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Simulated car accidents have become a common way for schools to warn students about the dangers of alcohol.
WHITMAN – Two dozen juniors and seniors party before prom – dancing, swigging vodka, playing beer bong and taking keg stands.
"How about another drink before we hit the road?" one student says.
"It's going to be the best night of my life," another says.
"He's alright to drive," says a third.
Suddenly, the auditorium lights at Whitman-Hanson Regional High School go out. The darkness is punctuated by screeching tires, a metallic crash and a girl calling 911.
There has been an accident in the school's parking lot, she says, can you please send help?
This kind of simulated accident – in this case involving several injuries, a drunken driving arrest and a dead boy who is taken from the scene in a hearse – is a commonly used tactic among local high schools to warn students of the dangers of alcohol ahead of prom season.
Whitman-Hanson held it Thursday morning, and has held similar demonstrations every two years for more than a decade.
Other schools do as well – the Students Against Drunk Driving group at Southeastern Regional Vocational Technical High School is planning a mock car accident with police and fire response next Thursday, and Abington, Avon, Weymouth and North Plymouth have put on similar events.
But do they work?
Despite their prevalence, there is only anecdotal evidence to support their effectiveness.
"It's become quite common," said Mitch Librett, a criminal justice professor at Bridgewater State University. "This is something that grows out of the moral panic that any type of tragedy involving children can engender."
Librett, a Duxbury resident and the father of two daughters, said that one of his biggest fears is his children getting into a drunken driving accident. But because of that, he said he knows that people are vulnerable to supporting strategies without evidence that they work.
"There is no empirical support for the idea that these presentations have any effect," Librett said. "I am not even aware of any research that's been performed."
David DeIuliis, a spokesman for the Massachusetts chapter of Mothers Against Drunk Driving, said that MADD began moving away from mock accidents more than a decade ago because the group found more effective tactics.
"We weren't sure what the impact was," DeIuliis said.
Instead, MADD focuses now on engaging parents to speak directly with their children about the dangers of alcohol and driving.
The portion of the brain involving reasoning develops last, he said, typically in the 20s, so teens can have a hard time relating accident demonstrations to real-life consequences.
"The most impactful thing is parents talking to their kids, just opening up those lines of communications," he said. "That has just an amazing impact."
Whitman-Hanson educators disagree with that assessment. Superintendent Ruth Gilbert-Whitner said that immediately following Thursday morning's safety skit, several students signed up for the high school's SADD chapter.
"If they save one life, it's worth it," Gilbert-Whitner said. "You give them the information and you hope they make good decisions."
William Frazier, the school resource officer, said the accident scenario is "very realistic."
During the crash aftermath, Frazier administered a field sobriety test to the driver of the van that killed the boy. He took him away in handcuffs after the student appeared intoxicated.
Nearby, firefighters used hydraulic cutting tools to remove the roof of the car so they could safely take out an injured student and place the dead body in a bag on the ground.
"I remember this like it was yesterday," said Katelyn Amico, a first-year teacher helping coordinate the event. "Hopefully it affects their decisions past high school."
Joseph Markman may be reached at firstname.lastname@example.com.


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Tuesday September 16, 6:48 pm ET
- Says Proposal is Inadequate in Multiple Respects and Not in the Best Interests of SanDisk's Stockholders -
MILPITAS, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--SanDisk® Corporation (NASDAQ: SNDK - News), the world's largest supplier of flash storage card products, today announced that its Board of Directors confirmed that it received an unsolicited, non-binding proposal from Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd (KSE: 005930) to acquire SanDisk for $26 per share in cash. After multiple meetings with Samsung since its original indication of interest in an acquisition, SanDisk's Board of Directors has deliberated on Samsung's proposal with advice from its financial and legal advisors, and on September 15, 2008, sent the enclosed letter to Samsung reflecting the board's unanimous conclusion that the proposal is inadequate in multiple respects and not in the best interests of SanDisk's stockholders. Samsung responded by reiterating its offer to SanDisk on September 16, 2008.
As stated in its letter to Samsung, SanDisk's Board of Directors concluded that, in its view, the proposal:
Eli Harari, Chairman of the Board of SanDisk and Chief Executive Officer commented, "We believe Samsung's proposal does not provide appropriate value to our stockholders and is opportunistically timed at the trough of an industry-wide downturn. In our view, this proposal fails to recognize the value of our patent portfolio, in particular to Samsung, our significant investments in our strategic partnerships, and our technology leadership in 3 and 4 bits per cell flash memory, advanced controllers and three dimensional (3D) semiconductor memory. We believe we have the strategy, execution record, innovation and financial resources to return to profitable growth and be the flash memory leader in new growth markets in mobile devices, solid state disk, and portable consumer electronics."
Irwin Federman, lead independent director of SanDisk commented, "We have been and remain willing to enter into good-faith discussions with Samsung. However, due to Samsung's unwillingness to meet fair and reasonable process conditions coupled with their desire to acquire SanDisk at a significant discount to our view of its intrinsic value, the Board believes that this proposal is not in the best interests of stockholders. Going forward, we remain committed to diligently executing against our existing business strategy and maximizing value for our stockholders."
This communication does not constitute an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to buy any securities or a solicitation of any vote or approval.
Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley are acting as financial advisors to SanDisk's board of directors and Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom LLP is acting as a legal advisor to the board of directors.
The text of the letter sent by Dr. Eli Harari to Dr. Yoon Woo Lee, Samsung's Vice Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, on September 15, 2008 is included below:
September 15, 2008
Yoon-Woo Lee, PhD
Vice Chairman and Chief Executive Officer
Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd
Samsung Main Building
250, 2-ga, Taepyeongno
Jung-gu, Seoul 100-742
Republic of Korea
Dear Dr. Lee:
This letter confirms many of the points we raised when we met with you last week. We received your unsolicited, non-binding proposal dated August 9, 2008 to acquire SanDisk Corporation for $26 per share in cash. After a detailed review, with advice from our outside financial and legal advisors, our board of directors has unanimously concluded that your proposal significantly undervalues SanDisk given the longer-term prospects of our business and does not reflect the substantial synergies Samsung can obtain from the proposed acquisition. In addition, your proposal fails to provide adequate deal certainty, thereby exposing SanDisk and its stockholders to unacceptable risk. Finally, your approach raises the question of whether this action is simply an effort to gain leverage in the ongoing negotiations to renew our patent cross license agreement and evidences an unwillingness to engage in a process designed to legitimately protect SanDisk's stockholders' interests.
We acknowledge the interest that you have expressed in SanDisk over the past few months and, as expressed in the discussions we have had since May 2008, the SanDisk board of directors remains open-minded about a transaction that appropriately addresses the issues of value, deal certainty and process. However, for these and other reasons we believe your proposal is not consistent with the SanDisk board of directors' objective of maximizing stockholder value and is not in the best interests of SanDisk's stockholders.
While you emphasized that your offer is a premium of 56% over the stock price on the date of your non-binding proposal, in our meeting on May 22, 2008 you implied that Samsung was prepared to pay a significant cash premium over the then $28.75 price of SanDisk's shares. Today, SanDisk's share price is close to its lowest price in five years, and your offer represents a 55% discount to the 52-week high. SanDisk's stock price is significantly depressed at this time given industry cyclicality, the uncertainty resulting from our unresolved patent cross license agreement renewal with you and general equity market conditions, and therefore does not reflect the intrinsic value of SanDisk's business.
The flash memory business is a cyclical growth market, which is characterized by periods of strong growth and profitability such as we saw between 2002 and 2007, punctuated by periods of oversupply and declining flash prices like those we are experiencing today. Our board of directors is focused on creating long-term value for our stockholders and believes that SanDisk has the right strategy and the requisite financial resources to manage through a prolonged downturn and emerge as a stronger competitor. We are taking appropriate actions to further fortify our financial position and are confident that in the longer term we will benefit when exciting new flash applications, such as storage in multimedia handsets, flash solid state drives, and new consumer portable applications fuel the next period of industry profitability and growth.
You have described on numerous occasions the significant synergies that Samsung will achieve from acquiring SanDisk, one of the reasons why we believe you were willing to pay a significant premium over the $28.75 share price on May 22, 2008. Nothing has materially changed since that date in terms of the synergies Samsung can realize from acquiring SanDisk. These include avoiding billions of dollars of royalties over the coming decade; gaining access to our x3 (three bits per cell) and x4 (four bits per cell) knowhow; owning our advanced controller technology; owning all of the leading card formats; gaining control of our revolutionary 3D (three dimensional rewritable semiconductor memory) technology - the best candidate to replace NAND flash in the coming decade; controlling our strong brand, broad retail distribution and leading market share in flash cards worldwide; and other cost and revenue synergies.
We also note that the run rate of Samsung's royalties to SanDisk continues to grow. Our view remains that without the right to use SanDisk's patents, Samsung's stand-alone NAND business' prospects would be significantly compromised. Conversely, ownership of our fundamental patent portfolio would greatly strengthen your patent position in emerging markets for flash storage like SSDs and managed NAND chipsets. We hope that your current offer is not an attempt to capitalize on the uncertainty reflected in our share price while this IP issue remains unresolved or a negotiating tactic in the licensing negotiations. SanDisk's stockholders deserve to be fairly compensated for the value SanDisk offers Samsung, and your current offer fails to recognize and monetize this value.
From the outset, we have expressed to you our concerns about the risks to SanDisk of moving forward with a transaction with Samsung if an announced transaction does not close. We note that any transaction between SanDisk and Samsung will be subject to regulatory review, including in the United States and the European Union. In addition, any announcement of a transaction with you could also have a negative impact on our business due to various factors. The simple, but important, point is that without both maximum certainty of closing as well as a viable path for SanDisk to continue as an independent entity should the transaction not close despite your best efforts, your proposal creates unacceptable risks for our stockholders and is not in their best interests.
