Too early to be thinking about Christmas? Not if you were hoping to purchase the fastest and most expensive Porche ever built—the 911 GT2 RS. It just sold out less than two months after debuting. Price tag? $329,000. Merry Christmas and a big red bow tied on to the 131 Americans who bought it.

“Savior Siblings” was the newspaper headline. Molly Nash is sixteen years old now—and very much alive. But in 2000 the promise of any future at all was doubtful. Molly was born with a severe type of Fanconi anemia, “a blood disorder that almost always results in leukemia by the age of 10.” Her only hope a bone marrow transplant. And the optimal transplant donor needed to be a sibling with genetically identical tissue. But Molly was an only child. Until Dr. John Wagner—a bone marrow transplant expert at the University of Minnesota—suggested a brave, novel protocol.

The rescue of the 33 Chilean miners, trapped for 69 days a half a mile beneath the mountain, is a story for the ages, isn’t it? Can you imagine the ecstatic joy that exploded into the cold night air, as that bullet-shaped recovery capsule emerged from out of the ground, transporting the first of the entombed captives to freedom? Desperate hope had become reality. The captives were coming home!

What’s not to like about a golden anniversary? Fifty years ago Emmanuel Missionary College became Andrews University, and this campus has never been the same! But what about a ruby anniversary? Did you know that forty years ago next week (which makes it a “ruby” commemoration, for those who keep track) there was a spiritual event on campus (it actually began off campus) that has left this university not quite the same ever since?

It’s a funny-named hometown. But could it be we’re all from there—that little berg with its lonely water tower? Known for miles around, the water tower was fed by an aqueduct from hot springs a few miles away. Naturally, the water started out piping hot, but by the time it spilled into the water tower it was lukewarm. So it’s no surprise that when the risen Christ sends a communiqué to the church in that town of Laodecia, he seizes the city’s trademark lukewarm water to shape his appeal to all of us.

What if God repeated himself every forty years? Then this university campus would be poised on the brink of a mighty spiritual revival! Last week Martin Kim, one of our graduate students, passed along a fascinating story by Beatrice Neal entitled “When God Came Down” (published in the Fall, 2004, edition of Adventists Affirm). In this article Neal, a religion professor at Union College at the time, has carefully pieced together an historical examination of the revival that spread across numerous Christian college campuses in 1970.

“Minister to burn Quran.” The media have been tracking this story about terry Jones, evangelical pastor of the fifty-member Dove World Outreach Center (Gainesville, Florida), who is threatening to burn copies of the Quran this Saturday to mark the ninth anniversary of the September 11 attacks.

Is there another earth in the universe? Last Tuesday at an international conference in France, scientists reported the discovery of a star or sun—HD 10180—one hundred light years or 587 trillion miles away (not exactly our next door neighbor, to be sure). But what was fascinating was their announcement that this sun is orbited by at least seven planets—most of which are 13 to 25 times the mass of our home planet Earth. However, one of those planets is only 1.4 times our size—making it the smallest planet ever spotted outside our own solar system.

If you’re claustrophobic, don’t read on. I’ll be the first to admit that the very thought of being trapped with 32 other men in a tiny 600 square foot chamber a half a mile underground . . . in pitch darkness inside the bowels of a collapsed mine . . . for seventeen days and nights . . . without any con- tact with the outside (above) world . . . is the stuff of nightmares!

“Freshmen: What’s a wristwatch?” That headline to a report about Beloit College’s annual “mindset list” caught my eye this week. For thirteen years now two officials at this small private school of 1400 students in Wisconsin have compiled a list of reminders for teachers that the incoming freshmen class is from another time and space than its elders. For example, few of the Class of 2014 have ever worn a wristwatch (can you believe that?). And most of them don’t know how to write in cursive (some of us fall miserably short, as well).