There’s a new radio station in Salt Lake City that I personally view as an intriguing social experiment. 97.5 The Oasis is a contemporary Christian station, but, unlike most (probably all) stations of its kind, it also plays contemporary LDS music. Just this morning I heard Kenneth Cope and Michael W. Smith back to back.

The station is owned and operated by Simmons Media Group, which also operates my favorite alternative rock station, X96. Being a secular station, The Oasis doesn’t run pledge drives like ministry operated CCM stations (e.g. the only other CCM station broadcasting in Salt Lake, 89.7 K-LOVE), but instead they play commercial advertisements. They also hold a rather postmodern, inclusive attitude toward the music they play.

I like listening to the station for the contemporary Christian music because their DJs aren’t as annoying as K-LOVE’s, but it may surprise you to know I also like listening for the LDS music. I cringe when I hear the lyrics of some of the LDS songs, but then I also cringe when I hear the lyrics of some of the CCM songs. Just as the CCM lyrics don’t always represent my doctrinal position, I realize many of the LDS songs don’t fully represent or even approximate the doctrinal positions of Latter-day Saints. Listening to the songs does give a good sense of the temperature of the culture, however, and that’s what I’m mostly interested in. Incidentally, I enjoy watching the Mollywood films for the same reason.

I have no doubt this station will appeal to many Latter-day Saints, but I’m a little worried that Evangelicals in Salt Lake will be up in arms over it. I’ve already had Christian friends recommend the station to me without noticing it plays LDS music. When they realize it plays LDS music, most Evangelicals will probably feel deceived and might even get angry. Of course, the station doesn’t bill itself as a Christian station, just as “family friendly radio,” whatever that means. I suppose I’m a little worried that Evangelicals will listen to this station and become indoctrinated with LDS ideas, but then many of the CCM songs are indoctrinating them with the health and wealth gospel, radical individualism, and cheap, surface level Christianity anyway.

So, as I said at the beginning of this post, 97.5 The Oasis is, at most, an intriguing social experiment. I’m curious to see how Evangelicals and Latter-day Saints react to the station. It will be interesting to see if it gains a large listener base or if both communities reject it as being too secular and lukewarm. In the meantime, it’s got its own spot on my preset dial.

I’m writing this entry in Internet Explorer 7. Let me back up—I’m not sure you heard me correctly. I’m not writing this in Internet Explorer 7 Beta or even in the Internet Explorer 7 Release Candidate. I’m writing this post using the official release of Internet Explorer 7. The official release announcement was made this afternoon on IEBlog.

You can download Internet Explorer 7 now if you’d like, or if you’re not anxious you can wait a few weeks, as the new browser will be released as a high-priority automatic Windows update.

I for one am impressed with the new product and can whole-heartedly recommend it to everyone. As far as web standards support is concerned, I don’t think IE7 hits the nail quite on the head, but it’s a far cry closer than IE6 ever was. I have to give credit where credit is due, and the Internet Explorer team has earned my praise for taking huge strides in the right direction.

My wife and I watched a wonderful movie a few days ago called Akeelah and the Bee. After watching it over a week ago, my wife’s Granny called it simply, “The best picture I’ve ever seen.” I couldn’t put it any better, myself.

When I was a kid, I read Charlotte’s Web probably a dozen times. Every time I read it I cried when I got to the page where the spider dies. I mention this only to illustrate that I’m quick to cry (and I’m not ashamed to admit it—all real men cry), and I tend to enjoy and return often to stories that bring tears to my eyes. Akeelah and the Bee has secured its place in my DVD collection by making me cry twice.

Akeelah and the Bee is a coming of age story for an 11-year-old girl and, frankly, her whole community. Akeelah Anderson (Keke Palmer) lives in a South Los Angeles ‘hood. Her principal discovers that she has an aptitude for spelling and encourages her to enter the school spelling bee. It takes her a while to warm up to the idea—she doesn’t want to be labeled a brainiac by her classmates—but the principal thinks she has a shot at competing in the Scripps National Spelling Bee.

Tutored by a reluctant but hopeful English professor, Dr. Joshua Larabee (Laurence Fishburne), she makes her way through the spelling bee circuit, making many new friends and some new enemies and discovering that there is much more to spelling bees—and life—than winning.

This movie touches on issues of civil rights and racial equality, grief over lost loved-ones, inner-city violence, friendship, community, and self-esteem. You might be tempted to assume it’s just another sappy cookie-cutter middle school competition movie, and I suppose in a few ways it is, but in many ways it goes so far beyond its genre that it really deserves a place on your shelf, too.

See also:

* Akeelah and the Bee trailer at Apple Trailers →
* Akeelah and the Bee at IMDb.com →
* Akeelah and the Bee at TopTenReviews.com →

A few more notes about the new design, and then I’ll stop yakking about it; I promise. I’ve now tested the site in Internet Explorer 6, Internet Explorer 7 (rc1), Firefox 1.5, Firefox 2 (rc2), Opera 9, and Safari 1.2. It passes with flying colors in all browsers, with the exception of IE6, where it doesn’t actually look half bad—the layout itself is fine but the PNG images puke big bluish blocks all over where they should be transparent. Sometime down the road I may decide to replace all the PNGs with something else in IE6 (using conditional comments or some other such hack), but IE7 is coming this month and will be a critical automatic update, so I’m not going to sweat about it too much.

Unbeknownst to me, the new design wasn’t at first valid XHTML and CSS. I took care of that this morning by properly closing a few <li> tags, fixing a few tag IDs, properly enclosing a couple of comment form elements inside a block level element, and fixing a few malformed CSS statements.

Last but not least, I should mention that the new design uses a couple of new fonts: Cambria and Calibri. Microsoft is releasing six new fonts with Windows Vista and many people (myself included) are hoping they become widely distributed enough to use them in web pages. If you don’t have these fonts, the new design properly degrades to using Georgia and Trebuchet MS instead, which I think looks pretty good, so you’re not missing out on much. To get the full effect, however, I recommend you download the new fonts if you can. They have been released unofficially to the public in the Vista betas and can be found on the web with a little effort.

I experienced an episode of the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon this afternoon. The Baader-Meinhof phenomenon is when you stumble across an obscure piece of information and then encounter it again seemingly at random very soon afterward.

Yesterday I was reading a Wikipedia article, The Answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything, where it talks about Arthur Dent spelling out the Ultimate Question using Scrabble tiles. The article mentions that it wouldn’t be possible to spell out the Question (“What do you get if you multiply six by nine?”) has three y’s in it, and that it wouldn’t be possible to spell out the Question because official Scrabble sets only have two y’s.

This afternoon I was showing my new blog design to a friend and he commented that the word Syzygy would be an excellent hangman or Scrabble word. He quickly corrected himself, however, and said that you wouldn’t be able to use Syzygy in Scrabble because official Scrabble sets only have two y’s.

It was so weird to hear him say that, so I brought up Baader-Meinhof and explained what I had been reading about yesterday. He said he had also been reading about Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy on Wikipedia, so I immediately assumed we had read the same thing about Scrabble tiles. This turned out to be yet another bit of synchronicity, however, as he had not read the part about Scrabble tiles. He explained that he knew about Scrabble tiles because he had been playing Scrabble a few weeks ago. I haven’t been able to shake this odd feeling since then.