text:
The other day I was standing at the till in the local Staples store, and as the clerk rang through my purchase he kind of grinned and said: "Hey Mr. Harris. Got a joke for me today?"
I only vaguely recognized him from a class I subbed a couple of months ago. I told him I couldn't tell him any jokes, what with me being off duty, and out of uniform, and all. We laughed.
This has been happening to me a fair bit these days-- unidentified teenagers accosting me randomly for a joke. Once I was waiting in line for a movie and the guy behind me suddenly said: "Hey, it's that Sub! Hey, Mr. Sub, make me laugh." Another time at the grocery store the cashier said: "Didn't you sub out at Riverview High once?" After we established that I'd taught her English class some five months ago, she said: "Yeah, you told us a crazy story about a pig."
I also told them how to correct dangling participles, or some such thing, but she remembered the pig joke.
As a sub, joke-telling was like the bat-a-rang on my utility belt. Taking that old proverb, "Only great folly shouts for silence" to heart, I usually started my classes by telling some corny story to get everyone's attention, rather than contributing to the chaos by trying to shout them all down. And usually before I was half way through, the class was listening rapt.
In two years of subbing, I developed a whole repertoire of goofy stories and off the wall lines that could get me through just about any roll-call unscathed, and establish the kind of credibility with teens that you can only earn by making them laugh.
In the process I learned all over again how important laughter is in forming community. Something about the shared emotional experience of a healthy laugh together: it fosters trust, and disarms confrontation, and encourages intimacy. Of course, humour can also do a lot of perverse damage. It can shatter trust, and intensify confrontation, and betray intimacy. C. S. Lewis said that the greater capacity something has for good, the greater the harm it can do when it is perverted to the bad. He used sex as his prime example of this, but we could say similar things about humour. The fact that it does so much damage when it's misused is a sign of how much good it's capable of if used wisely.
Once in a while subbing, I got to witness the good of humour.
For example: I'd been teaching a grade 12 English class a couple of days in a row, and as I reached for the attendance roster on day four, one of the students interrupted: "Just a second Mr. H." Then he plunked a digital audio recorder on the desk right in front of me. It seems one of his classmates had left for an early spring break to Hawaii. He was fine to miss the rest of the week studying the history of Canadian Lit, but he didn't want to miss the joke of the day. They were going to email it to him that night.
Among the many things I'll miss about being a sub, I'll miss those unique chances to laugh. And for the record, here's the pig joke:
Make Me Laugh, Mr. Sub
The other day I was standing at the till in the local Staples store, and as the clerk rang through my purchase he kind of grinned and said: "Hey Mr. Harris. Got a joke for me today?"
That a Man Should Rejoice in His Work
Now the kids are home from school, I've hung up the tie, my wife is finishing up her last days in the office, and we're looking ahead to new things: new home, new city, new province.
And new work.
August 1st I'll start my new role as a pastor of the Free Way Free Methodist church in Oshawa Ontario. This will mark the culmination of five years preparation at seminary, and something like eight or nine years since God first put it on my heart to pursue vocational pastoral ministry.
What with ending jobs and starting new ones-- and especially this particular job, one that my whole story, it seems, has been meandering towards for years-- I've been feeling pretty reflective these days about work. The Teacher of the ancient assembly says there's nothing better than that a man should find cheer in the work God has given him to do, "for that is his lot." And maybe he's right. At any rate, it's interesting to think how the different kinds of toil at which I've toiled under the sun have all contributed something to who I am, and who I'll be as a pastor.
Here are some of the more memorable ones (in loosely chronological order):
7. Hardwood Flooring Guy-- I have pretty early and awesome memories going out to the job site with my Dad as his "helper"; sitting next to him in that work truck at ten, or twelve, or whatever it was, I felt grown up at last. Eventually this would evolve into a great summer job doing hardwood floors through High School and some of University, and the ability to do something useful with my hands.
6. Convenience Store Clerk-- When I was in High School, a friend got me hired on at the convenience store he worked at: weekend night shifts dealing with drunk teenagers who had nothing better to do than loiter around the local Winks store and hassle the polyester-clad attendant; paying more in fuel to get to work than I actually made most weeks; spending the difference (if there was any) on "lunches" of gas station hot dogs and fountain pop.
5. Painter for Student Works Painting-- This was supposed to pay for my second year's university tuition. Three evenings a week or something, we would "cold call" neighbourhoods to find jobs. *ding-dong* "Hi I'm a painter for Student Works Painting. We're working in your neighbourhood and wondering if you have any odd painting jobs we could give you a free quote on?" I felt like a JW with a paintbrush. I made absolutely zilch at this job.
4. Bible Camp Counselor-- When he finally got it through my head that the painting job was a dead end, God sent me to work as a camp counselor at a Salvation Army camp in the interior of BC. I made zilch here, too, but living up in the woods of B.C., eating healthy camp food three times a day, hanging out with people who loved Jesus and doing ministry to children all summer sent me home a richer man.
3. Waiter-- I worked as a waiter in two different restaurants. One was a down-to-earth place that did things like Sunday morning brunch and cheap wings night; the other was a hoity-toity place where we opened bottles of wine at people's tables and the menu had some exotic Cajun dish with real alligator meat in it. The waiting profession was a world unto itself... and the bizarre mix of people you worked with. But it was fun, and good money.
2. English/Math Teacher-- Only a couple of days ago I jettisoned a big box of old teaching resources that I finally admitted to myself I'd never use again. Felt liberating and agonizing at the same time. Seven years teaching full time probably shaped me more than #6-#3 together, and to be honest, standing in a room full of young people and helping them feel passionate about things I'm passionate about always felt as life-giving to me as breath.
1. Substitute Teacher-- I've blogged before about the unique joys of being a sub. To the list I might add how working with young people can sharpen your wit, and remind you about the power of laughter and strip years off your soul, if you'll let it. I found a lot of cheer in this work; I'll miss it.
The Thunderous Whisper of God
Still thinking about the voice of the Lord, I thought I'd share this song I wrote a while back inspired by Psalm 29 (click play to listen).
When I was growing up, the "small still voice" from 1 Kings 19 got a lot of press. People would talk about listening for the small still voice of the Lord, with the implication that this was how God typically spoke. He doesn't speak in dramatic ways; you have to learn to listen for his small still voice.
Of course, 1 Kings 19:12 never says specifically that the "gentle whisper" was the voice of Yahweh; and the Hebrew's pretty difficult to translate here, anyways. Literally, after the wind and fire and earthquake, Elijah heard the "sound of crushed silence." Some interpreters suggest that what he heard was absolutely nothing-- the deafening roar of utter silence.
So does the voice of the Lord always come to us as a "small still voice"? Is this the point of 1 Kings 19:12?
I'm not sure. Psalm 29 says that the voice of the Lord flashes forth like lightning. And Job 35:7 says that God thunders wondrously with his voice. And Psalm 68:33 says that the one who rides in the ancient heavens sends out his mighty voice. (And look at Psalm 18:16, and Job 37:2, 37:4, 40:9, and Isaiah 30:30 and Jeremiah 10:13...).
That's "thunderous": 9; "small-still": 1.
Maybe the "small still voice" appeals to us especially because our ears have grown so dull from years of living in the modern kingdom of noise. The idea that God's voice is hard to hear resonates more with our experience. But the ancients seemed pretty convinced that, more often than not, when the Most High God spoke, you couldn't miss it.
Well. In thunder or in whisper, may God give his children open ears to hear him when he speaks; and may he give us courageous hearts to respond when we do hear. Speak, Lord, your servants are listening.
Labels: OT, songwriting
The Psalm They Never Told Me About in Sunday School
Last night there were severe storm warnings for the Moose Jaw region. Walking my dog, I could see menacing clouds piling up in heavy heaps in all directions. I kept humming that line from the old hymn-- "dark is his path on the wings of the storm"-- and watching the horizon-- and thinking about Psalm 29.
Psalm 29 doesn't get as much airtime as the more intimate ones like #23 or #42. This is too bad, maybe, because there's something really subversive going on here that's worth mulling over. On the surface it's this straight forward, albeit glorious hymn celebrating the Voice of the Lord with vivid "severe-storm-warning" imagery. Yahweh presides over the divine counsel (v.1 literally, "the sons of god"), and his mighty Voice rumbles out exactly seven times: it thunders over the waters; it is powerful; it is majestic; it breaks the mighty cedars; it flashes with lightning; it shakes the desert; it strips the forests bare. All creation convulses as Yahweh is enthroned as King forever, reigning supreme over the chaotic waters (v. 10 the "flood").
And in his temple, all cry "Glory!"
