitting motionless except for a quivering nose, watching them forage. She never tried to chase them...until they ran, at which time she quickly realized the futility of the effort.

There's a scary footnote to these photos. At one point, I looked up to see Abbye staring face-to-face with a large javelina. They were approximately the same distance from each other as shown in the preceding photo. However, I didn't grab the camera for that scene; I grabbed her leash and rudely (in her opinion) jerked her back to safety. My experiences with javelina have always been relatively benign, but they can exhibit nasty tempers, especially when their progeny are present. I wasn't taking any chances.

If you want to see a few additional photos, visit this page; it's not linked anywhere else.

Google has just announced that it will use the palindromic "GOOG" as its stock symbol. It also expects its upcoming IPO to fetch $108-$135/share, raising as much as $3.3 billion.

For those of you who entered the Gazette's "Name That IPO" contest, tough luck, as the winner is, um, me. Wallace gets credit for good judgment in following my lead, but loses points for creativity.

We'll award a special prize to Rachel for her guess of "GGLE," as that's what the Google execs will be doing all the way to the bank after the IPO.

No blogging at the Gazette until Monday...family obligations take priority. Have a great weekend, and check out some of the quality postage from the folks listed on the right side of this page.

OK, I give up. If you have any unused superlatives we can apply to Lance Armstrong and his USPS teammates, please send 'em along, because nothing I have comes close to describing reality.

Lance won a third straight stage of the Tour de France today, nipping an incredulous Andreas Kloden at the line. Kloden had jumped out in front of the small group consisting of the top five overall riders (plus hero-of-the-day Postie rider Floyd Landis) and seemed a lock for the stage win until Lance found another gear -- physically and psychologically -- and closed the gap mere feet from the finish line.

Lance didn't necessarily want or need the stage win; he really wanted Landis to get it, but Floyd left everything on the last climb helping Lance and the other top riders blow the rest of the peloton off the course. Lance figured that if he couldn't give Landis the win, he'd take it himself.

Lance is now ahead of Ivan Basso by 4'09" and will increase that gap before the finish in Paris on Sunday. He's also setting a new fashion standard: yellow is the new black, to match his cycling socks and, of course, wristband.

I've never really grasped the concept of the "flash mob," but here's an idea I think I can get behind: "Guerilla Drive-In."

Like most great ideas, it's really simple. Get a projector and a DVD, then find a blank wall and -- huzzah! -- you have a drive-in theater. (For you young whippersnappers out there, a drive-in movie theater was one in which you, um, drove in and watched the movie [or didn't...wink, wink] from the naugahyde comfort of your own car. You can research the historical records here.) If you want to get fancy, add an FM transmitter and invite some friends to watch from the Corinthian leather comfort of their own cars.

Deb over at Write Lightning brought this concept to my attention and she raises some good questions about the proper use of public property. Me, I'm wondering if we could get away with a Ronald Reagan film projected against the side of a movie theater showing "Fahrenheit 9/11"!

Lance has now beat every competitor in the Tour de France like red-headed stepchildren, in every conceivable way: with his team, in mano-a-mano sprints and now in the most painful of cycling events, the individual time trial.

The time trial is hard enough on a flat course, but it's hell on wheels when you're climbing 1100 meters over 15.5 kilometers, an inclince that averages around 8%. Lance was the only rider to break 40 minutes on this course up L'Alpe de Huez. In doing so, he caught up to and passed the overall second place rider, Ivan Basso, who started two minutes ahead of him. Basso is now almost four minutes behind Armstrong, and his performance dramatically illustrated the difference between hanging onto the wheel of another rider over a long road course, and doing it all on your own.

How hard is today's course? Armstrong averaged less than 15 mph in winning the stage. Compare that to his overall race average thus far of around 25 mph.

It's pretty simple, really. Lance can stand the pain. I think Lance embraces the pain. As he's said before, hurting on the bike is nothing compared to being cooked from the inside out by chemo treatments. The other riders feel the pain and try to overcome it; Lance grabs hold of it and bends it to his will.

The pressure of the race now shifts to the shoulders of Lance's teammates, who have the responsibility of protecting him through some still quite difficult stages.

Ever wonder what lines of work those Tour de France team sponsors are in? Me neither, but here's an article that will inform you nonetheless.

Actually, it's mildly interesting to consider that most of the sponsors are in relatively boring businesses (insurance, banking, flooring, consumer credit, etc.) and the fact that they are investing millions of euros in sponsorship gives you an idea of the prestige the race carries on the other side of the Big Pond.

The article also speaks to the Discovery Channel's taking over sponsorship of The Team To Be Formerly Known As The Posties, reportedly to the tune of $10 mil per year for the next three years.

Now, the Discovery Channel is a sibling channel to The Learning Channel, which leads to many intriguing promotional alternatives for the cycling team. For example, will we see Lance and main squeeze Sheryl Crow face off against Jan Ullrich and his sweetie in an episode of "Trading Spaces"? Will the team be gifted with a fashion makeover by the hosts of "What Not to Wear" ("oh, bubby...that lycra is just so 2001!")?

Tip of the chapeau to Tour de France 2004 for the link (but don't blame 'em for the lame commentary).

OK, so we had a bit of a sabbatical from our Bible haiku meme, but it's time to get back on it, because we've got a long way to go.

To refresh your memory, we kicked this off last April, and in just a few weeks had haikus summarizing each book of the Bible through Job. The complete list to-date is found here.

I'm not particularly obsessed about adhering to the original rules of the meme. If you want to submit a haiku for inclusion on our list, either email it to me, put it in the comment section here, or post it to your blog and ping any of the Gazette's posts -- I'll find it. Keep in mind that you can submit a poem for a book that's already been done, if you feel so led.

I'm currently in the book of Psalms in my RTBTIAY regimen, so it's easy to focus on these praise and worship songs. What's less easy is distilling the longest book of the Bible into a handful of words, but here's my offering:

Proverbs, anyone?

Kudos to Bryan over at Arguing With Signposts. Bryan just noticed that he's now officially a "Large Mammal" in the Truth Laid Bare Ecosystem (which, for you non-bloggers, is a semi-quasi-pseudo-official system for tracking the popularity of blogs). As of this moment, Bryan's blog is ranked #737 out of 12,890 total blogs listed in the Ecosystem, putting him in the top 6% of bloggers...no mean feat.

Bryan's blog was one of the first I latched onto when I started blogging and it remains one of my daily stops. He also took the time to give me some much appreciated encouragement early on, and was one of the folks who talked me out of bailing from the blogosphere during a down period. He's the only hockey-playing Baptist journalism professor with a tattoo I know, and that combination is bound to give him a unique perspective on life.

Way to go, amigo!