cymbaljack

from John 3

2011-05-23T06:18:00.000-07:00

The footnotes in my ESV Bible tell me that the "same Greek word means both wind and spirit" and that the word commonly rendered "again" can also mean "from above." So here's a slightly different translation of the first part of John chapter 3:

Now there was a man of the Pharisees named Nicodemus, a ruler of the Jews. This man came to him by night and said to him, "Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher come from God, for no one can do these signs that you do unless God is with him." Jesus answered him, "Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born from above he cannot see the kingdom of God." Nicodemus said to him, "How can a man be born when he is old? Can he enter a second time into his mother's womb and be born?" Jesus answered, "Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born of water and the wind, he cannot enter the kingdom of God. That which is born of the flesh is flesh, but that which is born of the wind is wind. Do not marvel that I said to you, 'You must be born from above.' The wind blows where it wishes, and you hear its sound, but you do not know where it come from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the wind."

Of course that's a bit of a misrepresentation, too. We could substitute wind/spirit at every occurrence to get more of what the Greek feel is. But when I looked at this, it felt new and powerful, so I wanted to capture it.

Purple Tears

2010-01-25T05:54:00.000-08:00

Living where I do, I have many friends and acquaintances who are Vikings fans of one degree or another. To all of them, I offer my sincere sympathy for a tough, tough loss in a huge game.

For what it's worth, you can take comfort in knowing that yesterday you had the best defense in the NFL. Forget the Jets. Forget everybody. Only the Saints and the Colts had any chance of beating you yesterday. Sadly, one of them just barely managed to do it.

That you were even still in the game, let alone on the verge of winning it, after all those turnovers is a testimony to the amazing game your defense gave. Time after time they got a stop you desperately needed. They put your offense back on the field and gave you another chance.

And if any of you are hounding number 4 for that last pick, stop for at least a minute and ask how your team managed to get 12 men in the huddle on the play before. Without that 5-yard penalty, maybe they don't pass, or maybe he's more willing to just scamper for a few yards instead of feeling like he has to get a bunch back.

If after yesterday nobody snatches away your defensive coordinator with a head coaching job, they're fools, but that would set you up well for another try next year.

Finally, just this: don't be crushed. Don't be Vikings fans who believe that it is fated never to happen. Don't wallow in this for 12 years. Say, "We had a great team, and on a day when only half our team played with consistency we were right there with the best of them." Take it from a Chiefs fan: that's something worth having.

Time Keeps on Slippin', Slippin', Slippin'

2009-11-04T18:39:00.000-08:00

My sermon got pushed back to the 15th, which is definitely a good thing. Seems like I have a lot to catch up on at present. It's partially just a busy time of the semester, but also I've been trying to be a little more engaged this semester--which means more conversations with folks, more emails, more things I've agreed to be involved in.

So that's really all to the good. It just means I feel like I need about a week to pause the world and catch up. Fortunately, some smaller pauses are coming up, so I just need to take advantage of those.

Again with the talking

2009-10-19T15:19:00.000-07:00

Cornerstone 's pastors seem to have forgotten what they know about me once again, since they're threatening to let me preach on Nov. 8. I'm still convinced that having multiple voices in a church, and some of them layfolk, is a good thing. As I get older, I get less convinced that anybody should let me be one of those voices.

However, I have been dying to talk about unity with this group, so I'm looking forward to that opportunity.

True Tales from the Classroom

2009-08-31T18:30:00.000-07:00

Today in my Comics as Literature class, I successfully said the name of every student. I then did some little celebratory fist-pump or something. This exchange followed:

Student: That was kind of geeky, there.
Me: What class do you think this is? I get paid to read Watchmen.

Nobody makes me defensive with calling me a geek. I get defensive easy, trust me, but not about that. I fully admitted my geekness a long, long time ago.

Two quick thoughts after an afternoon at the movies

2009-08-15T17:28:00.000-07:00

One: District 9 is awesome. That's science fiction, baby!

Two: I don't want to draw attention to the particularly ridiculous and offensive movie we saw a preview for. Let's just say this:

"God is light, and in him there is no darkness at all."

It is God who always, unfailingly, works for good, to redeem, to love the unloveable, and to bring good out of plans for evil.

That's all I wanted to say.

Restorative Justice

2009-08-14T08:04:00.000-07:00

Realizing that upwards of three people read this blog each year, it's time to use my celebrity to push an important cause: Restorative Justice. Restorative Justice is an approach to wrongdoing that focuses on repairing the harm done and rebuilding broken relationships. I think if we were wise, we'd move away from our "lock 'em up" model of criminal justice and put restorative justice approaches in its place. (Granted, a few extreme cases might need to be removed completely from others. But the vast majority or our ridiculously enormous prison population don't require that. And no one is really benefitting from the current system.)

I'm still in the process of learning about this, but sports fans should check out this proposal for restorative approaches to the steroids issue, and everybody can learn more at www.restorativejustice.org .

What I did on my summer vacation

2009-06-20T09:14:00.000-07:00

Lately I've been having a lot of conversations that are all very similar. Someone asks me if I'm teaching this summer, and I say no. Then they always ask, "So what are you doing?"

This is partially a natural function of our culture with its obsession with "doing" and defining people by their jobs. The common opening question when meeting someone is "What do you do?" So I get that people are curious.

What I'm doing is not teaching.

What exactly this looks like varies from day to day. If we need something done around the house or something from a store, I try to do that while my wife is at work so that we have more time together. And I have plenty to do to prepare for fall semester. Teaching well is a constant work of adjustment and adaptation, and after my mediocre performance the past couple of years, I'm eager to do better. That'll require some prep work from me. I have a new book for one class, minor cleanup for another, and some significant updating for a third.

That won't take me forty hours a week for three months, though. And so people in our work-obsessed culture don't understand what I'm doing. They want me to have some big project that I'm involved in.

Nope.

I'm not teaching. That is the project. Along the way I may do some writing to think through my teaching. I also will go for walks and play games on the computer and read things I want to read and just sit and think.

But mostly I'm not teaching so that when the school year starts up again, I can be teaching and teaching well. I want to have the reserves I need to act with patience and creativity and love. That requires some healing and rest, along with time to pray and meditate and plan. And some time to just goof off and do whatever I want to do.

Maybe someday I'll be stronger and healthier where I won't find this need all this time to recover, or maybe not. Maybe other teachers don't need this. I do, and I'm not going to apologize or feel guilty about it, though my training by the culture tells me that I should.

It's my off-season, and I'm enjoying it.

The Hack

2009-03-09T07:15:00.001-07:00

Six months ago, more or less, everybody I bumped into at Cornerstone was reading The Shack, so I figured I'd give it a try.

But everybody in Ramsey County was also reading The Shack, so it took a while for my request to come in at the Ramsey County Library. I picked it up on Saturday. Read (and sometimes skimmed) it Saturday into Sunday morning.

As a statement of a particular systematic theology, it's clear and mildly entertaining. And for those who've never encountered this particular theology or this view of God, I can see where it could be compelling and important. I can even say that I'm glad I read it. It reminded me of some things I had let myself forget, and it helped me to focus on some important questions. Plus I'm glad I'll be able to talk about it somewhat knowledgeably if it ever comes up.

But as a book, and particularly as a novel, my primary impression is that it was really, really bad.

First off, it's a novel that pretends it's nonfiction, which is annoying at the least and fraudulent at worst. (In the two days since I learned this, I've already encountered people who were misled into thinking it was a true story. Lots of people don't know what a "novel" is, as I've found out in teaching.) Since this is not the 19th Century, I don't understand why we have to have a foreword and afterword that pretend like this is all true. When novels were first being figured out, this was somewhat commonplace, but we've moved past it a long, long time ago. Doing it now not only seems ridiculously outdated and unnecessary, but like a cheap stunt. (I suspect the real reason it was done is that the author wasn't able to figure out how to work the backstory in to the main text and so needed the foreword to somehow get it in there.) It's made worse by the fact that the foreword describes our main character as someone who's really at his best conversing with experts. This kind of flies in the face of the rest of the book, where he seems easily dumbfounded by concepts no more esoteric than fractals.

Structure aside, the book is just poorly written. Several sentences were befuddling for no good reason. Others were just cliched, dull, or laughably obvious. ("They had a veritable feast of burgers, fries, and shakes." Hoo boy. First, that's not a feast, veritable or otherwise. Second, if their food is that pedestrian, why do we even need to know about it?) One of the best lines of the book is "Faith doesn't grow in the house of certainty." Yes, you read that right. One of the best lines is an incomplete metaphor. It couldn't be the garden of certainty, the soil of certianty, or as my wife suggested, the hothouse of certainty?

At the heart of the book is the main character's grief over the murder of his young daughter. He kind of works through this in a way that's kind of authentic. But I really felt the book cheated there, shielding him from all the worst stuff and letting everything work out in the best way it possibly could to give him closure. I'm not sure how much comfort that will be to people who live in a nonfiction world where some people don't get a miraculous solution that leads to earthly justice and a tidy ending.

And like all interpretations, this one reveals some things clearly and conceals others. The God it points toward is amazing, and if this book is someone's first or second or third step toward that God, great. God will use it for good, as with all things. But the people who are launching the "Missy Project" to get the book wider recognition and make a movie and everything should realize that this book has no "literary qualities" worth praising. God is worth better than this, much better. I appreciate that this guy tried to do something good, and I value the good that's come from it. But as a reader and someone who's a bit familiar with literature, I'm disappointed by the product.

comics / graphic novel artist wanted

2009-02-23T18:12:00.000-08:00

I am seeking an artist to partner with on an original graphic novel suitable for periodical release.

Who I’m looking for: I know "ideal" may also mean "impossible." But to give you some idea of who I'm seeking, if you’re my ideal partner:
• You are skilled at drawing and at page layout. You understand how comics work because you’ve studied them. You’re passionate about this medium.
• You’re a responsible person who likes to finish projects. When you encounter difficulties, you communicate about them and address them rather than trying to cover them up.
• You like sci-fi and fantasy weirdness (see below for some examples of what I like) and are good at making up alien or fantastic creatures.
• You can draw convincing or appealing or cool looking scarecrows and dragons and robots and zombies and horses. (Actually, I don’t know if horses will be in the script, but if they are and you draw them poorly my wife will never forgive us.)
• You’re good at expressions.
• You want to be a collaborator rather than an employee. While I have a strong vision and strong opinions about stories in general and this one in particular, I want someone who will give me feedback and bring ideas to the table. I’m looking for someone who will enjoy building something together. (And someone who can afford to invest time into this knowing we don’t get paid until we sell the thing.)
• You’re cool with me exploring stuff about God and faith in the context of an adventure story. Whatever your personal beliefs, you don’t think it’s bad to ask serious questions and playful questions about metaphysical stuff, and you won’t be put off by working with a writer who’s a progressive Christian.
• You have a sense of humor that at least has some overlap with mine.

If you’re an “I can do it all” artist who inks and colors and everything, that’s great, but I’m perfectly willing to work with a skilled penciller who fits with me and the project. We can work together to find the rest of the team we need.

What you’re buying into: Here are the two pitches I’ve developed for this project at present. They may get refined as we work.
Short pitch: Chaos is a scifi/fantasy story of a group of misfits saving their strange home. It’s an adventure/comedy about accepting uncertainty and change. It’s conceived as a graphic novel but is suitable for single-issue release.

Longer pitch: Chaos is set in a strange world made up of a bunch of different, overlapping realities. Our heroes are a team called the “Salvage Squad,” a group of talented misfits gathered together to solve problems that the regular “Peace and Security Force” can’t handle. While their leader fights to get his team the support it needs to be able to operate, the squad stumbles across a plan to detonate a “reality bomb” that will keep the world from changing or, more likely, destroy it altogether. They overcome interpersonal conflict, departmental politics, a traitor in their midst, and zombies, robots, and various jerks to save the day.

At the moment I have about 40 pages scripted and a general idea of where the story goes. I’m working on a more detailed outline of the rest and will continue to produce script while I’m looking for a partner. I don’t think you’ll ever have to wait on me to catch up to you unless you’re some kind of superspeed artist.

Who I am: Here are a few relevant bits about me:
• I’ve always loved comics. I’ve been making a pretty serious study of them for about the past five years.
• I’m old enough to know better, which means I bring a certain maturity and stability to the table. On the other hand, it may mean I’m not fully in touch with the 16- to 24-year-old crowd.
• I’ve been teaching writing for over ten years and have written many things, including long projects. Although I don’t have any comics writing credits to offer you, I am convinced that I can do my part of this project, but I also realize that I will learn as I go. I want a collaborator, and I want to collaborate. And when I have someone waiting on me for something, I almost always beat the deadline.
• I’m going to list some things I like that each have at least one thing in common with this project. None of them are quite like what I’m trying to build here, and I’m not claiming that I’m near as good as any of these creators, but this list may give you some idea of my taste and my ambitions: Creature Tech by Doug TenNapel, The Order of the Stick by Rich Burlew, Firefly by Joss Whedon et al, Astro City by Kurt Busiek et al, Farscape, Mystery Men, Eureka. I have many, many other influences too, of course. But if you hate all of these, we may not be on the same page.
• I want to do something that’s cool and fun and funny and also serious and meaningful. I’d like to make writing comics my full-time job if I can because I think it’s exciting to create and because I’m increasingly convinced that real, powerful stories can do more good than most anything else I’m capable of.

Before I pick anyone I have to see not only sample drawings but at least 4 pages of sample comics work. Ideally these would be pages that you did from a script, so you can show me the script and the finished product. If you want to see something more from me, I understand and will try to comply.

If you’re excited about some of this but this particular project doesn’t appeal to you, I have a couple other ideas on the back burner that we could talk about.

If you’re interested, you can reach me at cymbaljack@gmail.com with questions or expressions of interest.

They call 'em movies, not "newvies"

2009-02-02T16:52:00.000-08:00

I have no observations on the Superbowl itself (game or the spectacle). I have observations on the commercials and particularly on the disturbing worldviews most of them implied (lots of misogyny and selfishness on display there), but I'm not going to bother.

I can't recall all the movies that got advertised last night, but three stood out to me because of what they had in common: Star Trek, Land of the Lost, and Race to Witch Mountain.

Yeah, they're all some form of remake of something old.

Now I'm totally geeked out about the Trek movie, which looks to be a lot of fun. (I'm not a J.J. Abrams fan, particularly, but there appears to be a lot to like there, especially Simon Pegg as Scotty.) And I'm not generally opposed to people revising old stuff. Some of the things I love the most are good revisions of old things. Battlestar Galactica is at the top of that list.

But it does seem like Hollywood is cranking out a lot of re-dos lately. It's not that people aren't making new and original and interesting things. But they don't often seem to come from Hollywood. And I notice that the two big comics publishers have for years mostly been continually ripping themselves off re-doing and re-re-doing etc. the same storylines with the same characters.

So I wonder if you have to be a little out of the mainstream, or a little out of the main money (at least) to do the bold new original and interesting things.

In any event, I wasn't thrilled with what I saw in the trailers for Land of the Lost and Witch Mountain not because they happen to be remakes or revisions, but because they look very much like they don't understand what the original had. You can re-do something old and do it right in different ways. You can remember what the original had and do that well, as we're all hoping Star Trek will do. You can honor what the original had while taking it in a different direction or poking fun, like the Brady Bunch Movie. Or you can discover the potential good that the original didn't fully realize, like Battlestar Galactica.

But Land of the Lost looks like they've thrown away all that was good about the original. Look, I know it had all the limits of Saturday morning 70s television. Acting wasn't winning any awards, and by even the standards of the time it wasn't sophisticated in special effects. But it drew in some serious sci-fi writers, and it was trying to be serious. It had some drama and some surprises. To turn that into a Will Farrell weird comedy vehicle seems like a failure of imagination.

Race to Witch Mountain appears to be in the same mold. While they haven't turned it slapstick, the new version looks for all the world to be a made-for-Vin-Diesel action flick. The original Escape to Witch Mountain was much stranger than that. It was about two kids who didn't fit in trying to find their real family. There was no need to put the whole world at stake (or whatever plot they've shoved on top of things). It was about ugly ducklings, outcasts who didn't fit. I'm not saying it was a great movie: it's actually been so long since I've seen it that I couldn't say. But it had a resonance to it that came from somebody dreaming up something original, something that meant something.

