via amanda, check out the major damage uva's central grounds recently sustained due to an apparently huge-ass killer storm. at least the homer statue survived intact. countless lawn streakers everywhere are safe.

It's been pandamonium around here as the city celebrates the zoo's newest addition with the zeal of a pandacostal revival! Yes, the excitement is panda-emic here in the nation's capital! Sorry: pandapital.

But I have a terrible secret to share, people. The media wants you to think that the newborn's situation is too delicate to allow photographs. They throw out all this "the size of a stick of butter" nonsense because a stick of butter is small; delicate at room temperature; and something girls "just want to eat up". Clearly, the rhetoric is designed to evoke human babies.

But panda cubs are not the cute, scruffy pups you've been imagining. BEHOLD!

The Nabob spins a tale of arranged weddings, tumultuous religious instruction, and a little blacksmithing. You should go read it.

But I mention this because I, too, had problems with Sunday School. I think my mistake was assuming that my newlywed teachers were somehow being forced to be there, the same way I was. Not so. Turns out they were just really really earnest.

So we ended up having occasional personality conflicts. One that springs to mind started with a particularly weird exercise they had us perform involving a piece of sandpaper and a cube of balsa wood. "Sand it into a sphere!" they said. The unstated goal was to make everyone end up with a shitty, asymmetric orb-thing. This was somehow supposed to make a point about human fallibility.

But, unfortunately for them, I am an awesome sander, and I ended up with a balsa ball that, as near as anyone in the class's imperfect human eyes could tell, was a perfect sphere.

Then I ran around the classroom telling everyone that my wooden ball was Jesus. That didn't go over too well.

The teachers eventually cornered my parents in the parking lot and, from what I managed to overhear, complained about my distinct lack of piousness. To their eternal credit, my parents never said a word about it to me.