The 2006 FIFA World Cup is approaching, scheduled to take place between June 9 and July 9. Here’s BBC Sport’s coverage and here’s an ESPN press release listing the airtime of every game. They will all be broadcast in HD, either on ESPN, ESPN2, or ABC. It’s like a leap year Christmas!

The New York Times on Da Vinci Christianity. I think every student should be taught the historical side of Early Christianity – perhaps then they would realize that the central tenets of Christianity weren’t really defined until the First Council of Nicaea in 325. It’d almost be like creating the US Constitution today based on oral and written stories of the Founding Fathers – imagine the biases and disagreements.

A composer in Edinburgh has allegedly discovered a medieval composition encoded into the architecture of a 15th century chapel in Scotland. He believes that the markings on 213 decorated cubes represent the Chladni patterns of a melody that, when played in sustained notes within the chapel, will perhaps unlock another secret. Perhaps he’ll find Jesus and Mary Magdalene in flagrante delicto.

Darn. I tore through 4 of the 5 puzzles with great speed, but got stuck on the very first puzzle, the Sudoku challenge. Despite the fact that my only exposure to Sudoku has been through this contest, I had been doing quite well on them. My problem was purely observational; I kept on putting symbols in place that were clearly violating the constraints. Hey, it’s hard to keep track of nine weird looking symbols. So in the end, it took me 45-50 minutes to do the whole thing, 95% of that on the Sudoku, which I’m pretty sure is not winner-worthy. That’s OK – I heard the grand prize would’ve required more than $30,000 of federal taxes.

Playboy ‘s 25 Sexiest Novels Ever Written. I’ve read five of them (Story of O, Interview with a Vampire, Portnoy’s Complaint, Wind Up Bird Chronicle, and the “good parts” of Forever (I was a teenager)). Lolita and Fanny Hill sit on my book shelf. Hmm, now that I think of it, I don’t think the five I’ve read were very sexy, except for Forever (again, I was a teenager). (via kottke)

The anti-contraception movement is picking up steam.

And continuing to beat a still-living horse, a 1989 but incredibly detailed New Yorker interview with Errol Morris. Lots of stuff on his uncompleted projects and lots of detail on his first three films. Plus a Believer interview from 2004 – those two publications interview interesting people, I guess.

So, on a whim, I decided to complete some of the puzzles on Google’s movie tie-in, the Da Vinci Code Quest. It consisted of 24 puzzles over 24 days – I did the first 21 bored on a Sunday and finished the rest right after they were released. The first 10,000 participants to finish all 24 were promised a cryptex in the mail and a chance to win some prizes.