Someone Stole My Letters….

Courtesy of Photo Matt

BBC News reports:

Two men remain in hospital after a bizarre accident in which a car smashed into the top floor of a house.

Police are investigating exactly how the car managed to “take off” from street level and crash into the house in Basingstoke, Hants, on Wednesday.

A video is also available

As we flip through the channels during a commercial once and awhile you have to stop at TBN (Trinity Broadcasting Network). The other night there were 20 people dressed in black dancing behind the ‘praise’ leader when we happened upon the channel. Later, at the next commercial break a bleach blond preacherette. I would love to find a transcript of her talk that night. I swear she was channelling something! Given in a rap style with short three or four word statements that rhymed it was a sight to behold. Geoff, my 20 year old son, walked by and shook his head that we would be taking so much delight in something so disgusting.

Then I find this article by Tim over at Challies.com and I realize that we are not alone :)

Have you ever noticed that when someone says, “Don’t look at that!” you immediately look at it? I remember as a kid I used to delight in finding something gross and rotten and disgusting and showing it off to my friends, seeing who would flinch first as we dug around with sticks inside some rotten carcass. Perhaps I was a disturbed child but I don’t think my experiences were unusual. After all, there are any number of web sites that specialize in showing off the disturbing images of war, violence and stupidity. People have a fascination with spectacle. How else do we account for so-called reality television?

My father loves the spectacle that is TBN (the Trinity Broadcasting Network). He derives some crazy pleasure from watching half-crazed preachers ranting, raving and begging for other people’s money. The programming on TBN and other similar channels has come to highlight spectacle. Many who consider themselves Christian are simply no longer satisfied with the simple Gospel, but feel the need to add to it. The preaching of the Word, a simple message delivered in a foolish way by a foolish person, gives way to outrageous claims of miracles, tongues and supernatural experiences.

“the spectacle that is TBN” – I could not have said it any better.

Just listened to the Talk of the Nation story on the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy movie which is scheduled to be released tomorrow. The audio of the show should be available online tomorrow and I will listen to it again.

I have to admit I really enjoyed the books though they were quite sacrilegious. I remember reading the first 3 books of the 5 volume trilogy to Geoff and Mystie long ago. I am not sure why the books resonated with me except that his social satire was hilarious. It provides many opportunities to discuss many areas with the kids – from the beginning of time to the restaurant at the end of the universe.

Of course that the meaning of life the universe and everything could be answered so simply, 42, is amazing. I did find the site Deep Thought which documents this answer through history, from the bible to today.

As any digital hardware engineer, or software engineer, can tell you, the number ’42′ in base ten is equal to ’101010′ in base two. This alternating pattern of ones and zeros illustrates DEEP Thought’s indecision about the Ultimate Question.

Of course, in the original Hitchhiker’s Guide radio scripts, when Arthur has the “cave man” put out Scrabble stones and the sentence “What do you get if you multiply six by nine?” emerges, and then Arthur says “Six by nine? Forty-two? You know, I’ve always felt that there was something fundamentally wrong with the Universe.” — it is at this point that a faint and distant voice says “base thirteen!”.

42 (base 13) is equal to 54 (base 10). (Of Course — Douglas Adams has been quoted as saying ” You just don’t write jokes in base 13!” ) To dispel any myths about 42 (and to make Douglas Adams Happy!), Douglas Adams also wrote on USENET: The answer to this is very simple. It was a joke. It had to be a number, an ordinary, smallish number, and I chose that one. Binary representations, base thirteen, Tibetan monks are all complete nonsense. I sat at my desk, stared into the garden and thought ’42 will do’ I typed it out. End of story

After seeing the movie I will have to read the books again. My only fear in watching the movie is that “the pictures are always better on the radio” or in my head.

Update: The movie was good. Went with Geoff and Brendan, my 2 oldest boys, and all three of us laughed through the whole movie. We did bring our towels (only those who have read the books will understand) and Brendan attended wearing a bathrobe.

They did leave out the explanation of the babel fish being a proof that God does not exist.

