Well, it's official. I got laid off today. I had a pretty good idea that this was coming.

In many ways it's ok. I was thinking about taking a break from ministry, anyway.

Our top plan is to move back to the Iowa City area. So, if you have any contacts there you want to send my way, bring it.

What to say about the Super Bowl?

I loved the MJ ad and Terry Tate, Office Linebacker (if you register you can watch the whole 3.5 minute commercial).

Hats off to Jon Gruden. The Bucs just kept getting better throughout the season. The offense got progressively better. The team was emotionally ready and intense for each game. They made the Eagles and the Raiders look pathetic. I'm glad for Brad Johnson, Derrick Brooks, John Lynch. I know it's got to be bitter-sweet for Tony Dungy, but I hope at least some of it is sweet.

Warren Sapp and Keyshawn Johnson are mouthy punks, though.

Heresy! Blasphemy! Dave Barry Dissed The Two Towers (but it was funny).

Scott got a form letter from Tom Daschle and posted a good response. Here's my response to Scott's response:

i think that standing up against antiterrorism in the early days would have been political suicide. anybody who believed in it should have still done it.

the Iraq thing is different. there's room for a political stand there. it's still risky. Bush holds almost all of the intelligence (spy-type) cards. all he has to do is say 'our spies say they have WMD'. public opinion supports the ouster of Hussein. as long as the war is short, this is political gangbusters.

then you've gone a little too far, Scott. we have failed, too. the great thing about being a republic/democracy is that you almost always get the government you deserve.

there's no doubt in my mind that the masses in this country Repub in ethos: God and Country, fewer taxes for me, let the littler guy fend for himself (though union membership skews this a little).

i've said it before, i'll say it again: an out and out liberal is not electable. barring Repub political suicide, it would take a Bill Clinton-type moderate with personality and a marginally different economic plan - like pro health care (but not socialism) to get elected.

what happened: the Dems, too, are beholden to special interest money and they can't take down the greedy insiders because they have profitted from it. we saw that clearly in the Enron hearings. Enron bought a little stock in everyone.

Daschle's South Dakota First program, detailed on his website, as i've mentioned before, supports a lot of pork for SD farmers. as i've said before, some programs to support modest family farms would be great, but payments to people clearing 100k a year is bad policy.

great letter, Scott!

[check the comments]

Question: Do I really agree with Eric and Maureen Dowd: [the Repub.s] 'see the world through the prism of class, while denying that class matters.'?

I don't know. I'm more pro-equality and they're more pro-responsibility. I don't think they take enough account of the real barriers to opportunity and the massive, somewhat intangible benefits that many of us (especially those of us who are white and Protestant and male) have benefitted from. Like Eric's poem says, there's a difference if you don't have to think of your whiteness or your maleness, whereas some are always aware of their blackness or femaleness.

Maybe it's just a guilty conscience. What do you think? Where do I stand? Where do you?

You might be interested in bloginality, grouping webloggers by MBTI. I'm an ENFJ. The most interesting thing about my MBT is that I have never, ever scored an S (Sensing) in all the times I've taken the test. I'm a pure iNtuitive. This gets me into trouble with things like facts and the real world (via Rudy).

(The visual design over there is pretty annoying, and they're pushing their Amazon Associates links pretty hard, but, like I said, you might find it interesting.)

(via Jaq) Steven had a big post about the USNavy, if you're into that sort of thing.

If you were me, and you were going to do a PhD in Ancient Near Eastern studies, where would you do it? Toronto? Harvard? Washington?.

Iowa City is the third most educated metro area in the nation (Boulder is number one).

Kottke pointed me to the Creative Commons interview with Cory Doctorow who has just published a sci-fi novel: Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. Interestingly, he's releasing it into the public domain. I downloaded it and plan to start reading. Tor is publishing it. Though Cory admits we don't know what the business model for this kind of publishing will be yet, it seems like the right thing to me, intuitively.

The opening:

I lived long enough to see the cure for death; to see the rise of the Bitchun Society, to learn ten languages; to compose three symphonies; to realize my boyhood dream of taking up residence in Disney World; to see the death of the workplace and of work.

I never thought I’d live to see the day when Keep A-Movin’ Dan would decide to deadhead until the heat death of the Universe.

a poem from one of Kurt's comments:

This line is metaphysical
And on the one side the bad half live in wickedness
And on the other side the good half live in arrogance
And there’s a steep slope
With a short rope
This line is metaphysical
And there’s a steady flow moving to and fro
Oh look you earned your wings
Are you angel now or are you a vulture?
Constantly hovering over
Waiting for a big mistake
Oh my God what have I done?
Wouldn’t you love to be on the cover of a magazine?
Healthy skin perfect teeth designed to hide what lies beneath
I feel the darkness growing stronger as you cram light down my throat
How does that work for you in your holy quest to be above reproach?