It's possible that either of those movies might be good in one way or another. But I think even so they'll grieve me. Not deeply, though. I know that if I look a little further off the beaten path, I'll find the original and interesting stuff. And one of the joys of our media-drenched age is that the originals of most everything are becoming more and more available.

Stories are becoming more and more important to me, so I'll keep watching for the weird, the original, and the true. I just won't usually expect it to have a big studio's name attached.

On Public Education

2008-10-20T06:49:00.000-07:00

Let me start out with a couple of disclaimers:

First, I can be accused of bias in this. I am the product of public education. I briefly got obsessed with the idea of a private high school but my parents wisely waited me out. Both my undergraduate and graduate colleges were state schools. And now I work for the state of Minnesota, teaching at a community and technical college. My opinions are of course drawn from my experiences, but I don't think that precludes me from thinking rationally about this.

Second, I don't want anything here to be construed as an attack on any individual or any specific decision. One of my dearest friends teaches at a private school and his kids attend it. And maybe that's a good thing and the best decision their family could have made. I'm not trying to second-guess that decision or others like it. I'm looking more broadly.

But I'm a champion of public education. And in particular, I wish the people who call themselves Christian who want to create and support private, "Christian" schools would reconsider.

Public education is good precisely because it is public. It is for everybody, so it benefits everybody. I mean not only that anybody can be a student and get the benefit, but also that because it tries to educate everybody, the community as a whole is better off. Plenty of people complain about public schools not doing a good enough job, but imagine a world without public schools. Imagine how many people would be completely illiterate and much more ignorant about the world around them. Historically, that's been the reality in many cultures.

In particular, though, public education is good for raising and training Christians. I know this is not the common view. People seem to want to send their kids and even their grown, college-aged kids to private schools that operate within a Christian worldview. I can understand this impulse. The idea is to make sure they learn truth from the start. But there are problems with this. I'm not sure that any institution can really be "Christian," though perhaps a community can be. Institutions somehow have pressures that push them in strange directions. That's probably a whole 'nother blog entry.

Here's the thing: sending a student to a school that tries to only teach Christianity is not how you educate them, it's how you indoctrinate them. And an environment like that is generally not going to show students how to wrestle with doubt: it's just going to drive it underground. I went to public schools, and one of the lessons I learned well was "I am not like all other people." I got to say no to things that other people said yes to. I got to find out that my family disagreed with some popular notions. To me, that's pretty good training for following Christ. I'm currently watching a family member make bad decisions all based on the lifestyle she's seen on television her whole life. If she'd been taught as a child that sometimes you have to stand apart from the ways of those around you, she'd be better off right now.

Now there's some evidence that private schools do a better job than public schools. I'm not sure how solid this evidence is. Oh, I know how my friend teaches, and he does it well. And private schools are sometimes able to provide better setups in terms of class size and the like. But any student going to a private school either has parents who are wealthier than most (even in our wealthy nation) or people who put a higher priority on education than most. And chances are, having parents like that makes a lot of difference too.

So what I'd like people to consider is this: what if we took all those resources and all the time and energy involved in setting up and running these private schools and contributed all of that to the public schools? If all the parents who care enough to sacrifice to get their kids to private school would show up at PTA meetings, they'd be a voice that couldn't be ignored. And if the extra money that it costs to send a kid to a private school was contributed to the public school, that'd help too.

And all of that wouldn't just help the private school kids: it'd help all the kids. It would be for the public good, and especially for the good of those who can't begin to afford a private school. And that's a very Christ-like thing to do.

Just to be clear, I wouldn't want these Christian parents to be trying to use their voice to make the public schools "Christian." Don't demand that literal six-day creation be taught in science class, ''cause that ain't science. Do demand that students be allowed to talk about God and faith when appropriate, and encourage your kids to learn how to do that in respectful and beneficial ways. You can do your "influential leader" report on Dr. King or Nelson Mandela and tell how their faith influenced their actions. Don't expect the school to conform to you, but act to transform the school through your loving presence.

In other words, your kids should be in the school the way they'll be in the world. Because it's a good thing to do, and because it prepares them for what they will someday need to do. Otherwise, someday they leave the nest and enter a world that isn't all built around being or acting Christian, and they're in for a shock. I think we can do better for them, and for everybody, by actively supporting public education.

Olympic Highlights

2008-08-19T04:52:00.000-07:00

I don't quite get the charge out of the Olympics that I used to. For one thing, it's hard for me to get on board with the "only the U.S. matters" feel that most of the broadcasting has. That's always been the case, but either I'm more sensitive now or the coverage is more one-sided now. But here are some thoughts and observations.

Last night the main gymnastics announcer went to the sports cliche about how "one of the most difficult things to do in sports" is to "win when you're expected to." I hear this a lot, and I think it's ridiculous. Usually the people who are expected to win, do. Sometimes they don't. This is because the hard things to do are
1) To win when you're the favorite and
2) To win when you're not.

In other words, it's hard to win a championship. That's why we make a big deal out of it. Being the favorite doesn't make it hard: it's just a hard thing to do.

I don't want to watch a qualifying heat for any race. I'd rather watch the championship round between two countries I couldn't find with an atlas in a sport I don't understand than see a runner or swimmer qualify to be in the actual race.

Generally, I'm not much for races. My taste in sports is for athleticism and real-time, interactive strategy. Most races don't have much strategy, and even to the extent they do, it's hard to detect it. I'd rather see volleyball or basketball or judo or something where the game is partially about how you adapt to what your opponent is doing.

Along the same lines, I'm not much for sports where you compete against the judges, like gymnastics and diving. It can be impressive to watch those people do what they do--I enjoy the athleticism there--but it's mostly listening to announcers nit-pick minute stuff and then complain that the judges got it wrong. If I want that, I'm a teacher: I can grade stuff and be told I'm wrong and get paid for it.

I'm apparently in the minority in just wanting the Olympics to introduce me to a wider range of sports and concentrate on the sports. I change the channel when they start doing one of their "human interest" bio-documentaries. I tried to watch fencing the other day while Jill was grading, but couldn't enjoy it because they didn't bother to explain what was going on.

And to all sports announcers everywhere: I don't care if it's a blowout or a meaningless game, you are paid to call the game. So call it. Tell me what happened, why that was a penalty, who got hurt, what the ruling was, who made the shot. I don't want to hear about who you had dinner with or what that athlete does during the offseason while the game is still going on.

Finally, I wish that anybody who talked about the Olympics would recognize what an achievement it is just to get there and quit acting like a silver medal is some kind of blight or humiliating character flaw. Those medals don't actually mean much in the big scheme of things, but to the extent we celebrate them, we shouldn't act like it's gold or nothing.

Dark, perhaps. Knight? Not so much.

2008-08-02T10:46:00.000-07:00

Some spoilers may occur in this blog entry. Plus, if you're like 99.993% of the general populace, you're going to disagree with me. This entry is not intended to cure or treat any condition.

I didn't like the new Batman movie.

Yes, Heath Ledger gave a good performance. Yes, there's some other good stuff to say about it. But on the whole, it didn't make much sense. And most of all, it's not a very good superhero story.

I'm kind of old-fashioned on this, because I think that superheroes should be (1) super and (2) heroes. Batman isn't much of either. He's pretty good at beating up thugs, and he's got some (disturbing) high-tech toys. But he doesn't do much that's impressive in the movie. He never does anything very clever, although he is somehow capable of getting a fingerprint off of a bullet that's been smashed.

He certainly isn't very heroic. I realize that the film wants to explore territory beyond the hero of flawless virtue, and that's fine. I like superhero stories with that kind of complexity. But it doesn't really do that. It gives the Joker the whole movie. There's really no realistic attempt to offer any kind of counter view to the Joker's twisted philosophy. And in the end, Batman decides that deceiving the public is the only way to give them hope. Ugh. And Batman acts like a big martyr to be treated as an outlaw, when in fact he absolutely IS an outlaw. "Reckless endangerment" is his M.O. through the whole thing. I just didn't like him, and I didn't care to root for him.

Also, the seven consecutive endings annoyed me. I thought they wasted Two-Face after setting him up well.

I could go on, but instead here's someone who said it better: Dark Knight review

The Virtue of Heresy

2008-07-15T07:58:00.000-07:00

This may be a little disjointed. Want to jot down some thoughts and see where they lead. Maybe someday this will become something more finished.

I understand why people worry about heresy. Personally, I have a strong commitment to truth, and I don't like it when people say wrong things or build arguments on faulty evidence. And when people teach false things about God, bad stuff can certainly result. I get all that.

Still, heretics keep pretty good company:

Most of what Jesus said was heretical to at least one group of his hearers. The Zealots couldn't agree with his recommendation to submit to the hated Roman oppressors ("give Caesar what is Caesar's"). The Sadduccees thought his teaching about a resurrected life after this one was heresy, and the Pharisees thought he was pretty much non-stop heresy, most especially for claiming to be God, but also for teaching that the Sabbath could be violated and food rules weren't more important than people.
Then both Peter and Paul took their turns with the heretical idea that non-Jews were welcome in the kingdom of God.
And then history is replete with people that we now think were right or partly right but who were heretical at the time: Galileo, Martin Luther, people who thought we shouldn't allow slavery, people who thought women could preach, people who thought blacks and whites could mix and even intermarry.

Remembering this good company gives me some comfort whenever I'm tempted to worry about being treated like a heretic.

'Cause Christians historically do not treat heretics well. In the western world, at least, we seem to be past the point of putting them to death or physically torturing them to make them change their mind, though once in a while I encounter somebody who I suspect would like to at least give that a try. But there are still plenty of people who want heretics to be scolded, censured, and excluded from fellowship.

There are many problems with such hard-line approaches. First is the faulty assumption that it proceeds from, that some human has such a perfect understanding of theology that they can accurately determine what "heresy" is. At least since the Protestant Reformation, we Christians have largely been trying to build a church that gets it all right in terms of beliefs or creeds. Many churches have claimed to do so. Unfortunately, these churches all disagree with each other, so most of them have to be wrong and probably they all are. Certainly none of these churches has distinguished itself as being obviously superior to all the others (and the rest of the world) in love, which is how Jesus said his disciples would be recognized. So either nobody's got that perfect doctrine, or having it isn't the route to the kind of life Jesus said we should and would live as his followers.

And given the more humble approach that we might not be 100% right about everything, then heresy might turn out not to be heresy after all. Now we don't think the earth orbiting the sun has anything to do with God or the reliability of the Bible, but once it was a life-or-death matter. Someday people might look back at us and think, "How did churches get so hung up on homosexuality?" Entertaining that possibility makes it possible for us to think about things.

I'm not saying that anything goes or that all ideas are equal. I think there are plenty of wrong theologies out there. I think I posted here a few years ago about the book I encountered that asked what sense we should make of the story of Jesus' resurrection "assuming the accounts are not to be taken literally." As I said then, that's quite an assumption. I think the people who discount the resurrection as only metaphorical are wrong. I don't think any evidence supports there position, and I think harmful things follow from such a conclusion.

But I don't think people who say that need to be silenced or excluded. I'm happy to engage in dialogue with them. Then I can explain why I find their reading forced, ahistorical, nonsensical, and potentially harmful. And they can explain why it's compelling to them.

The solution to heresy isn't stamping it out. You can't do it, and you shouldn't want to. Somewhere in your belief system is heresy, and probably more than you think. We mortals don't get to be certain about things, and we don't get perfect understand of the transcendent God and God's transcendent ways. So somewhere you took a metaphor God gave us to help us understand and took it too literally or applied it where it doesn't apply. Or you ignored a complimentary metaphor. Or something. And the only way for your heresy to get rooted out is to be exposed to other ideas and test them and see what stands.

That testing is pretty important, and I think people do it pretty poorly. Most people use the test "Is this what I already think, or consistent with it?" That is not a useful test for finding where you're wrong. Sometimes instead we ask "Is this the traditional teaching?" but there too it privileges one view without testing it. "Does this make me uncomfortable?" or any other feeling-based test is problematic too. Feelings are important, but they're too fleeting to have the final word on something like this. Anything new and surprising may make you nervous at first (or excited, if you're a different type of person), but that feeling doesn't make the new thing false (or true).

The first part of a better test is from Dallas Willard in The Divine Conspiracy:
The acid test for any theology is this: Is the God presented one that can be loved, heart, soul, mind, and strength? If the thoughtful, honest answer is "Not really," then we need to look elsewhere or deeper. It does not really matter how sophisticated intellectually or doctrinally our approach is. If it fails to set a lovable God--a radiant, happy, friendly, accessible, and totally competent being--before ordinary people, we have gone wrong. We should not keep going in the same direction, but turn around and take another road. (329)

To this I would suggest we add a second part. Willard's acid test is based on the assertion of Jesus that the greatest commandment is to fully love God with all you have, so a theology that hinders that cannot be right or good. Jesus gave a second command that in his words is "like" the first: love your neighbor as yourself.

Therefore I think the second part of the test is like the first: if the theology presented discourages people from loving others--all others--as themselves, it is a wrong path.

With those tests in mind, I'm following Paul and testing everything, to hold on to the good. And some of what I'm testing at the moment is what some people have called or will call heresy. And some of it is turning out to be good. Through it, God may yet get me to where I should be.

Supernatural Insights

2008-04-19T06:46:00.000-07:00

Yeah, I've been away a long time. Duly noted.

Anyway, had a couple of interesting psychic encounters this past week. Specifically, I encountered one of those little booklets in the supermarket checkout line titled Are You Psychic? Then in last week's Parade magazine, in their annual "What People Earn" story, they included a "psychic" who earned $38,000 a year.

So I've realized that in the public interest I need to state for anyone who reads this
You are not psychic.

More specifically:

If you need a booklet you buy in a supermarket checkout line to tell you if you're psychic or not, you're not.
If you're using your powers on a full-time basis and making only $38,000 a year, you're not psychic either.

I mean, if there really are psychic people, they would either be out preventing 9/11 type events or they'd all be retired and living in some tropical paradise. I picture a new person moving into a condo there and having this conversation:

Old resident: Hey, welcome to paradise. Oh...I perceive that you're psychic.
New resident: Um, well--
Old resident: Don't worry about it. Most of us are. I made my fortune by telepathically stealing insider trading info on Wall Street. What about you?
New resident: I placed a bet in October that the Giants would beat the Patriots in the Superbowl.

If you're not playing at that level, then trust me, ya ain't psychic. Concentrate on developing your real skills instead.

Odds n Ends - a sort of update

2007-10-04T06:27:00.000-07:00

Things are crazy, but here are some notes and observations:

Barry has once again gone temporarily crazy and asked me to preach at Cornerstone on October 28. I get "The Fall." That should be fun.
Attention Sprint: you do not get to tell me what I dreamed of as a kid, and you most especially do not get to retroactively make it so that I dreamed about the product you now happen to produce. No little kid dreams of a magic screen that connects them to other people.
The Big Bang Theory is so far the best surprise of the fall TV series. It makes me laugh. That is a good thing. Sample quote: "In what organizational system is a tray of flatware on a couch valid? At least, I presume it's a couch. The evidence suggests that the coffee table is holding a tiny garage sale." My dear wife, when she could breathe again, gasped, "Organizational nerd humor!"
My fantasy team sucks to date, but who could've guessed that the Rams and the Saints AND the Chargers would be virtually unable to generate offense?
Comics as Literature is going great. And we've got Persepolis as the common book at Century this year. It's a good time to be a comics fan at Century College.

And apparently, that is all I know at the moment.

Customer Disservice

2007-08-09T04:23:00.000-07:00

This week's customer disservice award goes to Earthlink. I'm a little tempted to give it to the entire ISP industry, given that I spent a lot of time over the last couple of weeks trying to find a good high-speed connection solution and couldn't: basically the only option is Comcast, the Evil Empire, and I don't want them to have any of my money.

But Earthlink eventually proved itself superior in this category. They're providing our dial-up service, so I went to check on whether we could switch to high-speed with them. No go, so I continued my research. But then...

Last night, they called me. Now I'm never a fan of being called at home by people who don't know me. We're on every "no call" list we can find. And even with charities that we support, I tell them to send us stuff through the mail. I don't want to make purchasing decisions while I'm on the phone.

