cymbaljack

The greatest free entertainment in the world is live sports, if you know how to watch. The trick is to mute your TV and turn on the closed captioning. This lets you read what's being said--only because it's live, the transcription is often a little off.

Last night during the Vikings preseason game, we got the highlight of my week. According to the closed captions, this is what was said:

Referee: Personal personal foul, rubbing the passer.

That is, indeed, a very personal foul.

As I make the final preparations to start classes again tomorrow, I thought it would be useful to review the many lessons this summer provided. They say if you reflect on your learning, it will be more meaningful and lasting, and you may get a blog entry out of it.

• When it is very hot, I don't want to do anything.
• Very muggy, ditto.
• Americans suffer from the most bizarre form of impatience known to humanity. This was demonstrated by all the people standing in line for midnight showings/releases of things like Star Wars 3: Hacking the limbs off a Sith and Harry Potter and the Half-Baked Plot. (Yes, I have been waiting for almost a month to use that joke. Yes, I know it will hack at least one reader off. Hi, Laurel!) What is strange about this is that it means they waited a long time, not to be first, but to be among the first millions. Either they were impatient to be able to talk about the things with other people, or they were ironically willing to wait in line just so they wouldn't have to wait any more. (I went to the Star Wars movie like 6 weeks after it came out, and we bought HP the "morning after" at 8:30 am--no line, no fuss.)
• If a movie came out in the summer of '05 and did not star Johnny Depp or penguins, you don't want to see it.
• Duluth is always a good idea in the summer. International Falls is not, necessarily.
• My wife really, really likes playing the bass. And I really, really like it when something makes her that happy.
• It's going to be a great fall. Consider:

1. New Switchfoot album (9/13)
2. New Kendall Payne album, long overdue (end of September, if I remember right)
3. Wallace and Gromit movie (10/7)
4. Tim Burton's Corpse Bride (which means Charlie and the Chocolate Factory won't even be his best movie this year!)
5. Battlestar Galactica season 1 and The 4400 season 2 out on DVD
6. And, of course Serenity, finally, in theaters on September 30

My wife and I watched Love Actually on DVD last night. The very best thing I can say about the experience is that it confirmed one of the reasons I love my wife: except for choosing a husband, she has very good taste. She agreed with me that it was awful.

The reasons, sadly, are totally predictable for a mainstream film in our culture. "Love," in this movie, is almost always either defined as "sexual desire" or as a fleeting, mostly selfish emotional condition. There is a brief glimpse of genuine love--in the story of a sister who sacrifices her own happiness to be a reliable caretaker for her mentally-ill brother. But the movie pretty quickly dispenses with this story, because it's not very interested in her. It's busy showing adolescent wish-fulfillment and bashing marriage.

One of the "love stories" entangled in the film does lead to a marriage proposal--between two people who have only just learned the rudiments of each other's languages and don't really know each other or have anything in common except they spent a few weeks around each other, being clumsy and not communicating. None of the positive stories of love take place within a marriage. In fact, marriage on the whole takes a beating. We've got:

• A bleak tale of a man accepting the most pathetic, trampy come-on from a coworker and destroying his marriage
• A tale of newlyweds who are very happy together--and the "best friend" of the husband, who is in love/sexually obsessed with the wife and makes a little play to seduce her "because it's Christmas"
• The story I mentioned above about the bilingual marriage proposal. What makes it especially interesting is that the guy doing the proposing just found out five weeks ago that his wife was cheating on him. Can they even be divorced yet? It's a good thing he's not on the rebound, or his new marriage might be in trouble.
• And the most heartwarming tale of marriage commitment, the man who grieves for his dead wife for an entire five weeks before getting the hots for some blonde he just met. You know you have a good tale of love when you inspire comparisons to the villain in Hamlet.

Even the best stories in the film are kind of pathetic, and usually pretty obvious. Nothing really surprised me that much, including that in a film with Christmas as its setting and thematic heart, the only mention of Jesus is when someone swears using his name.

I'm sure some people had a more positive response than I did. If you felt uplifted by the actor stand-ins shyly making first steps together, or by the rock star admitting that the manager he publicly abuses is actually his closest friend, okay. But you should just be aware that actually there is much more powerful, deeper, richer love than this all around. Moviemakers just don't seem to know where to look for it, or how to recognize it.

I want to explain first the origin of my new concept, evangelical street hairstyling, before it changes the world and becomes famous.

The other day my wonderful wife and I were in our car and happened to be behind an expensive convertible. We were at a stoplight, and the man driving the convertible was very concerned with his hair. He kept looking at it in the rear-view mirror and messing with it. (The woman with him, who had much longer and therefore much more wind-blown hair, wasn't worrying with hers at all.) He was really obsessive about it. So when we got to the next stoplight and he started doing it again, I told my wife that I'd give her $5 if she'd go run up to his car and start fixing his hair for him. She allowed that this would be funny, but made some comment indicating she didn't think Jesus would approve. So I said she could tell him about Jesus at the same time, if she wanted to.

Thus was born the concept of evangelical street hairstyling. It will start out with a cadre of enthusiastic young extraverts who happen to have hairstyling skills. They will wander around the streets, armed with brush, comb, various potencies of styling gel, unrestrained boldness, and some kind of gospel "tract." They will ambush unsuspecting passers-by with free, unsolicited hairstyling and a lecture on God.

But the movement will only really take off once some prominent Christian teachers get behind it and start telling all there listeners that if we really care about saving souls, we'll all do evangelical street hairstyling. In fact, if you're not out on the street doing hairstyling, you must not have any love for other people--you probably aren't a "real" Christian at all.

So grab your mousse and hit the bricks! We've got work to do!