But here's the subversive thing: a divine warrior subduing the chaotic waters, sitting enthroned amid a counsel of divine beings, thundering his sevenfold voice from his divine palace-- these are all images straight out of the ancient Baal myths. In fact, in a text that Ugaritic scholars call KTU2 1.101.3b-4 (Ugariticia,V, 3.3b-4), we find a description of Baal sitting enthroned over the flood water, and then a vivid reference to his "seven lightnings," his "eight storehouses of thunder," his "shaft of lightning."
Remember Baal? The enemy of Yahweh? The false god whose cult Elijah worked so zealously to purge from Israel? Well it looks like psalmist here has lifted the precise attributes of the mythic Baal, and then ascribed their glory directly to Yahweh.
In a way that makes playing rock music in church look pretty tame, Psalm 29 uses the specific language of an idolatrous culture to make a bold case for the One True God. Because to claim that Yahweh's voice thunders over the waters is to claim implicitly and subversively that Baal's does not. Ugaritic scholar Peter Craigie says it like this: "Language normally employed to worship Baal for the awesome might of the thunderstorm did not rightfully belong to him who was not true god. Such language belonged to the God of Israel alone."
Now, I think it would be easy to make too much out of the Baal-myth imagery in Psalm 29 (and I've read a few scholars who've done just that). At the same time, however, it would be easier to make too little out of it-- to ignore altogether the startling fact that this psalm makes Baalistic imagery bear witness to Yahweh.
I've posted a bit on culture and Faith lately (like here , here, or here ). And as I wonder out loud about the Christian's prophetic role in a non-Christian culture, I wonder if we shouldn't meditate a bit on Psalm 29. Because here God confounds the claims of an idolatrous impostor by revealing himself specifically and scandalously in the impostor's own terms. It's almost as if you can hear God say to all those ancient Baalists: "You had the right notion of divine glory-- you just ascribed it to the wrong god. There is a voice that subdues chaos and gives life-- only it's mine, and most assuredly not Baal's."
And I wonder what it would look like if Christians were as daring in their apologetic strategy as this Psalmist. What if we looked for broken witnesses to the One True God buried in the language and imagery of the culture around us? What if-- like Psalmist #29-- we pointed these out, saying to our neighbours: "You had the right notion of divine glory-- or divine love-- or divine Spirit-- you just ascribed it to the wrong god."
If we could, we just might hear the same voice of the Lord that the Psalmist heard, rumbling like looming thunder on the distant horizon of his culture.
In the Logic of the Heart
In math, a surd is an irrational number (the root of an integer), or an unresolved mathematical expression. In linguistics a surd is a voiceless consonant. I like this word, "surd"; it has a ring to it that's almost as obscure as the numerical and phonetic concepts it signifies. I didn't come across it first in a math or linguistics textbook, however, but a theological one. Theologian Donald Bloesch uses it when he describes the impulse in a certain kind of rationalistic theology that tries to overcome all ambiguities in our experience and knowledge of God, because we just can't tolerate a "surd in human existence."
Something like that.
And something about how the biblical theologian needs to learn to accept unresolvable paradox.
I wrote a song called "Surd" a couple of years ago when I was struggling with a lot of irrational, unresolvable and inexpressible questions of my own about God and faith and ministry. At the time it was a really important heart cry for me; helped me figure out what it meant to accept unresolvable paradox in my life with God. Thought I'd share it here. Speaking of paradox: the guitar part was inspired loosely by The Clash's "London Calling," so you can think of it as a bit of Donald Bloesch meets The Clash.
Surd, in the logic of my heart,
No rhyme or reason help me please I don't know where to start
It's absurd that I don't know who I am
I fear to face the mirror see the child in the man
And I would give you my everything,
if I knew what my everything was
I'm sitting here with my dreams on a string
My heart was not for sale but it got rented for a while
And now I have to use my smile to hide my broken wings
Surd, in the silence of the night
I'm lying in the darkness and I'm trying to get it right
It's that word that you whisper in my ear
I miss it when I listen could you teach me how to hear
And I would give you my everything,
if I knew what my everything was
I'm sitting here with my dreams on a string
My heart was not for sale but it got rented for a while
And now I have to use my smile to hide my broken wings
Labels: songwriting, words
Picturing the Footstool of Christ
A couple of summers ago we visited the Montana State University Museum in Bozeman, Montana. They were hosting a touring exhibit of the treasures of Pharaoh Tutankhamen's tomb, with full-scale reproductions made by Egyptian craftsmen, accurate down to the finest detail.
And here 's where I stopped dead in my tracks: the footstool of King Tut's throne is decorated with stylized illustrations of his defeated enemies. Whenever King Tut sat in state, his court-- and indeed the whole world-- glimpsed this potent reminder that he had literally subdued the enemies of Egypt under his feet.
His sandals add imperialistic insult to political injury: the insoles are decorated with images of Semitic and North African prisoners of war. King Tut couldn't take a step without reminding himself and his empire that Egypt had truly tread down her enemies.
I stood there transfixed for a moment. Ringing in my mind's ear were the words of King David's messianic oracle: "The Lord (Yahweh) says to my Lord (Adonai), sit at my right hand until I make your enemies your footstool."
In the ancient world, it seems, this was more than just a throw-away line of poetic imagery. In the ancient world, apparently, you really did make your enemies your footstool, literally and symbolically.
I wondered about King David, and what they might have drawn on his sandals. Philistine mockers? Assyrian barbarians? Babylonian idolaters? The Lord (Adonai), this oracle says so confidently, will strike through kings and judge the nations. And the Lord himself (Yahweh) will draw the illustrations for the Messiah's footstool.
But then, still transfixed, I wondered about Jesus. What pictures would we see on his sandals? What illustrations adorn the footstool of his throne?
"Death. The fear of death. The Devil," says the author to the Hebrews, the teacher of the early Church whose midrash of this entire Psalm points us inexorably to Jesus. These have always been the enemies of God's people, he says. And this is why Jesus took on flesh and blood in the first place: "so that by his death he might destroy him who holds the power of death-- that is, the devil." St. John agrees: we'd see a representation of sin-- the works of the devil. After all, this is why the Son of Man appeared: "to destroy the work of the devil."
St. Paul would agree, too. Only, he'd add, we'd also see a picture of those idolatrous systems of human power that so dehumanize us, making people into things. Because in the cross of his Christ, he says, God disarmed the powers and authorities of this world, leading them captive in his victory parade. With typically Christian irony, Paul might say that on the sandals of God's Christ, we'd actually see a picture of an emperor's sandal all decorated with pictures of the empire's defeated enemies. Imperialistic power itself is one of the enemies of God's Anointed Emperor.
The Devil. Sin. Empire. The fear of Death. Death itself.
With every step of his nail-scarred feet, Jesus reminds us again that he has really tread down these enemies. And he invites us to walk, free and transformed, in the path of those footsteps.
Jesus and the Long Now
An organization called the "Long Now Foundation" is planning to build a mechanical clock that will keep time for the next 10,000 years. They call it "The Clock of the Long Now." The goal of the project is to inspire long-term thinking in a world where our whole sense of time is organized around increasingly ephemeral time-spans. I have trouble imagining the next ten years (sometimes 10 minutes is a stretch): this clock ticks once a year, with a "century hand" that advances every hundred years and a cuckoo that comes out every millenium.
Prototypes of the clock are now running in museums in London and San Fransisco, but the actual clock will be housed in a cave on top of Mt. Washington, Nevada, a region that is home, incidentally, to some 5000-year-old bristlecone pines (nature's-own Long Now Clocks).
You can click here to listen to Steward Brand talk about the search for a home for the Clock of the Long Now.
The whole aim of the Long Now Foundation is to promote slower thinking-- thinking on a scale of 10,000 years-- thinking about the long-range impact of our actions -- in contrast to the faster/cheaper/disposable/expedient mentality that has wreaked so much havoc on our environment, our cultures, our planet.
Treebeard, I think, would love these guys.
But I have to confess, when I first heard about the Clock of the Long Now, my cynicism reflex twitched involuntarily for just a moment: Yeah, right... who's gonna be around 10,000 years from now to hear that final chime?
And then it hit me, a crashing wave of conviction with an undertow of repentance, dragging my heart out into a sea of deeper faith: as a Christian, I confess Jesus Christ, coming again to judge the living and the dead. I'm the subject of a once, now and future king. And if anyone has reason for long-range thinking, I should. Because whenever Christians confess his coming to judge the living and the dead, in that very act we confess also our expectation that there will be still be some "living" around when he arrives.
Ten thousand years from now, either Christ will have returned, or we'll still be here proclaiming his death until he comes. And because we'll still be marrying and giving in marriage until the end-- and because no one knows the hour or the day-- and because a day is like a thousand years to the Lord-- because of all this, the Christian life has a future orientation that should make long-range thinking second nature to us.
