Here and Now

So we've been using the story of Dickens' A Christmas Carol  as the framework for our advent series and I've read a lot of stuff on the subject.  Two links for those who want them. First, since the book was published in 1842 it is public domain - so the full text is available here, at Project Gutenberg***: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/46/46-h/46-h.htm Second, did you know that Scrooge may have been based on a real person?  Yeah, me either - though knowing what I do about Dickens, it doesn't come as a surprise (he was an incredible social satirist and drew heavily on the people and places of Victorian England for his writing).  Anyway, here's an article on the "real" Scrooge: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1228112/The-Real-Scrooge-As-Dickens-miser-gets-3D-makeover-meet-MP-lived-like-tramp-inspired-story.html And for those who have wondered about Charles Dickens and his faith - here's an article that I found interesting - factual, d

Did you know that November is National Novel Writing Month?  That's NaNoWriMo to the (geeky) initiated.  Don't care?  Okay.  But here's a couple Dork Tower strips from 2007 that...well, it's me and the blog the past six months or so...

...found at a goodwill shop, written on the tag of a coat:

...I just had this conversation...    Jon Stewart Lampoons The 'War On Christmas' - Watch more Politics Videos at Vodpod .

For those who live around here - does this qualify as a blizzard?  All I know is we decided to defrost our freezer and the stuff on the front porch is frozen more solid there than it was in the freezer... Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow?

Sigh - my time is not my own anymore... Dork Tower from Dec 1, I believe (probably have to click to see all of it or something...) This struck me as hilarious (especially his explanation of why he did it in December 2010):

...at least at the Beatty house :) (you probably have to click on the picture to see the whole thing).  From Sunday's Baby Blues:

No, not the movie - or the metaphor (yea Ray Bradbury) for Chaos Theory.  But, well, a little like both, actually.  Or not... A few weeks ago Elie brought home a butterfly.  At school they found caterpillars and put them in containers with plants...and...stuff.  Um, I'm no bug guy, so you'll have to take my word for it - or ask Elie.  Anyway, when Elie's butterfly came out of the chrysalis, it only had three wings.  She couldn't release it to fly away - since it couldn't fly - so she "got to bring it home."  She fed it mashed up watermelon and tried to nurture it but, well, you know how this story will end.  It died a couple days later.  Elie did okay with that.  But we couldn't just throw it away.  We had to bury it.  Thankfully, she didn't want a full funeral - but she put up a cross made of sticks where her first dead pet is buried. I was mowing the other day and I almost mowed it - but I didn't.  I carefully went around it.  Why?  Well,

You know, I saw this picture at  Church Marketing Sucks  and I thought WT...ahem.  I mean, "What?"  :) Anyway, yes, a college campus outreach ministry used these banners - fully aware of the meaning - to advertise their ministry.  How far is too far?

Went to Atlanta last week for the Catalyst conference.  Tons of great stuff (of course) and a couple new worship songs (Gungor's new stuff is great).  One of my favorite quotes from the week came from Seth Godin. "Cupcake failure is not fatal." His point (in part) - a lot of what we are afraid to try to do in ministry, in work, in whatever, is the equivalent of cupcake making.  What happens if you fail at making a batch of cupcakes?  You throw them away, right?  No.  You have wasted a bunch of time, right?  No.  You are not a cupcake maker, right?  No.  You have gained valuable insight into what it does NOT take to make cupcakes.  But you won't die. If you want to succeed at ANYTHING, you have to be willing to fail first.  Take risks.  You will fail at times.  But if you succeed...you may have created a whole new way of making cupcakes.  Who was the first person to put applesauce in their cake recipe?  Have you heard about making a cake with Diet Coke in it?  I

