Good Things of 2007 (http://rasmusen.org/_amazon/xmas2007.htm )

The big news of the year is that we are on sabbatical leave in Oxford until July 2008.
1. House, M.D., a TV Show with Hugh Laurie as a cranky doctor who specializes in hard-to-diagnose cases.

2. Cod , by Mike Kurklansky, 1998. How can a history of a fish make such a good book?

4. Nuffield College dining hall lunches. People may smile, but Nuffield does a good job with English food.

5. The Belkin Tunecast FM transmitter. This device attaches to a CD player and sends its signal to one of five radio channels that can be played on your car or home radio.

6. The Maxtor One Touch III-Mini external hard drive. Data transfer is quick, and it's small. I'm glad we used this to transfer data to England.

7. Hay on Wye, a village on the edge of Wales that specializes in used book stores. Hay, not London, seems to be the place to shop for used books in England.

8. Skype, an internet phone service. Free to call other people who are signed up and at their computer, but also you can cheaply call people from your computer to their phone.

9. A Variety of Men, C. P. Snow, 224 pp., 1967. Biographical reflections on people such as Rutherford, Churchill, and Hardy. Snow beautifully writes up his observations.

10.Cast Away, a 2001 movie with Tom Hanks about a Fedex manager who is planewrecked on a desert island with only a volleyball, Wilson, for company.

11. God's Undertaker: Has Science Buried God? by John Lennox, 192 pages, 2007. A good overview by an Oxford mathematician of how scientific discoveries in physics and biochemistry create more difficulties for atheists than for Christians.

12. The Ancestor's Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution, by Richard Dawkins, 688 pages, 2004. A wonderful collection of stories about natural history, biochemistry, and evolution. Skip his embarassing atheism book and read this, which is what he really knows about.

Lists of good things from other years are at http://rasmusen.org/_amazon/amazon.htm. Some other items this year: Green Bitter Oranges candied--Greek. The new GE retro telephone. Clamdigging in Washington state. wine bottle plugs. Toy soldiers. Tan House Farm B + B in Herefordshire. The British Museum new indoor building. Kew Gardens. Jewel City Seafood, a restaurant in Huntington, West Virginia.