In fact, the paradox of the term "the long now" itself seems to capture something about the whole Christian posture towards time: in expecting his return instantly but being prepared to wait ten thousand years, Christians are indeed living in the "long now." And whether it's tomorrow or ten millennia from now, our hope that Christ will return at last to reclaim this labouring world should inspire us to think deeply about the long-range impact of our ethical, environmental or cultural decisions in and on behalf of his world, even as we wait for him to come quickly.
Labels: eschatology, hope, NT
On Kafka Dreams
Along with George Orwell (who gave us "Orwellian") and Cervantes (who gave us "quixotic"), Franz Kafka is one of those few writers of world literature whose work has become its own adjective. According to my dictionary, to call something "Kafkaesque" is to claim that it is "impenetrably oppressive, nightmarish." Just like a good Kafka story.
If you've never read a good Kafka story, I'd suggest starting with Metamorphosis. A good follow-up would be In the Penal Colony. And for the less-faint-of-heart, The Trial. His stories all deal with these perplexed characters who are haunted by some vague, oppressive guilt that they can never get to the bottom of, and every attempt to expiate it only unravels into more bizarre experiences of guilt. A man wakes up inexplicably transformed into a giant insect; a man opens a closet door and finds himself stepping into a macabre courtroom where he is inexplicably on trial; a man commits suicide in a torture machine that etches his inexplicable crime into his back. And no one will ever say why.
There's a scene in Calvin and Hobbes where Calvin insists that his mom give Hobbes a good night kiss, after which Hobbes claims: "If you don't get a good night kiss, you get Kafka dreams."
I get Kafka dreams once in a while. Even with my good night kiss.
A friend at seminary was doing his thesis on G. K. Chesterton's The Man who was Thursday, and his research led him to Kafka at one point. We had a few good conversations about the existential guilt in Kafka's work. Later I was thinking about this comic strip, and my friend's thesis, and guilt and shame and other Kafkaesque things. Eventually my thoughts stumbled into a piano tune I was working on and I wrote this song, "Kafka Dreams."
I wonder if Christians-- and especially those who grew up comfortably in the Faith-- shouldn't read a bit of Kafka once in a while. That acrid taste of guilt just might sharpen our thirst for the promise of atonement and reconcilliation that God offers us in the person of Jesus Christ.
A Case in Point...
With the words of my last post still ringing in my ears, my son and I sat down to enjoy an episode of the Debaters this afternoon. My bowdlerization-trigger-finger twitched for just a moment with the impulse to turn it off when I heard the topic: "Monotheism vs. Polytheism. If one god is good... are many gods better?"
My son looked at me. "Should we listen to this one, Dad?"
But we've talked a bit lately about Christian attitudes towards humor, and I wanted to model the kind of cultural mapping I was describing a post ago, so I said, "Well, let's listen to the kind of jokes they make, and talk about them after."
And here's specifically what we talked about after: listen to the argument that comedian Ron Sparks makes here in favor of monotheism. What struck me is that-- tongue-in-cheekisms and comedic bathos aside-- this is almost exactly the same argument that St. Augustine made against Roman paganism some 1600 years ago in his monumental work City of God: If the pagan deities are such supreme beings, why does there have to be so many of them to keep the universe running?
It's not quite as funny (or succinct), but here's how Augustine put it (Book IV, Chapter 8):
But how is it possible to recount in one part of this book all the names of gods or goddesses, which they could scarcely comprise in great volumes, distributing among these divinities their peculiar offices about single things? They have not even thought that the charge of their lands should be committed to any one god: but they have entrusted their farms to Rusina; the ridges of the mountains to Jugatinus; over the downs they have set the goddess Collatina; over the valleys, Vallonia. Nor could they even find one Segetia so competent, that they could commend to her care all their grain crops at once; but so long as their seed-grain was still under the ground, they would have the goddess Seia set over it; then, whenever it was above ground and formed straw, they set over it the goddess Segetia; and when the grain was collected and stored, they set over it the goddess Tutilina, that it might be kept safe. Who would not have thought that goddess Segetia sufficient to take care of the standing grain until it had passed from the first green blades to the dry ears? Yet she was not enough for men, who loved a multitude of gods, that the miserable soul, despising the chaste embrace of the one true God, should be prostituted to a crowd of demons. Therefore they set Proserpina over the germinating seeds; over the joints and knots of the stems, the god Nodotus; over the sheaths enfolding the ears, the goddess Voluntina; when the sheaths opened that the spike might shoot forth, it was ascribed to the goddess Patelana; when the stems stood all equal with new ears, because the ancients described this equalizing by the term hostire, it was ascribed to the goddess Hostilina; when the grain was in flower, it was dedicated to the goddess Flora; when full of milk, to the god Lacturnus; when maturing, to the goddess Matuta; when the crop was runcated,— that is, removed from the soil—to the goddess Runcina. Nor do I yet recount them all, for I am sick of all this, though it gives them no shame. Only, I have said these very few things, in order that it may be understood they dare by no means say that the RomanA comedian making jokes about monotheism on national, secular radio stumbles onto an argument that one of the greatest theologians of Church history marshaled in defense of the one true God against the pagans. The audience laughs. Ron wins the debate. And I'm trying to trace one more route to a spiritual point of contact on my map of Canadian culture.
empirehas been established, increased, and preserved by their deities, who had all their own functions assigned to them in such a way, that no general oversight was entrusted to any one of them.
Top Ten Reasons I Listen to CBC Radio
Looking back over the last few months of blogging, I've noticed that a fair number of my posts have been inspired by something heard on CBC radio. I'm not religious about it or anything, but I do try to catch a bit of CBC each day (usually on the drive to-and-from work), and often a thought provoking interview or insightful documentary will inspire me to reflect on God, life, faith, love, words or spirituality.
I was thinking about this the other day, CBC Radio sowing the seeds of blog posts in my brain and all, and I thought I'd put together my list of the top ten reasons I listen to the CBC.
10. Quirks and Quarks (Saturdays 12:06 pm). Bob McDonald takes the most esoteric of science and makes it feel like an old buddy from elementary school. Often makes me think about how deep a role science plays in the modern act of myth-making.
9. Tapestry (Sunday 2:05 pm). This weekly "exploration of spirituality, religion and the search for meaning" assures me that Canadians are "seeking" a lot more than they let on. They're just not seeking the way the mega-church-shopping seekers that Willow Creek has sensitized us to are seeking. This program challenges me to think carefully about how Canadians in particular are seeking, and how the church might meet them in that search with the life-changing story of Jesus.
8. Talking Books. Sadly this program is no longer on the air, but I loved listening to Ian Brown's book talks. Sometimes the guests he had sounded a bit pompous, but I think that was part of the charm: they always seemed exactly like I'd expect a book club to sound. You could almost feel the itch of the cardigan or smell the orange pekoe cooling in the cup as they ranted or raved.
7. The "9.30 in Newfoundland" thing. I love this constant reminder that Canadians are citizens of a huge country. Huge. Bigger than Vancouver. Bigger than Calgary. Bigger than Toronto. So big it needs an extra half a time zone. There're people scattered all over this land mass, and there's something kinda Canadian in not wanting to offend anyone by leaving any of them out.
6. Ideas (Wednesdays at 9:05 pm). Billed as the program that "explores social issues, culture and the arts, geopolitics, history, biography, science and technology and the humanities," any time I've listened it's actually delivered pretty well on this long list of disciplines. If there are still Renaissance men (or women) alive in Canada, I know what they're doing Wednesday nights at 9.
5. The Debaters (Saturdays 11:30 am). There is something quintessentially Canadian in this show: take some legitimate political, social or cultural issue and have comedians debate it with an irreverent combination of "fact and funny." Not only does it showcase what's best about Canadian humor, but it often unmasks pretty deep issues so that we can look at their foibles in new light. And it's really funny.
4. The Vinyl Cafe (Sundays 12:05 pm). Love Stuart Mclean's stories. So does my son. Often we catch them just as we're coming home from church, and he'll sit in the car in our driveway listening intently if we get home before the story's done. This program gives me hope that Canadians will still listen patiently, delightedly and enthralled to the spoken word-- even the orally-read written word-- if those words are arranged with care, love, wisdom and wit.
3. The Age of Persuasion (Thursdays 3:30pm). Anyone who lives in a world bombarded by advertising media should catch this program once in a while to get a brief, engaging glimpse at the inner clockworks of that world. There're cogs in there you never knew existed. And Terry O'Reilly is pretty good at explaining them as he explores "the countless ways marketers permeate your life, from media, art and language, to politics, religion and fashion."
2. Jian Ghomeshi (on Q). I think Jian Ghomeshi is one of the most gracious hosts on the air today. And I make this claim especially because I have no way of quantifying it. But anyone who could handle this interview with as much poise as he did is at least in the running for the Most Gracious Host Award. Listening to him makes me think all over again about the importance of insightful, well-timed questions and thoughtful, active listening.
