Keeping tabs on the blogosphere II

Once again I've gone overboard opening new tabs in Mozilla, but my excess is your gain, dear reader. Some items of note, in no particular order:

• Allen of Acorns from an Okie reports that Frontier City closed three hours early on Tuesday for no apparent reason other than the park wasn't full enough and wasn't making enough money. Very unexpected from an amusement park which is part of the world's largest amusement park chain and is right next door to the chain's world HQ in Oklahoma city.
• Dawn travels to the northern reaches of flyover country and visits the Mall of America, explores the Minneapolis skyway, and attends a wedding at a St. Paul library. She also tells of the removal of a superfluous tooth. They don't call her the blogosphere's single-and-still-living-at-home answer to Erma Bombeck for nothing. (They don't call her that, but you should read her stuff anyway.)
• Joel of On the Other Foot posted a touching tribute to his late grandmother on what would have been her 95th birthday. She was a preacher's wife, not much of a cook, but hospitable and never weary in well-doing. Of her generosity, he writes, "no baby was ever born in our church that didn't get a crocheted blanket." (I know how special that is: My little girl is very attached to the pink crocheted blankie made by her Great Aunt Bea.) When you visit that link, be sure to read some of his favorite posts. A couple of them have to do with a newspaper's hounding of a local politician, apparently driven by the newspaper's owners' other business interests. (By the way, Joel, feel free to move me into the "Prods" section of your blogroll!)
• Tim Bayly writes that just as a taste of a homegrown tomato spoils you from enjoying the hard, tasteless storeboughten variety, so an encounter with a church that follows the "old paths" -- right preaching of the Word, right administration of the sacraments, and right exercise of church discipline -- may spoil you from feeling at home in a congregation that lacks the marks of a true church. (If Tim should write a book on the topic, he should call it Secrets of the Vine-Ripened Church.)
• If you need motivation to acquire and enjoy some genuine homegrown tomatoes, read columnist Paul Greenberg's paean to an Arkansas variety of Lycopersicon esculentum: "Like life itself, the Bradley County Pink is perishable, but a joy while it's here."
• Here's another Greenberg summer classic, updated for 2005: "Fifty Ways to Beat the Heat." I can testify to Number 20 -- Ray Winder Field in Little Rock is a grand old ballpark, a great place to watch baseball.
• Three more interesting items from BaylyBlog: The use of zoning and other municipal regulations to harass churches; the history of William Tennent's Log College, predecessor to Princeton Theological Seminary, and the beginnings of a new school designed to train pastors in the tradition of the Log College, in the context of the local church; and thoughts on the decline of evangelical Christian colleges and the handful still worth considering.

Happy reading!