I thought it was time to change the layout of the blog. I get tired of a format after a while and I'm sure you do too. And that last one was doing some funny things to the screen width so I thought I'd try this one instead. Hope you like it.

For the past year or so, I've been listening to audible books from Audible.com. They're sort of like books on tape, except more convenient because a whole book can be downloaded into an mp3 player and so there are no tapes or CDs to manage. I get two per month as part of a subscription and then download them into my portable mp3 player and I'm able to listen to them while commuting to work or doing chores like cutting the grass. It makes otherwise mindless activities much more enjoyable. I am listening to one now by Bernard Lewis entitled 'The Crisis of Islam' in a effort to better understand why 'they' hate us so much. As you may have noticed, we didn't talk too much about other spiritual viewpoints in high school, I assume because the less said about conflicting viewpoints, the better. Perhaps it's just as well. A lot of trouble in this world seems to spring from one group of people who feel the need to correct the thinking of another group .

In one of those rare coincidences I found that extremist Islamic views got their start right here in Greeley, CO by Sayyid Qutb. He studied here at the local Teacher's College in 1949 and was repulsed by the moral decay he witnessed (he was seeing things like what we saw on the TV sitcom 'Happy Days', but more wholesome). I shudder to think what he would have thought of our generation, or of today's generation. Qutb went on to write books which are considered largely responsible for the extremist viewpoints of those who followed them, inlcuding Osama Bin Laden's Al-Qaeda .