So Earthlink calls to "follow up" on my DSL inquiry, which involves this woman rattling off a whole page of marketing script about how wonderful their DSL service is and how if I sign up now I get eight wonderful things. I ignore all of this because it doesn't tell me anything of actual concrete importance, like (a) how much it really costs after the intro price expires and (2) how fast it actually is (Qwest can offer us a whopping 256k connection!) and (iii) whether they can actually even provide me this service, since online it said they couldn't.

She finally asks me if I'm interested which lets her take a breath and me raise the crucial question, which is (iii): can they really provide me this service? So she "checks," because apparently (she claims) sometimes their online info is just wrong about whether they can or cannot provide service to someone. This makes me wonder: why are they storing two sets of data when they know one of them is wrong? What data is she looking at that contradicts what they've posted online? And why don't they just hook up their website to the real data?

But eventually (after asking me if I already had dial-up service, so I could point out that yes, we have it with her company, which is how they have any of my info in the first place) she concludes that no, they can't, but they'll let me know if that changes. I didn't even need to be part of this conversation. She could've just pretended to call me, imagined that I said ok, looked it up and disappointed "me" with the news that they couldn't provide the service.

Or Earthlink could check to see if they can provide a service before calling someone to offer it to them. Just a thought.

And if they've got time on their hands, they could get to the bottom of the whole two-sets-of-data-with-different-answers thing.

Fearless Harry Potter predictions

2007-07-19T05:26:00.000-07:00

Sunday's Pioneer Press featured an article that purported to predict what was coming up in the final Harry Potter book, but the article was disappointing: mostly it was review; the few predictions were vague and obvious.

But I'm willing to be more bold. Here's what I think is coming, drawing on my considerable expertise as someone who's read most of the series once and skimmed through the rest:

(This entry may contain spoilers, but I don't know if it does--that's the point.)

Snape is vindicated. Whatever he did to big D proves to have been at Dumbledore's request, and it won't actually be fatal. All along Snape has been doing the most dangerous task: acting as double-agent.
The prophecy has always been about Neville, not Harry. Neville sacrifices himself to defeat Volde once and for all. Harry feels angst over this, but learns something when he realizes that his heroics were not the result of destiny, but of acting on good values and being brave and all that. Plus it's hard to be down when Ginny is in love with you.
The house elves are freed or well on their way to being freed, and all the "old order" is pretty much turned upside-down. Magic society becomes more muggle-tolerant and Hermione is set to become a teacher and someday Headmistress of Hogwart's.
Harry faces a dark choice and seems about to give in to a desire to do something really bad (kill somebody, probably) but then relents at the last minute.
Harry somehow gets his parents back, probably through magic connection across time, but maybe through some kind of resurrection. Poor Neville only gets his parents back by dying to be with them in the afterlife.
By the end, Harry pretty much turns his back on magic. If he doesn't lose his power, he puts his wand away for good.
The book takes a good 800 pages to get to the end, of which only about 420 is necessary to actually tell the story, and yet millions of people are sad that there's no more of it.

So there's my guesses. We'll see if I ever manage to get it read to find out how close I was.

Observations on eating out

2007-04-18T06:10:00.000-07:00

These observations were inspired by our visit last night to a very fancy restaurant that will not be named because if (a) anybody actually reads this and (b) I were to name them, they would surely sue me out of existance (which wouldn't take much, at present).

No amount of french fries, regardless of quality, is worth $8. Bad french fries are not worth any money at all. Serving the french fries is a bizarre way, such as in a wire funnel, does not make them taste any better or make them worth more.

If in your restaurant kitchen you drop a 50-pound sack of salt so that everything - french fries, green salad, even the bread - becomes coated in too much salt to eat, you should close the restaurant until you can clean up and make edible food. Really, edible food is a pretty important feature of a restaurant.

You should never be scared of your ketchup.

All meat should be cooked. Despite what some people think, fish is meat. Meat is anything that at one time had eyes and moved around of its own accord. If you're going to eat something like that, you should cook it first, and waving it vaguely near some flame does not count. It needs to be cooked all the way through. If I wanted to eat raw food, I would go to a supermarket, which is full of raw food. The point of going to a restaurant is to get the cooking. Especially the meat. But basically, if you're serving food that is not (1) fruit, (2) breakfast cereal, or (3) ice cream, cook it!

My values in some very fundamental way are definitely middle class.

There's more to it than that

2007-04-16T05:29:00.000-07:00

Sunday's Doonesbury strip (go ahead and read it; I can wait) reminds me that whenever Christians let themselves get told that they have to support a certain candidate or a certain party because of one or two issues, what they're really doing is letting themselves be forced into supporting people and positions that they otherwise never would have. A book I used to teach from said something like, "Single-issue voting is just ignoring all the other consequences of your decision."

We need to be smarter than that. We need to remember that legislation is not the solution to every problem, and that the problems that trigger the strongest emotional response from us are not necessarily the problems that God considers the most urgent. If we forget, the people who run the political parties will remember, and they will gladly manipulate us to serve their own ends.

Time to be "shrewd as serpents."

Dear NFL: You Suck

2007-02-04T05:02:00.000-08:00

Apparently the NFL doesn't want churches to hold Superbowl parties. They don't want the game played on big screens outside of homes, and churches don't have the right to use the word "Superbowl" in certain contexts. And they're starting the enforcement of this with a church in Indianapolis, which is, you know, rather connected to the game in that their team is a 7-point favorite to win.

I am not a lawyer and don't intend to claim to know what the rules are. In fact, I just assume that the NFL has such an expensive team of lawyers that they're completely right about the law. And though it's tempting, I won't go into how this indicates that the law is screwed up.

But as we've all seen many times, there's a big difference between being legal and being right. And the NFL is out to prove it again. At first their objection was around the church having a cover charge and using their trademarked term, but after the church agreed to drop both of those they still squashed the party.

The reason: they're worried about TV ratings. Nielsen can't estimate how many people might watch at such events.

OK, first, if you have a problem with how Nielsen determines ratings, take it out with them. Leave the rest of us out of it. Second, are you suggesting that because your ratings might be a little inaccurate, you're going to have trouble selling Super Bowl ads? Can't you go to your advertisers and say, "Hey, you know that our real ratings are higher than this because so many people watch it at a friend's house or at a party somewhere."

It's also interesting that this ratings accuracy problem doesn't apply to sports bars.

So anyway, it's stupid. But I'm sure the NFL is doing what's best for them. I just hope this means they're going to be consistent about it. I hope that next week we see a press release from the NFL saying that they are banning all of their teams from asking for or accepting any public money to build stadiums for their teams to play in. It's clear from this event that NFL isn't about contributing to a community by giving them something to bond over: it's just a business, and all that matters is the business. If they have their own way (and someday, eventually, they will) the NFL will become entirely a pay-per-view operation, or at least confined to media outlets they wholly own, like "NFL network." They still won't be able to even get the down and yardage right in the broadcast, but everyone will have to directly pay them to see it, and that's all they care about.

Commence blog dump

2007-01-29T09:27:00.000-08:00

Warning: you are entering a low-coherence zone. Hardhats optional.

The first album by Hyper Static Union is currently blowing me away. Sample lyric from "Now That It's Over":

I was clinging to the very thing that held me down
Then I fell in love with the beast that kicked me around
I was defending the criminal that killed me
I was biting the hand that healed me

They're kind of Queen and kind of P.O.D. and I haven't figured out what else yet. They surprise me. My wife's comment was "We approve of the harmonies."

Apparently, Century College has a blog. Who knew? It's kind of fun--different comments by students. I don't know who's doing it--hadn't heard about it until the always-reliable writing center coordinator tipped me off.

I have been trying to think of a really witty way to express my disappointment with Pan's Labyrinth. I can't. It's just pretty dreary and not very fantastic at all. It may be a fantasy movie for people who don't like fantasy, at least based on how many critics are all excited about it. Fair warning is this: if you've seen a TV commercial for it, you've seen pretty much every cool fantasy image in it. The rest is all dreary real world war stuff. If that's your thing, enjoy.

I'm hopeful that Cornerstone, the church my wife and I attend, is headed into a time of deepening and maturity. They need to get strong quick, because Barry asked me to preach on March 18, so who knows what damage I'll manage to do. I know that yesterday we had two great worship services. For me, it was great 'cause I've finally gotten where I really can worship when I'm playing. It's partially about having achieved enough technical skill that I can play without constantly thinking about it, but it's more a matter of the heart.

My semester is off to a great start. I'm still trying to figure out how to get authentic questions, especially questions generated by students, at the center of all my classes, but that's an ongoing issue that I don't ever expect to "solve."

I'm behind on my work for the new comics class that starts in fall. I still hope to have it mostly in shape before the semester ends so I don't end up spending all summer working on it. But I need some dedicated time to put together documents and make final decisions about what projects to do and build the D2L site and all of that. And I've got a lot of comics to read.

My life is very painful, and you should pity me. ;)

Plus Century has adopted Persepolis as the college's "common book" for 2007-2008. The era of comics at Century College begins Fall 2007!

So I'd better go get ready for it.

T minus 2 days, and counting

2007-01-15T05:00:00.000-08:00

Yesterday morning as I was setting up to play at church, I noted the date on my song list, and it suddenly hit me that school starts on Wednesday.

There is absolutely no sensible reason why this should have hit me suddenly. This has been a very long break--maybe even too long, though mostly it's been a blessing. And I've known it was coming. I worked a couple of weeks ago to get everything up and ready, did more here and there last week, and even went to campus for a couple of meetings at the end of last week. It's no surprise to me that we're almost there.

But somehow on Sunday it felt shocking. I don't know what that's about.

Part of it, perhaps, is that I'm excited but uncertain about this semester. I'm trying to push out of the easy comfort zone I'd fallen into and do the real thing, and that means it doesn't feel automatic anymore. Everything is thrown open to questioning again. Conclusions I'd drawn before about how grading should work, how to start a semester, how to use our time, are all back out in the open. That's good, it's necessary, but it makes me a little antsy. The old way may have had plenty wrong with it, but I'd done it before, and there'd never been a crushing disaster. With the new way, no such guarantee.

And that's the thing about being real, I guess: the guarantees go out the window. Jesus was the most authentic person ever, and he got lied about and beaten and killed for his trouble. And some of the people (a lot of them, really) he reached out to didn't take what he offered.

So I resolve (once again) to set aside safe and do the real thing. On the surface it may not look that much different, or parts of it may get me into trouble. As I think about ways to connect deeper with students, a colleague I respect greatly cautions me that such behaviors might be disruptive to the department, if it appears that some students are getting some kind of "special treatment." And that could be just the first of many things. But as I think through my years of teaching, the ones that matter the most to me are the ones where somehow I made real connection. And the common factor there seems to doing the best teaching I can while being authentic. We'll see what the new semester brings.

And JQ, frisbee sounds like fun--but I think it may have to warm up just a smidge before I join you.

To blog or not to blog

2007-01-11T06:11:00.000-08:00

That is the question.

Look, I'm erratic. Scroll down to the post before this, brush the cobwebs off it, and you'll see I took three months off. And it's not like a lot of people are eagerly reading this.

But if I tried to get more consistent, maybe some people would. There are a few people I email who periodically ask me how it's going--and the blog could indicate that. I could use it to be more connected with my family. But the multiple audiences get tricky.

'Cause my family would probably just be hurt and mortified to read some of my opinions about some things. And my students too might be better off not hearing some of my blunt opinions out of the context of our class. They might draw some false (but understandable) conclusions about what I think about them. The things I want to say to the people I go to church with are not necessarily the same as the things I want to tell the people I work with.

Oh, I know, the culture of the Internet is largely that you can find any kind of offense you're looking for without much trouble, and that you have to pick what you read and take it with a grain of salt and remember that YMMV. But I don't want to take that as license to be cruel. I don't want to hurt my parents by rubbing in their faces how different some of my opinions are from theirs. I don't want a bunch of people at Cornerstone being alarmed about me.

Well, I want some of the people at Cornerstone to be alarmed, actually. But mostly either people I'm close to or people who are in positions to do important things. And I want them to be alarmed about thinking about what it really means to be disciples of Jesus, not to be alarmed that I read a comic book with dirty pictures in it.

I don't want students to read my blog and mistakenly think that I will grade them more harshly if they don't share my religious convictions or my politics or my preference for movies or music or sports teams.

So the question is, what now?

It's out of the question to try to keep multiple blogs for multiple audiences. I've experimented with that and never gotten any good results from it. I could keep this one blog and limit the audience for it, but I'm not sure where the limits need to be.

Maybe that's not true. I think I know where the limits need to be. If someone gives some indication that they want to know what I think, then here it is. In pieces, erratically.

So if you're reading, don't take anything here to be ALL of me. It's a bit of me, at this moment. I don't expect you to agree with me. I won't love you any less (or more) based on how you react to this.

But here are five things in my head right now:

The Kansas City Chiefs picked a really stupid week to experiment with running the Minnesota Vikings' offense.
Donald Miller's Searching for God Knows What --while I disagree completely with about 4 points in it-- gets to the heart of one of the most important ideas that modern Christians need to wrestle with: Christianity as about relationship, not abstractions.
As the new semester starts, I'm going to be turning more of my attention to relational issues. I'm trying to use that as a guide for how I use the time available to me. In my classes, I'm trying for better balance of "getting it done" and "slowing down to dig deeper."
It is time--way past time, actually--for Christians to absolutely respond to the GLBT community with love. We must immediately cease all efforts to politically or socially oppress them. We must even quit worrying about publishing our notion that sexual deviance is sin. (Not that all Christians 100% agree with that, which we need to admit.) None of us are worried about making sure everybody knows we think greed is sin, and everybody around us is greedy. We need to show these people we love them so that they know that God loves them. No more attacks. No more fear-mongering. No more hatred.
I start my "comics as literature" class in fall, and whatever "spare" time I have this spring will be spent getting it put together. This is great news for me. It's been a long time coming, and I can't wait to start it.

So there's a tiny bit of me, today. Maybe more in a week or so, if anybody's watching.

TV and life's other little disappointments

2006-10-04T04:27:00.000-07:00

A sign near us says "Full-time toddler opening $153/week."
Now, it's not great money--clearly below minimum wage. But the work isn't hard at all. I mean, you'd be paid to nap!
It's worth considering.

One word of advice: no one should ever sign up for an Internet discussion forum and by their 3rd overall post be telling people that they have everything all figured out. Trust me.

But the real subject is how I'm disappointed in every new TV show I've tried. Here are the highlights:

Studio 60 with the Overlong Title I dismissed after seeing about 20 minutes of a random episode. I realize that this looks like I'm judging it far too soon, and I know a lot of people like it. My suspicion is that most of those people haven't seen an Aaron Sorkin show before. I've watched all of Sports Night, his first TV show, and I watched all of the first couple of seasons of West Wing (before it got completely ridiculous). And Studio 60 is, to me, just more of the same. It's a bunch of articulate, witty people who know a lot of obscure little factoids trying to do something under terrible deadline pressure and gradually revealing their Shocking Secrets.

And the thing is, I'd like to imagine that people who work in the White House can rattle off statistics about traffic accidents and exports and financial whatevers, and I know that at least some of the people in sports broadcasting carry around amazing statistical details in their heads. I'm not so sure that writers and producers of Saturday Night Live--I mean, Friday Night in Hollywood--are worried about such things.

Heroes was what I was most excited about, and therefore what I'm most disappointed in. It's stupid and flat and often boring, and I don't care about any characters at all, partially because they aren't characters, they're just little play figures who get moved around a big board in order to advance the arbitrary (if I can use the word) "plot." It reminds me of when I was six and had a little Fisher Price Village playset. The characters on Heroes have about as much internal consistency as those little plastic figurines, and they act according to the same logic. Why does the guy with the mustache leave his fancy apartment with steaks on the grill to go across the street to get his hair cut? Because I want to use the cool bridge across the street and spin the wheel that changes the traffic light. Why is there a fire? Because I want to turn the crank that makes the siren noise! Why is there a cheerleader walking across the field in the middle of full-contact football practice? Because the writer wants another chance to have her display her power in public. (And apparently her power is "gets hurt really easily," since her neck snapped from being knocked over. If this guy wrote a movie about the NFL, the mortality rate would be 90%.)

OK, it's stupid, enough.

Jericho is also stupid too often, but there's more of a sense that it matters and that these people are people instead of cardboard cut-outs, so I'm willing to give it a little slack. But I wish they'd be more careful about the details, and I'm worried that when everything is revealed it won't be very satisfactory. For the moment I'm willing to watch it if I remember.