So I've given up "regular" features - in that I can't keep up with scheduled stuff every week - but I'll still drop the post title when appropriate. Anyway, today it's Apothegm (I was SURE that was a typo when I first read it - who puts g and m together in a word?) ap·o·thegm      [ ap - uh -them ]     Show IPA –noun a   short,   pithy,   instructive   saying;   a   terse   remark   or   aphorism. Also,   apophthegm. Origin:   1545–55;     earlier   apothegma    <  Gk   apóphthegma,     equiv.   to apophtheg-     (var.   s.   of   apophthéngesthai     to   speak   out;   apo-   apo-  +  phthéngesthai     to   speak)  +  -ma     n.   suffix —Related   forms ap·o·theg·mat·ic     [ ap- uh -theg- mat -ik ]     Show IPA ,  ap·o·theg·mat·i·cal,   adjective ap·o·theg·mat·i·cal·ly,   adverb —Can   be   confused:     adage ,  aphorism ,  apothegm,   axiom ,  maxim , proverb . Dictionary.com   Unabridged   Based   on   the   Random   House   Dictionary,  ©  Ra

No, this isn't about the cleansing of the Temple.  Yes Jesus got really mad that day, but this is another time.  I'm reading the Gospel of Mark today and I come across this verse in Chapter 3: He looked around at them in anger and, deeply distressed at their stubborn hearts, said to the man, "Stretch out your hand." He stretched it out, and his hand was completely restored. So the religious leaders want to trap Jesus and there's this guy with a "shriveled hand" in the synagogue and Mark says they're watching Jesus closely to see if he'll heal on the Sabbath.  Do you think about Jesus getting angry?  I guess I don't.  Too many images of the Jedi-Jesus - you know, no emotions, always calm and cool and spouting wisdom. But here it's almost like he's baiting them.  Doing what he KNOWS will upset them...because he's upset.  But here's the thing - he's mad for all the right reasons.  "...deeply distressed at their s

I happened on this quote the other day: The head of the Vatican Museum has warned that dust and pollution from tourists visiting the Sistine Chapel could endanger its priceless artworks. 'Such a crowd... emanates sweat, breath, carbon dioxide, all sorts of dust,' he said. Vatican Tourists 'Ruining Sistine Chapel'; The Independent (London, UK); Sep 10, 2010.  So...we should sequester the artwork (which was painted to be seen and experienced, right?) away from people because the very fact that they are people is destroying the artwork...  Um...  really? On the other hand - we've live in a time when we could create a near perfect reproduction of the work - I mean, it's already  available online   (and it's very cool, btw) - to the point where (with enough money  of course) it could look, sound, even smell like the real place.  Or we could go digital.  Imagine a huge ceiling that is a video screen projecting the that Michelangelo masterpiece - and

Okay, I had a post up the other day - but when I went to check it, I got a malware warning and so, thinking the picture (yes, it WAS a Star Wars pic) was somehow the cause of the warning, I pulled the post, looked at the html (which I know very little about) and cut all the imported html (losing the quote that had been the basis of the post - a quote that I can't find again now -  thus rendering the post useless...argh) only to discover that it wasn't anything I did that caused the malware warning.  Well, except that I trusted a bunch of people that I really don't know. Not Blogger. United Methodists. Yeah, okay, here's the thing, when I checked things with Google Tools (yeah, Google owns the internet) I discovered the problem.  I had on the side of my site a Western PA UM Blogroll.  It listed a bunch of UM (that's United Methodist for those of you who landed here accidently and for some inexplicable reason are still reading) blogs that I like to read once in

If you go to Otterbein Church, you'll probably hear me say some of this stuff at some point (soon) - but EVERYBODY needs to check out this three minutes from Francis Chan:

A while back my friend Aaron talked about his Jumble Box . A jumble box is a box, tote, or whatever that contains collected bits of...stuff - in this case musical stuff - cables, adapters, whatnot - over the years. I have a jumble box. Well, no, I don't really. I have a jumble room . Yep. I've got so many cables, amps, speakers, adapters, various and sundry pieces of electronic equipment that to put it all together in one place would jumble a room. And I can't help myself. I'm a packrat at heart (no, I don't like the term Hoarder , thank you very much, even if it's accurate). I collect stuff that I can use...someday...sometime....you know the drill. Lori has done her best to curb this tendency in me - and she really has for the most part - but not with musical...stuff. When I used to build model kits (and that's a story for another day) I had the "scrap box" or the "junk box" - you know, leftover parts, sprues, etc. The stuff t

Note to self: Next time you go away, make sure the coconut foo-foo shampoo bottle is closed before putting it in your suitcase...