- David Bazan

Virtue can be oppressive: Pharisaism, moralism, legalism, formalism. Our goal is virtue, but not as an end in itself and not without a reconstituted heart.

Eric writes that Wal-Mart has 480 billion $ in sales compared to 3Ms 17 billion.

See, the great thing for Wal-Mart is they don't have to mess with R&D.

I have no idea what in the heck Paul's talking about, but if you're interested in PostModernism at US universities, you should give it a spin. Then please leave me a stream-of-consciousness negative discourse.

Oh yeah, and on the off chance that you know what he's talking about, and there's actually some real-world referrent (please excuse the reference to the real world), you can leave that, too.

*end sarcasm*

I'm not dogging Paul. I really like his writing. But I sure don't get this.

Defective Yeti has two hilarious posts:

one about handy/unhandy people. my comment:

very funny. i'm like you in that i'm not very ept (ie, not inept), when it comes to this stuff. i'm not totally clueless, like some guys. when you tell me what to do, i can do it. but i can't figure it out for myself, and it doesn't stick when i do. my dad and brother have this intuition for what needs to be done and they never forget what they've learned. i still can't remember if i'm supposed to check the oil hot or cold.

and:

Tonight for dinner I ate both pasta and antipasta. When they collided in my stomach it set off a chain reaction that annihilated the universe.

So if you were wondering who had done that .. yeah, it was me. Sorry everyone. I'll make sure it doesn't happen again. [link]

I am so glad I read Defective Yeti today.

Jaq had an incredulous comment to my post from yesterday:

Whoa. You don't believe that intelligent life exists elsewhere?

My response:

nope. i find Hugh Ross' arguments absolutely convincing:

he has 200 factors necessary for life support (and that's not even intelligent life!). thus:

Probability for occurrence of all 200 parameters: approx. 10^-237
Maximum possible number of planets in universe: approx. 10^22

Thus, less than 1 chance in 10215 (one hundred billion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion) exists that even one such planet would occur anywhere in the universe without invoking divine miracles.

It fits with my worldview that we might just be so important to God that we are the only beings like us in all of his creation.

I don't hold this view dogmatically, though. I don't find it in the Scripture. It wouldn't destroy my faith if there were other lifeforms or other intelligent life.

Back to prehistory:

a good, long page on Kurgan culture (maybe the original ProtoIndoEuropeans, N of the Black Sea, southern Ukraine and Russia, 5000 BC and after.

Another early IndoEuropean settlement (before 6000 BC) was Catal Huyuk in central Turkey.

The Neolithic Landscape of Çatalhöyük. If you have any interest in this at all, you should keep touring through the subsequent 5 pages (follow the next button in the upper left corner). Fascinating stuff (at least to me).

I stumbled across Eric S Raymond's Glossary of SF Jargon on friday and it's a pretty fun read. [index] And he's got a long essay on the whole subject. The most interesting part to me was the Federation model towards the end.

So what will I pick for my SF world?
- ansible and NAFAL (pretty much exactly like LeGuin and Card)
- biogenetic alteration
- no AI (I don't believe in it)
- probably pretty far in the future to give some time for interesting development
- no aliens (don't believe in that, either. like Herbert.)
- near term rise of corporations (esp. health care, which is already rising, like in Sterling's Holy Fire) and distributed nations and bioegineering and cybernetics and growing gap between rich and poor and angels (rich people who flee to zero-g) and development of the Internet (like Gibson and Stephenson). not sure about nanotech, but i like it's role in those guys' books.

I'm the 19th result in Google for 'Kurgan culture map'. Pretty impressive, aye?

Jim Rome had a funny lampoon of a motorized wheelbarrow that he saw on an ad.

(Incidentally, he kept calling it a wheelbarrel. I wrote him to correct his usage. I wonder if that will be appreciated...)

(Also incidentally, the word barrow is OE for 'to bear'. 'Bier' is a related word. I think this is different from the kind of 'barrow' you might find a barrow-wight in, which appears to come from OE 'beorg/beorh' for 'hill or burial site'.)

('barrow' is also a pig that has been castrated before reaching maturity, from OE 'barow'. So is it somehow related to the word farrow? Nope. That's from OE 'fearh' for pig/little pig [fearh fearh fearh, fearh fearh fearh, let me in...). And there's an agricultural homonym that's unrelated etymologically: 'If a cow has had a calf, but fails in a subsequent year, she is said to be farrow, or to go farrow.' Not to be confused with a heifer.)

Do me a favor: don't tell Jim Rome this is where this thread led me. Don't you think he'd conclude I'm a loser with too much time on my hands? I just got interested...

Guilty pleasure: your basic smiley :-). I'm pretty tempted to switch to comments that plug in the picture, like some of the big kids have. But not yet...