But so far, there's nothing I'll miss at all. So, more time for me to read comics.

Odds & Ends

2006-09-17T04:45:00.000-07:00

ESPN radio quote of the week: "When we come back...we'll tell you what you think." Just one more service provided by the nationwide leader in sports.

People either need to stop using the word "fundamentalist" or else learn what it means. Just because someone is a Christian and takes the Bible seriously (even literally at times when it seems to want to be taken literally) doesn't make them "fundamentalist." The vast majority of Bible-based Christians are not fundamentalists.

Here in Minnesota a couple of candidates in supposedly "conservative districts" tried to build their campaigns around opposing gay marriage--and lost their primaries. I'm hoping this means that people aren't being suckered by that non-issue any more. I think we have a couple of more important things to worry about than passing ammendments banning gay marriage.

Now Louisville's quarterback is out for 4-6 weeks, after they already lost their star running back. I had counted on them to at least win the Big East this year, but now that starts to look pretty tough.

Tommorow I need to update my comics as lit blog to include (among others) my comments on Scott McCloud's Making Comics. Short version: it's another great McCloud book (though not appropriate for my comics as lit class), and it makes me wish that even as poor at drawing as I am that I could somehow have the time and resources to really make a serious attempt to make comics.

The Dangers of Anonymity

2006-09-04T06:15:00.000-07:00

Let me say first that I understand the desire to be anonymous well enough. There's still a part of me that wants a P.O. Box so I don't have to tell everyone in the world where I live. And I have a burnable email address that doesn't have any of my real information associated with it to use when a website I don't especially trust or want to be connected to for the long-term wants an email address. Some people, and many companies, will abuse any information you give them. So you keep a low profile to protect yourself. I get it.

Saturday at the mall I told my wife about my excellent plan to produce some kind of sarcastic "how to park across 4 spaces" document to put on all the cars, (especially) trucks, and (very especially) SUVs I see that can't or don't confine themselves to a single parking space. My wife wisely noted that this would be trying to control something that's beyond my responsibility, and I allowed that she was right. And there's no guarantee that these people would change their behavior.

But I think what I wanted to do, as much as anything, was deny them their anonymity. I've become convinced lately that a lot of the evils we do--especially the petty, little, day-to-day evils, but also some of the biggest ones--are possible only because we refuse to see the people we hurt. All of the excesses of America are possible because our TVs only show us people still richer than ourselves. When they occasionally show someone poor, either they make it out to be their own fault, some kind of deserved poverty, or we change the channel. We don't want to see them.

When I'm driving along in a straight line at a steady, legal speed, and someone suddenly pulls out to turn left in front of me, forcing me to brake aggressively to avoid hitting them, I notice that they'll never make eye contact with me. Even if I give them a bit of horn, they just stare straight ahead: If I don't see you, I didn't just screw you over.

So I figure the jerks who park across two and three spaces do it partially 'cause they can't see the people who are inconvenienced (and I admit that's all it is) just so they can -- I guess I don't know what they get out of it. So part of me wants to try to force them to see the people around them. I think we all need to do a better job of seeing the people around them. America has gone as far as anyone ever has toward individualism, isolation, and lack of community. Our most abiding relationships are with TV characters on shows that aren't even being made any more, because we can see them five, six, eight times a week. There's no one else we let into our homes eight times a week. We can't look to see if we cut them off, if they needed something.

We just keep staring straight ahead.

The Exhaustive List of Every Good Movie Released in summer 2006

2006-07-29T06:57:00.000-07:00

Ad Watch

2006-07-17T07:05:00.000-07:00

First, despite all evidence to the contrary, I am not dead yet.

Now on to some TV ads worth objecting to:

All the ads for Sleeperman --sorry, I mean Superman Returns with the critical quotes that suggest it's a good movie are lying. It's boring and silly and has about two really interesting images. Enough said.

The ads for Pirates of the Carribean: Dead Man's Chest likewise suggest that it's a great movie, instead of a ridiculous sequel that manages to be funny but not much else. We have once again proved, though, that you can make any sequel of anything and no matter how poor it is, someone somewhere will say it is "better than the original!"

AIG auto insurance has an ad in which a guy is lonely and can't meet the pretty blonde lady in his apartment building until he changes his car insurance company. Seriously. As we watched it, I said "Is he going to get the girl because he changes his insurance?" Jill didn't believe it could be that blatant, but it is.

And the Ford Motor Company president is appearing in ads to announce that his company now has a major marketing campaign to convince us that Ford has been working hard on fuel efficiency for years, instead of what they've actually been doing which is making enormous, fuel-wasting trucks and SUVs. All these auto manufacturers are now bragging about how many of their cars get 30 mpg or better. Cars have been able to get 30 mpg for 30 years! This is not an accomplishment. It's a clear sign that none of you have been trying to improve in this area.

Getting the message

2006-03-14T04:19:00.000-08:00

Last night I realized that TV has a simple, two-pronged message:

1) No one is any better than you, and most people are worse. This is especially the message of most sitcoms, which present people being really awful in every possible way. This is a reassuring message for most folks, it seems, knowing that everybody else continually does things as bad, or worse, than the things you do. A TV character who might seem to be superior in some way will always be revealed to be selfish and petty before too long. And characters who really should be trying to be good will always turn out to be hypocrites, self-righteous tyrants, or nutcases.

2) Despite the fact that no one is any better than you, some people are notably better off than you. So the route to self-improvement offered by TV is not any attempt to connect with God or do the right thing or contribute to others, it's becoming more like the wealthiest people on the planet. If you can just have a little more stuff, a little bit better car, a more expensive house, then you can be more comfortable, and that's all there is. No other kind of improvement is possible. This was driven home to me by the premiere of Julia "Can't Break the Seinfeld Curse" Louise-Dryfus' new show, in which she plays a woman with a very nice house, a brand new car, and her own business who compares herself to the exclusive people who can afford to send their kids to a rich private school. (Only funny line of the show: her son walks into this school, looks around, and says, "Where are all the black kids?")

You'd think that fasting would be leading me into some deep insights about the nature of God or something. Instead, I figured something out about TV. But it reminds me which way truth lies.

Okay

2006-02-09T06:24:00.000-08:00

There are those who think that it's impossible for anyone to be my friend merely because I am arrogant, callous, and cruel. But the depth of feeling I can inspire in others is clearly shown in this actual transcript* of a conversation yesterday:

Friend: [makes some declarative statement]
Me: Okay.
Friend: Shut up.
Me: I said "Okay."
Friend: You didn't say "Okay," you said "Okay."
Me: Okay.
Friend: Shut up.

Not everyone can produce so much love and warmth with so little effort.

* "Actual transcript" indicates only that it is, actually, a transcript of some kind. No guarantee of accuracy is intended. But this conversation, more or less, did "actually" happen. The issue, supposedly, was how I said "Okay." But to me, it still sounds like an Abbot and Costello routine.

Things I Can't Explain

2006-01-11T04:38:00.000-08:00

Why there is no upper limit to the number of cop, lawyer, and cop/lawyer shows that can be on TV at one time
How soap works
Why my 7:45 a.m. class filled faster than a different section of the same class that starts at 10:00
Why anyone would bother to play Quidditch if they weren't going to be a Seeker, since 95% of the time "Which Seeker won?" and "Which team won?" come down to the same thing
Where they find the people to be on and watch all these "reality" shows
Why Jill loves me
How it is that every time somebody discovers something that's new to them, they invariably become obsessed with it and start claiming that this is the greatest discovery in history and it solves every problem and everyone has to do this right away--even if it's well documented that other people have discovered it first, and yes, it's got some good features, but there are some problems too
Why more people didn't go see Serenity
What it will take to convince Christians that they shouldn't ally themselves with people who are reprehensible, even if they happen to agree on one or two political points
Why USC called their final time-out on the 2-point conversion, instead of saving it for when it would matter

Imperial Thoughts

2005-12-19T11:51:00.000-08:00

When I am, finally and inevitably, swept into power as emperor of this dreary world, among my mandates shall be these:

The consumption, by humans, of celery shall be strictly prohibited. Attempts to cause humans to consume celery, such as by including it in soups or fried rice, shall be subject to even more severe penalties. I remain convinced that God continually watches us, saying, "I can't believe they're eating celery." Yes, celery is edible. So is paper, but to date, no one has tried to list it as an ingredient in a canned soup.
Musac will be banned for any kind of "broadcast." Stores that want to provide a musac experience, and especially one involving Christmas songs, will have to offer headsets for those patrons who actually want to hear the stuff. (These patrons will be noted and watched for other signs of mental illness.)
Any member of the Kansas City Chiefs defensive squad who blows a tackle will be sentenced to two months' service as valet and errand-boy for my father, who deserves some kind of payment for being a loyal fan.
Naturally, the landscape of television will be changed quite radically. For starters, Joss Whedon will be given his own network to do with as he wishes. Any broadcast hours he cannot personally fill will be assigned by him to someone he trusts who has a good idea.
If Whedon gets tired of TV, he will be instructed to join forces with Peter Jackson in order to create the Ultimate Movie Of All Time.
Everyone involved in the creation of all the non-Spiderman Marvel movies will be charged with crimes against humanity.

Now it may seem at first glance like I would not make a very good dictator. In fact, some might argue that I would obviously be just another power-mad tyrant driven by my whims. And that is probably true. But for the record, if I decided to spy on the people I ruled, I would just declare that spying would henceforth be happening. I would not attempt to justify it based on some kind of self-contradictory claim of "defending" the people I was spying on from "enemies of liberty."

And I would never make any claim that I was always right and my detractors were always wrong, or were disloyal or unpatriotic. My position would be, "Of course I am wrong, but you cannot stop me." That is the only reasonable and honest position the emperor of the world can take.

I am counting on that refreshing honesty to keep the public off-balance for at least a year or two, giving me plenty of time to prepare to put down the inevitable uprisings.

I Dream of Genie or Be Careful What You Wish For

2005-12-08T04:42:00.000-08:00

Everybody always talks about getting 3 wishes granted. Often this fantasy involves a genie who grants the wishes. Well, I have recently made a very important discovery. Brace yourself (hold on to your monitor, if necessary), here it is:

There really are wish-granting genies.

Do not get too excited. I have a friend who recently encountered one of them, and her summary of the experience was, quote, "I hate your damn genie!"

She has good reason to feel this way. What the genie had done to her was to make her quite sick twice within about a three-week period. She had made the mistake of wishing not to work a full week for the last five or so weeks of the semester. She thought she would accomplish this by a combination of holidays and perhaps taking some personal time, or maybe one "mental health" sick day.

But her wish was granted, in classic, overly-literal fashion, by a genie who was hanging around. It turns out that everybody gets three wishes granted, at some point in their lives.

Unfortunately, it also turns out the genies are just as lazy and malicious as the rest of us, and they get to pick which three wishes to grant. So they ignore all the "million dollar" wishes, and the ones involving movie stars, sports cars, and careers that don't actually involve doing any work. (All of this is probably for the best, really, but that's the subject for another blog.) But when we come up with a relatively small wish that they can grant merely by screwing up our lives, then they're johnny-on-the-spot.

So as the old saying goes, be careful what you wish for--a genie might be listening.

Disaster Averted

2005-11-21T04:39:00.000-08:00

Well, I'm certainly glad the big scare is over. I was very worried.

The scare in question was that it appeared, for a time, that Americans might actually be thinking that happiness and significance could be found somewhere other than material possessions. I know: it's scary thinking, definitely heresy or treason or something. But the evidence was unmistakable. Even MasterCard, yes MasterCard, was running ads acknowledging that what people really wanted was things that were "priceless."

Now fortunely for American culture, the good people in marketing managed to make a series of ads that clearly implied that all of these "priceless" things like love, connection to family, pride, etc., actually could be purchased, indirectly, with a MasterCard. It's nice how that worked out. Still, it appeared that America was moving away from the view that all we want or should want is a big pile of material things.

The good news is, the new ebay ads make it clear that the threat has been headed off. Now we know that whatever "it" is, you can find "it" on ebay.

So as soon as I'm done here, I'll surf over there and order up some self-confidence, a side of unconditional love, and maybe a little joy and peace to get me through the holidays!

Unrelated side notes:

To the person in the giant Lexus SUV that briefly parked next to me at the post office: despite all the harm they will do to you in your lifetime, neither excessive wealth nor impatience count as a "handicap."
I said all along that the Bears were the only team to be worried about in the NFC North. Everybody believe me now?
I wonder what we're getting into when Disney does Narnia. Do they make it less sexist? Less explicitly Christian? More "action-packed"? More "Disney"?
I've almost survived a first semester back. Two or three weeks ago I started to feel almost normal again--like, at least briefly, I was caught up.

Those tricky protocols

2005-10-27T04:09:00.000-07:00

Took me an extra attempt to get connected this morning. The first time, I got an error message that said, "Your computer and the remote computer could not agree on PPP protocols," which makes it sound like they're involved in some tense cease-fire negotiation.

Remote computer: OK, I'll give you access to the Internet, but there are going to be some pop-ups.
My computer: No way. My user is very strict about this.
Remote computer: Well, if you can't show us some flexibility, I just think this whole thing is pointless. Do you want access or not?
My computer: Look around! You let all these other computers have access. Why am I any different?
Remote computer: We're not talking about them, we're talking about you.

My misunderstanding is a result of someone writing an error message that's intended to be somewhat user-friendly, at least compared to past generations of error messages:

Error (13)
"This program has performed an illegal operation and will be shut down." (Death penalty for software.)
and the ever-helpful
Syntax error

But because error messages are still being written by computer geeks, they don't quite manage to communicate to ordinary humans. It may be a while before we get a message saying

Hey! I couldn't connect because that other computer and I aren't even talking the same language. Either it has a serious problem or I do. Trying again later is your best bet, or double-check that you're trying to connect me to the right computer.

Just as well. Computers are still striving to be awesome as much as helpful, and a little mystery goes a long way towards awe.

Football explained

2005-10-17T17:49:00.000-07:00

Louisville lost in OT, breaking my heart. I am still counting on them to handily win the Big East. They were easily better than every Big East team last year, and were only prevented from winning the conference by the technicality that they weren't a member of it yet.

In the NFL, Kansas City managed to overcome Washington, and I'm counting on my Eagles to have their usual strong performance coming out of the bye.

As for the local team, maybe they just suck, has anyone considered that? And maybe that's all about letting the only real coach the team had get hired away, leaving them adrift with no one at the rudder. Lo says that she watches Vikings games for the same reason she watches Special Victims Unit: morbid fascination. Maybe my show should be called CSI & Order: Special Criminal Death Investigations--Minnesota Vikings Division. It could feature gory close-ups of Dante Culpepper getting sacked.

So when it comes to football, there are reasons, but never any explanations.

Mystery

2005-10-05T12:39:00.000-07:00

Like every good American, I feel it is my number one obligation to make an obscene amount of money and then refuse to share it. My latest idea for doing that is to produce a #1 television show, and I think I've got an idea that can't miss.

My new show is called CSI & Order: Special Criminal Death Investigations--Detroit. The show will feature lots and lots of shots of violence in extreme blood-splattering close-up. Every single week the body count will be as high as some 80's horror movies.

The only worry, of course, is that viewers might not be able to tell my show apart from the fifty other shows exactly like it. But we can be sure it would be popular.

I'm not sure why shows like this are popular among a bunch of people who's only direct exposure to violent crime came when they were 10 and a schoolyard bully pushed them down in the process of stealing a basketball. Usually they do involve the bad people getting caught and (hypothetically) punished, probably on some other show about prisons. So maybe it's a hunger for justice. Or more likely, it's some kind of morbid fascination with violence that probably isn't too healthy.

So anyway, the good news is that when I don't watch TV, I have more time for drums and comics.

Nearly Serene

2005-09-29T05:53:00.000-07:00

Well it's almost time. The nutcases (and those with no work or school on Friday) will be at midnight shows. And if you don't already have plans for the weekend, you too should go see Serenity seven or eight times to drive up the initial box-office receipts and make sure Whedon has the cash and popularity to get Firefly back on TV.