While driving this evening I heard part of an interview on NPR’s On Point program titled Christian Dominionism. When I got home I got online and listened to the whole program. Chris Hedges was being interviewed in regards to his recent article in Harper’s Magazine, Feeling the Hate with the National Religious Broadcasters. Hedges pretty much said what one would expect from someone who is definitely intolerant of the Christian Right. He also seemed somewhat confused despite his “research” for this article. He called these people ‘Dominionists’. I doubt Dobson and Falwell have ever used the term of themselves. It is a label proudly worn by the Christian Reconstructionists, but those who follow Dobson, Falwell and their ilk are primarily Arminian Premillennialists who think the Rapture could be tomorrow. The Reconstructionists are Postmillennialists who believe Christ will not return until most of the world is Christian (by voluntary conversion not coercion). Hedges even labeled his Dominionists as Postmillennial – which I think is proof that he has taken the theology of a small group of Reconstructionists and put all the ‘born-again’ Christians into it. Talk about stereotyping and hate speech!

Rev. Christopher Ortiz from Chalcedon Foundation (Birthplace of Christian Reconstructionism) is brought into the discussion for balance and does a good job pointing out Hedges misconceptions and points out that Hedges is confusing Dobson & Falwell as Dominionist but that they are in reality Activists.

Harvey Cox, Professor of Divinity at Harvard makes a good point that not all ‘christians’ should be lumped into the Dominionist/Activist camp and that people of faith should not be shut out of politics.

With all the vitriolic speech out of the way Hedges finally makes some good points near the end. He says that Jesus repeatedly rejects the mantle of secular power and that Dominionist pick very narrow passages from the Bible and deeply distort the message of the Gospel. Ignored by the Dominionists are calls by Christ to take care of the marginalized, the poor , the dispossessed, the weak, the outcast.

Cox agrees and says that these activists really do not talk about Jesus very much and instead they talk about the 10 commandments and Levitical law but they stay away from Jesus.

So, what is the Christian response? Michael Spencer asks both WWouldJD? and WDidJD? Which is real question and that question has a real answer.

Doug Wilson in his blog makes a passioned plea to a person who is contemplating becoming Roman Catholic. He gives 8 plus reasons why this makes no sense. He also answers, I believe, charges that he himself is moving towards Rome.

As you are considering a return to Rome, I want to urge you to remember all the different ways in which private judgment will necessarily still be exercised by you. First, as you know, Rome requires you to “come home.” But, as your minister, I have required that you not go there, that you remain a faithful Protestant. Now, who makes the decision between these two competing authoritative voices? Who decides which voice is not genuinely authoritative? And incidentally, there are far more than just these two choices. Countless other groups beckon you as well. In all this, the ultimate decision will be made by you. This means that this is a dilemma that cannot be escaped. If I were to be asked by a Roman Catholic how I know my private interpretation is correct (over against the hubbub of all other private interpretations out there), I can reply with the same question. “Assume for a moment that we agree that we sinners all have need of an infallible interpreter. How do you know that you have picked the right infallible interpreter?”

Second, if you were to return to Rome, you would discover that you had not left the pandemonium of having to make choices in our Baskin-Robbins Protestant world for the plain vanilla solitary choice in the Roman fold. Multiple choices still confront you. These choices include what “denominational” faction within the Roman church you will align with. Will you be a Latin rite family, ultramontantists, middle of the road nearest Catholic church advocate, part of the “let’s ordain women as priests” faction, cheerleaders for liberation theology, etc.? These are not hypothetical questions-you will have choices to make, and the magisterium of the Church will not necessarily help you make them. For example, the pope is unlikely to say, any time soon, that all nuns should leave the liberal Maryknoll order. And, if he did, the likely absence of subsequent discipline would lead many to believe that he didn’t mean it. Authoritative teaching is impossible without authoritative action.

Then he closes with this arguement:

Finally, at the final day of judgment, God does not count by twos or tens. Each individual will stand before Him to give an account, and if that individual sat under the ministry of lies, then that individual will be judged accordingly, and all in full accordance with the Scriptures.

Does not sound like someone who will become Roman Catholic anytime soon.

Date Started: April 25, 2005
Date Completed:

The Essential Drucker, subtitled: In One Volume the Best of Sixty Years of Peter Drucker’s Essential Writings on Management, looked like a good book to help me with my management skills – and as Napoleon Dynamite says, we all need skills. I don’t remember where I read the recommendation for this book but I asked my local library if they could get the book and it came in today.

http://homepage.mac.com/bobembry/studio/biz/conceptual_resources/authors/peter_drucker/essential/ted.pdf

My Selections & Notes

Date Started: April 24, 2005
Date Completed:

Just started reading Leap Over a Wall by Eugene Peterson. I have been running across quite a few articles that reference him so thought I should read him for myself. I have had his book Long Obedience in Same Direction but it is packed in storage so found that the library had this book and the blurb on the back sounded good:

Of all the characters in the Bible, it is David who is most human. His life is lived on the “rough-edged actuality” of real life, and his relationship with God is an energetic one. Through the passions, the trials, and the lyrical poetry of this beloved figure, we gain powerful insights into the role of God in our own lives.