Because of this, we have proposed negotiating a replacement cross license and supply agreement, both of which would become effective in August 2009 if an announced transaction does not close. We have also requested that you commit to certain terms to ensure that a transaction has maximum certainty of closing. Despite our repeated requests Samsung has failed to address these legitimate concerns.
We have been clear that together with price, these critical issues of deal certainty and risk mitigation must be addressed before we provide you due diligence access to the highly confidential and competitively sensitive information that you have requested. We note that there are sizeable synergies in this transaction for Samsung, most of which you control and can determine without access to confidential information. In addition, given that Samsung operates in the same industry and that SanDisk is a public company, we are confident that Samsung possesses the necessary information to address the issues we have highlighted above prior to gaining access to confidential information. However, despite our many attempts, including those by our lead outside director, Mr. Irwin Federman, to communicate the importance of these process issues and offering a reasonable roadmap by which we both can address them, you have rejected our guidance and instead insisted on access to highly confidential information about SanDisk before these issues are resolved.
The members of the SanDisk board of directors have taken, and will continue to take, their responsibilities to SanDisk's stockholders extremely seriously. We remain committed to the goal of maximizing stockholder value. As Mr. Federman has said to you on multiple occasions, including in our recent meeting in Seoul, on September 11, 2008, the SanDisk board of directors is open minded about a transaction with Samsung if it represents a price that recognizes the long-term intrinsic value of SanDisk and the significant synergies that accrue to Samsung, provides deal certainty to SanDisk and can be conducted in a process that adequately protects the interests of SanDisk's stockholders. Samsung's current offer and approach falls well short on all counts. As such, we respectfully reject your proposal.
Very truly yours,
Eli Harari, PhD
Chairman of the Board and Chief Executive Officer
Forward-Looking Statements
This news release contains certain forward-looking statements, including statements about our business prospects and outlook that are based on our current expectations and involve numerous risks and uncertainties that may cause these forward-looking statements to be inaccurate and may significantly and adversely affect our business, financial condition and results of operations. Risks that may cause these forward-looking statements to be inaccurate include among others:
About SanDisk
SanDisk Corporation, the inventor and world's largest supplier of flash storage cards, is a global leader in flash memory - from research, manufacturing and product design to consumer branding and retail distribution. SanDisk's product portfolio includes flash memory cards for mobile phones, digital cameras and camcorders, digital audio/video players, USB flash drives for consumers and the enterprise, embedded memory for mobile devices, and solid state drives for computers. SanDisk ( www.sandisk.com/corporate) is a Silicon Valley-based S&P 500 company, with more than half its sales outside the United States.
SanDisk, and the SanDisk logo are trademarks of SanDisk Corporation, registered in the United States and other countries.
For SanDisk: Lori Barker Padon, 408-801-1384 or Jay Iyer, 408-801-2067 or For Brunswick Group: New York Steve Lipin, 212-333-3810 or San Francisco Michael Buckley, 415-293-8461 or Hong Kong Tim Payne, 852-3512-5000

subset: commoncrawl


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Get Involved
Ipswich Hospital takes pride in serving two communities - its own internal community of staff, patients and visitors and the wider community of Ipswich and Suffolk.
This hospital is committed to listening to and acting on the views and opinions of people who use our services, their carers and to our staff in order to provide a patient-centred service which responds to the needs of the community.
- Promote patient involvement in their own care, as active partners with professionals;
- enable patients to become informed about their treatment and care and to make informed decisions and choices about it, if they wish;
- make sure that patients, the public and staff have the knowledge, skills and support they need so that they can influence planning, delivery and monitoring of health services;
- actively involve patients and the public in planning, delivery and monitoring of our services;
- acknowledge and act upon information we receive from patients and the public; and
- feed back to patients and the public how their involvement has influenced the operation of Ipswich Hospital.
Opportunities for patients, their families and the public to get involved
There are a number of ways to get involved and make a difference – click on the links below to find out more:
If you would like further information please contact the Patient and Carer Experience Office on 01473 702101 or click here to email Sarah Higson.


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Extra food from veggies that are usually harvested once
One of the many joys of growing your own food is the nearly constant supply of fresh fruits and vegetables. Freshly picked tomatoes, cucumbers, berries, and squash are some of the most delightful summer treasures. Yet many crops, such as lettuce, onions, and Swiss chard, tend to be thought of as single-harvest vegetables, making it necessary to provide enough space for large plantings as well as a keen attention to succession planting in order to receive several weeks worth of these single harvest crops. Many of these vegetables, however, are capable of producing multiple harvests if you provide just a little extra attention to the harvesting methods and give them a bit of time to recover from each picking.>> read "Cut and Come Again" #Edibles #Pruning #Vegetables
Have you noticed your obedient plant rebelling into a doughnut shape with an empty hole in the middle? Has 'Rozanne' lost her vigor, with less and less flair each year? Are your spring tulips a carpet of green instead of red? Or maybe your friends are dying for a piece of your lungwort? While most flower gardens start out lush and colorful early in the season, late summer and fall often yield a less desirable look. Don't be afraid to chop on your plants, you won't hurt them. A little deadheading and dividing can go a long way in the perennial garden.>> read "Lazy Daisies & Tired Tulips" #Bulbs #Perennials #Propagation #Pruning
Don't throw out those clippings! Make a great potpourri!
Every week I make my rounds, pinching things back and trimming as needed. Needless to say, I end up with a lot of material. By the end of the day, visitors have snatched up most, but what's left gets stuffed in a bag, and I bring it home to make potpourri.>> read "Perfect Scents" #Crafts #Fragrant #Pruning
As a horticulture specialist for the University of Georgia, I certainly get my share of frustrated homeowners that want me to help them recover their house from their overgrown landscape. Where they once had a beautiful vista of their backyard or swimming pool, they now suddenly have a blob of green obscuring the view. Many times, they are uncertain whether they should try to prune the bush down a few feet in hope of getting their window back, or go through the arduous task of yanking out the beastly plant altogether. While the best solution would have been to plant the appropriately sized plant to begin with, we do not always have that luxury when we purchase a used home. Renewal pruning, sometimes called rejuvenating pruning, is one option that can help recover a severely overgrown plant or landscape. This radical pruning technique can buy some time and add many years to your existing overgrown plants.>> read "Pruning Tips to Salvage an Overgrown Landscape" #Landscaping #Pruning #Shrubs
Ultimately, gardening is the act of 'controlling' plants and shaping the landscape to our own designs. Topiary takes 'gardening' to a higher level. Topiary, the art of training live plants to grow into a myriad of shapes and forms by clipping foliage and branches has been practiced since Roman times. The word itself comes from the word topiarius, a description of an ornamental landscape gardener or the creator of topia ...>> read "Topiary Gardens" #Art #Design #Landscaping #Pruning #Shrubs #Themed Gardens #Trees
When we begin to leave winter behind, the time will be ripe to take a good look at the evergreens in our landscapes and begin to prepare them for the upcoming spring spurt of growth. Most of our evergreen plants fall into three general categories – those with needle-like leaves, those with scale-like leaves and broadleaf plants ...>> read "How to do that… Tidy Tips for Your Evergreens" #Pruning #Winter
When you prune a plant, whether you're pruning stems or branches aboveground, or roots below ground, you're wounding the plant. A wounded plant will attempt to seal off or compartmentalize the wounded area to prevent decay. This process forces the plant to use stored reserves (starches, etc.), and thus has a depleting effect. Pruning can also stimulate new growth, but for this new growth to occur, additional stored reserves must be used. Therefore, even though top and root pruning can be, for certain objectives and at certain times of the year, beneficial to a plant, the plant does pay a price...>> read "Is it OK to prune roots?" #Pruning #Trees
New from our Bloggers:
Featured Books for Mississippi
Pamela Crawford
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A complete guide to simple container gardening designed for anyone who has ever killed a plant. It includes illustrated instructions to create gorgeous, fool-proof container gardens that even you can't kill!
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Enhance your health naturally with herbs from your own garden. Even if you've never gardened before, you can care for yourself and your family using time-tested herbal remedies harvested from your own medicinal herb garden. Master Gardener Dorie Byers offers simple growing instructions for more than 20 versatile medicinal herbs such as garlic, chamomile, and echinacea. You'll also find recipes and tips for using the herbs for first-aid and preventive health care.
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text: Pro skateboarder Keith Hufnagel moved to San Francisco in 1992 after growing up in NYC. He's been the streets mayor of SF since. When Keith started HUF, it was just a shop in San Francisco's Tenderloin District. Now HUF makes some of the most bangin' gear in skateboarding. People who don't even smoke run those weed socks. The footwear division is killing it, too. Welcome HUF to The Boardr Store.Shop HUF


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FLEET RESERVE Association Unit 208 ladies auxiliary meets at 7 p.m. July 1 at the Jacksonville Moose Lodge, 135 Moosehaven Road.
FLEET RESERVE Association Unit 208 ladies auxiliary meets at 7 p.m. July 1 at the Jacksonville Moose Lodge, 135 Moosehaven Road.
DIXON HIGH Reunion Classes of 1965-1970 hosts a joint class reunion at 5 p.m. Sept. 21 at the Surf City Welcome Center. Registration deadline Aug. 15. Call 910-327-0099 or 346-9268.
SNEADS FERRY Community Center, 126 Park Lane, hosts bingo every Monday at 7 p.m. Call 910-327-3335.
RIDE FOR THE Warriors Poker Run fundraiser to benefit the USO at 11:45 a.m. July 27 at the USO. Registration from 9 to 11 a.m. Cost $25 per bike, $10 per passenger. Visit vema-usa.com.
JONES COUNTY Community Foundation is accepting grant applications from nonprofits for community projects in Jones County. Application deadline Aug. 13. Call 252-670-5929.
JACKSONVILLE Moose Lodge, 135 Moosehaven Road, hosts a community open house from 1 to 6 p.m. July 27 with free family pig picking, water slide and bounce house. Call 910-346-4550.
BLOOD DRIVE from 2 to 7 p.m. July 1 at Pamlico Rescue Squad, Bayboro.