All of that said, I'm not going until next weekend, so I don't want to hear anything about it. So if you bump into me and start to say anything that I think might be related to the movie, I'm going to cover my ears and run away singing, "I can't hear you!" Possible triggers for making me run away would be these:

The names Mal, Zoe, Wash, Jayne, River, or Simon. (If you are named Jane or Simon, don't try to introduce yourself to me for a week.)
Comments like, "I thought it was pretty good but--" I will be out of earshot before you can explain you were talking about Harry Potter VI: Revenge of the Dark Side (or whatever it was called).
"Joss Whedon is my master now" t-shirt sightings.
"Guess what I did this weekend?" I'm sure it's wonderful, but I can't afford to take the chance that you'll tell me about it.

So thanks for supporting the movie, but stay far, far away from me until I can support it too.

What went RIGHT for the Vikings

2005-09-19T07:01:00.000-07:00

As Minnesota Vikings fans reel from the embarrassment of this week's game, they may get too pessimistic, as though there is no good news. They are likely overlooking these good points:

Thanks to Philadelphia (go Eagles!) and Chicago, Minnesota's loss was not the worst of the day.
2-point conversion rate: 100%.
Head Coach Mike Tice still believes in the team. So much so that, down almost 30 points with 3 minutes remaining, he opts to go for the onside kick. When that fails, he uses a timeout before the 2-minute warning to try to have enough time for the comeback.
Both "Minnesota" and "Vikings" spelled correctly in the official program.
Back-up quarterback Brad Johnson kept on sidelines to protect him from unnecessary risk of injury.
String of quarters without an offensive score finally snapped at seven.

So it looks to be another great football season in Minnesota! Get on the bandwagon now--there's plenty of room.

Back to Basics

2005-09-16T04:18:00.000-07:00

Coming back from sabbatical has been both easier and harder than I'd expected.

Some things immediately felt familiar and natural. I wasn't particularly nervous about the first-day stuff. Organizing small groups, answering the familiar questions, all felt like I hadn't missed a day. But I was very intimidated at the thought of learning all those names--even though I used all my same techniques and got through it right on my traditional schedule. Somehow I expected it to be harder.

I'm more aware of being an introvert now. I really noticed how difficult and tiring those first three "getting to know you" weeks were. Now that I kind of know these people, and they're beginning to trust me, it's a little easier to go to class.

I had forgotten how much it takes to get some students to be equipped to be responsible for the course schedule on their own. I had forgotten how much conferences take in terms of energy, even when they are completely peaceful and productive. And apparently, I've forgotten how to get things done in a timely manner, because I can remember sometimes feeling like very briefly I was caught up, but I'm nowhere near those parts now. Part of that is that I've done a better job of encouraging students to give me drafts, which translates to more work for me but better results for them--so that's a tradeoff that's worthwhile. But I can't do everything.

One of my resolutions coming back was to continue to do the important work of reflecting on classes and being flexible and bringing my creative energy to the classroom--coming up with new activities, new approaches. But that just takes time, too, and when I'm slogging through participation grades and drafts and doing conferences and fixing broken stuff on D2L and thinking I'm really overdue to collect journals in 3 of my classes...oh, boy, does it get interesting.

I'm not complaining. I said in my journal last year that if I want an easy job, I should just go get one. I know this job is impossible. I'm just trying to work through it sufficiently that I can feel confident that I'm doing high-quality teaching but still managing to get the important, non-glamorous bits done and maintaining a healthy approach to a balanced, God-pleasing life.

That I'm still functional and upright through the first fourth of the semester is a miracle in its own right. And it's good that I'm being driven to depend on God. And it will get better, as I get more back in the swing, as I finish recovering from this cold, as I work through a few more of the decisions I made about teaching last year. It won't be easy. I didn't ask for easy.

It will send me back to the drawing board later in the semester and during the break, to think about whether there is anything I'm committing myself to doing that eats up my time without giving students real benefit.

The flood has hit

2005-09-15T07:06:00.000-07:00

I don't know WHAT ever made me think I would have time to keep up a blog once I started teaching again. As I'm really starting to have to juggle class planning and drafts and grading and tasks for the department and whatever else comes along...whew. I'm up to my eyes in it.

And there are things I'd like to get to here, about teaching and about other things. I'll review the new Switchfoot CD, but first I have to get enough time to at least listen to the entire thing once. I want to talk about drums and drama. I want to talk about the transition back into teaching. I'm sure there's other stuff too. Right now, I need to decide whether I can get a couple of drafts dealt with before I go back to class, or if I should read the assignment for tomorrow's class instead.

So, it's still a tough job. I'm still trying to manage my time in such a way that I don't work 70 hours a week, that I maintain space in my life for the other important things. But it ain't easy.

"Some days you eat the bear, some days the bear eats you."

Miscellaneous observations from a long weekend

2005-09-06T09:15:00.000-07:00

Lots of people don't know what a "deadline" is.
Logan's Run is even more entertaining now than when I first saw it, and not purely for laughs--though yeah, for laughs.
Anything presented in any medium can be made better by letting Joss Whedon write it. After seeing what he did with X-Men, I really, really cannot wait for Serenity.
The Roland TD-6 drum kit is every bit as awesome as I thought it was. :)

Unwanted Contact Sport

2005-08-27T10:21:00.000-07:00

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.

What We Learned This Summer

2005-08-21T04:03:00.000-07:00

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:

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

No, actually

2005-08-11T03:51:00.000-07:00

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.

Something to "Do"

2005-08-04T04:19:00.000-07:00

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!

Catch-up

2005-07-31T05:45:00.000-07:00

I'm a bit overdue for a post here, so this will be a collection of odds and ends to get back on track.

First, if anyone ever tries to tell you that there's lots to do in International Falls, MN, they are lying. Perhaps if you have a boat or like to fish, there's enough to do. Otherwise, plan to drop by on your way through to somewhere else. Fortunately, a summer trip to Duluth is always a good idea.

I've stopped having not-ready-for-school nightmares. I still have some prep work to do but I'm having fun doing it.

My predictions about The Fantastic Four were dead-on, meaning that the movie was not. Depending on exactly how many times Johnny Storm said "Flame On!" I got either 8 or 9 out of 10. The one that was definitely wrong was #10--there was no "Herbie the Robot" joke. Sadly, the movie would have been better if there were.

That still doesn't make F4 the worst movie of the summer. There are many obviously worse movies that I have not gone to, and the worst movie I saw is still easily War of the Worlds. The reason it is more popular than F4 is that, in America, it is a far worse crime to be boring than to be offensive, distateful, and mean-spirited. As long as it is "exciting," okay!

For professional sports team mascot names, there's still nothing dumber than the New York Knickerbockers. But if Larry can take them all the way, nobody will care.

I'm sick of athletes who are already getting millions but want to get more millions using their families as a PR point. "I'm just trying to do what's best for my family." Oh really? Then carefully invest the millions you've already been paid, quit playing that dangerous sport, and spend your time being a father, jerk.

I understand that NASCAR drivers give great interviews and are good to their fans and mostly aren't jerks, and that driving a car at that speed for that amount of time is a really hard thing to do, but I still don't want to watch it.

I do want to watch the NFL, once we get past the pre-season nothingness. In the meantime, a local station is showing Canadian football on Saturday nights. It's better than car racing or baseball.

Off to drum in a few minutes. YAY!

a bright spot

2005-07-13T06:01:00.000-07:00

For those who are down in the dumps about a dreary summer with too many poor movies, you should see the best Star-Wars-related anything of the summer. Enjoy!

Interplanetary War, 2 flavors

2005-07-03T05:40:00.000-07:00

Part 1: Why you should not go to see War of the Worlds

It completely sucks.

I will elaborate only a little, because this movie is not worth much of my time or energy, and I want to stop thinking about it as soon as possible. Yes, there is a lot of spectacle, so some people will probably be very excited about it. Yes, Tom Cruise is in it, which will cause another group of people to be excited. That's about all that you can say that's neutral about the movie. There's nothing to say positive.

On the negative side, it's a bleak, anxiety-producing, implausible, and depressing stream of dreck. At its best moments it is stupid and tedious. At its worst, it made me feel sick with anxiety and revulsion. I thought about leaving about a third of the way in. I didn't, but now wish I had.

Most the film is two hours of watching a little girl suffer unbearable psychological trauma, occasionally "lightened" by a plot point so ridiculous you will laugh out loud. (Like the magic van that somehow always has a path available to drive through huge traffic jams or whole neighborhoods reduced to piles of debris.) Some people will probably try to defend the film as being an admirable story of determination to survive, the only problems with that being:

1) "determination to survive" is hardly noble or uplifting and
2) the characters who do survive do so by a combination of dumb luck and the writers cheating to help them out.

In short, I have seen horror movies that are more uplifting and have a more positive view of humanity. Seriously, don't give Spielberg any of your money. Don't reward him for churning out this crap.

Part 2: a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away...

Star Wars III: Such as it is opened, and last week I finally got to see it. And everybody's right: it's the best of 1-3, which isn't hard to do. It won that award just by virute of "Jar Jar Binks is barely in it at all." It's fun to see the circle completed. The dialogue is terrible, and "lost the will to live" is the weakest explanation anybody's ever likely to hear.

I was confused about one thing, though. Maybe it happened when I was in the bathroom, but when does Obi-Wan Kenobi receive the severe head injury? I know he must get whacked on the head pretty hard at some point, because that's the only explanation for why, in movies 4-6, he can't remember anything that happened in movies 1-3.

Example, from episode 4:
Kenobi: I don't remember ever owning any droids.

Hello, Mr. Head Injury Patient, you don't remember the astrodroids that tried to keep you alive during the Clone War? You don't remember these two droids in particular--the one who repeatedly saved your life, and the one that Annikin Skywalker made? You know, your prized student, who you hacked three limbs off of and left for dead? The father of the guy you're talking to right now? You'd think some of this would make an impression.

But the damage to Kenobi's memory is quite severe, as it perseveres even after he is dead.

Example, from episode 5:
Luke is flying away.
Ghostly-Kenobi: That boy is our last hope.
Yoda: No. There is another.
Ghostly-Kenobi (thinking): That's funny. Why didn't Yoda say, "No. Another, there is"?
Yoda (thinking): That's funny. Why doesn't remember that he was there when the twins were born, and he was part of the whole plan to hide the kids from Annikin? But then, why did I agree to let him "hide" Luke from Annikin on Annikin's home world, with Annikin's family? I must be getting too old for this. I mean, too old for this I must be getting. When younger I was, more consistently inverted my speech patterns were.

Anyway, dumb as it was, I have no regrets about paying money to see Star Warts. Not so with Spielberg's War on Good Taste.

I've got an un-Fantastic feeling about this...

2005-06-29T05:51:00.000-07:00

Tomorrow I will probably get my post about Star Wars III: Such As It Is done. For today I want to focus on my impressions of the upcoming Fantastic Four movie, based on a couple of trailers and my general experience with Marvel supers movies.

So in other words, here's

What's Going To Be Wrong with the Fantastic Four Movie
(This entry may contain spoilers, for all I know. Then again, if even half my predictions are true, the movie is already spoiled.)

Johnny Storm is going to be very annoying. The movie will present him as immature, self-centered, and superficial. Of course all of these characteristics are part of the original character, but in the comics he was a scrawny teenager, so we could to some extent forgive him. When a grown man acts this way, it's going to be hard to put up with.
The Invisible Woman will be even more annoying. Jessica what'shername will continue to look out of place in the movie. She will not have the grace that Sue Storm (later Richards) always had, and she won't do nearly as many cool things with her powers as Violet did in The Incredibles.
There will be too many explosions for no reason, and far too much gratuitous destruction. The overall feeling of the movie will be that the main thing the F4 have brought to Manhattan is several billion dollars worth of property damage.
Ben Grimm (The Thing) won't be nearly funny enough and will spend too much time feeling sorry for himself. He won't feel like a product of the ghetto. He will say "It's Clobberin' Time" one time too many.
Johnny Storm will say "Flame On!" at least three times too many.
Reed Richards will be dumbed down. He won't talk as smart as he does in the books, and he will do at least two really stupid things.
Doctor Doom will be a complete disappointment. He won't look right (I'm pretty sure about that from seeing the trailers). He will not be a brilliant, ruthless dictator but instead some kind of psychotic, sadistic Joker rip-off. Instead of being a mad scientist who also dabbles in black magic he will have been given some "power" as a result of the same events that give the F4 their powers, which will mess up the metaphor. The F4 are obviously the 4 elements, so adding a fifth guy doesn't make much sense, unless the story is Chinese (it's not) and the fifth guy gets wood powers (he won't).
On the whole it won' be fantastic enough. While Spider-Man pretty much just beats up villains in NY, the Fantasic Four were always the crew who were out exploring the unknown and doing the impossible. They go to the center of the earth, outer space, and other dimensions as often as most people go to Starbucks. This sense of wonder will be missing from the film.
In the end, they will (at least supposedly) kill of Doctor Doom, ignoring the reality that (1) this is virtually impossible to do and (2) there is no way ultra-humanitarian Reed Richards would ever allow it. (This is, after all, the guy who once saved the life of Galactus the World-Eater.)
There will be a "Herbie the Robot" joke. It will be the funniest thing in the movie, to those who get it.

So there. 10 predictions. Once I see the film, I'll let you know how I do, and by extension, how they did.

Scary Story

2005-06-24T08:01:00.000-07:00

Yesterday my wife and I went to a nearby grocery store. We got up to a checkout line with nobody in it. The cashier appeared to be a young woman, but she had her back to us, and all I cared about was nobody in line ahead of us. So I quickly started flinging our groceries up onto the belt, and the cashier turned around.

Cashier: Hello.
Me: AHHHH! Please don't eat my brains!

Okay, I didn't actually say that, but I wanted to. I did come very close to making noise when I saw her. She had the scariest makeup I have ever seen. I'm glad Jill was with me, because it allowed me to confirm later that the makeup was very, very frightening. Jill also said that she didn't think it was accidental--it didn't look to her like the makeup was applied poorly, just too much, too dramatic. Seriously, if I'd had something in my hand, I would have dropped it.

When my little sister reached the age where she wanted to do such things, she ask my mom if she could start wearing makeup. My mom said, "Only if Pop can't tell." I think that's good advice. I'd be happiest if the entire makeup industry just went away and let people look how they look, but failing that, I wish those who choose to use makeup would aim for a target of using it too subtly to be noticed.

On the other hand, my heart got a good workout yesterday, which I don't usually expect from a grocery store trip.

Batman's Benign

2005-06-19T04:26:00.000-07:00

This review/commentary on Batman Begins contains some spoilers: proceed at your own risk.

It is definitely the best Batman movie yet. That isn't saying a whole lot, though, and there's still some definite room for improvement. I was surprised to find that I agreed almost 100% with Scott Kurtz on this movie. (Go to his PVP Online page and scroll down to find his review.)

What's good about this movie is mostly the cast. My wife says that Michael Caine stole the show as Alfred, and I can see her point. But Morgan Freeman is great as Lucius Fox, and I liked what'shisname as Batman/Bruce Wayne. For me, it helps having an actor I don't really know in that role--I don't get distracted by his being so familiar.

I've heard several people object to Katie Holmes. I'm not sure her performance is bad, but she is poorly cast, and in any case her role makes no sense in the movie. She's too petite and young-looking, lacks presence both physically and psychically to stand up alongside the intensity of Bruce Wayne/Batman. Plus, the movie wants to have it both ways--wants her to be the outsider character who shows him what it's going to cost to have a dual identity (she is obviously turned off by his "billionaire playboy" actions), but also wants her (for no reason) to be a love interest that he reveals his identity to. And this Batman isn't going to last very long when he reveals his identity to the first person who asks.

"Welcome to super-hero training school. Lesson one: if someone asks your secret identity, don't tell them!"
"Oooh, I'd better write that down."

Really, all the movie's problems stem from trying to fit the blockbuster summer movie formula. They think there has to be a love interest so they force a character who doesn't fit and pretend that these two are attracted when for most of the movie they just seem like childhood friends who've grown apart. There are far too many explosions, fireballs, and general property damage. Batman doesn't look heroic when he destroys buildings and police cars--he looks desperate and clumsy. But I know they don't think they can make a thrilling chase without lots of pursuing police cars being wrecked. Alfred, watching TV coverage of the chase: "It's a miracle no one was killed." Me: "Yeah. Good thing the writers threw that comment in or we might believe our eyes."