John 13 and Scott love Chipotle. Hmm. We have no such thing here in Tulsa, of course. Looks like Atomic Burrito to me (which we do have, and I love. Can I get a witness, Scott?). Also looks like they have them in KC and Chicago. Maybe I'll have to try it next time I'm going through one of those towns.

Jason left a nice comment on my column post below. Here's my reply:

thanks, J.

the conundrum for me is that when i try to manage these things without 'knowing Christ' in a pretty fundamental way i inevitably get off into the wrong thing - pride over better economic values while not-so-secretly wanting more money and more stuff - the virtuous anger of the 'deprived', judgmentalism about parenting, harsh questions about 'well, why do they have to be so thin? they must have issues, too!' or it's just natural for them. slim chance there's any actual God-inspired self control there.

i think you're right, that the people whose opinions we care about often can respond to this stuff pretty well.

but, again, i don't tend to approach growing that relationship lovingly unless i'm connected to Jesus. Paul said 'speak the truth in love'. i'm tempted to speak the truth in judgment or to hold back the truth in accepting/tolerant permissiveness (which isn't really love). it's not truth without love, and it's not love without truth. but, dang, that's hard, and i don't get to it without the Spirit working in my life.

(note: i'm using 'knowing Jesus', being connected to Jesus (like the branches to the Vine in John 15), and the indwelling Spirit cf Galatians 5.13ff) as different terms for a basically equivalent state. i obviously think this is what's happening in the Scriptures)

Steven Johnson writes about the planetary chalkboard - leave commentary at a specific GPS for others to pick up.

Some military tech:

I saw a picture of George the Second today that had SSN 776 on it. Google. The USS Hawaii, a Virginia class submarine, and, boy, are these things incredible.

The Pelican, a Boeing Phantom Works Project

Dwarfing all previous flying giants, the Pelican, a high-capacity cargo plane concept currently being studied by Boeing Phantom Works, would stretch more than the length of a U.S. football field and have a wingspan of 500 feet and a wing area of more than an acre. It would have almost twice the external dimensions of the world's current largest aircraft, the Russian An225, and could transport five times its payload, up to 1,400 tons of cargo.

Designed primarily for long-range, transoceanic transport, the Pelican would fly as low as 20 feet above the sea, taking advantage of an aerodynamic phenomenon that reduces drag and fuel burn. Over land, it would fly at altitudes of 20,000 feet or higher. Operating only from ordinary paved runways, the Pelican would use 38 fuselage-mounted landing gears with a total of 76 tires to distribute its weight.

"The Pelican currently stands as the only identified means by which the U.S. Army can achieve its deployment transformation goals of deploying one division in five days, or five divisions in 30 days, anywhere in the world." If necessary, he said, the Pelican could carry 17 M-1 main battle tanks on a single sortie. Commercially, the aircraft's size and efficiency would allow it to carry types of cargo equivalent to those carried by container ships, at more than 10 times the speed.

"Why would such a huge airplane be flown at such a low altitude?

By flying low, the Pelican, like its name-sake, exploits the aerodynamic benefits of a well-known phenomenon called ground effect. Flying close to water, the wing downwash angle and tip vortices are suppressed, resulting in a major drag reduction and outstanding cruise efficiency.

"It's an effect that provides extraordinary range and efficiency," Skorupa said. "With a payload of 1.5 million pounds, the Pelican could fly 10,000 nautical miles over water and 6,500 nautical miles over land.

"Flying in ground effect demands the latest flight control technology, conceded Skorupa. Reliable systems will provide precise, automatic altitude control and collision avoidance. Cruise altitude will be adjusted according to sea state, and if the seas get too rough, the Pelican can easily climb to high altitude to continue the flight.

Arioch (Dark Tower) also had a Mighty Orbots page. That brings back fun memories of 7th grade, when I was still watching a few cartoons that were maybe cool enough (GIJoe, etc.). If you ever enjoyed this cartoon, you owe it to yourself to at least listen to the theme once

My lastest column for our church newsletter:


Redeemer meets in a part of town where there are a lot of well-to-do, well-off people. There’s nothing wrong with being well-off or meeting in such a part of town. But those of us who are well-off, middle to upper class, tend to have a high value on looking like we have everything together – like we’re gainfully employed in rewarding and challenging work, like we have a nice home and cars, like we have smart, talented, well-behaved children, like we have a loving marriage, like we have self-control in eating and exercise regularly so we can be glowingly healthy.

That’s the problem.

Obviously there’s nothing wrong with any of those things. They’re highly desirable. But if we make the acquisition of any of those things our number one priority in life, that’s idolatry. And if we don’t have them and we start faking it, that’s a bad thing. And if we feel like we can never be happy without some or all of these things, that’s a lie.