1. Lessons in Loving the Culture Christ Died For. In his book, The Twenty-First Century Pastor, David Fisher says that learning to love our culture with the redemptive love of a Christ-follower is vital to genuine Christian ministry. He writes, "Cultural adaptation and respect has far more to do with effective pastoral ministry than many people want to admit. We need to become experts at reading and understanding [our] cultural maps." The questions I hear being asked on CBC Radio, and the answers I hear being offered, help me draw the kind of "cultural map" Fisher's talking about here. And Christians really need this kind of a map. We need sources for doing the cartography. Because, as Fisher says in a more convicting passage later on: "Christ's church and its pastoral leaders need to follow Jesus down that hill [from which he wept over Jerusalem] towards our address. A culture-bashing Christianity does not serve well the Christ who went to a cross to die for his enemies, even the enemies of our church." As mixed up and confused as some of the stuff I hear on CBC is, it always reminds me that this is the culture that Christ died to redeem, and this is the culture that he has called me to do ministry in.
It's for the Birds
Just a little follow-up from my last post. Here's the traditional icon for the baptism of Jesus. Notice how the little fish are swimming up just to touch His feet, just to play in the presence of the One who is their Saviour, too.
And here's a fantastic stained glass detail of St. Francis preaching the gospel to the birds. I love how rapt and intent they all look.
You see: we haven't always pretended that the Gospel was only about the rescue of our own individual, non-corporeal souls from the flames. In some corners of Christendom, on some branches of our family tree, we've tried to take Paul seriously when he said it was a message of hope preached to all the creation under heaven (Col 1:23).
Labels: environment, saints
Clean Hands, Dirty Jordan
Apparently by the time the Jordan River reaches the Dead Sea these days--what with the nation of Israel diverting 60% of her flow, and the nation of Jordan allowing septic tanks to seep crap into her water basin, and the nation of Syria maintaining some 40 dams on her major tributary--by then there's little left but a putrid trickle of raw sewage.
Miles up stream, spiritual tourists still come to be baptized gloriously on the same banks where Jesus himself once fulfilled all righteousness; down stream, here, today, you couldn't enter the water without serious health risks.
Not that anyone would want to.
The stench, they say, is nauseating.
I get that this crisis is shrouded with all sorts of political and social issues that defy a quick fix. Like a serious water shortage in the nation of Jordan. Like decades of political strife that have prevented these nations from cooperating on a solution. Like climate change, and economics, and a rapidly collapsing water table across the Middle East.
I get all that. And this morning, to be honest, I had a warmer, longer, more luxurious shower than I needed to. So who am I to blog?
But still, seeing the Jordan river pillaged and polluted like this should pierce us to the heart. Because some two millennia ago, the people of Judea came out to this river when they heard John's voice crying in the wilderness: "The promises of Isaiah 40 are now being fulfilled!" This is where they were drenched with the same water that Israel miraculously crossed when the nation first entered the land under Joshua. Here they enacted the burning cry of their hearts: "We want to be made new as the people of God."
And this is the river where we caught our first glimpse of the one in whom and through whom God would fulfill all the Messianic promises of Isaiah 40. Here we first saw the Beloved Son on whom the Spirit rests, who would provide comfort for the harried exiles, renewal of the covenant people, straight paths for the Creator's reign over his creation.
But if we read Isaiah to the end, we see that when the Messiah reigns in righteousness over his people, it will mean restoration and healing for the hurting creation. The desert will burst into fecund, verdant, joyous life. Isaiah 41-- the same Isaiah 41 that Jesus' baptism was somehow meant to fulfill--Isaiah 41 says it like this: "I will make the rivers flow on barren heights... I will turn the desert into pools of water."
Somewhere, I think, Christians forgot that when we saw Jesus emerge dripping from the Jordan, we were witnessing good news not just for us, but for the whole of the broken creation.
And we need to remember. Because the tragedy of this dying river is being played out all over the planet right now, as our greed, waste, materialism and idolatries continue to pillage the rivers and lakes and wetlands of our world. (After it's quenched Las Vegas' decadent water fountains and California's thirsty vegetable gardens, the Colorado River doesn't even make it to the Gulf of California anymore.)
May the stench of the dirty Jordan teach us to long once again for that promised day when God will restore all things under the reign of his Christ; but may it also convict us that our life together as the baptized people of the Creator can and should translate into healing shalom for his creation today, even as we hope for his future Coming.
Labels: baptism, environment, Jesus, OT
Asked the Anti-Theist...
Listening to the radio last night I heard an interview with this guy who had written a book explaining why he despised religion and felt he needed to confront religious people with the dangerous error of their ways. He described himself not as an "a-theist" (one who simply can't find any compelling reasons to believe in God), but as an "anti-theist" (one who believes that the more people disillusioned of their faith in God, the better).
His anti-god polemic is part of a new movement of "loud atheism" which is quite vitriolic in its attacks against faith. The book's sandwiched somewhere between Richard Dawkin's The God Delusion and anti-God ad campaigns on city buses.
When the interview started, I really expected to find my spiritual hackles raised and my intellectual defenses battered. By the end, however, I felt like I just wanted to play an Apologetic Buzz Lightyear to his Atheist Sheriff Woody in that scene under the car in the original Toy Story.
Remember that line? "You are a sad, strange little man. You have my pity. Farewell."
Apparently this guy is one of the greatest philosophical minds of our time or some such accolade; but really, the whole thing just seemed so confused and pompous and spiteful that it was hard to take it seriously. Towards the end, the interviewer asked him what in his own view, lacking religious faith and all, it meant to live a good life. I don't doubt his tongue was buried in his cheek as he answered, but even then, the vision he offered was so sterile that you could almost hear the wind whistling through its desert hoo-doos as he spoke: irony, laughing at the misfortunes of others, literature, winning arguments with stupid people and forcing them to concede you're right, and passing on your genes through procreation.
Seriously. Those were his five pillars of wisdom.
But at one point he said that the lynch pin of his argument-- the question that no one has been able to answer in any of his debates-- the question that deep-sixes faith every time, is this: what's one moral thing that faith "makes" people do that they would never do without faith? (He said that there were none, but there's all sorts of bad stuff religious people do that non-religious people would never do. And when the interviewer tried to name some good things religious people have done, he dismissed them all: Mother Theresa didn't do that because she was religious, she did it because she was Mother Theresa. It seemed to me like he wasn't playing fair: when a religious person does something bad, you say it's because they're religious, but when they do something good, you won't let them attribute it at all to their religion...)
And I'm still trying to figure out why this question is such a big deal for the anti-theist argument, anyways. At best all it can prove is that religious faith is morally unnecessary; it doesn't prove it's untrue. But it's not the first time I've heard it. A friend of mine just moderated a long blog conversation along the same lines (you can read it here if you're interested). There the specific question was: "What is Jesus doing within the church that isn't happening elsewhere in society?"
And when I hear these kind of questions, the answer is so obvious that it stands out like a "Preach it Brother!" in a Presbyterian Church. The one moral thing that a person of faith does that a person would/could never do without faith is: worship God.
What Jesus is doing in the church that isn't happening anywhere else in society is: receiving our worship in Spirit and Truth and offering it on our behalf to the Father.
Of course, I don't expect an anti-theist to acknowledge worship as a moral act anyways, so here we may have to part ways. But it is a moral act. For the Christian, I think, worship--worship defined biblically mind you, not "Vineyard-ically" -- genuine worship is the most profound of moral acts. It's that act of the will and the heart and the body in which we find ourselves rightly aligned with the Creator and genuine participators in his creative shalom in the world.
It's the moral act that only Jesus makes possible; and it's the moral act that no anti-theist could ever commit.
Labels: apologetics, worship
The Leveling of St Paul
In 1835, the French political thinker Alex de Tocqueville published Democracy in America, his famous study of the United States. One of the intriguing observations he made about American democracy was that the same cultural values that promoted equality also ensured a kind of "middling mediocrity"-- a gravitational pull culturally towards the lowest common denominator that made it impossible for great people to be great. At its worst, he argued, democracy can devolve into a "tyranny of the majority," where society actively limits the talents of any who challenge it with greatness, trading true freedom for a kind of leveled out mediocrity because it cannot abide anything that threatens its equality.
Okay: I don't know that Alex de Tocqueville was right. And even if he was, I'm pretty sure that, this side of the Second Coming, I'd choose democratic equality over any of the alternatives that we've seen in human history.
But I was thinking about de Tocqueville the other day because I was working on a sermon, and I went to say something about "Saint Paul." Then I checked myself and changed it to plain old "Paul"-- reflected again-- made it the "Apostle Paul"-- then finally settled again on "Saint Paul."