Where I disagree with Scott Kurtz (other than in his continued love of the X-Men movies (?!?)) is in his statement that the fight scenes are too unclear. I actually liked that here, though I've complained about it elsewhere. Batman is a creature of the shadows, and I don't think we should see him too clearly or know exactly what he's doing most of the time. Maybe the climactic showdown fight could have been clearer. Otherwise I just think the fights should have been shorter. Either that, or we need to have more sense that Batman's really struggling to win the fights because he's new to this.

But at least we corrected some of the worst problems of the previous films:
1) The actors are professionals who take their roles seriously.
2) The script has some structure and development and several nice reversals/re-used lines with irony. Even if I could see pretty much all of the surprises coming, it's a better script than we've seen in a Batman movie in a long time.
3) The villains have their own creepy personalities rather than just being the Joker over and over. I mean, I never like Jim Carrey, but I could gladly spit on whoever decided he should play the Riddler like that.
4) We don't kill villains, because Batman doesn't kill. Okay, some people probably died in the temple fire, and despite Alfred's reassurance, there's some dead cops in that chase. But he doesn't set out to kill. Well, Ras al Ghul, kind of. But Ras will be back, no worries. Ok, um, we have less completely killed off bad guys than in previous films, which allows for the possibility of seeing these villains again, which is a key part of the standard super-hero genre.

Best feature of the film: the creepiness. Batman should be scary, and with the Scarecrow as a key villain, it should be a creepy movie. At times, it really is.

Worst feature: the cave-in to formulaic "thrills" whether they make sense / fit with the character or not.

Overall, it's definitely worth seeing. Unfortunately, it's not even the best film I saw yesterday, because that I-can't-believe-Disney-made-this gem Lilo and Stitch was on TV last night. But more about the wonderfulness of L&S another time.

Things you should know about the "Weber Q" portable grill

2005-06-17T13:23:00.000-07:00

It's very cute.
It's about as portable as a grill can be, particularly if you also get the cart for it (sold separately, of course).
It lights very easily; however, the flames that the instruction book tells you to look for are very small, blue flames that are hard to see. If you are ignorant or new to grilling (I was both), you might not see them at first. So the first time, we probably lit it 10 or 12 times and kept shutting it off because we thought we were failing to light it.
Using it, my wife can make awesome grilled tuna steak tacos.

What matters

2005-06-13T07:28:00.000-07:00

It happened that last week, as we were visiting my parents, they got the call informing them that my uncle had died. So about an hour later, I was sitting on their couch and wondering why nobody ever taught me about the important stuff. I felt very useless and stupid, sitting there not knowing what to say to my father when his brother just died.

I'm not suggesting that having some teacher along the way lecture me about grieving would have helped. I know about Kubler-Ross's research on grief and that sort of thing. But that didn't tell me what I could say or do. And while possibly no one could have told me what to say or do, talking about it at some point might have helped.

But in this country, we don't particularly talk about anything important. We've all but forbidden any serious discussion of God, because you'll either be dismissed as foolish by the eggheads, who have all decided that they're smarter than all the brilliant people who came before who were convinced God was real, or silenced by religious zealots who won't let you talk honestly about God. (One of my co-workers once said in class that he would be on campus every day "God willing." A student went to the dean to complain about his "casual" talk about God.)

We don't seem able to talk seriously about any serious matters, either. About death or life or marriage (or any sort of commitment) or what kind of society we are becoming. Or about what we will be when, inevitably, we are no longer the world power. We could make good choices right now about that--about whether we want to become a former power like Britain, that still retains influence and pride, or whether we intend to fade into nothing like so many major powers before us.

But we're too busy, busy with TV shows that deliberately avoid anything important, busy buying crap to distract us from those important things until they sneak up on us, and someone dies, or we're forced to confront a major decision, or we find ourselves in over our heads and we wonder if God still listens to people.

I wish we would make more time and energy for the important things. I intend to. In fact, I'm convinced that if I do, the less important things will recede to their proper place, and the less serious things, the frivolous things, the fun things will be sweeter.

I was not close to my uncle. But I will always remember the joke he used to play on me when I was small. "You wanna see the geese?" he would ask, and if I said yes (probably only the first time), he would stand behind me and cup my head in his hands to tilt it up to "see the geese." Then he would lift me off the ground by my jawbone, leaving my feet dangling in the air. Thereafter, for years, he would ask, and I would hastily say, "No."

But now I wish that at least one more time I had said, "Sure!"

LOST season two secrets revealed!

2005-06-02T06:09:00.000-07:00

As I was standing in line at the grocery store today, I had the chance to flip through their cover story revealing secrets from Lost, season two. As is always the case with Lost (see my May 12 entry), revelations proved less forthcoming than promised. Fortunately, I have used my extensive Hollywood contacts to get the real scoop, and so I proudly present

Secrets of Lost (season two) revealed!

10) In a flashback, we will learn that even though she is directly or indirectly responsible for the deaths of dozens of people, Kate has a heart of gold.

9) On weeks when there is not a new episode (approximately every other week), ABC will show the series premiere again. They want everyone to get a chance to see it, and apparently there are some people (current estimate: 8) who haven't yet.

8) In a flashback, we will learn that even though his medical ethics vanish more mysteriously than promised revelations, Jack has a heart of gold.

7) On the island there is apparently some kind of monster that can be seen by people but cannot be described or photographed with television cameras.

6) In a flashback, we will learn that even though he is creepy, psychotic, and underhanded, Locke has a heart of gold.

5) On the raft, Jin will somehow find a Korean-English dictionary and a complete set of Learn English Instantly CDs, which he will put to good use.

4) In a flashback, we will learn that even though he is a lying, wife-abusing gangster, Jin has a heart of gold.

3) We will discover that on an uncharted island full of predators, parasites, diseases, and traps, a dog running loose has a longer average lifespan than a character who actually knows any information.

2) In a flashback, we will learn that even though he is a selfish, manipulative, murderous con artists, Sawyer has a heart of gold.

1) In the season two finale, you will learn that even though you invested another eight months watching this show, you still don't know much of anything.

Sun amid the storms

2005-06-01T04:18:00.000-07:00

Saturday morning we decided we should try for a quick bike ride. We'd had two solid weeks of rain and threatening-rain, and Jill had heard that the morning was our best chance of decent weather. So we saddled up and headed over to circle Bald Eagle Lake.

It turned out there was a race in progress around the lake. I don't know what race it was, or whether it was super-competitive or just a "run" to raise money or what. But for most of our tour around the lake, we were riding against the stream and watched the racers plod by. We had already missed the front-runners, but had plenty of opportunity to see lots of runners.

Even in the front group one person had dropped to a walk. Throughout, we could see evidence of the strain. Faces were grim or slack with exhaustion. People were panting, struggling, or stoically pressing on. Occasionally another was walking.

Then, in the middle of the final third of the runners, one young woman smiled broadly and said, "Hi," separately, to each of us.

Was she some super-fit runner who just wasn't pushing herself? Does she just not notice physical tiredness as much as other people? I don't know, but she certainly stood out amidst her companions.

So anyone who did whatever race/run that was: congratulations on doing a hard thing. And smiley, whoever you were, thanks for the cheer on a gloomy day.

Good gifts

2005-05-26T03:55:00.000-07:00

I'm constantly amazed that people have talents and aptitudes. From a purely naturalistic standpoint, it wouldn't be completely surprising if some people were better at moving quickly and gracefully, as that could help with hunting or escaping from a hunter. But lots of people have talents that suit them especially well for stuff we've made up. Some people have just what it takes to be computer programmers. Others, while they might be generally athletic, are perfectly suited for volleyball. I mean, really, when you think about what the average height of humans was two or three centuries ago, what is the chance that now you'd get a bunch of guys who are over 6'6" and have the ability to arc a ball through a hoop?

But what astounds me even more than people's talents is their preferences. I'm constantly in wonder over the fact that people have preferences, and seem to have them from very early on. Some babies go for apricots, others for the green beans. There's a little boy in our church who from the time he was old enough to get away from his parents' supervision has been trying to get to the drum set. He's drawn to it. Other people want to work with cloth, or make food, or sculpt, or be with animals. And when aptitudes and preferences correspond, as it seems they frequently do, that's a really good gift.

I think about this a lot when I drum. I don't remember how I came to pick drums as my band instrument back in middle school. I think it was just an offshoot of piano--I was looking for something familiar, and figured I could do xylophone or something. And I didn't stay with band long or pick up much skill during that time, and then nothing with drums for years and years. Then an opportunity arose, and armed with half-forgotten basics and whatever natural aptitude I have, I started playing. It's been enough that I haven't gotten fired from the worship team yet. I enjoy it, and I think I'm just designed to do it. Not professionally or even in a noteworthy way, but good enough to serve, at least for here and now. And that's a pretty good gift.

Learning about teaching

2005-05-22T05:16:00.000-07:00

Well, I definitely miss teaching. I find myself thinking about scenarios where I can do the kinds of things I do when I teach. I'm wishing there was someone who wanted to ask me questions. This is very good news, considering that when I left I wasn't sure that by the end of sabbatical I'd be even willing to go back, let alone looking forward to the good parts of it.

I'm also completely anxious about it, at least based on the frequent not-ready-for-the-first-day-of-class dreams I'm having. This next week I want to put some final touches on some documents and see if I can get moved back into my office. Maybe that will calm me down. It's weird that I have this anxiety. I am better prepared to start fall than I've probably ever been before the end of May. If I could get copies run, I could start tomorrow. (In the dream last night I showed up the first day without copies, and IT was still replacing the computer in my office, so I had no way to get anything printed.) And of course, I don't need to be ready yet.

I suspect it's just that I know I'm out of practice. When it sometimes happens that I don't play basketball for several months, that first time I get back on the court, I'm not looking to play in a game. I know I don't have my shot back yet. After a day or two of just shooting around, the confidence returns. I hope that a little prep work these next couple of weeks will calm me down for summer, and that then some time rehearsing before start will put an end to this pointless anxiety.

geek wars II

2005-05-18T17:11:00.000-07:00

Today a couple of different sports radio talk-shows were poking fun at the Star Wars geeks, who are out in force (har!) and in costume to stand in line for hours to see the 12:01 a.m. shows of Episode III. Both shows made some comparison between Star Wars geeks and sports fanatics, but both tended to say that the sports fanatics weren't "as bad."

What they failed to account for is that a new Star Wars film only happens ever few years, and only six times in all of history, total. Can you imagine how annoying sports fans would be if they had to wait years to see a new baseball game?

Also, the excitement of the Star Wars crowd is understandable, since Episode III is widely expected to be the best of the new films. Of course, this is like saying that so-and-so is the most talented Monkee, or that such-and-such is the best episode of Green Acres, or that this particular year's Republican/Democratic National Convention was the most interesting to watch ever.

Still, despite the bad review my wife read on it today (saying that the movie failed to really answer the crucial question, "Why does Anakin go to the Dark Side?"), I'm hoping that when I finally get to see it at some matinee someday, I'll find something in it worth liking. That's all the more enthusiasm I can muster. But for those who are still waiting in line: May the Force be with you. Because something is going to have to help you with bladder control.

Treasure Memories

2005-05-17T06:53:00.000-07:00

As I sat in the "cheap seats" movie theater on Saturday I wondered if I had somehow missed a word in the title. Maybe instead of National Treasure, it was supposed to be National Lampoon's Treasure. Because this is definitely one of the most ridiculous movies I've seen in a long time. This is a film that starts out in the Arctic Circle with characters wearing ordinary winter coats and no protection for their faces or ears. From there, it gets less realistic.

I knew it would be ridiculous, of course, from the trailers. The premise of the movie is that the founding fathers of the U.S. had some vast treasure and hid it somewhere, leaving behind clues to its whereabouts. This is a pretty stupid premise. Consider:

To: Benjamin Franklin
From: George Washington, General, Valley Forge

Ben:
We are freezing and starving. At this rate we will never make it through the winter. SELL THE BLOODY TREASURE and get us food, blankets, and ammunition!

--George

I won't go into all the rest of the silliness--it's just too easy. But I did wonder later why anyone would come up with such a thing. It may be too much of a stretch, but it seems to me that this is an attempt to re-imagine those founding fathers in a way that's more friendly to our greedy, materialistic society. It's not enough that they risked their lives to try to do something unheard of and break away from one of the super-powers of the day and establish a functional republic with protections for individual liberties: they have to have been rich, too.

If I thought LOST was bad TV...

2005-05-14T08:21:00.000-07:00

So, last night was the season finale of Star Trek: Reprise (theme: “boldly going where we have gone many, many times before”) in the form of two complete episodes. (Oh, boy!) (I believe the episode titles were "Hoshi is a wimp" and "We're so boring, our final episode is about some other show.") Even though I gave up on this show sometime back in its first season, I thought it might be interesting to see how they ended it. And the answer is: pretty much like they started it. I laughed out loud two or three times, my wife said she wanted to “hurl” because of the female characters, and on the whole it didn’t make any sense or particularly seem very important.

This leaves us with the question: is Star Trek forever dead on big and small screens? (It will probably go on forever in the form of conventions, online “sims,” memorabilia, etc.)

At the moment, my answer is: that’s the best we can hope for.

I am not a Trekker fanatic. I’ve never been to a convention. I don’t own any Star Fleet uniforms, or any collectible merchandise.

But my credentials as a fan are in order. When I was a little kid, and the original series was the only Star Trek, on in reruns, I would sprint up our long driveway every day so that I wouldn’t miss more than I had to. (Show started at 4:00; I got off the bus about 4:12. To this day if I see the opening of an original series episode I will think I haven’t seen it, until we get about 15 minutes in.)

I watched Next Gen fairly faithfully for most of its run, and was very devoted to Deep Space Nine, or as it is more formally known, “The best Trek ever.” I tried to watch Voyager, off and on, despite its many problems. (Toward the end we called it “The Doctor and Seven show.”) And I gave Reprise a chance for a while. I’ve seen all the movies and can recite most of The Wrath of Khan.

So why am I hoping that we’ve seen the last movie and the last TV show? Because for several years now, they have been running it into the ground, and without hope of something changing, I’d rather see no further damage done.

The movies had their moments. II was great, VI was solid. I can say good things about Generations and even First Contact. But since then it’s been increasingly clear that the movies are just about being cash machines with superficial plot lines. They completely avoid all the complexity that made the late Next Gen / complete DS9 era great.

The TV shows have been worse. You can just see what happened when they switched from syndication (NG and DS9) to being on Paramount’s own network (Voyager and Enterprise). The plots get dumbed down. Women get treated as inferior and mostly as sex objects. We steal from ourselves and don’t do anything too edgy. And people yawn and turn to something else. And the network comes in and says, “People aren’t watching! We need more sex! And fistfights!”

So unless someone can wrest control of the franchise away from the money-grubbing Hollywood-mindset execs at Paramount, it’s better if there is no more Star Trek. We still have the good ones on DVD. Serenity is coming soon, and even if that doesn’t lead to a new Firefly series, it’ll remind people what’s possible, and someday there will be another sci-fi series worth watching on television.

Booklist

2005-05-13T08:41:00.000-07:00

Some books worth mentioning at the moment:

Just re-read The Divine Conspiracy by Dallas Willard. Still the best, most important book outside of the Bible for modern Christians to read.

Also recently finished Rumors of Another World by Phillip Yancey. Lots of good examples, suprirsing insights, and great quotes.

Next fall I'm going to teach 1984 by Orwell and 2024 by Ted Rall. Looking forward to that.

Plastic Man: On the Lam by Kyle Baker. It's Plastic Man! Plus, it's as fun to look at as any comic I've seen in a long time.

Speaking of comics, I'm still waiting for the latest Astro City title, Local Heroes, to come out in paperback. What's the holdup?

And if you can't be bothered to read all the archives of Order of the Stick online, you can buy the book: Dungeon Crawlin' Fools.

Get LOST

2005-05-12T09:16:00.000-07:00

So we sort of half-accidentally watched Lost last night, and again resolved to be done with it. I think I only liked it in the first place because it's good compared to the rest of the junk on TV.