ROLLING Thunder Chapter NC-5 is accepting applications for the SSgt. Goodwin Scholarship. Application deadline July 15. Visit rollingthundernc5.com or call 910-326-7969.
YOUNG AT HEART of Trinity UM Church meets at 11 a.m. July 1 at Golden Corral. All faiths welcome. Call 910-347-1979.
WHITE OAK High School Class of 1993 will celebrate its 20th class reunion on July 20. Email firstname.lastname@example.com.
LAFAYETTE Lodge No. 83, A.F.&A.M. will hold a Stated Communication on July 2 with dinner at 6:30 p.m. Refreshments follow meeting.
INFANT OF Prague hosts bingo every Tuesday in the parish hall. Doors open at 6 p.m.


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This week, I received a touching sympathy card from a few of my students. The card began, "You are not alone. In this time of sadness, many thoughts are with you..." I laughed out loud. Why? Because they had bought that card to tell me how thankful they were to have me as an ESL (English as a Second Language) teacher. These students had not understood that they were giving me a card that you give a someone when their loved one has passed away. They thought it was a beautiful card, the perfect card to give a beloved teacher to say thank you for a job well done.
It goes to show that cross-cultural communication can be both confusing and delightful. If the speaker and the listener both have communication, not perfection, as the goal, moments of genuine exchange can take place. Most of us are impacted by internationals or immigrants in our small community of Campbellsville. You may sit on the same row as a Korean university student at church, be served by a Mexican server at a local restaurant, or provide customer service for a Chinese family at your job. We all have opportunities for cross-cultural communication. The trick is to have patience and understanding when communicating with individuals whose native language isn't English.
I'm interested to know, what language barriers have you had to covercome in your communication with other Campbellsville residents?
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Staunton Augusta Art Center
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20 S. New Street, Staunton, Virginia 24401
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We return to Genesis chapter 3 in our series in origins. I didn't know when I started out how long we'd be in to this series, but I'm certainly enjoying every bit of it as we look at the origin of those things which are absolutely critical to any true world view. And we have dealt with creation, seen how God created the entire universe in six days, six solar days, an evening and a morning. And we are now studying the Fall of man. The third chapter of Genesis in many ways is the most defining chapter in the Bible because it explains why things are the way they are today. Why there is what there is in the world. Why there is decay. Why there is disease. Why there is dysfunction. Why there is disintegration. Why there is ultimately death and judgment. Those things plague our entire universe. And they all come out of the event recorded in Genesis chapter 3...the Fall of man and his universe.
And as it is true of Genesis 1 and 2 that you have God's own account of creation, here again you have God's own account of the Fall. This is God's history. Yes, it is true that Moses was the human instrument who wrote this history, but it was all inspired by the Spirit of God. As the New Testament tells us, all Scripture is given by inspiration of God. Holy men of God, including Moses, were moved by the Holy Spirit as they penned the Scripture. And this is God's inspired history on the Fall. It explains why things are the way they are in the world. It establishes the dilemma of sin, the presence of all those things I mentioned, decay, disease, dysfunction, disintegration, death and judgment. It also establishes for us the need for restoration, the need for recreation and the need for regeneration and salvation. All of this is built on Genesis chapter 3.
Now what happens in Genesis chapter 3 is that Adam and Eve who up to this point are sinless and living in a perfect environment in which death does not exist and disintegration doesn't exist and disease doesn't exist and dysfunction doesn't exist and decay doesn't exist, none of those things exist...it's a perfect world, perfect in every sense, it is complete in terms of its creation and it is flawless and without any decay or anything that disintegrates...it is the perfect Edenic creation of God and they live in it without sin, enjoying all the wonders of God's creation. But at some point, we don't know exactly how much time elapsed from the sixth day of creation on, we don't know how long from the time they were created till they sinned, it was certainly before they gave birth to children, somewhere in there this occurred and there is really no way to know precisely when it happened. But we can know how it happened.
What you have here in Genesis 3 is not legend, it is not myth, it's not a fairy tale, it's not a tradition passed down from generation to generation. It is the written and inspired Word of God. And it explains to us exactly why things are the way they are and how sin came into our world and how it began to effect our world.
Now again, the first seven verses give us the account. And as we flow through these verses, we identify certain features that become the hooks to hang our thoughts on. First is the solicitor...the solicitor, that is Satan introduced to us in verse 1, "The serpent was more crafty than any beast of the field which the Lord God had made." And here we are introduced to the solicitor, the one who solicits sin, the one who is the tempter. And this is a real reptile, as we have already learned, because he's compared to other beasts of the field. This is not some supernatural creature, this isn't a figment of imagination in the mind of Eve, as Jewish scholars have always believed, that there never really was a serpent, it was just something going on in the mind of Eve. But it clearly indicates this was a serpent, this was a nachash, this was some kind of reptile...a synonym to that is the word tanninused as a synonym in some places and translated dragon and Revelation 12:9 and Revelation 20 verse 2 describes Satan as a serpent and a dragon. Some kind of reptile and in this case an upright reptile coming up and holding a conversation with Eve.
More intelligent, more crafty...the word crafty means intelligent or wise, than any other animal because this animal was merely an instrument for Satan. Satan was talking through the animal and therefore the animal had supernatural wisdom. Not in its own animal life but because it was an instrument of a supernatural creature, namely Satan.
Satan, as you remember, fell. He was Lucifer, son of the morning, probably the praise leader of heaven and he decided he wanted to be like God. He wanted to be like the Most High God. And so God threw him out of heaven, along with a third of the other holy angels and they constitute Satan and his demons. So when tossed out of heaven, he then goes down to earth and attempts to bring the rebellion in to the perfection of the earth. He comes as the primary solicitor of evil. He still is behind evil in our world. Obviously we are all sinful and so evil is in us, but he is still the main solicitor. He still, not that he comes individually to everybody and solicits like he did Eve, but he has developed a world system, he has developed a world cosmos, a world order that becomes the source by which he tempts. Through many avenues in the world temptation comes at people. He is still the primary solicitor of evil. Since the time his own rebellion was quashed in heaven by God and he was thrown out, he has become the number one adversary of God and the number one adversary of man. And so he continues even today and will always be until he is cast into the lake of fire the primary solicitor of evil.
So we saw the solicitor. Second...secondly, we began to see the strategy starting in verse 1. We followed the dialogue. He said to the woman, "Indeed has God said you shall not eat from any tree of the garden?" Now remember, his strategy is lies and deception, it's not any different now than it was then. So the main solicitor is working primarily through lies, disguising himself as an angel of light he is really the angel of hell. Disguising himself as a speaker of truth, he is a speaker of lies. He is a liar and the father of lies, it says in John 8:44. And what he wants to do is to get people to believe that God doesn't tell the truth, to get people to believe they have a right to question God and they have a right to doubt that God has told them the truth. He really solicits people to believe God lies and he tells the truth. And that's what he did.
He says in a very somewhat benign way, initially, to Eve, "You shall not eat from any tree of the garden, is that what God said? Let's talk about what God said." That is in fact similar to what God said. God said they could eat from any tree of the garden, every tree of the garden but there was one tree that they were not to eat of. Well Satan sort of introduces the issue. "Let's talk about God's prohibition. And this is where solicitation to temptation comes initially, it comes when you question God. The assumption here is that you have a right to render human judgment on what God commands, on what God provides. And that's where things begin to come apart.
At this point, Eve should have said...God has made it very clear and that's all there is to that. We will uphold the Word of God and we will honor God and we will trust God.
But she got lured into the idea that she could sit along with this being she was talking to in a position of judgment on what God had said. In fact, the implication was that God was not really good. If God was really good and really cared and really loving, He would never have put a restriction at all on them. The idea is that God is restrictive and God is narrow and God is cruel. And Satan is generous and Satan loves freedom while God really is in to bondage. That's the way the dialogue goes and Satan begins to try to lead Eve to think of God as restrictive.
So then you not only question God, you question God's goodness, God's nature. And Eve falls into this by responding and saying in verse 3, "God said you shall not eat from that tree in the midst of the garden, or touch it lest you die." And she adds this little phrase "touch it." It may have been that Adam had said that to her to keep her from the tree, but she says it as if God said it. It may be that she just invented it to make God...to make God harsh. Yeah...she's kind of saying...yeah, you know, you may be right because God says you shouldn't eat of that tree or even touch it. She's sort of narrowing God down and making Him appear more harsh with her own perception here. What she should have done is defend God. She had all the necessary truth about God, as we said last time. She could have defended His character. She could have defended His goodness. She could have defended His perfect wisdom. She certainly could have defended their perfect contentment and need of nothing. And she should, we said last time, questioned the tempter. She should have asked questions to unmask the tempter. Why is he...why are you saying this and where is this coming from...why do you care...and why do you want me to question God...and why do you want me to question God's goodness?
But Satan has got her on the slippery slope and subtlely suggesting that in truth he is more devoted to her joy, he is more devoted to her freedom, more devoted to her fulfillment and her satisfaction than God is. He is for freedom and God is for bondage. And that lie still dominates in Satan's world, doesn't it? It still does. You hear all the rhetoric that was going on in the last couple of weeks in the anti-proposition 22 group. They were talking about, you know, why do people want to restrict our freedom. Why do people want to restrict our freedom? We're free to love anybody we want to love. What's wrong with loving anybody that you want to love? Love is a wonderful thing. Why not love anybody you want to love? And that all sounds so good and so saccharine and it's all about freedom and being whoever you want to be. That's always Satan's approach. And when you step into that environment and you say...Well, I would like to say this, God says that is a sin and you're not to do it...and when you say that, that convinces them for sure that God is not about freedom. God is all about bondage. And that is essentially the lie that Satan led Eve to buy into. And it's the same lie that you buy into and I buy into whenever we sin. When you sin, you have in that sin believed that you will get greater enjoyment by sinning than by not sinning, right? So therefore you have believed that God's promise of blessing for righteousness really isn't true. That's the practical reality of it. Cause when you sin you believe that you will get greater joy out of your personal fulfillment by violating God's law then you would get if you obeyed it...which means you believe the lie.
