According to the Des Moines Register, a transsexual professor at the University of Iowa was baptized at Trinity Church in Iowa City last month. Deirdre McCloskey, formerly Donald McCloskey, told an audience at Iowa State University in Ames that people in Iowa have accepted her as a woman. She said the people at Trinity have been "tremendously supportive." And in perhaps one of the great quotes of 1997, she said the transition from man to woman was "the most interesting thing I've ever done."

A stained-glass window at the Cathedral Church of the Advent in Birmingham, Ala., contained a depiction of Jesus with Band-Aids on his forehead. An explanation is in order. Maintenance workers who were painting and repairing inside the cathedral found that the window, which shows Jesus wearing a crown of thorns, had a hole in the head. Someone had placed Band-Aid adhesive strips across the hole, "but it didn't heal over," the Rev. Canon J. Thompson Brown, canon administrator, told the Birmingham News. The window, about 60 feet above the floor, was removed and repaired by a parishioner experienced in working with stained glass.

Ellen Diming, of Charlottesville, Va., sends this definition of "mean-spirited" published in C'ville, a Charlottesville weekly: "An epithet of last resort, hurled by the pure-in-heart when no mud is at hand."

Seen by an alert observer on a warm fall day in Chicago's Loop, a man wearing a T-shirt which read "My wife thinks I'm at Promise Keepers."

The Rev. John Riley, of Jacksonville, Fla., spotted some wisdom on a sign on the lawn of a small rural church in Georgia: "You are a child of God ... Remember to call home."

Looking for license plates: PRAY 39 and I COR 13. Managing editor John Schuessler observed JSUS FRK, and music editor Patricia Nakamura saw WITHGOD. Other sightings: The Rev. Robert Crafts of Indio, Calif., saw HOREB, JESUSXU, JCROZ4U, AND OHMYGOD. Deacon Roger Patience, of Lake Geneva, Wis., spotted TNK GOD, ACTS 2 4 and ACTS1 8. The Rev. David W. Plumer, assisting at an Anglican parish in Richmond, New Brunswick, Canada, reports the cars driven by him and his wife bear the tags GLORY and ALLELU. Finally, the Rev. David Baumann, of Placentia, Calif., saw HE ANSRS.

Note to Ms. C., somewhere in Montgomery County, Md.: It is still permissible for Episcopalians to receive communion in ELCA churches.

David Kalvelage, editor