Because let's face it, the main feature of the show is that they never really tell you anything. Everything is as vague as possible, to try to get you to come back after the commercial, next week, next season, when maybe we'll give you another little crumb of information. Here is how I think it goes when they interview a writer for the show:

Producer: Can you tell me about your last job?
Candidate: I was a writer for another show, but then I did something...terrible.
Producer: And before that?
Candidate: Before that, I worked on a...project. You know.
Producer: You are being incredibly vague and evasive about everything.
Candidate: Do you think so?
Producer: You're hired.

Last night, (spoilers ahead! Well, not really--nothing here will "spoil" anything) Kate was the Featured Flashback Character of the Week. So we saw her go hook up with an old boyfriend, and at one point they had this exchange:

Kate: Do you think it's still there?
Boyfriend: What?
Kate: You know what.

Well, "what" turns out to be a silly time capsule that they buried when they were maybe twelve years old. Knowing that, this conversation makes perfect sense if you are a character on Lost. Ordinary humans, on the other hand, might sound like this:

Kate: Do you think it's still there?
Boyfriend: What?
Kate: You know what.
Boyfriend: How on earth would I know what you're talking about? Why are you being so vague?!?

Or even:

Kate: Hey, do you think the time capsule is still there?

But that would not produce the desired effect of perpetual suspence over nothing, so we don't do that. (Now, spoilers ahead.) For weeks Locke has been carefully concealing from everybody that he'd found the chamber or whatever it is in the jungle. Last night he revealed it for no apparent reason. And despite yet another backstory-of-Kate episode, we still have no idea what her real, original crime is. And at this point, I don't care. Even if she's innocent of the original crime, she has since done a number of destructive, illegal things while on the lam.

That's the other problem I have with the show, I guess. In all the flashbacks, we discover all these people (even Sawyer) have a heart of gold, but in the real world of the current story, they're awful: violent, selfish, mistrustful and untrustworthy. Hurley is the biggest exception to this, but there's just not enough of Hurley (reported to be the most popular character) to make it worth watching.

Netflix has all kinds of TV series on DVD and provides good service. So we can find better to watch.

Best of Nerd Factor and Court Jester

2005-05-12T08:37:00.000-07:00

Below are the best posts of my old blogs.

First, from Nerd Factor:

Thursday, January 13, 2005

arbitrary, shmarbitrary

So I was browsing through a roleplaying game rulebook and found an interesting sentence in the introduction to their chapter on all the nitty-gritty rules. It was explaining why there are rules and dice used. It said that if your character always succeeded, that would be boring (true), and if the GM decided everything, it would seem arbitrary.That's right. Their stated reason for using dice to determine whether your character succeeds or not is that it seems less arbitrary than having a human being make a judgment call.

Monday, January 03, 2005

On the nature of geekiness

This insight is the result of a lifetime of being a nerd, combined with my first experiment with fantasy football this year and recently viewing the entertaining documentary Trekkies.I originally thought that my insight had to do with how much useless knowledge we nerds have. In one Calvin and Hobbes strip, Calvin says, “I’m not ignorant, I just command a body of thoroughly useless information.” But reflecting on what I’ve experienced recently, I realized it’s a little different than that. My insight is this: geekiness consists of a vast body of potentially useful knowledge being put to no (socially recognized) use.

In the film, there’s a young man (who manages to be remarkably articulate considering he’s a male teenage Star Trek fan being interviewed by the attractive Denise “Lt. Natasha Yar” Crosby) who really knows his stuff. I don’t just mean that he knows lots of Trek trivia—I mean he knows what collectible is worth getting and why, etc. In other words, he knows everything he needs to know to make a killing on ebay selling off his collection.But he almost certainly never will. His love for what those objects represent will overwhelm any desire he has to make money off of them, so unless some greater love intervenes, he’ll keep them forever. And in a hundred years, his descendants will be on Antiques Roadshow saying, “I guess our grandfather used to collect these, they were from some TV show.” And the congenial antique dealer will talk about what a carefully chosen and well preserved collection this is, and how these action figures are worth $50000 at auction, and the people will blink and say, “Oh my goodness” because it may be 100 years from now but it’s still PBS.

Anyway, my point is that his descendants will be richer not because he carefully planned to bring about that end but because he is a geek.Fantasy football illustrated the same principle. If you know which NFL teams are better against the pass or allow tight end touchdowns in every game or whatever, and you use that knowledge to go get a job as, say, the offensive coordinator for the Philadelphia Eagles, then you are at least making a comfortable living for yourself and also helping a whole group of people to achieve a common professional goal, so people think you are doing something useful. But if you use that knowledge to dominate your fantasy football league, you are a geek.This means that the line separating geeks from non-geeks is, of course, arbitrary. The issue is not so much specialized knowledge, as almost everyone has some of that, but what kind of specialized knowledge, how specialized, and (most importantly) what use it is put to. In America, if the use it is put to is making money, then you are not a geek, really, Bill Gates notwithstanding. Because we think making money is an acceptable goal. If you run a highly successful game company or comic book store and are wealthy as a result, you are largely free of the nerd taint. But if you collect comics to read them, or play RPGs for fun and personal development, then you are a little weird. If you are a cooking geek, you will probably be free from ridicule because you produce food, which is valued. If you produce detailed maps of worlds that do not exist, you had better sell a million copies of an associated novel or else prepare to be mocked.

Trying fantasy football also showed me a little about how that arbitrary geek line can be blurred. Back when we lived in Louisville, which is already about ten years ago, I remember listening to a sports radio talk show in which any time anybody called in with any comment about fantasy football (or fantasy anything), the host would play a toilet flushing sound to indicate “get that crap out of here.” Here in the cities I can’t find that same show, if it still even exists, but I notice that time has greatly softened the attitude toward fantasy sports. Most talk shows will occasionally ask guests questions aimed at helping fantasy coaches, and there are even whole shows devoted to providing useful info for fantasy games (including a quite excellent one on a station here in the Twin Cities).

So, assuming my observation is accurate here, what has happened to move this geeky activity away from the margins and closer to the mainsteam? Why is fantasy football borderline acceptable, while RPGs are as nerdy as ever?

First, it helps that fantasy sports are an offshoot of a legitimized geek activity. Sports as a whole has a very large geek element: extremely specialized knowledge of something that has no practical, real world benefit. I like watching sports, but really, who cares who wins the World Series and when the last time they won was? Other than a name, what do the Boston Red Sox of 2004 have in common with the Red Sox of any other year? But of course, lots of guys (and it seems more and more women) put the “fanatic” in fan, memorizing obscure trivia, obsessing over every little decision and every play and every official’s call, and acting as though it all matters somehow. And because so many people do it, and because it’s big business, and because it serves a useful social function (of giving a relatively “safe” topic for stranger to converse about), it’s forgiven for being so geeky.

So that helped. I think it also helps that fantasy sports are good for sports in general. Fantasy football means that lots of people are more interested in every NFL game than they would otherwise be. Ordinarily, only devoted fans would care who wins in a game between two non-contending teams in week 16. But if you’re in a fantasy football league, one of those non-contending teams may have one of your star players on it. Even blowout games can stay interesting: maybe my quarterback can get another 100 yards in the air and another touchdown, even though his team’s obviously going to lose the game.

Also, fantasy football has a nice sliding level of involvement. You can’t be a completely uninvolved participant, really, but you can get involved without knowing much and then learn as you go. I didn’t have any idea what I was doing for the first three weeks. Then I kind of caught on and started making some roster shifts and doing okay. Then I fell apart at the end of the season and dropped from #3 of 8 to #6. Must be the Minnesota effect. But I managed to win the consolation tournament in my league. And I did this without being a total geek about it. But to win, to really win, you need a mix of luck and a very high level of geekness. This is probably true of any mental competition: spelling bees, chess, Texas Hold ‘Em, whatever.

The people who win and make big bucks at it are forgiven their geekiness because they’re being successful at the greed game, which Americans revere. And the people who pick a game that’s popular, like fantasy football, may get a pass too. But if you pick to specialize in something with no recognized value and only limited mainstream popularity just because you like it, come on, what a nerd.

Wednesday, August 04, 2004

Fox Loses a Legend

This week’s TV Guide names the “top 25 science fiction legends” (by which they of course mean the top 25 legends from sci-fi TV shows). I could make lots of interesting observations about the list, but what strikes me the most is #18: Malcolm Reynolds, captain of the Serenity, from Joss Whedon’s Firefly. What’s remarkable about his inclusion, of course, is that Firefly only got about 11 episodes aired before Fox pulled the plug. Now, this isn’t another rant about how Firefly is better than any other sci-fi on and I can’t believe they’re still making Enterprise and Andromeda when they cancelled this. You can find plenty of those rants elsewhere. What I want to talk about is what went wrong, and who gets the blame.

What went wrong: it was on Fox.

Who gets the blame: Fox.

I’ve read other articles talking about how Fox mis-managed the launch of the show, and that’s certainly true. I’m no expert on time-slots, but obviously you don’t build an audience for a show by putting it on for a couple of weeks and then canceling it for most of a month for baseball games. I had a friend who was watching the show too, but after the first couple of episodes I’d ask her what she thought and she’d say, “Oh, I forgot it was on.”

But the sporadic showing of Firefly was really the last in a series of mistakes that doomed the show. Before that was the inexplicable decision to not air the pilot as the first episode. Now the show is strong enough that you can throw people into it almost anywhere and they’ll like it, but all the characters and the situation would have made a lot more sense if we could’ve started at the beginning, as owners of the DVD set now get to.

Before that bad decision came what was possibly the worst one: they let idiots decide how to market the show. This is probably part of a pattern of bad marketing. Back when I used to try to watch Star Trek: Voyager, I noticed that the previews would consistently misrepresent the episodes they were advertising. The preview would make it sound like the episode was about two female characters getting naked and having sex and maybe dying, and then the episode would turn out to be about a gravity anomaly that makes the crew sick or something. It’s a bait and switch move, and those are always frustrating. In the case of Firefly it was not merely frustrating but suicidal. When I saw the ads for this show, I rolled my eyes. The way they depicted it, it was a show about a tough guy captain and a tough guy mercenary and some other tough guys, and by the way there was a prostitute on board. It looked completely like a fourteen-year-old boy’s fantasy. I didn’t plan to watch it at all.

Of course, those ads left out a few things:
1) This is from Joss Whedon, creator of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, etc.
2) The crew isn’t all guys and it isn’t all tough guys. The pilot is wimpy and funny, and the doctor has courage but little experience in dangerous situations, and the second-in-command is a woman who may be the toughest person aboard.
3) And by the way, it isn’t just sci-fi, but a blend of sci-fi and western.

How did they ever imagine they would build an audience this way? People who would like the show, like me, were likely turned off by the ads. People who liked the ads were unlikely to watch the show. And so, not nearly enough people watched it, and Fox flushed it. But Whedon isn’t giving up. He’s working on a film, and he’s still crazy enough to dream that the film will be a success and allow him to re-launch the series.

Let’s just hope he works with someone other than Fox.

Now the best from Court Jester:

Thursday, January 13, 2005

Thou shalt be happy

In the store this morning I saw a book called The Ten Commandments of Financial Happiness. Obviously the author understands what Americans are all about. The original Ten Commandents weren't sold as the key to happiness, at least not for each individual. They were about communal happiness and prosperity, about having life be good in the deeper, richer sense. It's not that it makes you, individually happy to avoid stealing--it's that the community is healthier, and your neighbors are much happier, if you leave their stuff alone.

But all we care about is being happy, in the sense of being rich enough to get all the junk we want and waste it without worrying about the consequences. And now someone was smart enough to write a book specifying the ten commandments that will get you there. This is certain to at least bring the author some financial happiness.

Personally, I'm only happy financially when I'm not thinking about money. The one who made the first commandments, and who has the authority to make them commandments, not rules or principles or guidelines or suggestions, says you can't serve two masters.

Monday, January 03, 2005

Odds and Ends

No big resolution or anything, but I'm going to try to get back into blogging a bit with a more open-ended attitude about it.

If the NBA wants to clean up its act, it needs to replace players like Ron Artest with players like the Kansas City Chiefs defense--no matter what the provocation, those guys won't hit anybody.

On the street the other day, we say a sign that said "DANGER SIDEWALK CLOSED." If they know it's a danger sidewalk, why did they open it in the first place? And if you're wondering, the way they "closed" the sidewalk was by having it not exist, which is pretty effective.

The bad news for the Minnesota Vikings is, they backed their way into the playoffs, and given the pathetic state of the NFC, they might even do okay there. This is bad because what this team really needs is some pressure to make serious changes. But I guess those changes will have to start with a new owner.

Speaking of owners, I wish to establish the Frozen Tundra Bowl somewhere here in Minnesota because I don't think there are enough bowl games already. Some teams with perfectly respectable 4-8 records didn't get to go to a bowl game. So if you happen to be a large corporation with lots of money to throw around sponsoring a bowl game, get in touch with me or just send me a check for several million dollars.

I've been trying to find a complete fantasy novel to read that isn't "volume 1" of some series or isn't 800 pages all by its lonesome. Guess how that's going.

Trying to write a novel isn't any easier, either.

If you missed it, you need to see Bucky Katt's tupperware armor. Get Fuzzy rocks.

Scott McCloud, your new year's resolution needs to be to start doing morning improvs again!

New year, new week, new blog entry. Back to work!

Thursday, September 30, 2004

My Prophetic Powers

I am willing to endure almost any amount of suffering to be a thorough blogger. So I have spent 35 of my personal minutes (and a goodly share of blood pressure) this morning listening to the message on same-sex marriage that I wrote about a few weeks ago. My regular readers will remember this, but of course they have all had their computers seized by the U.S. Justice Department, so I should explain.

I got a postcard in the mail about an upcoming “sermon series” at a nearby mega-church called “Lost it? Reclaim it!” The sermon that struck me the most was the one encouraging us to reclaim “morality in a same-sex marriage world.” I wondered why they chose same-sex marriage / homosexuality as their chief example of immorality, and I went on to make several predictions about the sermon in question. Last weekend the message was finally preached, and today I listened to it online. While not all of my predictions came true, I’m happy to report that I still have some of my hair after listening to the message.

For those of you who are too lazy to scroll down and read the original or simply too smart to read two of my messages in one day, here were my predictions:

So of course their message on morality is going to attack same-sex
marriage. Other popular examples of immorality will probably be drug use (but
not alcohol abuse), abortion, swearing, general rudeness, and possibly street
crime. In other words, the general message is probably going to be “Isn’t it
awful how that outside world is, so don’t you want to come join us here where
it’s safe from all of that.” And by “outside world” what they’ll really mean is
lower-class / deviant / politically left-leaning. This is, after all, a church
by and for wealthy white people in the suburbs, and they’re busy building a
bigger church even farther into the suburbs. Which really explains why greed
isn’t their example of immorality. If they challenged greed, they’d have to say
that money shouldn’t be anyone’s first priority. They’d have to acknowledge that
it’s important that money be earned honestly. And they might even have to
mention that our money should largely be used to help those who don’t have any.
In addition to being a left-leaning idea, this could lead someone to question
whether they should be spending over $2 million to build just the children’s
wing of their new facility.

As I said, I wasn’t 100% accurate in these predictions. This was in part because I assumed from the title “Morality in a Same-Sex Marriage World” that the focus of the message would be on how to reclaim morality. In fact, nothing was really said about how morality could be reclaimed. The emphasis was solely on same-sex marriage, and here were the key points:
1) Homosexuality is bad.
2) Same-sex marriage is bad.
3) Same-sex marriage will destroy “the family.”
4) So we need a Constitutional amendment.
5) Liberalism is bad, and conservativism is good, but I can’t tell you who to vote for, so you’ll have to figure that out for yourself.

So the speaker never got into abortion, swearing, drug use, and the rest, because homosexuality was the whole issue, and political solutions were at the center of the discussion. Along the way, there was one token mention that all sexual sin, “not just homosexuality” was bad. And perhaps the best point the speaker made was toward the end when he said that if heterosexuals really got their act together and did it right, we probably wouldn’t even have this debate. I actually agree with that, but it makes me wonder why that wasn’t the central point of the message.