In this inspirational volume, Professor Eugene H. Peterson, translator of The Message, uses stories from David’s epic life as vivid lessons in everyday faith and spirituality. Exploring David’s experiences of friendship, grief, love, sin, and suffering, as well as sanctuary, beauty, and wilderness, he reawakens us to the enduring truths behind these beloved stories.

Selections & Notes:

While searching for something else I came across the following Prairie Muffin Manifesto and had to post it.

Some women have been caricatured as denim jumper-wearing, Little House on the Prairie-worshiping, baby machines who never trim their hair or wear makeup. Like the Americans who bore the name Yankee Doodle as a badge of honor rather than be cowed by the enemy who used it in a derogatory way, the name Prairie Muffin is meant to convey the message that we are sticking to our convictions despite the silly labels people try to stick on us.

And now I know there are also Prairie Dawgs:

Note: It was decided in a hotly-contested election, that the husbands of Prairie Muffins would henceforth be known as “Prairie Dawgs.”

Reading some of the replies at Boars Head Tavern lately has made me chuckle (ok, split a gut.)

Mark Whittinghill’s post about Creeds and Statements of Faith tries to spell out what his perfect church would preach/teach that:

drinking Budweiser is a serious error requiring corrective beer catechism, etc.

I have done an internet search and so far have been unsuccessful in finding a good ‘beer catechism’ :)

And Michael Spencer, as always, is stirring things up. Here he lists:

How The BHT Can Get Good Reviews In The Reformed Blogosphere.

1. All repeatedly cite our complete agreement with WCF.
2. All repeatedly cite our constant debt to ________________ (name reformed bigwig.) Then buy and love all his books. Every paragraph.
3. All agree to tell our Catholic friends they are going to hell because they worship a different Christ.
4. All agree that postmoderns are not Christians.
5. All agree that Brian McLaren and N.T. Wright are heretics. Cite the Reformed bigwigs who said so.
6. All agree that TULIP is important enough to talk about all day, every day.
7. Trash Arminians as often as possible for their inability to read what the Bible is plainly teaching.
8. Be uncharitable to all non-Calvinists in the name of “truth-telling.”
9. Endorse the political agenda of GOP, and tie it to the Christian Worldview. Question the salvation of those who don’t agree with our interpretation of that worldview.
10. Forgive the errors of all Puritans. Be outraged at the errors of anyone else.
11. State openly that some people need to “watch” what they blog, and women don’t need to blog at all.
12. Question the mental stability of those who persistently criticize Calvinists.

I think the only one that he really misses on is #8 – instead of just ‘non-Calvinist’ it needs to add ‘and so-called Calvinists who don’t agree with me’

Tim over at Challies.com has a book review of William Chadwick’s book, “Stealing Sheep” subtitled: “The Church’s Hidden Problems with Transfer Growth.” The review, if not the book, is worth reading.

From that insider perspective, Chadwick writes about the dark side of church growth. Having done extensive research and having examined the fruits of his own early ministry, the author came to the startling revelation that the church growth movement has succeeded far better in pulling believers from other, smaller churches than in reaching the lost. “Great effort is being expended, but few are actually turning to Christ for the first time. Instead, the faithful are mostly just changing churches” (from the back cover).

The statistics are startling. It has long since become common knowledge that while there are many more megachurches in the United States than in days past, there are no more Christians. Obviously the only way to account for this is to realize that people are moving from small churches into these megachurches. And why wouldn’t they? Megachurches offer excitement, quality of music and programming depth that small churches can only dream about. The large churches have a great advantage in our consumeristic culture where we demand that our needs be met. Just as WalMart has put far too many mom and pop shops out of business, so megachurches have closed the doors of many small, faithful churches. The author’s research found that over 90 percent of the members at some of the largest churches in America have arrived from other churches. When we consider that some of these churches have 8,000 members and that the average church in America has only 100, we can see how this transfer growth has decimated other bodies.

I did a report when I was in college documenting the membership records of the church we were attending. It was amazing to see the swings in membership and that the growth was always from other congregations and then when membership declined it was to the church in the area that was now “the place to be”.

