about 11.30 pm, listening to Rent

have a Starbucks napkin from Borders on Saturday (when the waiter took my chair away from under me when I stood up) that says: Vir virtutis sum. English translation: I am a manly man. Shawne tells me 'vir' means 'man' in Italian (Latin?) -- and therefore 'virtue', that which a man does. Isn't that cool? In a bad, sexist way of course.

Shawne and I looked up 'ethnic' in the dictionary today: it comes (through ecclesiastical Latin) from ethnos, meaning 'nation', and ethnikos, meaning 'heathen'. I think we should put forward a new formulation of the civic/ethnic nationalism distinction: civic for godly nations, and ethnic for pagan, heathen ones.