But not without a bit of uncertainty.
You see, when I was growing up in church, you never said "Saint Paul." Or St. Luke, or St. Mark, or St. Mary. There was nothing tyrannical in this, you just never did it. And somehow, you knew you never did it. I have a few theories about why this was, but my main one is this: One of the central tenets of our theology is its conviction that we are all equal before God-- all equally have sinned and fallen short of his glory. And since calling some people "Saint" and others not might confuse this equality, we didn't do it. Paul was a sinner in as much need of God's grace as any of us, so let's not risk forgetting that by calling him Saint Paul.
But when I stared at that uncertain "Saint Paul" on my sermon page, I started wondering if we didn't risk a kind of "middling mediocrity" in our spiritual vision when we refused to call a saint a Saint. Because really, equal sinners though they were, God called and commissioned Paul in a way he didn't call or commission any of us-- and he spoke through Luke or Mark or John in a way he hasn't spoken through any of us-- and He chose Mary to be something that no other human being in the history of the planet has ever been: the mother of God Incarnate. In being so used by him for his great purposes, each of these really did discover themselves "set apart" in the very way that word "saint" signifies.
And if we acknowledge this, we have a real opportunity to rejoice in the free, unfettered grace of God, grace that can raise up the common, the lowly, the chief of sinners according to his will, and lavish an unmerited glory on them by using them uniquely in his great plan to show the world how good he is.
Thomas Howard puts it like this:
The more glorious the king, the more glorious are the titles and honours he bestows. The plumes, cockades, coronets, diadems, mantles and rosettes that deck his retinue testify to one thing alone, his own majesty and munificence. He is a very great king to have figures of such immense dignity in his train, or even better, to have raised them to such dignity. These great lords and ladies, mantled and crowned with ... honour and rank are, precisely, his vassals. This glittering array is his court!Now I'm not suggesting here that we return to the Catholic system of canonization. Just this: if we can find the spiritual generosity to celebrate the many-layered splendor of this court of Saints, without keeping an eye on how high or low or equal our own place in it might be, then we will find ourselves truly free to worship the glorious King whose splendor it reflects.


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subset: commoncrawl


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Editing in the Brave New World
While the Clinton and Obama presidential campaigns claim to care about working women, one working woman is not exactly feeling the love.
Rosie the Riveter? Lady Marmalade? Umm Czarina? Would City Room care to fill us in on the working stiff's identity?
On Monday, Shelly Sindland, a senior reporter for Fox 61 (WTIC-TV) in Hartford, lingered after a town hall meeting held by Hillary Rodham Clinton in Hartford to ask the candidate what she thought about last week's Obama endorsements from Senator Edward M. Kennedy and his niece Caroline. A campaign aide informed Ms. Sindland that the senator was there only to meet voters. Ms. Sindland tried anyway, putting the question to Senator Clinton three different ways, without luck. The senator continued shaking hands and signing autographs as if Ms. Sindland were not addressing her from a few feet away.
Take that, working people of all nations! Needless to say, the Obama camp, a few days along, is eager to play catch-up:
A female Obama aide chided Ms. Sindland that* the event was only for "real people'' and that Mrs. Obama would not respond. Mrs. Obama shrugged obediently and kept moving.
And what does the Free and Independent Press think about this?
Ms. Sindland, who has interviewed powerful women — from First Lady Laura Bush to Queen Noor of Jordan — without incident, was not sure how to respond to the put-down. But outside the diner, she said, "I had more freedom of the press in the former Soviet Union," when she covered the nuclear accident at Chernobyl.
Hmm. Does the alarm go off at the dissonance between the quote and the explainer? As in, it'd be hard to cover the Chernobyl accident "in the former Soviet Union" because it didn't occur in a "former" Soviet Union but in the real thing? Blunder? Track record inflation? If so, whose?
The claim doesn't appear to be the reporter's; to hear Fox 61 tell it, she picked up an award in 1997 (that'll be nine years after the explosion at the Chernobyl plant) for a series based on her travels with "a group of local humanitarians":
Sindland spent time in "The Dead Zone", saw deformed babies in an Orphanage
and made it as far as the Chernobyl Plant's gate but then left after being
threatened to be arrested.
"More freedom of the press," eh? Granted, a political culture that encourages openness to the media is part of some press-freedom measures (the current incarnation of the Freedom House scale, for one). But access to official business isn't the same thing as a constitutional right to an answer from a candidate's spouse about whether she/he is enjoying her/his trip to Hartford. Draw your own conclusions about any comparison to the Soviet days. (Fox 61 apparently has.)
The vitae-baking, though, looks as if it belongs exclusively to the Times. And it's the sort irritating small-scale factual annoyance that copy editors catch, as long as they have time and somebody's interested in seeing such stuff caught. Is Times editing going to catch up with Times blogging? Is editing going to catch up with blogging anywhere?
* Sure looks like an out-of-bounds "chide."


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Wisconsin Supreme Court upholds Voter ID law
Federal court challenges means no immediate impact
The Wisconsin Supreme Court upheld a requirement Thursday that voters show photo identification at the polls, but the law remains blocked in federal court.
For the state law to take effect, the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals would have to overturn a federal judge's decision in April that struck it down as unconstitutional.
Wisconsin's Republican-led Legislature passed the photo ID requirement and Gov. Scott Walker signed it in 2011, achieving a long-sought GOP priority. Former Gov. Jim Doyle, a Democrat, had vetoed a similar requirement three times between 2002 and 2005.
Republican backers argued an ID requirement would cut down on voter fraud and boost public confidence in the integrity of the election process. But opponents say concerns over voter fraud were overblown and not documented, and the law was meant to reduce turnout among minorities and others likely to vote for Democrats.
Walker said in a statement Wednesday: "Voter ID is a common sense reform that protects the integrity of our elections ... We look forward to the same result from the federal court of appeals."
U.S. District Judge Lynn Adelman, in striking down the law in April, said the state was unable to prove its case and the law violated the U.S. Constitution's guarantee of equal protection. The U.S. Justice Department sided Wednesday with challengers in the federal court case, saying that the photo ID requirement unfairly affected minority voters; the department also took a similar stand on an Ohio law that limits when voters can cast an early ballot.
Thirty-four states have passed laws requiring some sort of identification from voters, but only 31 of them are in effect, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Like in Wisconsin, a court has struck down Pennsylvania's law, and one passed in North Carolina won't take effect until 2016.
The state Supreme Court issued rulings in two cases Thursday, concluding in both that the law was constitutional. One was brought by the League of Women Voters and the other came from the Milwaukee branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and immigrant rights group Voces de la Frontera.
In the NAACP case, the Supreme Court said the state can't require people to pay fees to receive state-issued ID cards. Doing so would be a "severe burden on the constitutional right to vote," Justice Pat Roggensack wrote.
Currently, it costs $20 each to obtain copies of a birth certificate, which is needed to obtain an ID card if a person doesn't have another acceptable form of identification. The court interpreted the state's administrative code to mean that the Division of Motor Vehicles cannot require someone to present any documents that cost money in order to get a voter ID.
The court ruled 4-3 in favor of the law in the NAACP case and 5-2 in the League of Women Voters lawsuit.
Chief Justice Shirley Abrahamson wrote a blistering dissent, arguing that the law is unconstitutional.
"Today the court follows not James Madison - for whom Wisconsin's capital city is named - but rather Jim Crow - the name typically used to refer to repressive laws used to restrict rights, including the right to vote, of African-Americans," Abrahamson wrote.


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The following accessories are suitable for cleaning wine glasses:
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Please Note: The diameter measurement signifies the widest point of the glass whether it be foot, bowl or rim primarily to aid with racking purposes.
Schott Zwiesel Glass Size Code: 6500/42
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The Old Spice Guy set the bar pretty damn high for other men. Builds kitchens: check. Rides horses: check. Buys diamonds: check. Got two tickets to that thing we love: check. But now someone is trying to outdo him.
Sesame Streets's Grover stars in a just-released spoof of Isaiah Mustafa's Old Spice commercial and it has us cracking up.
Sesame Street may not have known what they were doing when it came to the Katy Perry and Elmo clip, but they definitely got this one right.
Unfortunately, Isaiah no longer does the Old Spice commercials. But he's been replaced by another good looking football player, Ray Lewis. And we think the ads are still pretty damn funny.
Who else would you like to see do a spoof of the Old Spice ad? What do you think of the new face of the brand?
Videos courtesy of Sesame Street and Old Spice


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Shes Not Playin: Mother Buys 14-Year-Old Son A Gun To Fight Back Bullies!
CNN reports "Mom admits to buying a gun for her bullied son in an attempt to boost his self-esteem"
Please click the "Report" button below if the video on this page is not working properly.