The other good point was when he challenged the audience to be better about the “love the sinner” part of the old admonition, and he admitted that as a church “we’ve got the hate part down.” Unfortunately the instructions for how to love homosexuals were a little vague, except that we should amend the whole Constitution of the U.S. to prevent them from marrying because we are afraid that they will destroy marriage, but this must not be construed as homophobia. It must also not be construed as terribly logical, since the speaker claims that only 2% of people are homosexual, and this is almost always the result of some kind of abuse or neglect, and in any case, he cites example after example of what a good thing marriage is. So apparently our loving message is that marriage is really, really good, so out of love for you, we can’t let you have it. Oh, and by the way, all you single parents out there, when I listed all those ways that marriage was good and married people were better and kids would be hurt if they didn’t have two parents, I wasn’t talking about you, okay?

I did have one prediction that was spot-on, however, which is probably more accurate than all the speaker’s predictions of what will happen if same-sex marriage is allowed. I predicted that in all the talk of the immorality of our society, there’s be no attack on greed. And there wasn’t, at least from the speaker. Of course in the process of condemning homosexuality, he did find occasion to cite I Corinthians 6: “Do not be deceived: Neither the sexually immoral nor idolaters nor adulterers nor male prostitutes nor homosexual offenders nor thieves nor the greedy nor drunkards nor slanderers nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God.” He made a point that this passage isn’t referring to people who “fall into” this sin, but to people who “embrace the lifestyle” of a particular sin. His point, of course, was that our culture can’t condone people who embrace a sinful lifestyle, in particular homosexuality. He made no mention of the word “greedy” in the passage.

And after listening, all the people went out and got in their Lexuses and BMWs and drove to their lakefront homes and congratulated the speaker on being so right.

Monday, August 30, 2004

Lost and Found

I got an interesting postcard from a nearby mega-church the other day. They have an upcoming “Fall Message Series” they want me to attend. Well, not me, specifically. It’s addressed to “our neighbors at” my address. Anyway, this series is called “Lost it? Reclaim it!” and each week features a different item that has been lost. Week 1, for example, is called “SANITY in a Drive-Thru World.” Apparently drive-thrus are insane, possibly because of their spelling.

Week 2 is the one that really struck me, though. In week two, they are going to discuss the lost and reclaim-ness of “MORALITY in a Same-Sex Marriage World.” That took me aback a bit, and not just because of the irony that week 3 is “COMPASSION in a Hate-Filled World.” (Maybe in week 3 they will apologize for the gay-bashing of week 2.) I wondered how they chose same-sex marriage as their epitome of immorality.

It just seems to me that, looking around at our society, they might notice one or two other sins that were a tiny bit more prevalent than homosexuals wanting to get married. If they had chosen violence, I would have understood. Our popular media certainly glorify, glamorize, and over-publicize violence, so it can seem like we live in a very violent society although, in fact, we do not. If they had chosen heterosexual lust, or lust generically, as an example of immorality, that would make a lot of sense. But most obvious of all, if we’re going to talk about the immorality of American culture, is greed and its little brother materialism. You only need to watch about two minutes of television commercials or just drive down the street to see that the word “pervasive” doesn’t begin to describe the presence of greed in our society.

So it seemed to me like greed would make a much better illustration of how morality was “lost” for most people and needed to be reclaimed. But then I woke up and realized I was an idiot. Because blasting same-sex marriage is a very popular position, and the whole point of this mailer is to be popular. Their tag line makes clear what they want: “If you’ve lost it, reclaim it at [our] church!” Not if you’ve lost it, God will give it to you. (God is not mentioned anywhere on the postcard.) If you’ve lost it, we have it, come get it. We’re like Target, except we’re only open on the weekends.

So of course their message on morality is going to attack same-sex marriage. Other popular examples of immorality will probably be drug use (but not alcohol abuse), abortion, swearing, general rudeness, and possibly street crime. In other words, the general message is probably* going to be “Isn’t it awful how that outside world is, so don’t you want to come join us here where it’s safe from all of that.” And by “outside world” what they’ll really mean is lower-class / deviant / politically left-leaning. This is, after all, a church by and for wealthy white people in the suburbs, and they’re busy building a bigger church even farther into the suburbs. Which really explains why greed isn’t their example of immorality. If they challenged greed, they’d have to say that money shouldn’t be anyone’s first priority. They’d have to acknowledge that it’s important that money be earned honestly. And they might even have to mention that our money should largely be used to help those who don’t have any. In addition to being a left-leaning idea, this could lead someone to question whether they should be spending over $2 million to build just the children’s wing of their new facility.

(*To be fair, I don’t know what the message will contain since it hasn’t happened yet. I’m just guessing based on what I observed at this church when I visited. My wife suggested for them the slogan “Now with a third less Scripture!” If I remember, I might try to listen to the message once it’s posted online to see how my predictions pan out.)

So overall I have to hand it to them. They’ve packed a lot into a little postcard. It’s the perfect invitation: those who read it and feel good about it will probably be comfortable at this place. And those of us who read it and feel excluded know better than to show up.

Wednesday, August 04, 2004

Christian Colleges and Swearing

Some months ago, my wife was deciding whether to apply for a job at a nearby private, Christian college. One of the requirements for applying was to agree to their elaborate statement of responsibilities for “membership in the college community.” Here’s a part of that statement that especially struck us:

The College acknowledges that there are many things that are disputable,
which the Bible does not specifically forbid us to use, though it certainly
forbids us to abuse them (Romans 14:1-15:6; I Corinthians 8-10). Nevertheless,
the College expects that all members of the community will rule and govern
themselves in such a way as to abstain from the following things: gambling,
possession and use of alcoholic beverages, possession and use of tobacco
products, possession and use of non-medicinal drugs, and most forms of social
dancing. Year-round abstinence from these is expected of all administration,
faculty, staff, and students to assure an environment that is suitable to
accomplish the College’s mission. Deliberate participation in any of the
above on the part of any member of the College community will result in
administrative review and appropriate action. Continual participation will
result in dismissal from the College community.

My wife found this a little legalistic for her tastes. My reaction was somewhat stronger, and may have involved the word “Nazis.”

Being a more reasonable person than I am, she tried to get clarification of this policy, particularly the alcohol prohibition. Because the way this text reads, it seems to mean that
1) You can’t receive Communion at a church that uses wine.
2) You can’t own cooking wine.
3) You can’t have a beer in your refrigerator to offer to a friend.
4) If you go to a wedding and Jesus shows up and provides free wine, you should look down your nose at him, shake your head, and make the little “tsk” noise.

But her attempts to get clarification were merely met with a restatement of the policy and its absolute, no-exceptions nature.

Obviously this college was strongly committed to its position. It’s a little hard to understand why. I mean, they readily admit in the statement that there is no Biblical support for this position. And for a “non-denominational” college to require “all administration, faculty, staff, and students” to abstain from receiving Communion in Lutheran, Episcopal, or Catholic churches seems a little odd. But they give their reason: “Year-round abstinence from these is expected…to assure an environment that is suitable to accomplish the College’s mission.” Apparently, the college’s mission would be derailed if one of its community members, somewhere, was off playing poker for money or smoking. And you can just imagine the chaos that would result if they knew that some professor liked to go home after work and take the spouse out dancing.

Seriously, though, I’m sure this statement provides a real benefit to the college. Because it is in place, they can rest assured that everyone who belongs to the community is either
1) a Christian who happens not to be particularly tempted by gambling, alcohol, tobacco, drugs, or dancing or
2) a liar.
And of course the purpose of a Christian college is to educate. This policy taught my wife and me a lot, and it probably teaches young Christians a lot too: to expect irrationality and legalism from all Christian institutions, and how to lie like a dog to be accepted in a Christian community.

Monday, July 12, 2004

The End of the World!

I have concluded that I am apparently the only Christian alive who is not 100% convinced that we must be living in The End Times. I’ll allow that we might be near the end of the world, but I also think maybe God won’t end the world for another eight or ten thousand years. Yet it seems I can’t go a week without hearing somebody else say that we are definitely in The Final Days. And I am open-minded enough to acknowledge that if every other Christian on the planet disagrees with me, there is a slim chance I am wrong and they are right. So in the interest of a fair exploration of this issue, I present

A completely balanced and fair discussion of the question “Will the world end soon?” (correct answer: probably not)
To join me in this discussion, I have invited noted end-times expert Dr. Willard R. Ong (hereinafter, W.R.ONG) to join me. Since he is on my left, I will be referred to in the following transcript as RIGHT.

RIGHT: So what is the compelling evidence that leads so many Christians to conclude that we must be living in the end times?
WRONG: Every day there are many clear signs that the End is upon us. Look at the “wars and rumors of wars”!
RIGHT: You mean, like the wars that our President, who we are told over and over is a man of strong Christian faith even if we can't see any evidence of that in his actual running of the country, is carrying out?
WRONG: Exactly.
RIGHT: And has there ever been a period of history when no wars were going on? And weren’t wars just a sign that “the end is not yet?”
WRONG: But it is clearly coming. The best evidence is in the detailed interpretations of the end-times prophecies that expert scholars have developed.
RIGHT: I’m familiar with some of these prophecies. They all involve very elaborate “decoding” of the symbols in these prophecies, right?
WRONG: Exactly, and they show that all the signs of the end are coming to pass all around us.
RIGHT: Don’t a lot of those interpretations rely on some pretty large assumptions, like that the Israel of the prophecies is the modern nation of Israel as opposed to the church, which would make more sense?
WRONG: I’m sure the experts are in a better position than you to judge that.
RIGHT: And haven’t people been coming up with similar decodings for years, and haven’t all of them been wrong?
WRONG: The earlier interpretations were wrong; ergo, ours, the only one left, must be right.
RIGHT: I can’t argue with logic like that. But I do notice that there’s been an unbroken pattern throughout history that every generation of Christians thinks this must be the end.
WRONG: But now it’s clear and all around us! Look at how terrible our society has become!
RIGHT: Um…terrible?
WRONG: Do you know how few people go to church on any given Sunday?
RIGHT: Do you know how boring most church services are?
WRONG: Blasphemy! It’s a clear sign that people are turning their backs on God!
RIGHT: Yeah. Because I’m sure when all the people went to church out of social expectation they were completely devoted to God and not hypocrites at all.
WRONG: It’s not just church attendance. Look at how crime-ridden our society is.
RIGHT: Actually, crime rates are low and the broad trend is downward. We’re just very worried about crime because we see news reports about it all the time with no context.
WRONG: You cannot deny that we live in a violent society.
RIGHT: We certainly glorify violence and sell it in both media and the political arena as a solution to problems. But we’re hardly more violent than the Middle Ages or the Roman Empire at its worst.
WRONG: But clearly the trend is downward. We, the most Christian nation on earth…
RIGHT: OK, I’ll have to do a whole ‘nother blog on that.
WRONG: …are clearly becoming more corrupt, what with drugs and gangs and filthy movies.
RIGHT: I’ll grant that a move toward more subtlety about sex would be a welcome change, but it’s not like everything was pristine and innocent fifty years ago.
WRONG: Fifty years ago was a better time! People didn’t lock their houses! Women dressed decently and stayed home to raise their families!
RIGHT: And black people could be lynched in the streets with nothing be done about it!
WRONG: Look, all the signs that are clearly mentioned are present now. There’s simply no other alternative than to believe these are the end times.
RIGHT: No other alternative?
WRONG: Exactly.
RIGHT: What about this? Those signs are all present because they’ve always been present, in every age, to remind Christians that he is coming back and we should be looking forward to it.
WRONG: If you just want to produce wild, uneducated opinions, I can’t stop you. But the scholars and experts have studied the prophecies at great length, and they’ve concluded that the world is ending soon. Other than being right, what possible reason could they have to say that?
RIGHT: I can’t think of a thing, unless it’s wishful thinking so that they don’t have to take responsibility for the long-term consequences of their actions.
WRONG: Preposterous.
RIGHT: Plus I think they’ve sold several million books.

Thursday, July 08, 2004

New Christians Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

I’m trying to get ready to deal with the thousands of new converts we’ll be seeing after the Luis Paolo event (see below). That’s a lot of new Christians all at once, and I’m sure they’ll have a lot of questions. So as a public service, I’m presenting here the New Christians Frequently Asked Questions list!

Q: When I got saved, they told me to find a Bible-believing church. How do I do that?
A: This is made very easy by the fact that every church claims to be Bible-believing, even if their teachings and practices contradict the Bible so blatantly that they have to invoke some other book or person with authority equal or superior to the Bible.
Q: Then how do I go about picking a church that’s right for me?
A: This is less difficult than it seems, and most people can find a church they are comfortable with during their first thirty years as a believer. But finding a church is made easier because the institutional church is very, very organized. The first step is to identify the key factor that will tell you if you belong in a particular church or not.
Q: What’s that key factor? Theological positions? Style of worship?
A: No, wealth. If you are rich, you belong in a rich person church. I recently visited a church that was building a new building even further into the suburbs. The week I visited they were bragging about how they had raised the $2.2 million needed for the children’s wing of the new church. Obviously you need to be rich to go to this church. And incidentally, if you are not white, you need to be very, very rich to go to this church.
Q: Once I find some churches in my wealth level, how do I pick?
A: This is where the organization of the institutional church will really pay off for you. It’s kind of like going into a video store. If you’re in the mood for a shoot-‘em-up action movie, you don’t want to accidentally get some thoughtful drama instead. So Christian churches are divided into categories where you’ll only get what you like and never anything that’s challenging or unusual. We want church-going to be easy and automatic, just like it was for the early church, except that they all lived under the constant threat of being tortured or killed for what they believed.
Q: What kind of categories are there?
A: The basic categories are weighty and traditional, energetic and emotional, strict and intolerant, welcoming and vague, or well-meaning but disorganized.
Q: What if I want a church that’s really exclusive and standoffish, one that refuses to acknowledge that any other churches have anything of value to offer?
A: You can easily find that in any of the categories.
Q: Once I find a church, then what will happen?
A: Again, the modern church really strives to make everything easy for you. So you will probably get to go to some kind of class or small group where they will tell you everything you should believe, think, and do for the rest of your life.
Q: What if I want to think for myself?
A: Then you are going to be miserable in church for a long time, so you might as well get used to it.
Q: But what if I really disagree with a particular teaching of a church I’m in?
A: Most churches offer two convenient plans for such a situation:
1) They can send some tireless crusader to lecture you from (and if necessary, physically pummel you with) the Bible until you change your mind.
2) You can lie.
As usual, the church is very flexible. By lying and claiming you agree with everything the church teaches, you will be allowed to stay in the fold. As an added bonus, you will suddenly find new relevance to all the verses where the Bible talks about hypocrisy!
Q: Couldn’t I just find another church that I do agree with?
A: Absolutely, as long as you mean “agree with” on just that one particular point. But Christian churches all have thousands of points of teaching, and they’re inventing new ones all the time, so your best bet is to get comfortable with lying.
Q: What if I’m not comfortable with lying about my beliefs?
A: Again, never let it be said that the modern church made anybody uncomfortable. You can join an exciting new trend called “church-hopping.” The way this works is, you go to a church for a while and get excited about it. You start to meet some people you like, and for a while you are very happy. Then you gradually become aware of some things you don’t like in the church, such as their particular teachings, or the obvious disconnect between what they say and what they do, or how much of your money they seem to need to put on a show every week, and then you start looking for a new church. Many Christians are finding this method now seems like second nature.
Q: Is there anything else a new Christian needs to know other than how to find a church?
A: Not that any official spokesperson will probably tell you, no. But you should know that you are about to get your butt kicked. You will likely face immediate doubts about whether your conversion was real, or whether God is real, or whether you can really be saved. You may face immediate or delayed trouble in your life, either as a direct result of choosing to follow God or seemingly unrelated.
Q: Any last advice for me?
A: Yeah. Try to keep your mouth shut. I know you’re all excited about this new thing and you want to share it with everyone you know or everyone you encounter, but you don’t know how to do that yet. Go find some Christians you respect—in a church or outside of it—and hang with them and learn what the Bible says and figure out what it means to be a Christian so when you do share your faith, you know the answers to the questions you’re going to get asked. In the meantime, you can tell people you’ve made a change in your life and are happy about it—and leave it at that.

In with the new

2005-05-12T08:34:00.000-07:00

My previous blogging efforts faded out, I think because I was trying to focus too much. Without some kind of steady feedback or indication that they were worthwhile, I couldn't keep going doing the same kind of thing over and over. So I'm trying a more generic blog, where I can just post what I feel like, and we'll see if I can maintain this.

I will soon delete the old blogs, but first I will import over any entries that seem worth preserving.

And then I'll get to picking on Lost, which will be the first new post of substance.