Well by verse 3 this is all being internalized by Eve. And she's beginning to not trust God as fully...I mean, she trusted God 100 percent up to this point, now she's beginning to not trust God. She's beginning to see Him as restrictive and narrow. And I said this last time and I repeat it because I think it's sort of a nexus in the discussion here. As soon as one does not completely, unreservedly and wholeheartedly trust in the wisdom and absolute goodness of God, as soon as one does not believe that the purposes and the commands of God are for our best and highest joy, sin has entered the heart. Because anything less than loving the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength is sin. That's how you break the law. And so if you have any level of distrust, any level of questioning God's goodness, any level of questioning God's wisdom, that's sin...that's sin. So it's when she's internalizing this that sin comes into her heart. So she joins the cause of Satan and makes God appear harsh by adding the words "or touch it," as if God had said that when God's words in chapter 2 verse 16 and 17 don't say that at all. So her heart has set his course...set its course, God is harsh, I'm beginning to feel that. She's not defending God, nor is she offended that God's goodness is being attacked and that God's commands are being questioned.
The Fall took place then when she stopped loving the Lord her God with all her heart, soul, mind and strength and loving Him means believing Him and trusting Him. She believed Satan was telling her the truth and maybe God wasn't. And that Satan was offering her the true fulfillment, the true satisfaction that God was holding back from her.
Well, Satan knew he had her so he pushed in for the kill in verse 4, and he gets blatant. "The serpent said to the woman, 'You surely shall not die.'" God had said, "You surely shall die." By the way, she left out the word "surely" in her report on God's command, but God did say you surely shall die. And Satan picks up on God's word and says, "You surely shall not die." Now you know the truth about Satan. Whatever God says, he says the opposite. His subtleties end at this point. He's no longer subtle, he simply overtly says, "God told you a lie...God told you a lie."
Satan says the lie is that you have to pay for your sin. The lie is that there's judgment. That's the big lie of God, there's no judgment. Believe me, folks, that is the lie that Satan wants the whole world to believe, there's no judgment, right? All these people living in this homosexual life style, living it blatantly, overtly, living it almost flauntingly in front of our society are doing that because they have believed the lie, first of all, that there is no absolute authority. But they believe that second compelling lie that there is no judgment, there is no judgment.
Now they have to work...to live that kind of life style, you have to work through guilt. And you have to basically come to terms with your guilt and you have to believe that your guilt is illegitimate and wrong. But you do have to work through it. You have to work through the fear of judgment, the fear of God. You've got to work through that because the fear of judgment is built into the fabric of the law of God written in your heart and your conscience. So you have to work through that and effectively silence your conscience and you effectively do that in our society today by flaunting it in such a garish way with other people who flaunt it that collectively you sort of ride across the top of your guilt. And then you have to be convinced that there will be no judgment, that this is all about love and all about caring and all about freedom. And that's the lie.
Well there you have Satan's strategy. Question God, you have the right, question Him if His laws don't seem reasonable to you, if they seem restrictive, needlessly restrictive and narrow, if God seems like He's in to bondage rather than freedom, you need to assess that. And if that's the case, then you have every right to doubt God's goodness because God is holding back from you something very good. If you will sin you will find real pleasure in your sinning, not just, of course, homosexual sins but any kind. And then you want to...you want to follow the pattern that to be convinced that you defend God any more, Eve didn't defend God, that is to say Eve should have risen up and said, "Wait a minute, there is a divine law and God has given it. There is a divine lawgiver and it's God and I will not violate God because He is the divine lawgiver and because He's given His law." But she basically came to the practical attitude that she was not under any authority to obey God's law because she disobeyed it. And she also was convinced there was no judgment.
So that's how Satan works. First you question God, then you question God's goodness, then you believe that the real satisfaction is in the sin. And then you begin to hedge on the absolute character of Scripture as its authority, and then you begin to hedge on the fact that you're going to have to pay a consequence for your sin. And Eve made all those wrong choices. They're the same wrong choices that you make today when you sin.
Then the question came up last time, why would God be so narrow, why would God be so restrictive? And that's a fair question. And you can know that it was in the mind of Eve. Okay, if she's this far down the line, but why would God be like this? Then in verse 5 Satan says, "Because God knows that in the day you eat from it, your eyes will be opened and you'll be like God, knowing good and evil." And Satan...what he's saying to her is the reason God doesn't want you to do this is not because...because...because He's a good God and He wants to protect you from dying, He wants to protect you from death. The reason God doesn't want you to do this is because He's a bad God and He's jealous and He doesn't like rivals and He doesn't want competition. See that would be Satan's personal testimony. After all, he tried to be the rival of God, tried to compete with God as we learn in Isaiah 14 and Ezekiel 28, he tried to compete with God and got thrown out of heaven for it. So it sticks in his craw that God will not tolerate a rival. And so there's a certain amount of truth in this. He's saying God just doesn't like anybody getting on His level. But from Satan's viewpoint, it's not because God is all glorious and holy, it's because God's character is flawed. And God is jealous and envious and selfish and motivated by self-interest, He hates rivals. Doesn't want you to eat that fruit because you know what? That fruit is not only not going to kill you, it is so good, not only will it not kill you, it will make you like God. Now that's a noble thing, that is a noble thing.
Well Satan says that a lot. He tells the Mormons that all the time. You know, you're going to become like God. You're going to be the God of your own planet and have celestial sex and populate your own planet. That's the Mormon view of heaven. He tells...he tells people in forms of mystical religions that they can ascend to the higher levels, gnostic theology is like this and mysticism and they can ascend higher and higher and higher into the eternal consciousness. And even within the realm of Christianity there are those who believe somehow that they can become higher and higher and higher, ascending toward God by some mystical experiences.
Well, it's not a totally ignoble thing to want to be like God. We have to realize that this is a pretty subtle thing. He's saying to Eve...You'll be like God. Well on the surface that's a good thing. After all, we're all trying to be like Christ. The Holy Spirit is trying to make us like Christ. That's a good thing. So there's a certain half truth and that's the way Satan usually operates. But for Eve to be like God in Satan's scheme, she has to disobey God. For us to be like God, in God's scheme we have to obey God. So he's got the thing completely reversed. But it is a noble thing to want to be like God. And he says you're going to be like God, you're going to know good and evil.
Now that's a half truth. They did know good and evil, Adam and Eve did, that's right. Over in chapter 3 verse 22, "Behold, the man has become like one of us knowing good and evil." But as I said last time, they didn't know good and evil the way God knows evil. They knew good before but they began to know evil not the way God knows it, God knows it like the physician who offers the cure to the cancer victim. They know evil like the cancer victim who is dying from it. They knew evil experientially. It wasn't that they knew evil...Oh, now I understand what evil is. It wasn't that, it wasn't some kind of cognitive thing, it wasn't some rational thing. They knew evil by doing it. And so, Eve wanting to be like God, thinking probably that's a good thing and doubting that God was all good and if God's not all good, and there are things outside of God's allowance for me that are good and satisfying and fulfilling, I can get those things and at the same time be like God, I think that sounds pretty good to me.
And so, the sin had already taken place in her heart. The Fall already came before she even ever took the fruit. And I remind you, there's nothing magic about the fruit. There wasn't some magic potion in the fruit. This isn't the Aesop Fables. There's nothing magic in the fruit. It was...it was not that that brought about some change in her nature. It was the moment that she first distrusted God that catapulted her into sin. Nothing in the fruit was evil because nothing in the world was evil, right? Even the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil was part of God's good creation, very good creation. So they knew evil when they distrusted God's character. And the evidence that they distrusted God's character in the heart came when they disobeyed His Word by taking the fruit.
So, by now Eve's mind has changed. Now it has to work on her emotions. So let's go to tonight's point and see how far we get. From the solicitor to the strategy, from the solicitor to the strategy. We come, thirdly, to the seduction...to the seduction.
Now what happens is...this is in the mind of Eve, that she has sinned by not loving God with all her heart, soul, mind and strength. She's now sinned in the mind. She's distrusting God, distrusting His goodness, thinking He's narrow, thinking He's harsh. She's changing His Word, altering what God said to accommodate the way she's thinking. She's not defending God's character. She's not defending God's Word. She is even believing the lie that there is no absolute standard that she has to conform to or she will die. She now is convinced that it's not as absolute as God said it was and that she won't die.
But that's not all that has to happen. That's just the mind. That's just the cognition process. Got to move beyond that so now you come to the seduction. Look at verse 6. "When the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was desirable to make one wise, she took from its fruit and ate." And we'll stop at that point.
Now here's the process that's going on inside of her. It's in the mind now. She's got doubts about God. She's got doubts about God's character. Satan has caused all of that to happen in her mind because she made all the wrong choices down through the whole conversation. But what is in her mind has to work in her emotions in order to activate her will to actually take the fruit. And that's what's happening. This is defined for us in very clear terms in James 1. James tells us how this process works. James 1:14, "Each one is tempted when he is carried away and enticed by his own lust." Now we move from thinking to feeling...from the mind to the emotion. We...we have a thought and we let that thought begin to move and seduce us through our lust. In verse 15, "When lust finally conceives, it gives birth to sin and when sin is accomplished, it brings forth death." So there's the sequence.
It goes from the mind to the emotion. It goes from thinking to feeling. Now in her mind, now follow this, her goal has changed. Now this is a monumental change. Up to this time the goal of Eve in life was to glorify God, right? And that's the perfect goal, to love God with all heart, soul, mind and strength, that's the fulfilling of the whole law, that's perfect righteousness. So she just loved God, consumed by loving God. There was nothing but the love of God in her and all she wanted to do was love and honor and praise and glorify God. That's all she wanted to do. There was never any thought about self-satisfaction. There was never any thought about self-fulfillment. There was never any thought about personal pleasure, personal gain. Those thoughts didn't exist. Now there is a new thought in her mind, it is this...self-fulfillment. That's the new thought. It never existed before. Never that thought.
