By now, the Discovery Channel showing of The Lost Tomb of Jesus in the US is complete, and those of you who cared to have probably seen it. Thanks to a family connection, I was invited to a theatrical screening of this documentary in Toronto, and have just returned home.

What I saw was the 108-minute version, whereas the Discovery Channel showed an 88-minute version. (The Discovery Channel will apparently be showing the longer version next week.)  Simcha Jacobovici was there to introduce the film, and to answer questions afterwards. It was a very informal occasion. Most of the audience were people who had worked on the film, and their families. Jacobovici’s five charming children were there, and the youngest, who couldn't have been more than three, interrupted her father several times during his talk -- the last time for a goodnight kiss.

I'm not going to review the film. Too many others are doing so; you don't need me to chime in. I may, however, be able to add some details that haven't come out in media accounts.

I'm an agnostic, but I go to church on Sunday. I go for many reasons.

Two in particular: First, the church down the street from the house we just bought is a warm, welcoming community, a good place to make friends. More important, the familiar services are a period each week when I can sit and think seriously about what it means to be human, in the context of a tradition that has meant a lot over the centuries to a very large number of humans, so it clearly must have something going for it.

This week, the first Sunday in Lent, the Gospel reading was about the forty days and forty nights Jesus spent fasting in the wilderness. (As a child, I remember being struck by Luke’s peculiar insistence on the 'forty nights,' as if we might otherwise think that Jesus only made day trips to the desert and trotted back to sleep in a motel each night!) At the end of that period the Devil tempts him. Jesus resists, quoting scripture.

More below the fold...

If not, you’d better not plan on travelling anywhere outside the US by air. Starting next month, the US is not going to let American air travellers back into the country without a passport. That includes coming back from Canada or Mexico.

That’s right, you read that correctly. Your citizenship doesn’t matter. A naturalization certificate is worthless; a birth certificate won’t impress anyone. Forget about a driver's license. They don’t care. As of January 23, 2007, if you haven’t spent $95 for a US passport don’t plan on travelling anywhere outside the country, because they aren’t going to let you back in. You don't have the right to return to your own country.

More below the fold.

It isn't good.

New Orleans is a much smaller city now. So much damage everywhere, the mind can't grasp it. Perhaps forty or fifty thousand people. It's hard to imagine how it could ever come back to what it was. But the people who are there now, all of them, are people who passionately want to be there. They aren't getting a lot of help, they are acquiring strange new survival skills, and life means improvising.

I just came back from visiting my son in New Orleans. Here's some of what I saw, below the fold:

She is now teaching a university course in American Culture. What, you say? A Canadian teaching American Culture? And she hasn't even lived in the US? Well, it seems that Americans aren't the only people who think Canadians are just like Americans, except... well, okay, different country and all that, but hey, really about the same. So she should be able to teach the culture, right? This is the theory, at least, of the administrators at the university.

She is doing her best, but she'd like her students to have some more accurate information. So she sent out, to anyone who might know, a list of questions from her students. I thought immediately that I knew of a whole slew of people who would love to explain America to some curious Chinese kids. With her permission, here are the questions they asked... below the fold:

Some of her nominations below the fold, but click through on the link to read it all...

Recently, I was in Winnipeg again. While I was there, I bought myself a new winter jacket -- and a lesson in global economics.

I'm still at work. In an hour or so I'll be going home and watching the coverage on whichever channel our old cable-less TV set can receive best, while sitting in front of the computer with a tab open to CNN's page, and I'll be interacting here. A few hours from now, we'll know for sure if all those promising clues have added up to the right answer.

But right now, while the outcome is unresolved, while the EC counters are all still sitting at zero, I want to say how wonderful you all are. You here at dKos, and all the rest of the devoted citizens who came alive and got together. This is right, this is good. This is how democracy is supposed to work.

TOPDOG04.COM

If you think this is valuable, maybe recommend it so it doesn't vanish too quickly. (Not vanity on my part -- this is all someone else's excellent work.)

So here, for your enjoyment...

overconfident, adj. 1. cocksure, dead certain, too certain; arrogant, brazen, audacious, impertinent; swaggering, blustering, push, bumptious, self-assertive, self-assured, self-assuming, imperious, overbearing, egotistic, lofty, toplofty, condescending, vainglorious, conceited, high-and-mighty, pompous, self-important, riding for a fall....

And to illustrate, he reads out this sample to me:

I suppose when GWB was doing his MBA at Harvard, they didn't have books like that...

Seriously, folks, take the time to read this level-headed analysis. You'll be glad you did. It pulls together a lot of things we all know, and puts them into a coherent picture.

A policy against islamic terrorism.

At the very least, it deserves more than the scant two comments that were there when I found it. And Jerome is promising more in his next entry: what "control of oil" really means...!

Let me tell you, I'd sleep a lot easier if I knew Kerry had read it.

First news, nobody uses Stories! (This is, um, not a big surprise, since as far as I know, the feature doesn't do anything.) As for Replies and Hotlists... the results were interesting. Scoop poll percentages don't add up to 100; I suppose they're truncated rather than rounded, so I recalculated in Excel, which also makes a very pretty pie chart that I won't try to post here.

Of the 35 Kossites voting, 40% said they referred to one or the other of these two features on every reload of the front page. Also, 3% said they used both features enough that they wished the two were separate. Another 29% said they used one of the features "sometimes", while 28% didn't use them at all.

So. 43% of the poll respondents so far said they make constant or heavy use of one or both of the features. That's significant. Let's cut to the chase: another poll...!

Of course, Kos will do what he wants to do, and we will all still love the site no matter what. But here's your chance to let him know what you think:

This little right-column box has currently been banished to the bottom of the Diaries list, so if you keep your Diaries list at 50, that's a loooong way down. If the feature is really not used much, scrolling down is fine, but if a lot of people are wanting to check it every time they reload the front page, good user design would suggest it ought to be moved up.

It seems to me that because it is informational, click stats can't be telling the whole story about how much it is being used. The box gives both positive and negative information -- knowing that no change has happened is just as useful as being notified that a change has occurred.

Since the click stats won't give the full picture here, I thought I'd throw out a quick poll to find out about actual usage.

For those not familiar with it... Turtledove is writing an alternate political history of North America, in which we have the CSA, the USA, Quebec, and US-occupied Canada. This alternate world has had a different series of wars in its past, which I would probably be able to explain better if I'd picked this series up from the beginning. I'd ignored it, not being a big fan of "what if the South had seceded," or "What if the Germans had won WW I," both of which appear to be the case here. Still, once I really delved into this middle book, I found it fascinating, and horrifying.

Dean for VP Group Plans Floor Fight at Convention

Discuss.

(comment below the fold)

If it's site maintenance in progress, well hey, I don't mind being patient -- dKos is plenty worth waiting for. If it's a DOS attack, um... gr-r-r-rr!

But if you need yet more server power, Kos -- just pass the ol' hat! I can't contribute to the dKos 8, and helping you out at least lets me feel I'm doing something.