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Plague of the Jesus Bricks Aug 15 2001: A friend of mine brought this article to my attention. Short version: To help support the King County Redmond Regional Library (that's Redmond, WA as made infamous by Microsoft), the Friends of the Library sell tiles which will be engraved with your message and placed in the walk outside the library. Most people put their name, or wish their kids good luck, or remember their dearly departed. However, the gentleman who wrote this article was surprised to see "Christ Died For Our Sins" on one of the tiles. It seemed that the Friends didn't think to place limits on what messages people might like to have engraved. The author was slightly offended and tried to get the religious tiles removed. When the library declined, he put in a few messages of his own which were deliberately over the top. To his surprise, they took them. You have to go read the article. It's great. Since I live in Redmond, I had to go see this for myself. The pictures at left are of some of the tiles mentioned in the article. You can also seem them "in situ". To spread my own religious messages, I've submitted a few tiles of my own. When/if they should be engraved I'll put pictures of them here. The tiles I've submitted are: Socialize Microsoft (a coworker's suggestion, which I loved) Worship a Daemon Run FreeBSD In Memoriam Netscape 1994-1998 Remember, this is Redmond, backyard of Billy Gates where making fun of Microsoft is its own sort of sacrilege. As the ACLU lawyer involved (Mr. Aaron Caplan) pointed out, the Redmond Library has opened up a bit of a can of worms for itself. If you'd like to support the library, and have your own message in the sidewalk, stop on by. It's as close to the Hollywood star as most of us get. Aug 17 2001: Amazing how fast this stuff spreads. This page now linked to from Memepool, BBSpot, and has a discussion thread on Plastic. I don't think I'm going to want to see this month's bandwidth bill. To clarify though, I didn't write the original article. Matthew Barry did, and you find it here. Aug 18 2001: Some suggestions I've seen and like, for anyone getting bricks of their own: I helped fund this library and all I got was this stupid brick "There should be limits to free speech" GW Bush And the best suggestion (sent to me in email), the titles and authors of books that have been banned at various points in history. Huck Finn, To Kill a Mockingbird, Catcher in the Rye. You can get lots of information on banned books here Dec 11 2001: The guy who started this, Matt Barry, mentions in a followup email, that his latest order for bricks was returned to him with a note that the program had been suspended. Quoth the library: " in order to reconsider our pricing, our public relations approach, the projects benefited by our program and the program guidelines. We expect to reinstate the tile program with some changes in the 1st quarter of 2002." My own check has never been cashed or returned by the way. Guess I won't get to see my bricks. *sniff* Dec 14 2001: There's a mention of this debacle and a repost of the original article on Swans with some good links. Oct 8 2002: The local news, ever on the ball as usual, just discovered this story. There's a lovely picture of a baby crawling past the "God kills babies..." tile. I think it's supposed to be ironic or something. Seattle Times story is here. One of the local TV stations has the AP wire story here.