I can’t believe it… Satan must certainly be wearing a toque and parka! After some twenty years Apple Computer released a mouse that has more than one button! Unbelievable!! Dubbed the Mighty Mouse, this mouse has side buttons as well as a scroll ball (ball… not wheel!).

First Apple announces Macs are going to be made with Intel inside and now this!

Mark my words… the end is nigh!

Here are some more Bible Software news items, this time in connection with Logos Bible Software:

• Logos has launched a Logos Bible Software Blog. According to the first post, the blog will but “provide a single site where you could find all of our [=Logos employees who already have blogs] posts related to Logos Bible Software.” Welcome to the blogosphere!
• Logos is taking pre-orders for Old Testament Greek Pseudepigrapha with Morphology, a new resource for Logos Bible Software. Ken Penner from the Online Critical Pseudepigrapha project is working on the tagging and lemmatization. All the details about the project and screenshots are here.

For information on other software packages, see my Software for Biblical Studies pages.

OakTree Software has just released Accordance Bible Software version 6.7. The free update fixes some font smoothing problems and includes a nifty little Accordance Widget for Macintosh OS 10.4 users. This widget is installed into your dashboard and allows you to retrieve verses instantly (OK, perhaps not instantly, but pretty quick!) from any text you may have installed in Accordance and paste them into a document you are working on. It’s like having your own Dead Sea Scroll on your desktop! Nifty-keen-o-wow is all I can say.

Here are some screen shots. I have it set to retrieve from the tagged Hebrew Bible text (BHS-W4):

This is the widget as it appears “closed”

Here is the widget with some text ready to be copied into a word file

OK, now that I have your attention, VisionTV — the primary religious cable television channel in Canada — announced the world primiere of a multi-part documentary series on archaeology and the Bible starting in September 2005. From the press release it looks like it will be interesting to say the least! Sorry… no pictures available!

Here is the press release:

Simcha Jacobovici is The Naked Archaeologist.

In this world premiere documentary series for VisionTV, the two-time Emmy Award winning producer and director shows viewers Biblical archaeology like they’ve never seen it before.

He dances. He raps. He clambers under barbed wire and over fences in search of the most extraordinary archaeological finds from the ancient Middle East, and crosses swords with some of the world’s foremost archaeologists, historians and scientists.

Shot on location in Israel, Egypt and Greece, The Naked Archaeologist airs on Mondays, starting Sept. 5 at 9:30 p.m. and 1:30 a.m. ET , and repeats on Tuesdays, starting Sept. 6, at 10:30 p.m. ET .

Fast, funny and irreverent (think the Ali G. meets Indiana Jones), Jacobovici asks the questions we all want to know the answers to: Why is it so bad to be called a Philistine? Was Jezebel really that sexy? What do you do when you find a 2,000-year-old palace under your house? And where do you stop for a good falafel when you’re on your way to find the real Mount Sinai?

“My goal,” says Jacobovici, “is to demystify the Bible in general, and archaeology in particular, to brush away the cobwebs and burst academic bubbles.”

Drawing on years of personal research and his experience in bringing history to life on the screen, Jacobovici fearlessly probes some of the most controversial new theories in Biblical archaeology: that an African army rescued Jerusalem in the 8th Century B.C.; that the invention of the alphabet contributed to the Biblical Exodus; and that recently discovered Bronze Age ceramic penises may explain why Delilah fell for Samson.

Says Alberta Nokes, VisionTV’s Director of Independent Production and the Executive Producer of The Naked Archaeologist : “This series is a completely fresh way of looking at archaeology and history. Simcha takes the viewer to places most of us will never have access to and reveals what archaeology can – and cannot – tell us about history and the Bible. And he has great fun doing it.

“The show also helps us to see that the ancient past is still with us. Only The Naked Archaeologist could relate a history of the alphabet that brings together ancient inscriptions, the Biblical story of Exodus and the ‘tags’ of modern-day graffiti artists.”