A woman at Redeemer who was struggling with weight loss asked me one time, ‘How can all of the women at Redeemer stay so thin?’ It’s certain that some people at Redeemer, especially in these tumultuous times, have financial problems. It’s certain that some of us worry that our marriage might not hold up, or that our kids might not turn out right. And how will that reflect on us? Then people will know that we don’t have it all together. Having it all together can be a form of idolatry.

Redeemer does not exist to chaplain people who ‘have it all together’. We’re not trying to give folks like that just a little God and a few more life skills and a place to fellowship and find a little meaning. Again, these things are desirable (removing the ‘little’s and ‘few’s). But they have to come after we come to terms with where all of these things fit in our lives.

Paul said he considered things like these (Philippians 3.2-6) crap (and that’s still the polite translation – 3.7) in comparison with knowing Christ and becoming one with Him (3.8-21). [Philippians 3]

A good place to start is by devaluing these things in our lives. The most important thing is knowing Christ, not just meeting him, but getting to know him better day by day. We need to stop our striving for these lesser things. We need to stop our worrying. We need to stop our faking.

One good, proactive strategy is to be honest about our condition, to admit the areas where things aren’t going as we would wish. That doesn’t mean we go around and ‘throw up’ our tough situations on people. But there are times and places (especially with friends and in small groups) where we can be honest about these things. And we can stop acting like we have everything together. If we can get away from it, it’ll help our brothers and sisters who are also tempted to live up to our act of having everything together.

So, if you’re one of those people who seems to have it all together – it’s no big deal. The stuff the world cares about are peripheral in God’s eyes. And you’ve been afraid that you don’t fit in at Redeemer because you don’t have it all together, don’t be. Don’t worry and don’t pretend. None of us really do.

My latest review: Master of the Rings - The Unauthorized Story Behind J.R.R. Tolkien's "Lord of the Rings"

Stay away from this DVD
...or you'll regret you spent the money. Instead, buy Carpenter's excellent biography. Or buy Artist and Illustrator. I'm a huge Tolkien fan and this movie was embarassing to watch. I agree with the recent review that the interview with Carpenter was the best (so read his book). It was also a nice to see some of the Oxford environs (especially for those of us who aren't English), but the tour guides were total hacks.

I also got J.R.R. Tolkien - Master of the Rings - The Definitive Guide to the World of the Rings. It was better, but still just OK.

An essential palindrome that will help you with life:

gag.

That is all.

I came across a reference to Dark Tower yesterday.

We had this game when I was a kid and loved it. Come to find out the entry price nowadays is at least 150$ on eBay. Nope.

I Googled it and came across a great site.

So, there's got to be a computer version, right?

Right, and it kicks butt two times if you ever played and loved Dark Tower. Just hearing the sound effects and seeing the graphics brings back great memories of playing it on the floor in our room.

Simply click on the following links:

http://well-of-souls.com/tower/darktower-bin.zip
http://well-of-souls.com/tower/darktower-doc.zip

(And how’s about that nice Raiders of the Lost Ark address, also from our childhood?!?)

Then you’ll need the Java Runtime Environment:

http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.4/download.html (the first download link on this page, about midway down)

No need to thank me for all of these exquisite time-wasters.

Oh, yeah, this page also list Dragonmaster, which we also had and played as kids. Same illustrator. They've even got an interview with the guy.

Am I getting old and lame, is that why this nostalgia is hitting me so hard, longing for a better day? I hope not.

More defective yeti:

And The Award For Best Performance In A Dramatic Role Goes To ...

Story told to me by a friend:

On the evening of New Year's Day my two girls were jumping around on the big bed. Eve accidentally whacked Cynthia in the mouth, loosening a very loose tooth. Blood was shed; Cynthia panicked. She ran to the bathroom, saw blood, and started howling. She put a cold cloth on it but wouldn't allow us to touch or even look at it.


So from 8:00 to 9:00 she sat with the washcloth pressed to her mouth as the flow of blood abated. We told her to try to move it with her tongue, but she said that it hurt too much. She finally agreed to rinse out her mouth -- carefully. We told her that we'd have to do something that night, because we were concerned that, if the tooth fell out during her sleep, she could choke and die.


Well, she was a bit worried about that prospect, so she finally allowed us to take a look. But then she got more and more scared of our pulling it out. I was trying to hold her arms and face while my husband looked in her mouth. Meanwhile she was screaming! We were afraid the neighbors would call the police on us.


So finally we said, "Okay, Cynthia, look: you either have to let Daddy pull out your tooth or you'll risk choking in your sleep."

To which Cynthia replied "I CHOOSE DEATH!"

***

This will happen in my house.

By the way, that dude's got a lot of funny stuff. Jorn was right. Go read everything (especially the favorite posts)!