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|"Are you a wizard or not?"
The title of this article is conjectural. Although it is based on canonical information, the actual name is a conjecture and may be supplanted at any time by additional information released from canonical sources. If this occurs, please move this page to the appropriate title.
Rock to dog is a Transforming spell that was used by Cedric Diggory during the 1994 Triwizard Tournament.[1]
During the First Task, Cedric used this spell on a rock in the arena. The spell transfigured the rock into a Labrador. However, the dragon decided midway through attacking the dog that she would rather have Cedric. Cedric was burned with dragon fire and was required to have Madam Pomfrey heal him.[1]
- Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (First appearance)
- LEGO Harry Potter: Years 1-4
Notes and references
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, Chapter 20 (The First Task)


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By Jean Hopfensperger
From storefront charities to sprawling medical centers, nonprofit groups are discovering that their property-tax-exempt status no longer shields them from cities casting for cash to make ends meet.
City officials across the nation are rethinking the sacred covenant between governments and nonprofits that historically have escaped property taxes because of the contributions they make to their communities.
Boston now requires its biggest nonprofits to collectively pay millions of dollars "in lieu of taxes." Madison, Wis., is considering the same. In Minnesota, home to one of the nation's most vibrant nonprofit sectors, cities are taking other steps.
The Mankato City Council last month voted to require all property owners to fund city lighting, not just property taxpayers. Bemidji and 17 area cities and townships are working to form a fire district that could be financed by a protection fee paid by all real estate owners.
"In the past 10 years, we've seen a surge in the number of cities looking for new ways to get revenue," said Anne Finn, assistant government relations director at the Minnesota League of Cities. "More and more cities are finding that property taxes aren't getting to the bottom line. If they can take something like street lighting off the property tax rolls, and make it a fee, then they can collect from all properties that benefit."
Nonprofit leaders bristle at the trend. They argue that the new fees are the start of a slippery slope to impose taxes on organizations that, by law, are exempt from property taxes.
"It overlooks all the contributions that nonprofits make to their communities," said Pam Determan, executive director of VINE Faith in Action of Mankato, who testified against the city lighting fee.
"For example, we regularly respond to calls from government officials requesting help, for example, for elderly people who need home repairs. We give 28,000 rides a year to the elderly, disabled and people going to work. We have meals on wheels."
VINE's lighting payment, about $960 a year, saps money directly away from those services, she said.
"Where will it end?" added Jon Pratt, executive director of the Minnesota Council of Nonprofits. "Snow removal fees? Street maintenance fees? Lighting fees? You could take the entire municipal budget and divide it into a thousand pieces. Then the whole concept of tax exempt is gone."
Is it fair?
Nonprofit groups are exempt from property taxes in all 50 states. The logic is that they provide services that otherwise might fall upon the government, or services that strengthen and benefit their communities.
Although they pay no property taxes, nonprofits employ nearly 300,000 workers in Minnesota alone, and pump money into their local economies. And they aren't the biggest tax-exempt group. Forty-three percent of non-taxable land in Minnesota is owned by the government and 22 percent by schools, according to the Minnesota Department of Revenue.
A city's amount of tax-free land varies widely, from about 25 to 30 percent in Minneapolis and St. Paul to more than two-thirds in places like Falcon Heights, the Minnesota League of Cities reports.
But is it fair that 75 percent of real estate owners pay for 100 percent of city services? asked Pat Hentges, city director of Mankato, where 23 percent of the land is tax free. The City Council's decision last month to create a lighting fee paid by all will generate about $500,000 a year, said Hentges, and remove that burden from property tax rolls.
Under the ordinance, nonprofits must pay 5 cents per linear foot of street frontage, he said. The local American Red Cross will pay about $10 per month. Minnesota State University Mankato will pay the most, about $1,160 per month.
"[Without this], taxpaying properties pay 100 percent of the cost," said Hentges. "Now they pay 80 percent."
The debate over who should pay, and how much, has blasted into public consciousness in recent years. The obscure topic is now the subject of national conferences, scholarly research at Washington think tanks and countless media articles.
"This became hot in about 2009 and it continues to receive an enormous amount of attention," said Daphne Kenyon, a property tax scholar who suddenly has found herself in big demand.
The issue has gained heat along with the nation's anti-tax climate, the fiscal crisis, and changing attitudes toward nonprofits, said Kenyon, of the Massachusetts-based Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.
"And it's a human drama story," she said. "It's not just cold numbers."
The biggest money-makers are "payments in lieu of taxes," used most widely in Boston. They require nonprofits, typically the largest, to pay a portion of the real estate taxes for their land.
Park Nicollet Health Services, for example, agreed in 2007 to pay property taxes to St. Louis Park for a parcel of land it bought from the city, said Park Nicollet spokesman Jeremiah Whitten. It paid $20,640 last year, the cty reports.
Far more common are smaller fees for waste-water treatment or lighting. More than 25 Minnesota cities have lighting fees. St. Paul is the granddaddy of these fees. About 100 years ago, the city approved a fee for dust control "because back then, there were a lot of dirt roads," explained St. Paul city engineer John Maczko.
"Then it grew into filling potholes and other services," he said, "and it became a roadway maintenance fee."
That fee now pays for everything from street and sidewalk repairs to snow plowing to boulevard trees. It accounts for 12 percent of the city's general fund, Maczko said, or about $27 million.
It's simply part of life for St. Paul nonprofits. The University of St. Thomas, for example, paid $112,000 in city fees last year, said university spokesman Doug Hennes.
Minneapolis does not have any added fees, city officials said. The City Council passed a lighting fee in 2009, but it was never implemented because of opposition and other factors. The city found other revenue sources, they said.
'In this together'
The proliferation of new fees is a violation of the "social compact" between government and nonprofits, argued David Thompson, vice president of public policy for the National Council of Nonprofits.
"The rhetoric from cities is "paying their fair share,'" said Thompson. "Our message is that the current city budget hole is smaller because of what nonprofits do."
It also raises a different question about "fairness," nonprofit leaders said. Is a street light in front of a nonprofit of more benefit to the people who drive by at night than the people who work inside during the day?
Kenyon urged both sides to recognize their mutual needs.
"As we move forward, cities and nonprofits should realize that they are in this together," advised Kenyon. "Nonprofits are an important part of the city economy, but they need to help out the city economy if it is in dire straits."