Now, not only is that her thought, that has become her goal. Her goal has come to be, "I want to have the satisfaction that that tree will bring me and what that tree will bring me is to be like God and know good and evil. I want that because God wants to withhold that from me for the wrong reasons, because He's not good, He's restrictive and He's narrow and I want that and I'm surprised God doesn't want me to have it but I want it." And here is the first time on earthly soil you have somebody saying essentially what Lucifer said in heaven, "I will...I will...I will...I will...I will," five times, you remember that? Now Eve is saying I will. Self-fulfillment has taken over for consuming love for God.
For the first time ever what is driving her is her satisfaction and that's when sin moves from the mind into the feeling. She's already sinned in the mind, but now the sin is going to work on her emotionally. And it's going to conceive and it's going to bring forth evil, disobedient behavior and that will produce death in exactly the pattern of James 1:14 and 15. This is the self-seduction. This is where the feelings follow the mind.
Look how it unfolds in verse 6. "When the woman saw that the tree was good for food." That's not intellectual. Now you say, "What kind of...what kind of tree was it?" We don't know what kind of tree it was. Have no clue. You say, "I thought it was an apple tree." It wasn't an apple tree necessarily, I don't know what kind of tree it was. The reason people traditionally have called it an apple tree is because in the Latin there's a word for apple, malum, m-a-l-u-m, malum. There's a word for evil in Latin, maluse(?), pretty close? And in the genitive case, both apple and evil are mali, m-a-l-i. So some people have taken that little linguistic thing and turned this into an apple tree. And then there's the silly legend that Adam choked on his apple and that's why men have an Adam's apple...which is about as silly as saying it was an apple to start with.
Now what is going on here is that now all of a sudden self-satisfaction drives her. It isn't the glory of God any more. It isn't the honor of God any more. She is being seduced by her physical appetite. She looks and she sees this as good for food.
Now let me ask you a question. Do you think she was hungry? Think she was starving in the garden? No. There was plenty of food. There was food all over the place. But she had come to believe that there was something satisfying in this food that she had never enjoyed in any other. And this is lust. This is the emotions following the mind. And now she begins to feel the desire for the satisfaction, the taste, flavor that this fruit can bring.
Secondly, she not only sees that it's good for food, but she also sees that it's a delight to the eyes. There's a certain...there's a certain emotion going on here. "Oh, it will taste so good...oh, it's such a beautiful fruit." It's exciting her aesthetic appreciation. It's not as if there wasn't anything...as if everything else in the garden was brown and ugly, it wasn't. But here again is a selfish discontent. And once the mind went, then the emotions begin to take over and it looks like the only food you really care to eat, oh it's so beautiful. And you can just see that the appetites are taking over and conceiving the behavior.
Also, there's a third element. She also saw that the tree was desirable to make her wise. Now she was very concerned about herself and that she could have this delectable satisfaction and that she could become wise. This has emotional power. I want that, I want that. And what's happening is, her imagination is shaping sin, it's conceiving sin in her.
Now I want you to notice these three things, they're very important. "She saw the tree was good for food, it was a delight to the eyes. The tree was desirable to make one wise." Let me tell you something. These are the same three approaches that Satan still uses...still uses them. And they are described in 1 John 2...1 John 2. You will remember, if you don't now, this passage if you've studied the Bible much. First John 2, listen to this, 15, "Do not love the world or the things in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him." Now here is verse 16, 1 John 2:16, listen to this, "For all that is in the world...here it comes...all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the boastful pride of life is not from the Father but is from the world."
Did you hear that? Everything in the world, all, the whole evil system, the whole...the whole evil kosmosof Satan, the whole Satanic system, the whole thing can be summed up in three things...the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes and the pride of life. It all fits in there somewhere. The lust of the eyes, the pride of life, the lust of the flesh.
Now go back with that in your mind to Genesis 3. She saw that the tree was good for food, that's the lust of the flesh. She saw that it was a delight to the eyes, that's the lust of the eyes, the material side. And she saw that the tree was able to make one wise, that's the pride of life. There they were right in the garden. They're the same three, can't be any different because that's the bridgehead to sin in all our lives. What happens is the mind begins to distrust God, the mind begins to question God, begins to question God's Word, begins to question God's judgment, God's authority. And then it begins to work in the emotion, as we look at the temptation, as we look at the sin it begins to work its way down into our imagination and we begin to conceive it by thinking how much it will satisfy the flesh, how much it will satisfy the eye that we want to wear it, we want to do it because of its beauty, because it will enhance us, because people will notice us. Or as the third one would indicate, the pride of life, it will elevate us above everybody else. And we do what we do out of pride. We do what we do out of the desire to fulfill what the eye sees and covetous things. We do what we do out of the desire to fulfill the hankering lusting desires of our flesh.
Always those same three. So what you have there in Genesis you have also in 1 John 2. Now in another little while, we're going to be looking at Luke 4, but turn to Luke 4 for a moment because I want you to see this. In Luke chapter 4 Jesus' temptation and in the temptation of Jesus, Luke 4, the devil came to Him, in verse 3, and he said, "If You're the Son of God, tell this stone to become bread." Now what was the condition of Jesus at this point? He had been doing what for 40 days? Fasting, okay. So there's no question that He became hungry. Verse 2, He was hungry would be a mild word...40 days of fasting. The devil comes, "If You're the Son of God, tell the stone to become bread." That's the lust of the flesh. That's exactly the temptation that came to Eve. "You're hungry, that food is good, it will satisfy You, grab it."
Jesus said, "No, I'm not going to do that. The only bread I want is the Word of God." What He was saying was when God gets ready to feed Me, He'll feed Me. I won't grab that satisfaction for Myself.
And then he took Him up into a high mountain in verse 5 and showed Him all the kingdoms of the world in a moment of time. And the devil said, "I'll give You all this domain." That's the lust of the eyes. He showed Him the whole kingdom of the world, all...some view, overview of all the kingdoms of the world which really belong to Him. I mean, the bread certainly was His, He could turn it...He could turn stones into bread if He chose to. Certainly the kingdoms of the world belong to Him. But God had a plan and a purpose in which He would reveal when and how that came to pass. Satan showed Him everything, that's the lust of the eyes. And Jesus...Satan's requirement was You have to worship me and Jesus said, "No, I only worship God."
Then he led Him to the temple, the pinnacle of the temple, probably about 400 feet in elevation, to dive off that southwest corner, or southeast corner of the temple...it's incredibly steep. Took Him up there and said, "Jump off...jump off." That will be the last discussion about whether You're the Messiah.
There was another guy earlier who tried to do that, made a splat, and was fairly convincing that he wasn't the Messiah. "But why don't You just dive off, after all, the Old Testament says He'll give His angels charge over Thee and You won't hit Your foot against a stone, just come down to a landing and that will be the end of that. Everybody will know that You're Messiah." That's the pride of life. Why don't You grab a little pride, You've been humiliated long enough. Why don't You grab a little bread, You've been hungry long enough. Why don't You grab the kingdoms of the world, after all, take a look, they're all Yours anyway.
Satan always comes on the same grounds. Here he is on the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, the pride of life, coming after Jesus Christ. That's it, folks. That's the same three appeals that he always makes. And what happens is your mind has come to terms with some of Satan's lies and then they begin to work on the emotion and they work on the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes and the pride of life to conceive the sin that finally comes.
That takes us to point number four, the sin in verse 6. Back to Genesis. I'm sure your Bible opened rather readily to Luke...we'll go back to Genesis. Genesis, we come to verse 6, "She took from its fruit and ate." Are you surprised? I'm not surprised, not...not knowing where she is by this time, it went from the mind to the emotions and the emotions overpowered the will and the will produced the behavior. She took from its fruit and ate. A simple act, very simple act with massive impact, massive impact. And then it simply says, "She gave also to her husband with her and he ate."
Now all of a sudden Adam's here. Where has he been when we needed him? Well, I'll tell you one thing, he wasn't there during the temptation. How do I know that? Because it says in 1 Timothy 2:14 that Adam was not deceived. He wasn't there during the deception. Satan pulled her out from under her protector. But Adam appears from where, we don't know. But again 1 Timothy 2:14 says he wasn't deceived, so he wasn't there through this whole process of deception. Or else if he had been there he would have been in the conversation, believe me. But it just says she gave to her husband with her and he ate. Why? You say why, Adam? Why? Why? Hold it, hold it, hold it, Adam. What are you doing?
Why did he do it? We aren't told why he did it. Can we speculate? Sure. I don't really know why he did it. And I...I mean, you can speculate but what's the point? I don't know why he did it. You say, "Well maybe Eve took him back through the process of how she had been approached by this amazingly wonderful reptile and maybe she said to Adam...Guess what, Adam, if we do this we'll be like God, isn't that good? Isn't that neat? We'll be like God, Adam." Maybe she didn't tell him the whole deal. If that's the case, he should have stopped her and said, "Whoa, whoa, whoa. You were talking to who? A what? A talking reptile? I named the animals, I never ran across him." I mean, at some point it doesn't make sense for Adam to just say, "Oh really, a talking reptile told you to do this and you'll be like God, give me one." That's a little...that's a fast track for a man of the intelligence of Adam.
Maybe...maybe she said to him, "You know, Adam, God said...or maybe we didn't hear Him right, God said in the day you eat of that you shall surely...what?...die. Well, you know what, Adam? I'm here and I did it. So I guess...I guess you can eat that and it is good for food and it's beautiful and it's going to make us like God and guess what, Adam, I didn't die." Maybe that was like some part of the conversation, I don't know.
But I do know 1 Timothy 2:14 says he wasn't deceived. He just did it. He didn't go through the deception process that Satan took Eve through. Maybe she just said to him, "Isn't it wonderful, now I'm like God and, oh Adam, you can be like God, too. Wouldn't that be great? And by the way, we must have misunderstood what He said. You know, we kind of thought He said you'll die, but I didn't die."
