bloggedy blog: the personal weblog of a music lover and aging punk wannabe

:: Saturday, May 15, 2004 ::

Commencement
Today was UMR's commencement. One of my most loyal readers, the notorious Mista Sinista, graduated today. Kudos to you, Sinista one. I've made a special gift for you, which I will deliver this evening.

:: Andrew 11:35 + ::
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50 writing tools
Roy Peter Clark, a senior scholar at the Poynter Institute, who looks curmudgeonly enough to be a righteous editor, is posting week-by-week lessons from the writer's toolbox. These tools are designed for journalists, but any writer -- even a blogger (or especially a blogger) -- could benefit from reviewing them. As Clark points out, most writers use these tools without realizing it, but it doesn't hurt us to refresh our memories from time to time. So far, he's posted five of the 50 tools, with exercises at the end of each segment. My staff and I will be using Clark's essays and exercises in the coming weeks to review our own work.

:: Andrew 11:24 + ::
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:: Thursday, May 13, 2004 ::

Fire?
Years ago, when I more enthusiastically embraced the spectacular approach to youth ministry -- i.e., loading a bunch of hormonally charged teens into a van and taking them to some big spiritual event -- I would on occasion gather up a group of teens from our church and go to an Acquire the Fire gathering. But after doing a few of these, I grew tired of Teen Mania's manipulative approach to recruiting youth for short-term missions trips, and the emotional roller-coaster rides many of our youth would go on during and after one of these events. So I quit taking our youth group to AtF meetings. I would occasionally receive calls from AtF representatives, who would ask me whether I planned to attend the next big spectacle. But since no big AtF events are coming to a large community near me these days, I've quit receiving the calls. Oh, I still get the occasional letter from Teen Mania founder Ron Luce or, more often nowadays, his partner/youth-ministry veteran Josh McDowell (pdf file), reminding me that I am involved in the battle for "a generation in crisis," and quoting alarming statistics about teen suicide rates and inviting me to "join the revolution," etc. But I don't get those calls from the 18- or 19-year-old kids from AtF anymore. I'm not sure why. But if I did, I wonder if I would carry on a conversation like this one with them. Probably not. I'm much too cordial on the telephone.

:: Andrew 17:22 + ::
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Oh dear, Watson
Dawn Eden recounts her recent encounter with Nobel Laureate James Watson, a man not known for his couth. I have my own Watson encounter story, which occurred a few years ago when he came to lecture on our campus. He appeared at the pre-lecture press conference in a bow tie and ill-fitting tweed jacket, fitting perfectly the mind's idea of the disheveled, absent-minded scientist. Shoulders stooped with age, Watson's curious bug-eyed stare and superior sneer, which grew larger whenever some reporter asked what Watson perceived to be a stupid question, kept us all ill at ease. The man was even more eccentric during his lecture, and discussed at length his continued interest in the old eugenics movement to build a better human. (In her post, Dawn also mentions his connection with eugenics but is particularly interested in his comments about abortion.) Watson was just kind of scarey, in an eerie, Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde sort of way. He's used his celebrity as a Nobel Laureate to advance some specious and unethical causes.

:: Andrew 08:54 + ::
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Now playing: wadio woebot (RealAudio)
Read the playlist and more here. And listen to the woebot. It's good stuff.

:: Andrew 08:30 + ::
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I'll take useless blog blather for $200, Alex
Lee Anne, who knows all about the Battle of Agincourt and sounds like someone I could use on my trivia team, blogs about my favorite game show, which I seldom get to watch anymore due to the day job. Apparently this week has featured politico "power players" such as Peggy Noonan, Bob Woodward, Al Franken and, um, Ashleigh Banfield? Anyway, Lee Anne claims she held her own.

A Jeopardy! matchup I'd love to see: Bill O'Reilly, Al Franken and Ann Coulter. I can see it now: Franken is kicking O'Reilly's behind all over the place. O'Reilly's hand goes spastic trying to beat Franken to the button. O'Reilly, boiling mad with red blotches appearing all over his face, yells at Franken as he tries to answer: Shut up! You've had your fifteen minutes! Now SHUT UP! Coulter, in second place, wins big on a Double Jeopardy, so Franken tries to get her to settle the score with a wrestling match, even though he has a bad back.

