What If You Spent Every Day of the Last Year Following Every Rule of the Bible?

You would look like this guy.

For a year A. J. Jacobs lived his life by every rule set out in the Bible. That includes the prohibition of certain hair cutting, as seen in the picture above. But what wasn't he able to cut out? Coveting.

But he did manage to stone an adulterer!

From a Newsweek interview:

What rule was the hardest to follow?
Two kinds of rules were hard. Avoiding sins we commit every day like lying, gossiping and coveting was hard, and then there were the rules that were hard to do in modern life, like stoning adulterers. But I did manage to fulfill that one. What happened was, I was in the park, dressed in my white garb, and this man in his 70s came over and asked what I was doing. I explained I was trying to follow every rule in the Bible as literally as possible, including growing my beard, not mixing fibers, stoning adulterers, and he said, “I’m an adulterer, are you going to stone me?” I said, “Yeah that would be great.” The Bible doesn’t say what size the stones have to be, so I had been carrying around these pebbles in my pocket for just such an occasion. I took the pebbles out of my pocket, and he instantly picked one up and threw it at me, so I decided, an eye for an eye, and I tossed one at him. It did provide an entry for talking to people about capital punishment and the Bible. How could they stone adulterers, what was life like back then, does it apply today. I tried to say to the guy, you shouldn’t sleep with other women, but I don’t know if it sunk in.

I like how now his perception has shifted and he appreciates good things that happen and how he sees his life as one of responsibility rather than rights and entitlements. I guess that's the real point of religion? To give your life some meaning and to help you get through the days when they are hard.

Learn more about A. J. Jacobs and his new book, The Year of Living Biblically, at Newsweek.

(via Boing Boing)

A Vacation at...Ikea?

Many South Floridians are getting giddy over the "coming soon" Ikea - but did you know that there is an Ikea in Norway where you can extend your shopping overnight and stay in the Ikea hostel for free? They even have a bridal suite! Of course my brain first goes to all the liability issues (how do they keep people from not living there for free?) but I bet those type of problems don't come up. It's Ikea and somehow it's a utopia of cheap furniture and Swedish meatballs.

(Boing Boing)

Stephen King on Cho Seung Hui

Stephen King was asked by Entertainment Weekly about his thoughts on the Virginia Tech murders. Being that Stephen King writes horror stories, I felt it was really interesting to hear his take on it. A lot of people said that Cho should have thrown up warning signals because of his violent stories, but wouldn't Stephen King have thrown up the same flags? When is it just imagination or crossing the line to disturbing insanity?

Here is what Stephen King had to say:

I've thought about it, of course. Certainly in this sensitized day and age, my own college writing — including a short story called ''Cain Rose Up'' and the novel RAGE — would have raised red flags, and I'm certain someone would have tabbed me as mentally ill because of them, even though I interacted in class, never took pictures of girls' legs with my cell phone (in 1970, WHAT cell phones?), and never signed my work with a ?.

As a teacher, I had one student — I will call him George — who raised red flags galore in my own mind: stories about flaying women alive, dismemberment, and, the capper, ''getting back at THEM.'' George was very quiet, and verbally inarticulate. It was only in his written work that he spewed these relentless scenes of gore and torture. His job was in the University Bookstore, and when I inquired about him once, I was told he was a good worker, but ''quiet.'' I thought, ''Whoa, if some kid is ever gonna blow, it'll be this one.'' He never did. But that was in the days before a gun-totin' serial killer could get top billing on the Nightly News and possibly the covers of national magazines.

For most creative people, the imagination serves as an excretory channel for violence: We visualize what we will never actually do (James Patterson, for instance, a nice man who has all too often worked the street that my old friend George used to work). Cho doesn't strike me as in the least creative, however. Dude was crazy. Dude was, in the memorable phrasing of Nikki Giovanni, ''just mean.'' Essentially there's no story here, except for a paranoid a--hole who went DEFCON-1. He may have been inspired by Columbine, but only because he was too dim to think up such a scenario on his own.

On the whole, I don't think you can pick these guys out based on their work, unless you look for violence unenlivened by any real talent.

Swim across the Atlantic

This is hilarious, the people at Google have a great sense of humor.

Here is Google map/directions from New York to Paris. Step 23 - Swim across the Atlantic Ocean - 3,462 miles. Yup just a hop, skip, jump and swim away!

Thanks to my friend anna for sharing this with me.

A Real Life Memory Eraser?

The movie "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" (one of my all time favorite movies) is about a couple who separately undergo a treatment which zaps memories related to their former lover. It begs the questions - if you could erase a traumatic memory, would you?

Looks like this questions may be soon a reality for many people. A new pill has been created which may be able to erase memories.

The hope is that a post-traumatic stress disorder patient can work with a psychiatrist and focus a traumatic event, take one of these drugs and then slowly forget that event.

This type of pill can be used on war veterans, car accident survivors, rape victims or anyone else who has lived through an experience that continues to haunt their everyday lives.

Many ethical and psychological questions hang over this issue. Who has had a traumatic enough life to allow them to use this drug? Will personalities be altered by the erasing of memories? Does erasing a memory allow someone to move on?

If it was possible, would you erase the past?