Well, you say, "Does Adam have less guilt?" No. In fact, whenever you look at the Scripture in other places, the Scripture always holds Adam accountable, not Eve, right? First Corinthians 15:22, "As in Adam all die..." Eve has immense guilt, no question, so does Adam. Eve was deceived by the serpent through the whole process. Adam just joined in the sin for reasons or explanations we don't know. But both of them disobeyed God. God did say don't eat, and they disobeyed God. And that's sin.
You say, "Well then why doesn't it say as in Eve all died?" Because there's a principle of headship in the Bible and it starts with Adam and it never ends. And it works in marriage just as well as it works in the trinity as it works in the church. There's a principle of headship. And the husband is the head, right? First Corinthians 11, "The husband is the head of the wife as God is the head of Christ." And so he then becomes the responsible one. By God's design, headship is in the man. Man then bears the responsibility.
You say, "Well what if Adam said, 'I don't care what you did, Eve, I'm not doing it?'" I don't know, how could you ever know? There's no way to know that. But Adam tried to play that because when he was confronted by God, he blamed God for giving him that woman...he said, "The woman You gave me." He didn't really blame the woman, he blamed God for giving him the woman. He went to sleep single, and woke up married and said, "I didn't ask for a wife, let alone that one. I didn't even know what a woman was and then I had one. And You had to pick her? It's not my fault."
So those are questions we don't know. But we do know that Adam bears the headship so whenever we talk about the sin of the Fall, it goes back to Adam as the head. It doesn't lessen Eve's guilt. It doesn't increase Adam's guilt. It's just the fact that when referring to that you refer to the head of the family by design. And that's a great reinforcement, isn't it, of God's design for marriage. We see that in the trinity and we see it even as Christ is the head of the church.
So the one that God had given to Adam to be his helper became the instrument of his disaster and death. Since the sin...as soon as they sinned, as soon as Eve sinned, you know, on the inside, she started feeling things she never felt, desires she had never felt, lusts she had never felt, lust of the eyes, lust of the flesh, the pride of life. And the moment Adam bought into deciding to be disobedient, immediately the principle of decay and death entered into his life and at that point the whole human race is plunged into evil. And whenever you refer back to that event, you always refer to Adam because Adam is the head. And it takes the work of the last Adam to undo this.
For a moment, turn to Romans 5. We could go into some depth in Romans 5, obviously, but just...just a look at it will suffice, I think. In Romans chapter 5 verse 12, "Just as through one man sin entered into the world and death through sin, so death spread to all men because all sinned." Let me tell you what that verse is simply saying. One man sins, Adam. He is the head. Of course, his wife sinned as well. But the sin of Adam as the head is how sin enters the world. And it enters the world and with it comes death, spiritual death, physical death and eternal death. And that death spread to all men because all sinned. You say, "Well how in the world did we all sin?" We all sinned in the loins of Adam...we were all there. We were all there. Whatever he became by way of corruption, we were there in his loins, in his genes and Eve's genes and whatever they would produce would be sinful. That's the point. So sin reigns and death reigns in everyone who comes out of Adam and Eve.
So what the Apostle Paul is saying is that sin entered the world through Adam. Death entered the world through sin. Death spread to all men because all sinned in Adam. We were all there and when he was corrupted, then everything he produced was corrupt. And he says this over and over again here. Verse 15, "By the transgression of one, the many died." Verse 16 talks about the one who sinned. On the one hand, the judgment arose from one transgression resulting in condemnation. Verse 17, "By the transgression of the one, death reigned through the one." Verse 18, "Through one transgression the result of condemnation to all men." Verse 19, "For as through the one man's disobedience, the many were made sinners." Over and over and over again Paul says that our sinfulness is the result of Adam's sin. When he sinned, he brought down the whole human race that would come out of that original couple. We were all in his loins. We were all in the genetics. We were all there and when he was corrupted, everybody he produced was corrupt.
The other side of this, of course, in what Paul's trying to say here...you see, the question that Paul is answering here, somebody is going to say when Paul talks about Jesus being the Savior and Jesus delivering you from your sin, and the Jewish people would argue and say, "Well, how can one man die for so many? How can the death of one man apply to so many? How can the work of one man influence so many?" And Paul's answer is, "If you think you have a problem with that, wondering how the one death of Jesus could apply to so many, let me give you an illustration of the one man Adam, because one man literally catapulted the whole human race into sin. One man, the last Adam, can save many." That's the comparison. And so he makes it all the way through. In verse 15 again, he says, "It was much more through the grace of God and the grace of the one man, Jesus Christ, to many." And in verse 16 he says it again, "The free gift arose from many transgressions resulting in justification." Verse 17, "The abundance of grace and the gift of righteousness will reign in life through the one Jesus Christ." "The one act of righteousness, verse 18, brings justification of life to all men." Verse 19, "One man's disobedience made many sinners, the obedience of one made many righteous." So that's...that's the comparison. You see the comparison?
So it is possible for what one man does to effect many. Somebody asked the question...Well, it's not fair. How can we be held responsible for Adam's sin when we weren't there? How can we sin in Adam when we weren't there?
Well, ask yourself this. How can we die and rise in Jesus Christ when we weren't there?
Or you say, "How can we be held responsible for what Adam did?" On the other hand, how can you be saved by what Jesus did?
Well the answer is because that's the way God designed it. That's how God designed it for His glory. God allowed this in order that sin might come, in order that He might destroy it so that it wouldn't any more be a possibility, it would become a reality and He would destroy it and in the process He would save sinners who believed and judge sinners who did not. And therefore He would put Himself on display as to His power, as to His grace and as to His justice. And He couldn't display His power and He couldn't display His grace and He couldn't display His justice in that way if there weren't sin. So God allowed it. Just as we fell in one man, we rise again in one man, the last Adam, Jesus Christ.
Well that leads us to the last point, which I will make in brief words. Shame...back to Genesis 3. We go from the solicitor to the strategy, to the seduction, to the sin, and then comes the shame. And this is quite interesting, I think. In verse 7, "The eyes of both of them were opened," immediately bang, their eyes were opened. What did they see? They saw what? They saw evil is what they saw. They were aware of their wickedness. They knew they were naked. They had been naked for who knows how long. They knew they were naked, all of a sudden, and they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves loin coverings. Why do you think they did that? That sounds like a bizarre thing to do. Why didn't they put a mask on their face? Why didn't they cover their entire body, or why didn't they cover their feet? What's going on here?
You see, once they knew personal evil because they did it, a whole new way of thinking entered their minds. They were wicked. They were evil. And they were embarrassed. They felt it. They felt self-conscious. They felt guilty. They felt fearful. And they were gripped by a new emotion--wicked desire, evil desire, perversion, lust and shame. As Derick Kidner(??) wrote, "This was a grotesque anticlimax to the dream of enlightenment," as sin always is.
They were in the same garden, looking at the same spouse, in the midst of the same creatures, under the same sky, but all of a sudden into their pure world of relationship, into their sexual innocence came perverse evil thoughts. And sin clung to their innocence. And they felt it strongly and they felt exposed and they felt shameful about feelings they had never felt before. Their purity was marred. They were shocked by thoughts that were wicked and impure. Even that pure gift of marriage was so polluted as to make them feel that they needed to hide their loins from God and from each other. That very part of their body which was the source of joy and the source of life because a source of guilt and a source of shame and they were embarrassed to be naked. And they did an appropriate thing. They sewed fig leaves together and made themselves loin coverings. This is a feeble effort to cover their shame and to cover their guilt.
Now let me tell you something, folks. Wearing clothes is good. You know why? Because it covers our shame. Wearing clothes does not signal that you have abnormal inhibitions, that's what the nudists would tell us. That's what these wacky evolutionary anthropologists would tell us, we all ought to be running around stark naked in a jungle somewhere and return to being noble savages. Whether they're nudists or exhibitionists or primitive tribal people or even anthropologists who celebrate nakedness, or whether they're rock musicians who seem to me to be mostly naked most of the time, or whether they're movie actors and people who bear themselves as if this is some testimony to their freedom from inhibitions, they would like us to believe that there's a road back to the noble savage who has no shame and no inhibitions.
Listen, folks, I'm going to say this carefully, the unembarrassed nudity of primitive tribes, the flaunted nudity of warped naturalists, the perverted nudity of pornographers, rock singers and movie actors may be called freedom, it may be called a return to nature, it may be called a return to innocence, it may be called deliverance from inhibitions, but in reality it does not and it cannot ever recover innocence.. You know what it does indicate? That the person who is naked has accomplished a victory over reasonable shame. It indicates that the person has conquered normal reasonable guilt and shame.
They covered themselves and that was reasonable. It was a signal of their fall. It indicated that they had fallen. And people who are civilized understand that. People who are naked have triumphed over reasonable shame and guilt. And they do what they can by dressing appropriately, not to totally unabashedly inflame their shameful lust. Those people who are advocates of nudity flaunt their wicked desires.
One final thought. They could cover their bodies. It was a nice try. It was reasonable, it was a good thing to do. But they couldn't really hide their sin. And there's a beautiful picture of this, we'll see it in verse 21, it says, "The Lord God made garments of skin for Adam and his wife and clothed them." And I'll just point this...we'll get to that later, but I just point, in order for God to make them a garment of skin, what did God have to do? Kill an animal, that's the first time. And the little analogy that I would make here, you can try to cover yourself with your own fig leaves, but in the end you can only be covered by God in a sacrifice. In the end, that's for God to do, to cover sin. More on that when we get to verse 21.
So, let me sum up. Like Lucifer, Adam and Eve fell so far there was nothing good in them. They fell so far that they were absolutely embarrassed and full of shame. They fell and an avalanche of sin was loosed that would never stop. They pulled a stone from the mountain and were horrified to discover that the fatal rock slide would bury all humanity and its environment in the dirt and rubble of sin. Satan had done his work and he disappeared from the garden. And they were left to face God. And we'll see that in our next study. Let's pray.