:: Andrew 07:39 + ::
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:: Wednesday, May 12, 2004 ::

Rock's on a roll
Hey hey, my my. Here's some more good news from Newsweek: rock and roll is making a comeback.
If you tuned out on rock music a few years ago because you just couldn't stand to hear another Creed song, it's time to come back to the flock. For too long that giddy sense of digging up buried treasure that comes with discovering a new band was a once-, maybe twice-yearly occurrence. Now, thanks in part to file-sharing and iPods, which have turned even graying rock fans into music collectors again, it's hard to get through the week without making a find. We're in a golden age for pure songwriting, with rare talents like Gibbard, the Shins' James Mercer and Wilco's Jeff Tweedy revitalizing the four-minute pop song and making a case that, in fact, it hasn't all been done before.

:: Andrew 16:48 + ::
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Newsweek interview with Madeleine L'Engle
It's nice to read an interview with one of the best writers of Christian fantasy around, Madeleine L'Engle. She discusses her faith ("... I sometimes think God is a s--t -- and he wouldn't be worth it otherwise"), the Harry Potter books (she read one but found "nothing underneath it"), The Da Vinci Code and writing.

:: Andrew 16:14 + ::
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Original sin and Abu Ghraib
Fuller Theological Seminary President Richard Mouw comments on the Iraqi prisoner abuse scandal from a Calvinist perspective. It is not only the idea that "civilized" Americans could carry out such abuses that upsets him. It's more personal than that. "I am horrified because those images make me confront the evil that lurks in the deep places of my own soul."
am a Calvinist, which means I have a firm belief in the reality of original sin. I have come to many of my strong Christian convictions by weighing arguments on various sides of the issues. But not my belief in original sin. ...

When I recoil in horror, then, at the sight of American soldiers torturing Iraqi and Afghan prisoners, it is not because I am witnessing an evil that is unfathomable to me. That kind of evil is all too familiar to me. I see it lurking inside me, and once again I cry out to God for mercy and forgivenness, on my own behalf as well as for people whose misdeeds right now have become a matter of public record.

As a Christian, I certainly do not believe that our only recourse is a fatalistic acceptance of the reality of evil. Both my theology and my experience tell me that divine grace is possible. Humans can, with God's help, resist doing the evil that might come "naturally" in horrific wartime situations. And, with grace, we can be forgiven for even the most depraved sins against our fellow human beings. With repentance, great sinners can recreate their moral lives.

Link via ChristianityToday Weblog.

:: Andrew 07:49 + ::
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Blogging is now officially legit
Because Google now has its own blog.

:: Andrew 07:47 + ::
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Kurt Vonnegut's geezer rant on the state of America
An excerpt:
Doesn't anything socialistic make you want to throw up? Like great public schools or health insurance for all?

How about Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, the Beatitudes?

Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the Earth.

Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy.

Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God. ...

And so on.

Not exactly planks in a Republican platform. Not exactly Donald Rumsfeld or Dick Cheney stuff.

For some reason, the most vocal Christians among us never mention the Beatitudes. But, often with tears in their eyes, they demand that the Ten Commandments be posted in public buildings. And of course that’s Moses, not Jesus. I haven't heard one of them demand that the Sermon on the Mount, the Beatitudes, be posted anywhere.

Via blogdex.

:: Andrew 07:42 + ::
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:: Monday, May 10, 2004 ::

The great outdoors
I OD'ed on outdoor activities this weekend but failed to complete everything on an ambitious agenda of landscaping and yard work. Dy and I began our landscaping work at around 9 a.m. Saturday. We were going to put edging around the new swimming pool. I thought the black plastic edging would stick nicely and neatly into the soil but ended up having to dig a trench around the pool, a miniature moat into which to fit the edging. That took most of the day. Digging and redigging, squatting, troweling, fitting the edging in, stretching the back, and digging some more. Then we sowed new grass around the outside of the edging and covered it with straw. By then it was 5:30 p.m. We didn't even get to the landscaping inside the edging.

I was stiff and tired Sunday morning. My hamstrings and calves ached more than anything else. I like to think that running 12-15 miles a week keeps me in pretty good shape, but eight hours of yard work beat me on Saturday. It was all I could do to wash my car on Sunday afternoon. I also offered to wash my mother-in-law's car, since it was Mother's Day, but thankfully she didn't take me up on it.

The stiffness remained today. This morning's run was more of a trot, but I managed to stretch out some of those aching muscles, and I'm feeling better now.

What an inane and irrelevant post this is.

:: Andrew 09:58 + ::
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