Latin, brains, funny church signs, non-english music

It's Sunday. And here is today's top 5:

The BBC reports the view of the Vatican's 'chief Latinist' that the future of that language at the Holy See is in trouble. Among other things
...more junior members of the Catholic hierarchy are less enthusiastic about Latin than the recent Popes.
At the Vatican, bishops appointments are still written on papyrus in Latin as are letters of congratulations from the pope, but many bishops and cardinals write back asking for translations.
When I was at the UCT, introductory Latin was very well attended, because it was required for all law students. I was one of the very few that took Latin because I was really interested in the language.
I remember too that the memory of the lecturer was absolutely amazing. There were at least a couple of hundred people in the class, and she soon had everybody's name memorized.

The older I get, the less dogmatic I get. When I was a spiritual young oke I was convinced that consciousness was independent of the body. Now, I'm not so sure and am actually swinging the other way. This story, about a bloke that "forgot the urge to smoke" after suffering damage brain damage after a stroke, is tangentially related to this observation.

To make it easier to maintain a US postal address while I am out of the country, I signed up for an account with Remote Control Mail. With this service, any postal mail received is viewable over the WWW.

Funny church signs from Ship of Fools, 'the magazine of Christian unrest.'

Blog recommendation: 'We promote non-english language music' is pretty much what it sounds like. For music you may not hear about elsewhere, check them out. I found them through a search for fokofpolisiekar, but they are fairly diverse in their offerings. For instance, the last few entries profile Slovak punk, traditional Ladino, Turkish rock, French pop, Klezmer, Afropop. Most of the links seem to be to Youtube - I wish there were more mp3 downloads.