It is hard to say where the problem lies – is it the church that is attracting them that is causing the problem? Is it the fickleness of ‘sheep’ who are ever itching for something else? Is it the original church that was not able to build their people into a community that would not dream of abandoning one another?

It was time for the annual pinewood derby for the boys again. With play practice there was not much time for preparation of cars but the boys did a good job. This year they created bionicle cars that were able to place them in the final round. They placed 6th and 8th but had a lot of fun.

There were some really creative kids. One car was a porcupine! They had installed what looked like 100 toothpicks poking out of it. Another car was designed as a tube of AquaFresh toothpaste – complete with the three colors of toothpaste twisting out of it.

Karis won the speed contest this year. I think he or one of his brothers has placed in the top 3 every year. If they have a secret it is just that. Next year we will have to start earlier and do some research on how to make our cars faster… Of course I think I say the same thing each year ;)

3 of my kids were involved in a homeschool production of Shakespeare’s The Tempest. My 14 year old boy played the part of Stephano, a drunken butler, and did a very good job for his first part with real ‘lines’ learn. My 11 year old twins were able to play sea sprites and mostly were the ‘invisible’ cleanup crew between scenes. Once again Ged Scharold took the show with his great performance, this year as Caliban, the monster of the island. He will be graduating from High School this year, so it may be his last.

They older homeschool kids spend 4 weeks studying the play and then 6 weeks of practice. This was quite a young group since most of the experienced actors graduated during the last 2 years and are away at college – but they did very well. The directors hopefully will be able to continue puting these productions together because even without my own kids in the production I would make sure to attend each year.

Photos are stored at ClubPhoto.com

Just saw this on SearchEngineWatch.com and it looks interesting.

Google Personalizes the Web

Say goodbye to bookmarks: Google has rolled out a seriously cool search history feature that automatically keeps track of all of your web searches and every page that you view from search results.

The new Google My Search History feature is a beta application launched in Google labs.

My Search History differs from the automatic caching feature in the Google Desktop application, which saves copies of web pages you’ve viewed on your personal computer. My Search History doesn’t save web pages; rather, it saves your search behavior, and makes it easy to rediscover both your past queries and the search result pages you’ve viewed.

The Google page describes itself like this:

Remember what you saw on Google, no matter where you are.

My Search History lets you easily view and manage your search history from any computer. This feature of Google web search enables you to find information you thought you lost. And over time, you’ll see an increasing number of relevance indicators in your search results that help you find the information you want.

Was time to go read Lark News again and ran across two articles that were too good to pass up.

Woman upset by theater mix-up

Maria Holsapple thought she was attending performances at the local community theater, but after twelve weeks, she was angered to learn she had been attending Oak Grove Center, a 3,000-member church.
. . .
“The pastor quoted Jesus, but he quoted Socrates, too, and Britney Spears,” she says. “How was I to know?”

2nd Place went to:
Rapture takes two

The Rapture occurred March 31, 2005, at 9:43 a.m. Greenwich Mean Time and took both people on the planet whose theology was exactly correct.
. . .
In a surprise, Tim LaHaye says he was “slightly wrong on the subject of the Beast,” and was left behind.

Well, it had to happen. I just was surprised how quickly it came. I had about 5 comments on the Dogberry Patch today that looked like gibberish except that buried in them were links to some poker site. I hastily deleted the comments then went looking for what to do about it.

My first thought was some of the plugins like SpamKarma or CAPTCHA but after reading some of the posts I have my doubts as to their effectiveness. Binary Bonsai makes some good points on How to Stop Spam on WordPress. He recommends Optional Comment Moderation but I found the plugin Auto Moderate Comments that accepts the comment or send it to moderation queue based on how “old” the post is. Instead of just using the date originally posted though, it uses the latest of date of last comment, the post’s modification date, and the original writing date.

The reason for using dates is that most spam hits posts after they have been in the search engines for a bit. That is how the spammers find the posts. So by only moderating posts that are ‘old’ you keep out most spam. The drawback to using the original write date is that if a post has activity then you also are cutting off legitimate posts. We will see how it works.

Next was a recommendation to remove the rel=’nofollow’ since if you have no spam in your comments there is no reason to have it. Made sense to me. I ended up following Tom Raftery’s instructions on how to remove the rel=’nofollow’ routines. After following the instructions I read about the DoFollow plugin that may make more sense than hacking the code and will probably install it once there is a new update to WordPress (since that will remove my hack).