Just because I have to vent for a moment... Windows 7 may be "all that" (at least compared to Vista) but I can't find the freaking files I need using the Widows 7 search. It's the first real feature about 7 that I've hated (well, they dumbed down MovieMaker, too, but there's a workaround for that) - but it's a deal breaker for me. The problem is I have about 400 gigs of files on an external hard drive - and it's not indexed by Windows 7 so it won't search it. At all. I can type in the name of a file that I can clearly see on the screen on the external drive and the search returns "no files found." Really? But i can see it...urk... So I wasted half an hour looking for a file that I know is on the external hard drive - give up, decided to spend another 15 minutes or whatever copying 34 gigs of files (one of which I was sure was the file I wanted) to the "Bill Beatty" folder on the desktop. Searched and, what do you know,

Catching up on some things that have happened sort of recently.... A while ago (hmmm, could it have been a year ago now? Anyway, quite a while ago) Elie saw a fly swatter and asked, "What is that?" Lori said, "It's a fly swatter. You use it to kill flies." About a week later, Elie was with Lori's mom when she bought two fly swatters. Elie asked her something like why did she need two or something and Lori's mom said something like, "To get you with them." And Elie got all wide-eyed and asked, "Do you want to kill me?" Now...I don't know what she really thought, but it occurred to me yesterday while I was mowing that I tend to talk to and around my kids like they're adults - like they get irony or sarcasm or humor or whatever when they hear it... And they don't. At least not always. I can probably say to a friend (within earshot of the girls) if they are misbehaving, "You want to take some kids home with you?&q

...I feel like this.

So, a guy at church asked me as I downed my fifth Diet Pepsi of the day if I'd read about the studies connecting drinking soda from aluminum cans and Alzheimer's Disease. I hadn't, and I kind of dismissed it (after all, there's lots of "internet science" out there, so...). Today I was thinking about my consumption (or lack thereof) of soda from aluminum cans the past couple days...and I got to thinking about the possibilities... What if this feeling of finding thoughts difficult to reach was somehow related to the fact that I drink way too much Diet Pepsi? Okay - it might be nothing...but, well, it might not be...um...nothing... There was a note here about symptoms of aluminum toxicity and I've got 'em. Here's the relevant quote: A 2005 research study from Poland examined behaviors in 67 males who had worked in an aluminum production facility for as few as two and as many as 34 years. These workers exhibited headaches, irritability, difficulit

I was playing Yahtzee today (a little handheld thing that we sometimes keep in the car) whiled Lori was in a store. I got 620 points. No, really. I had 4 yahtzees. My record is over 700, but that was on a handheld that we no longer have... :( Anyway, here's what I was thinking about as I hit my fourth yahtzee: You can't get the highest score in Yahtzee*** playing "safe." The only way to get the highest score in the game is to play it recklessly. For every roll to be "going for a yahtzee." That's what I did. Already have 6's? Who cares, you just rolled three on your first roll. Save 'em and go for a yahtzee. And it worked. But here's the thing. To get the highest score, I had to endure hundreds of failures. Lots and lots of "false starts" (NEVER start a game with less than 4 of a kind in something...) and lots of "just missed" opportunities (roll a large straight on your first roll? Nope, save the three and ro

I guess I needed...lemme check...three weeks off. Sorry. It all kicked in with Annual Conference - and it hasn't slowed down at all... Last night I moved heaved and earth to get a computer connection to our main TV so that Lori could watch a Netflix "watch instantly" or whatever they call it. I have a couple "used" computers at the house - still good, figured I'd be able to use one to buffer the video so that we could watch the movie - it's an XP machine, should have been able to handle it but...no direct internet connection. I grabbed a wireless USB internet...thing...from the church. Of course to install it - wait for it - I had to be on the internet and download the drivers... sigh... Tried another machine, loaded with Ubuntu . I couldn't connect it either... ('cause I'm a geek...but sometimes a hopelessly clueless geek...) So I did what I should have done in the first place and connected the laptop to the TV. Now, I didn't wa