(c)2013 the Star Tribune (Minneapolis)


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Reliable HVAC Contractors in Indian Springs Village, AL
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Truckee Tahoe health and wellness announcments
TAHOE/TRUCKEE, Calif. – Health & Wellness briefsContent is selected from e-mail submissions to Community Editor Amy Edgett at firstname.lastname@example.com. Submissions are published in the print edition news space permitting. To enter an event online, visit http://www.sierrasun.com, locate the event calendar. Click on submit an event, follow instructions. Keep event description to 50 words.Give Yourself the Gift of Reiki, $5-10 Donated to CharityThis holiday season, through Dec. 20, Marianne Klemm, RMT will donate $5 of every full price Reiki session and $10 of every full price Raindrop Reiki session to one of two charities. The client will be able to choose between the Tahoe Forest Cancer Center and St. Jude's Children's Research Hospital. Why should you experience Reiki? Reiki can help on all levels, emotional, physical and mental. It can help the mind to stop running in circles and create a space for clarity and positive thinking. It can help release and ease physical pain. Reiki can help relieve the overwhelming emotions that can accompany sickness or illness and allow you to create a healing space in your life. Reiki Tahoe is located at NaturaMed Natural Family Medicine in Kings Beach. For more information visit http://www.reikitahoe.com. For an appointment please call 530-546-0400.High Fives Foundation to host Holiday Happy HourThe High Fives Foundation will host a "Holiday Happy Hour Party" Thursday, Dec. 20, 5:30-7:30 p.m. at the CR Johnson Healing Center, 10775 Pioneer Trail, Ste. 108, Truckee. Everyone is invited.The evening will include a check presentation to the High Fives Foundation from Fireside Pizza, a screening of the B.A.S.I.C.S. Program Service Avalanche Awareness video, a book signing with Grant Korgan, author of "Two Feet Back," as well as custom hats sewn on site by bigtruck Brand. Attendees can sip and support High Fives through tastings and purchases of the High Fives Foundation private label wines from J.K. Cellars. Holiday portraits with Heckler Magazine will be available for a donation, along with a raffle, food and beverages.Ryan Williams of Northwestern Mutual, a key High Fives Foundation supporter, will welcome his clients in appreciation of their respective business this holiday season. The next marquee High Fives Foundation fundraising event will be the Squaw Valley Prom on Feb. 23, at 8 p.m. Details can be found at http://www.highfivesfoundation.org.BEYOND 2012:Birthing a New Earth RelationshipJoin Girvani Leerer and Michael Stone for a Winter Solstice weekend workshop at Sierra Hot Springs: BEYOND 2012: Birthing a New Earth Relationship, Dec. 21, beginning at 10 a.m. This University of Earth presentation will be an exploration into basic tools of Shamanism. Journey, drum, dance, sing, meditate and soak your way into non-ordinary states of reality, discovering new ways of being in the world and how to dream a new world into being. For registration call Rich Silver at 530-368-6325. For reservations at Sierra Hot Springs call 530-994-3773, ext. 0. For more information visit http://www.UofEarth.com. Admission: Friday, optional gathering for no host dinner and soak; $95 for Saturday workshop 10 a.m.-10 p.m. (lunch Included); $15 for Sunday Sweat Your Prayers Moving Meditation.Keep Tahoe FedBring joy to others by donating your non-perishable goods to Yoga Studio Tahoe this holiday season, in support of Project MANA. For fun you can theme your donations and think "Macaroni Mondays," "Tuna Tuesdays" and "Fruit Fridays." Receive a raffle ticket for every five donated items. Deadline is Dec. 31. Raffle will be held after Bhakti Flow on Jan. 2, 2013. Donate to win: Monthly Unlimited at Studio Tahoe; one 64-oz. Bella Bucha Kombucha Glass Growler; holiday gift from Tahoe Teas; five $5 gift cards from Coffee Bar; half-hour massage from Zenergy Wellness SpaVisit studiotahoe.com or call 530-587-1891.SOS Outreach announces donations, matchesOn Dec. 4 all donations made through givingfirst.org were given an extra boost by the FirstBank Incentive Fund. Additionally, SOS Outreach secured a $7,000 match from the Tom Sims Legacy Fund. SOS Outreach received $24,800 in individual donations from 186 donors. This total does not include the $7,000 match or the FirstBank additional funds. A very successful Giving First day.Donations made to https://givingfirst.org/sosoutreach/overview continue to be credit card fee free throughout the year. Currently, SOS Outreach is running their fifth annual Friends of SOS Pledge Campaign in which individuals who create their own fundraising pages in support of SOS can win great prizes for raising certain donation levels. The pledge campaign runs until Jan. 15. Visit http://www.sosoutreach.org/page/pledge-campaign.Balletone for fitnessBalletone will be offered weekly at the Truckee Recreation Center – Dance Studio, Wednesdays at 8:30 a.m.Balletone: Standing Flow is the "original" Balletone workout blending dance and fitness into a mind-body exercise class that is an explosion of graceful movement. Created by Jody Hoegstedt as a new class designed to strengthen, stretch and motivate, Standing Flow creates a challenging mix of muscle conditioning and stretching exercises designed to lengthen, strengthen and energize the entire body with movements derived from Ballet inspired movements. By blending principles from classical ballet, Pilates, stretching and fitness, Standing Flow delivers a unique approach to creating, delivering and enjoying exercise.For more information on Balletone visit http://www.balletone.com. Call TDRPD at 530-582-7720 for more information about classes. Snowshoe under the full moon at Lake Tahoe Join Tahoe Adventure Company and watch the sun set and stars come out while you trek through a snowy and tranquil forest under the full moon. Increase your knowledge of astronomy with moonlit views of Lake Tahoe and cap it off with hot drinks, snacks and stargazing. "Full Moon Snowshoeing has become very popular, especially with guests who have experienced our other adventures," says Kevin Hickey, owner of the Tahoe Adventure Company. Several different Snowshoeing Adventures are offered by the Tahoe Adventure Company. Day trips cover a comprehensive safety talk and instruction, natural and human history discussions as well as snacks, hot drinks and an impressive lunch served at a scenic location.Knowledgeable guides point out winter ecology, geology and other natural and human history along the way. Winter 2012-2013 Full Moon Snowshoe dates: Dec. 28, 4-7 p.m.; Jan. 26, 4:30-7:30 p.m.; Feb. 24, 4-7 p.m.; March 27, 6:30-9:30 p.m. and April 25, 6:30-9:30 p.m.Trip includes Full Moon Snowshoe Trek with all gear, hot drinks, trail snacks, professional guides, natural history discussions, and permit fees. Cost is $65 per person. Call 530-913-9212 or visit http://www.TahoeAdventureCompany.com. Reservations required.
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Now, get ready...let's start with what you will need.
Here's a movie showing how I turn around at the end of the row. I'm a few rows further already, but that doesn't mind, 'cause the technique is the same at every row.
Super cool tutorial! Love it! I crochet and I'm proud, now I follow you just to see watcha do next. You can come check me out at my site: www.knowandtellcrafts.blogspot.com .BeantwoordenVerwijderen
Thank you so much for this lovely tutorial Lisette! Such cute cozies and I like the way you explain everything! I hope you'll make a photo tutorial soon, as I love your pics! :)BeantwoordenVerwijderen
Nice tutorial and beautiful pictures!!!
I liked it a lot!
And I like your blog, too!!
@ Awesomeartist99: Thanks a lot for your comment, I'm glad you like my tut! I will check out your blog :)
@ Andrea: Thanks dear! It's good to hear that my tutorial is valued, it's quite a challenge to explain things in a simple and clear way! But I definitely had fun, so more tuts will follow for sure ;)
@ laubao: Thank you Laura, I really appreciate your kind words! Greetings back to you :)
Great blog. All posts have something to learn. Your work is very good and i appreciate you and hopping for some more informative posts.
jubilee mugs
I love this one! The button sake the pattern.BeantwoordenVerwijderen
That should be "makes" the pattern.Verwijderen
Love your pattern!!! Easy to follow instrutions and now I have perfect gifts for my friends :-)BeantwoordenVerwijderen
Nice tutorial! It makes great Xmas present too. I was wondering which yarn you used in this tutorial. Really like how the color changes.BeantwoordenVerwijderen
Follow me!


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Resources for Researchers
NIAID offers many resources to support your research, including reagents, model organisms, and tissue samples, to name just a few. Use the filters under Filter Search Results to narrow your search, or simply enter specific search terms in the search field.
Showing results filtered by:CLEAR ALL
1 Results
HIV Drug Formulation Development and Manufacturing Services
This service program supports the development and manufacture, of a wide variety of pharmaceutical dosage formulations, including tablets, capsules, semi-solid preparations, injectibles, and sustained-release products. If requested, manufacturing can be done under GMP.


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There seem to be a lot of questions and a lot of people confused about how to make maps (or other related content) on modern technology. Currently, almost all of the old mapmaking technology has been redone to expand old capabilities or just provide convenience to people without Mac Classic. So in this topic, I will briefly discuss the tools I recommend for current work as well as provide links to the tutorials.
If you have easy access to Mac OS9 or earlier, then you can use Forge and Anvil with relative ease and be mostly done with it. As far as I can tell, the only real weakness left in the current technology is the Anvil stuff, but I'll get there when I get there.
Forge could draw maps, texture them, and merge them all together as one big complete program. This has been completely replicated across three programs (thanks primarily -- but not exclusively -- to Treellama's tireless efforts), which some may find to be a bit inconvenient, but the extended capabilities of all three of them I think greatly outweigh the "inconvenience" of having to run more than one program at once. Anyway, here are the seven components involved in creating pretty much all of the content required for Marathon stuff. You don't need to know everything for everything -- for instance, if you want to make multiplayer maps, all you need to know are how to draw, texture, and merge maps. This is, as far as I can think of, a complete guide for content creation. For anyone who thinks that's an awful lot of stuff to make a scenario, try making maps for a modern game.
1. Drawing maps
I recommend using Weland for drawing maps, though Obed has existed for quite some time. The primary reason I recommend Weland is, besides the fact that you ought to pay for Obed, Obed was designed for Marathon 2 and, therefore, doesn't operate well with the Marathon Infinity stuff (from what I understand).
Weland is free and is designed to mimic just about all of Forge's functionality, except most notably for Visual Mode and map merging. From the interface to the buttons and commands, those familiar with Forge can switch to Weland without any real trouble. For those of you who are not familiar with Forge or Weland, the Forge guide that shipped with Marathon Infinity as well as the seven tutorial videos apply pretty nicely to Weland as well -- except for, again, Visual Mode, as well as a few interface differences. Forge can be a somewhat daunting program to learn from scratch, but a bit of determination can overcome that fairly nicely.
I found the tutorial videos on Youtube by searching for marathon forge.
Additionally, the excellent written guide is available in PDF format on the Trilogy Release website here. This is the single most important resource for learning about Marathon content creation.
Even if you have Forge available and ready, I recommend using Weland if possible because Weland can circumvent most of Forge's limitations, including (most importantly to me) polygon limits and object limits. Weland also has some smaller advantages or conveniences over Forge, including not repeating colors in elevation mode.