The entrance of Your Word gives light, illuminates our minds and hearts. And, Lord, we do learn so much when we understand the strategies of Satan. We understand what he wants to do is kill and destroy. And that is exactly what he did in the garden and he's still endeavoring to do it. Lord God, how we thank You that we have been delivered from death and delivered from destruction because we've been delivered from sin by Your grace. We praise You for it. We thank You for it in our Savior's name. Amen.
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PHILADELPHIA --- The Flyers and Penguins fought for three hours Sunday, mixed in a little hockey and collected 148 penalty minutes. There were four misconducts, two game misconducts and an unsportsmanlike conduct penalty. Faces were bloodied, heads smashed, names called, threats exchanged, helmets dislodged, sweaters dragged out of shape and a crowd of 20,092 thoroughly entertained.
Scott Hartnell was given a standing ovation just for being kicked out of the game.
'I didn't expect it,' Max Talbot would say afterward.
Didn't expect it? What was he watching two weeks ago when Peter Laviolette nearly climbed from the Flyers' bench to the Penguins' side in a violent rage?
What was he listening two last week when after the final regular season game, a parade of Flyers rolled in front of cameras and discussed bad blood between the franchises?
What did he expect Sunday from the Penguins, who had been humbled in the first two games of the opening-round playoff series at home --- that they would ease into the Wells Fargo Center and just allow their season to be disassembled without at least trying to do the same to a few noses?
'Before the series, I remember Scott Hartnell talking about 'blood bath' and things like that,' Talbot said. 'But I didn't want to believe it.'
Talbot has been in the NHL since 2005 and on both sides of the Flyers-Penguins rage, so he couldn't be surprised that two late regular-season games followed by a first-round playoff series would be too much, too frequently for two cantankerous hockey teams to take. So he knew something would happen, for it was all but on two marquees at opposite sides of the state.
Chances are, then, that he was unprepared for the series' ill-will to reach such levels that late hits have become common and sneaky punches have multiplied. In the Flyers' 8-4 victory Sunday, pretty much any nasty activity that can be suffixed with an 'ing' --- roughing, cross checking, fighting, hooking, tripping, slashing and even the often-ignored but altogether heroic kneeing --- was pointed out by the refs.
The only penalty that bordered on odd was the two minutes Craig Adams drew with 4:42 left. That was for instigating. Instigating? The Flyers-Pens battle was into its third consecutive weekend, each increasingly heated. By the time Adams had gotten around to it, the only thing left to instigate was a civil hockey match.
As if ... 'It's awesome,' said Brayden Schenn, who had his forehead rammed to the ice by Arron Asham in a first-period spill of Pittsburgh frustration. 'It's playoff hockey. You see how hard everyone is competing ... and the hatred between these two teams. It's a lot of fun.'
As much as the atmosphere was stirred by the scheduling oddity of the Flyers playing twice in Pittsburgh in the final two weekends of the regular season, there was more. There has been some frustration, the Penguins having wasted leads and losing the first three playoff games. There has been the Pens' inability to wiggle MVP candidate Evgeni Malkin free from rookie Sean Couturier. There were the three little words that would unnerve any Penguin: Marc-Andre Fleury.
'It's not something we can control,' Danny Briere said. 'All we can control is our play, playing hard and sticking up for each other. That is what we were doing. They are going to get frustrated and we can't control that.'
The series could end Wednesday, but who are the Flyers to believe that? Wasn't it just two springs ago that they rallied from three back in a series to eliminate the Bruins? And haven't they allowed 12 goals in three games? So as the sour blood is sprayed, they are not exactly running with the tourniquets themselves. By Sunday, their most valuable player, Claude Giroux, was even in a rumble with Sidney Crosby.
'Would I rather have G (Giroux) keep his gloves on? ' Laviolette said. 'Sure. But when he's fighting Sidney Crosby, that's playoff hockey. That's this series.'
That's the series. And anything else would have been the surprise.


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Black and Brown Table
I thought I would share a recent acquisition (yes, I was trying to sound all fancy schmancy with that word instead of saying "thrift find"). I found the set of four dinner plates at one place and then a week later I found the matching bowls at an entirely different thrift shop. Don't you just love when that happens?!
I started with a brown suede tablecloth (okay, it really is a leftover piece of fabric my mom gave me) and then added these Dollar Tree bamboo placemats.
Yup, it states they were from Kohl's for $3.99 each but, they ended up at the Dollar Tree.
They have a lovely floral pattern in dark chocolate brown.
I really like the brown glazed terra cotta dishes for salads.
I added the matching bowls.
Simple plain brown napkins (bought at a local grocery store for .24 cents. Set of four) with my shell napkin rings.
Vintage drinking glasses.
Tonight is a S-S-S dinner…..Soup, Salad and Sandwiches. So, I brought out one of my white ironstone soup tureens. No fancy centerpiece tonight.
I used some vintage wood handled flatware.
Just a simple table for dinner.
A fun vintage coffee pot for after dinner coffee.
How fun is that? It is a musical pot. You wind it up and it will play the music every time it is lifted up.
Just something silly to make us smile at the table.
Thank you for stopping by for a visit! I hope you have a wonderful day!
I'm joining:
Tea Time Tuesday
You're Gonna Love it Tuesday
Nifty Thrifty Tuesday
Let's Dish!
22 comments :
Love it. The brown transferware is stunning. Those pieces are so hard to find and usually way out of my budget. Gorgeous tablescape. Hugs, MartyReplyDelete
Thanks for sharing...OMG I remember drinking out of one of those vintage glasses when I was 8...LOLReplyDelete
Mingz Eclectic Creations
Love the plates and napkin rings, Diann. Your table looks pretty!ReplyDelete
- AnonymousJanuary 21, 2013 at 11:43 AM
I love this! Neutral colors are always good in a tablescape, and I wish I had your shopping skills.ReplyDelete
I love those pretty plates, Diann! You always find the best bargains. Your soup tureen was a steal! It's perfect for any time.ReplyDelete
Your table looks great. I love how it all came together!! I have had that happen. I have found pieces at a garage sale, more at a thrift store and months and months later, some more pieces! It's so fun! Very pretty table! Love it!ReplyDelete
Isn't it fun to find things that go together! Love the dishes, and the teapot is so cute! Love your table...it turned out beautifully!ReplyDelete
It's OK to say thrift Diann, we're all proud of you for the acquisitions you make. I've never seen a musical pot before, how fun is that? I have been scouring around myself for a soup tureen, but the price has to be right.ReplyDelete
Diann I love those plates and bowls. I have some of those dishes also and need to do a tablescape with them. Your's turned out great. Perfect for a sss meal!! Love that coffee pot, very cute! Enjoy your evening!ReplyDelete
Big Hugs, Linda
Hi Diann,ReplyDelete
Your table looks very pretty and very pulled together. I really like your china. The musical coffee pot is a charmer and how fun to have that at your table! I too have been looking for a soup tureen but it has to be the right price. Thank you, my friend, for joining me for my tea party today. It's always a pleasure to have you join me. Have a wonderful week.
Great finds, Diann! I like them and I like the placemats too...ChristineReplyDelete
What a fun time you had getting this table together. You found some really nice things at the thrift store too and it all coordinates so nicely. I love the musical coffee pot. Have a great week. PamelaReplyDelete
WOW! What a neat table. I love the way you acquire...umm, I mean thrift. The dishes are awesome and everything comes together so well. Love the coffee pot. BTW, what song does the music box play?ReplyDelete
xo Ginger
That's so lucky finding the bowls at a second store. I like the mix of elegant and fun you've pulled together for your table setting. Well done!ReplyDelete
So pretty!! It's amazing what turns up at the dollar store!ReplyDelete
I like your place settings Diann, and the little musical pot is adorable.ReplyDelete
great fin d and beautifeul tale. I really love those glasses.ReplyDelete
Great transfer ware. Love the coffee pot!ReplyDelete
Jocelyn @
Hi Diann,ReplyDelete
I've been collecting the same dinnerware for awhile now. I have a set of twelve dinner plates, dessert plates, and cups and saucers. No bowls yet! I love the transferware pattern! Your cute coffee pot is a wonderful find! Goes so well with the dishes!
What a pretty table and such great finds/prices!!! :)ReplyDelete
I'd like to invite you to check out my thrifted link up!
Love your beautiful black & brown tablescape!ReplyDelete
Timelessness is the key when decorating on a budget. Here are three design elements that won't break the bank. They include, black & white, Hollywood regency, and vintage modern.ReplyDelete
Thank you for taking the time to comment! I love to hear your ideas. If you ask a question, I will answer it here in a comment back to you. Please check back! Thank you for visiting and have a wonderful day! Diann :)


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Is it callous to call the Titanic's sinking everybody's favorite disaster? No doubt, but you know what I mean. Considering how oodles of the tragic minutiae no buff can do without bump up against the climax's unknowns, April 15, 1912, is like an ideal cross between the assassination of JFK and the Alamo.
The unprovoked attack on a blameless iceberg by the pride of the White Star Line is far from the worst maritime disaster on record. It's dwarfed in loss of life by the 1945 torpedoing of the Nazi leisure tub turned refugee ship Wilhelm Gustloff. Only three years after the Titanic's demise, the Lusitania's sinking in 1915 had more historical consequence, rallying neutral America against the Huns and dangling the temptation of playing world policeman.
For resonance and romance, though, there's no contest. On a bitterly cold night 100 years ago, modern civilization didn't just say goodbye to more than 1,500 boosters. It gained an industry. Now that the centenary is here, Titanic--mania is getting its biggest revival since James Cameron's 1997 movie. The main event is said flick's rerelease in 3-D, giving us our best chance yet to pick a winner in its most momentous collision: Leonardo DiCaprio's plucky chin versus Kate Winslet's Olympian jawline. But that's only the tip of the … ah, never mind.
