Lift Up Your Hearts!

Women who want to get pregnant are now being advised to avoid tofu and other soy products, at least around the peak times for conception. New studies have shown that even small amounts of genistein, which mimics the hormone estrogen and is found in soy products, cause sperm to lose their fertility.

Well, I guess that explains why 20% of the world's population is Chinese!

I've never read Al Franken's Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them:  A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right, and frankly I doubt it will ever rise far enough up on my "must read" list to see the light of day.  For all I know, it's a great book full of interesting and useful information that would do me good to read.  But if so, why does it have a title that sounds like a pre-adolescent playground taunt?  That alone makes it hard to take the content seriously.  Someone needs a ghost title-writer.

Score one more for mothers. When you sang to your baby, rocking and bouncing him, or danced with him around the room, others may have said you were being silly. You may have thought you were just trying to keep your baby from crying. But what you were really doing was giving him his first music lessons. A Canadian study has shown that being moved to music helps babies learn rhythm. Just watching you dance is not good enough, by the way; the baby must dance, too.

This isn't high on the list of important things I have to do at the moment, but Jon challenged me and it looks like fun, so I'll see if I can come up with something reasonably quickly.

Total size of music files in my computer
About 500 songs, I have no idea how many hours, about 2.1 GB.

This is slightly misleading, as most of the music I listen to is not on my computer. What I've counted includes a number of recordings, compositions, and transcriptions of music featuring family and friends.

Last record bought
Prayer for Peace (Orlando Deanery Boychoir and Girls' Choirs), title song by Robert Kerr

Song that I am listening to now
Silence. No, not Simon & Garfunkel's Sounds of Silence, but the real thing, or what passes for it in this busy world. Sometimes silence is my favorite song, especially when I'm trying to concentrate.

Five songs that I listen to a lot or that mean a lot to me
Impossible to choose! But here is a representative sample:

Camille Saint-Saëns, Symphony No. 3 (Organ Symphony)

I Heard the Voice of Jesus Say/Star of the County Down (The link will take you to Horatius Bonar's words, but you'll have to click on the "Kingsfold" MIDI link to hear the right tune.)

St. Patrick's Breastplate (Irish tunes "St. Patrick" and "Deirdre" with Cecil Frances Alexander's translation of an ancient Gaelic poem attributed to St. Patrick. The link doesn't have the complete music, but will give you an idea.)

Kilkelly (Green Fields of America)

Non Nobis, Domine (unpublished arrangement by Linda Clary of Patrick Doyle's version from Kenneth Branagh's production of Shakespeare's Henry V)

5 persons to whom I am passing the baton
I'm not going to name names, but hope some people will add their own information in comments.