Status: Installed

The Google Desktop allows you to search and find find your email, files, media, web history and chats. You can also view web pages that are stored in your cache.

A number of plugins are available to allow you to search other types of files.

Installed Plugins:

• Larry’s Any Text File Indexer – “Search any text-based files on your computer.”
  • Must reinstall to modify the list of files that are indexed
  • Reinstall looses all changes to the configuration file
  • Program directory: ‘C:\Program Files\Larry’s GDS Plugins\Larry’s Any Text File Indexer’
  • I added the following extentions:

# PHP
AddNewExtension "php"
# JAVA
AddNewExtension "java"
# AutoIt
AddNewExtension "aut"
AddNewExtension "au3"
# Pegasus Messages
AddNewExtension "CNM"

Plugins To Check Out:

• DNKA looks pretty interesting. It appears it will let you use the index on anyone else’s machine. I could see this as being useful at the office to enforce and verify computer usage.
  > It acts as a web server (search server) by interacting as a layer between Google Desktop Search (GDS) and user. And allow other users to search, view and download your files, emails, chats and web history.

I am listening to a tragic story “The Children’s Blizzard” by David Laskin on my Palm T3 (I record Dick Estelle, the Radio Reader, off the internet so I can listen in my car).

Anyway, in an aside about the journals of the imigrants to America the author writes:

It was the logistics of the journeys that the imigrants wrote about in greatest detail. The emotions they either took for granted or were too shy to record, especially the Norwegians who were famous for their reserve.

There is a Norwegian joke about an old farmer who in the grip of powerful emotion once confessed to his best friend “I love my wife so much I almost told her”.

Status: Installed

Ditto is an extension to the standard windows clipboard. It saves each item placed on the clipboard allowing you access to any of those items at a later time. Ditto allows you to save any type of information that can be put on the clipboard, text, images, html, custom formats, …..

• Ditto Home –
• Public Forums
• Help File

Key Bindings

“I am having the depressing experience of reading congregational descriptions of what church want in a pastor. With hardly an exception they don’t want pastors at all – they want managers of their religious company. They want a pastor they can follow so they won’t have to bother with following Jesus anymore.”

• Eugene Peterson

This goes right along with what my Pastor spoke of Sunday evening. He read from some ‘ads’ different churches had published who were looking for pastors: “Young congregation seeking experienced pastor to ….”, “Mature congregation seeking young pastor to invigorate our….”. All these requirements, but nowhere a mention of doctrine. Nowhere a request for “a man after God’s own heart”

Update: The Palm LifeDrive has shipped and BrightHand has a hands on review out.

BrightHand is announcing that Tungsten’s rumored new PDA, the Life Drive, is now being called the Tungsten X.

It will support USB 2.0, so transferring files onto the Hitachi 4 GB miniature hard drive should be relatively quick.

Supposedly, this device will have Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 1.1 wireless networking.

The Tungsten X will run Palm OS Garnet on a 416 MHz XScale processor.

This handheld will have a 320-by-480-pixel display.

This sounds like a pretty slick little machine. Palm is expected to announce it in May with a price of about $500. Ouch. Guess I am going to have to figure out some way to get the office to justify buying this for me :)

Status: Installed

Shadow Plan is the ultimate in Palm OS outliners, note takers, ToDo-listers and task managers. It also has a Windows Desktop application as well. Shadow Plan was the first PalmOS program that I registered and when the desktop version came out I registered it right away. The desktop has come a long way. I am still waiting for the filter system to come out of beta testing and then I think I will be able to do all I want with it (until someone comes along and shows me there are things I have not thought of yet.)

I currently have about 2 dozen list that I keep in Shadow including my ToDo list along with my schedule for video taping the HomeSat classes for the kids.

After a couple of mispellings on my posts here, I ran across this post at smallegan that describes how you can use the spellchecker in the new Google Toolbar Beta 3 to check your spelling in text entry boxes. The great thing is that it should work not only on my posts here on Dogberry Patch but also when I am writing comments on other peoples blogs! I will install it and give it a spin.

Search the Scriptures
A 3 year schedule to read through the Bible

I finally pulled the photos off of my camera and have put them over at ClubPhoto. There are 3 new albums. The The December 2004 Album is mostly Christmas, both in Boise with cousins and grandparents and then back in the Tri-Cities with Hans and his folks. The January – April 2005 Album. Then, finally, I put together Hans gets Older pulling pictures from June 2004 to the present since he has a large fan club.