2. Texturing maps
Maps need to be textured. The nice thing about Forge (and, really, the only compelling reason to use it still) was how easily you could switch between drawing and texturing. If you plan on using Weland, however, you will also need to use Visual Mode.Lua.
VML (for short) is a script that runs inside Aleph One. Installation instructions are pretty straightforward and are included in the download; I actually have a separate installation of Aleph One with different controls to keep things easy and organized between maps in-progress and playable maps.
When you're ready to texture in VML, you need to pave the map and save it in Weland (or Forge), and then load it in Aleph One with the VML script selected as a single-player script. (You can do it in multiplayer too, but I don't recommend it.) From there, it will probably take a little while to familiarize yourself with the iconography and the controls, but before long I at least found it to be much more convenient than using Forge's visual mode. There are three primary advantages that VML has over Forge:
a) Forge will constantly pop up with error messages (or outright crash) if you have over-long view distances or too-complex geometry. These were limitations in the original Marathon 2 engine, but no longer exist in practical measure in Aleph One; therefore, using VML won't present any such error messages. You can still create overly-complex geometry that will cause older computers to slow down, but that requires a very considerable amount of detail.
b) VML allows you to texture with all texture sets at once; Forge will lock you into one. I have written a small treatise on tasteful use of this ability, but in any event, you can do it in VML but not Forge.
c) Forge can only run in 256 colors, I believe. This is a problem since no monitor produced in at least the last 12 years is limited to that, and the difference in color depth is absolutely extraordinary. In VML, what you see is what you get -- and that can be really important.
Having to make changes or fixes on the fly requires you to save the map in VML and reopen it in Weland, fix the error, and then reopen it in VML -- which may be an inconvenience if five extra seconds of work counts as valuable time lost to you.
Some of the Visual Mode stuff in the Forge tutorials applies to VML as well, but really VML is simpler to learn than Weland. Learning how to texture well is a different subject.
3. Physics models
This is one of the unfortunate weaknesses at this point. Physics Editor One is the current offering, and replicates Anvil's physics model creation somewhat well. The interface, while not very attractive, is pretty similar to Anvil's in organization. If you can run Anvil either through Classic or by some other means of emulation, I'd recommend that, because:
a) Anvil's tutorials are built in through a remarkably useful help pop-up window. PEO assumes you're familiar with Marathon physics, but if it weren't for the Anvil help button, it would all be Greek to me.
b) The creator of PEO, HogePiyo, is Japanese, and while his English is pretty good, some of his descriptions or translations are unclear or inaccurate, which just throws another monkey in the wrench.
c) I have had difficulty with saving physics models every now and again -- but this doesn't always happen.
However, it will do in a pinch. The Forge manual also has a small part about Anvil, which can help, but really the most valuable tool is either Anvil's help button or a good friend that can explain it to you. If you can run Anvil, I actually recommend using Hakvil, which is a modified version of Anvil that provides some of the functionality that Bungie kindly locked out of Anvil, and a few interface improvements besides.
An additionally useful reference guide was written by Mark Levin.
4. Shapes files and graphics creation
(this is not really my area of expertise, but I'll do my best anyway)
For creating new textures, monsters, or other graphics, Adobe Photoshop will serve you best. If you don't have Photoshop, GIMP is an open-source version that works just fine. For creating new weapons, you might want some kind of 3d modeling program -- Blender is one open-source opportunity, and from there you can render images.
Importing them into a shapes file is necessary. Anvil can do this as well (and Hakvil can do it better), but barring that, Shapefusion is the Aleph One program of choice. It has most of the functionality for handling Marathon shapes files. Shapefusion mimics Anvil pretty nicely interface-wise, generally speaking, although it uses a tree layout instead of a pop-down menu, which I think is an improvement. Shapefusion can also open sounds files and import sounds.
As with physics editing, the Forge manual covers using the shapes editor in some detail -- and this translates over into Shapefusion as well.
Shapefusion can also export shapes patches. Shapes patches are useful for merging in custom shapes (textures, primarily) into a map so that you can use those textures without needing a separate shapes file; this is most useful for graphically expanding multiplayer maps.
For the use of high-resolution graphics, you will need Aorta to convert image files into the DDS image type, which is optimal for performance in the Aleph One engine. You will also need to write some MML to accompany it, which I'll cover briefly later.
5. Terminal creation
Terminal files are regular old .txt files, really. One program, Hex!, existed alongside Forge, but that was for the Mac OS days of yore. But the Forge manual covers pretty succinctly everything you need to know about how to write terminals, so just open up Notepad or whatever you prefer and get to writing. It's also going to be extremely useful to have an example for formatting and all that; I would use Atque (described below) to unmerge the Infinity map file and open up one of the resultant .term.txt files.
6. Merging map files together
While Forge can make merged map files, Atque completely supplants Forge's abilities and has quite a bit more beyond that. Even if you use Forge for everything else, Atque is still a more useful merging program.
Map files should be merged before they're distributed. Using Atque (and the included documentation to learn how), Atque can combine:
- Multiple maps together, and for each individual map:
- Physics models
- Terminal text
- Terminal and chapter pictures
- Shapes patches to conveniently extend the existing shapes model*
- Lua scripts*
(asterisks denote things Forge cannot do)
Run it through Atque and it will produce one single .sceA file which is a ready-to-play single player scenario or multiplayer map pack.
Also unlike Forge, Atque can split merged files apart into their constituent components. Forge could extract single maps, but not the associated physics or terminal text. Furthermore, Forge required you to use a stupid "Terminal Picts" file if you wanted to include terminal and chapter pictures, which required you to use ResEdit and add in the images that way -- and, if I remember correctly, this doesn't even work for Windows, but it's all naff anyway. Atque will work fine with normal bitmap files put into an associated folder, reducing the stress by a thousandfold.
There are also a couple terminal functions that Atque can successfully merge, but Forge cannot. Atque can also create .imgA files, which are basically used for the menu screen and so forth. The Atque manual is accessible here.
7. Scripting
Aleph One allows for extended functionality through MML and Lua. MML stands for Marathon Markup Language and is pretty similar to HTML, and very easy to learn. MML is required for high-resolution replacement graphics, but it can also edit various level or game settings that take place when the level is loaded. MML will let you circumvent a lot of the stuff that was "hard-coded" into the original Marathon 2 engine.
Lua, on the other hand, is an existing language and has its own syntax with is fairly easy to learn. This is better at handling stuff on-the-fly in-game.
Actually, I'm going to let someone who knows a lot more about this stuff than me explain it for me and in much greater depth. Linked in that topic are the MML and Lua documentation, which will tell you all of the wonderful stuff they can do (which is a fair bit!). However, I believe some of that documentation is outdated, so for convenience, here's what I use:
- Lua documentation
- MML documentation


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Guided Bird Walks
Friends of the San Pedro River
- Address
- 9800 E. Highway 90
Sierra Vista, AZ 85635
- Use Contact Form
- Event Start
- 7:00 AM on Aug 26, 2017
- Event End
- 9:00 AM on Aug 26, 2017
Sponsored by the Friends of the San Pedro River, birders of all levels are invited to participate in upcoming bird walks to introduce then to the diverse avian community found in the SPRNCA. Observe 25-50 species on these popular two to three hour bird walks.
When: 7 AM - Wednesday August 9, and Saturday August 26
Where: Depart from the San Pedro House, 9800 Highway 90, east of Sierra Vista at the river.
All Bird Walks are FREE, although donations are accepted to support docent programs
- Event Start
- 7:00 AM on Saturday, August 26, 2017
- Event End
- 9:00 AM on Saturday, August 26, 2017
- Location
- San Pedro House
- Additional Information
Please dress appropriately for the weather, bring drinking water, a snack, good trail shoes, a hat, and sun protection.
Basic Directions
From Sierra Vista, head east on Hwy 90 toward Bisbee. Turn right at the sign for the San Pedro Riparian National Conservation Area. The walks depart from the San Pedro House.


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Eastampton NJ Haunted Houses & Halloween Attractions
Eastampton has some great options for a haunted night out. Below you will find our best haunted houses near Eastampton, NJ to get the most out of this Halloween season.
BloodShed Farms Fear Fest
Columbus, NJ
Columbus, NJ
Legend has it, that the Lived family had a very dark secret. During the time the Liveds ran the old farm, 16 reported people went missing in a span of 3 years. Investigation never led to the farm. ... Read More
Night of Horror
Shamong, NJ
Shamong, NJ
Flashlight Corn Maze, The Corn Maze isn't challenging enough? How about we make it a little more interesting… Experience our corn maze in total darkness! All you need is a flashlight and a few frien... Read More