A glut of anniversary-themed books is headed our way, from Bianca Turetsky's The Time-Traveling Fashionista on Board the Titanic to Stephen Spignesi's fact-packed The Titanic for Dummies. The list of home-video Easter treats is topped by the Criterion Collection's Blu-ray edition of 1958's remarkably sturdy A Night to Remember, based on the Walter Lord book that did the most to repopularize the whole tale.
Meanwhile, two new TV epics will compete to drown us in tears: the 12-part Titanic: Blood and Steel, starring Derek Jacobi in a dramatization of the doomed ship's story from its construction on, and Downton Abbey creator Julian Fellowes's terse-by-comparison (only four hours) Titanic. Since Downton Abbey itself began with the news of the Titanic's demise, and social hierarchies are Fellowes's bread and butter, there's a certain inevitability about his eagerness to clamber aboard. But his Titanic is as frothily watchable as you'd expect.
Cameron's movie has made the ship's environment and real-life celebrity passengers so familiar that Fellowes's version can't help seeming, and sometimes being, imitative. Fellowes knows his strengths, though. He's much more juicily expert than Cameron about class distinctions—not only between categories of privilege but also between layers of underlings. His thumbnail sketches of 1912 politics—Irish Home Rule, anarchist plots, and women's suffrage all get cameos—root the story in a historical moment more unsettled than we're usually nudged to recall.
Despite the miniseries's elegant structure (we keep looping back for the inside scoop on scenes we've seen only in fragments) and entertaining dialogue, at heart this Titanic is another swank Fellowes soap opera: doomed shipboard romances, snubs, revelations, Toby Jones as a mousy husband who reconciles with his shrewish wife before the big glug-glug. It lacks Cameron's extravagant, vulgar pop poetry. Yet we're hooked for the most primitive reason: We want to find out who lives.
That the story can hardly be bettered as an illustration of how inequality works is one reason for its enduring fascination. Still, who'd have supposed yet another retelling would be so timely? The pernicious but amusing flip side is that the tale lets us revisit a time when our plutocrats were elegant, poised, and even had codes of conduct that weren't wholly chimerical in the crunch.
So it's just as well that, as historian David Donald once wrote about Abraham Lincoln, "consistency is not an essential in folklore." Jostling each other and yet reconciled in the popular imagination, both the proletarian interpretation of the Titanic's notoriously imbalanced casualty list, which does give "stacked deck" a whole new meaning, and the aristocratic version ("I say, our chaps behaved awfully well when the chips were down") have been part of the legend pretty much since the sinking.
The economic disparities haven't lost their power to shock. While 97 percent of the women in first class survived, fewer than half of those in steerage did. Yet to bluebloods and male chauvinists at the time, the statistic that mattered most was that two-thirds of the men in first class had apparently met death with fortitude. So had an even larger percentage of their less moneyed counterparts down below. As prescriptive behavior for gentlemen and proles alike, all this was an excellent tutorial for World War I.
As Stephen Biel recounts in his 1997 Down with the Old Canoe: A Cultural History of the Titanic Disaster, the ship's sinking was the most adaptable of tragedies. Whether as a byword for overconfidence, an indictment of capitalism's heartlessness, or an example of how to drown in style, it really had something for everybody. That included its use as an argument against women's suffrage on the grounds that "women and children first" wouldn't be long for this world once those bitches got the vote.
As for the drowning-in-style bit, Biel is especially good at explaining how the image of silk-scarved but gallant toffs accepting their noblesse oblige doom as the womenfolk got rowed away was used to teach the unnervingly no-longer-supine Great Unwashed why their social betters had the gig in the first place. Yet in all fairness to yesteryear's richies, the myth wasn't spun from whole silk. White Star Line owner Bruce Ismay really did spend the rest of his life as a social pariah after ignominiously boarding a lifeboat to listen to his clientele's dying screams. Moneyed New York was proud of John Jacob Astor, the richest man on the passenger list, for stoically welcoming the Atlantic's embrace.
In fact—as Fellowes shows—Astor had asked permission to join his pregnant, much younger wife on a lifeboat but didn't argue when he got turned down. Say what you will, it's hard to imagine Donald Trump playing the same role—or being turned down, sadder still. Even Warren Buffett is a maybe at best.
Because James Cameron is a leftist the way Zelda Fitzgerald was a ballerina—all that effort, and no one cares—his movie tried to spell "chivalry" without using the letters "r-i-c-h." The lead upper-crust nabob, Caledon Hockley (Billy Zane), is a psychotic coward. Honor and sacrifice are left to DiCaprio's footloose Jack Dawson, whose mission in death is to make Rose DeWitt Bukater (Winslet) safe for democracy.
The shallowness of the writer--director's politics—or maybe just how they're outranked by opportunism—is most blatant in his use of the Titanic's stewards and such as authority figures worth humbling. Most often, it's for comic relief, which is fairly grotesque in this context. Does Cameron have anger-management issues with parking valets? If so, he'd hardly be the first Hollywood radlib who's failed to spot the contradiction.
I'm an unreconstructed fan of Titanic just the same. What's most original about it is Cameron's affirmation of modernity. It's traditional to view the sinking as a microcosm of a doomed society—those blinkered Edwardians, suddenly knowing they're going to die (the Alamo parallel) in the traumatic curtain-raiser to even worse cataclysms to come (the JFK-assassination one). Yet only Cameron's version salutes what replaced it by sending forth the now-liberated Rose to live through and incarnate the rest of the 20th century before dying satisfied at age 100. The ship went down to let her arise, you see.
Like many a filmmaker, Cameron does keep telling the same damned story. The Terminator, Titanic, and Avatar all pit technological hubris against a naif who triumphs over it after the conversion experience of great sex with someone outside her or his comfort zone—a time traveler in Terminator, a bohemian interloper in Titanic, and a member of a literal alien species in Avatar. Whether his setting's the present, past, or future, this is a man with a theory of history. An upbeat one, too, even though Marx would blush.
Predictably, though, Cameron does no better than anyone else at telling us what we most want to know. What went through people's minds at the last? How did it feel to die aboard the Titanic? We'd all like to make plans. The appeal of disaster cultism may be how it turns the ultimate metaphysical puzzle into a detective story by adding special circumstances to the mix. The question can't be resolved, but it's here in our brains. And our brains do go on and on.


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Off that Blue Chips fully produced by Party Supplies. This video is dope.
Tag Archives: Steve Wynn
Action Bronson Live @ The Middle East 5-20-11 (Photos/Videos)
The other night I saw Action Bronson live for the 3rd time, They say third times a charm and they really arent kidding. Action klilled it, his best performance I've seen to date. His stage presence has gotten much better and he's entertaining as hell. He had the crowd in the palm of his hand in which he became a part of during multiple songs, he was lighting big long joints and sharing them with the fans while security just sat back and watched. He performed a couple exclusives that he's never performed live such as Thug Love Story 2012 and Action said that aside from Queens Boston is the best. Click here for Hi-Res Photos.
01. Pouches of Tuna
02. Steve Wynn
03. Barry Horowitz
04. Thug Love Story 2012 (1st Time Ever Live)
05. Ron Simmons
06. Hookers At The Point
07. Shiraz
08. Bird on a Wire
09. Not Enough Words
10. Brunch
11. Larry Csonka
12. Jar Of Drugs
13. Beautiful Music
14. The Madness


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ZinZanni Presents IN TENTS with RECESS MONKEY, May 5
The ZinZanni Institute for Circus Arts presents 'In Tents' with Recess Monkey, a kid-oriented circus spectacular of high flying thrills and spills, hijinks and hilarity, to be performed at 11:00 a.m. on six weekends, from Saturday, May 5 through Sunday, July 15, in Teatro Zinzanni's historic spiegeltent at 222 Mercer Street, Seattle, WA. (See detailed performance schedule below.)
'In Tents' with Recess Monkey combines the artistic talents of performers from Teatro Zinanni's renowned dinner shows (and several circus stars of tomorrow) with Recess Monkey, to
present a three-ring adventure of jugglers, ballerinas, acrobats, contortionists, dancing bears, and music. In a musical "sneak preview", 'In Tents' with Recess Monkey also heralds the upcoming release of Recess Monkey's circus-inspired CD, In Tents.
Audiences will be able to sample live performances of gems from the new album, with Recess Monkey's high-energy songs serving as soundtrack to the show's daring feats of balance,
strength, acrobatics, and zany antics. Kids will be encouraged to get in on the action by dancing, singing, and interacting with the circus artists. The wacky script features a trained bear who wants to forsake his ursine role and follow his bliss (playing the drums), a beautiful wizard, an irrepressible circus strong man, and a pixie sprite who is loaded into a cannon and miraculously shot into the air.
Notes Recess Monkey's Jack Forman, "The circus is such a perfect blend of comedy and drama, careful pre-planning and extemporaneous fun, high and low energy, all of which are elements
that we work into our songs and shows. How have we not already done a circus album? We've talked about this project for years but finally found that we had assembled enough offbeat
ideas, catchy melodies and a narrative to bring it to fruition. In fact, we actually conceived the album as the soundtrack to a story that we wrote, inspired by Teatro ZinZanni! In Tents has
emerged both as a circus story-inspired album and as an exciting series of magical performances in which kids will feel like part of the show. Pretty amazing!"
Recess Monkey weaves puns, jokes, stories, and shenanigans into its songs.
In addition to Recess Monkey, 'In Tents' with Recess Monkey at Teatro ZinZanni will also feature an international cast of circus performers, including:
*Pacific Northwest Ballet's former principal ballerina and Teatro ZinZanni alumni Ariana Lallone
*Peter Pitofsky, known from years of TV appearances, tours with Ringling Brothers Barnum & Bailey Circus, and multiple Teatro ZinZanni productions,
*Siberian gentleman juggler and original Teatro ZinZanni cast member, Sergey Krutikov
*Seattle's 10-year-old contortion and aerial phenom Saffi Watson
*And the return of Teatro ZinZanni's mischievous Bear, played by Korum Bischoff.
The Teatro ZinZanni lobby will open at 10:00 a.m. on performance days for a pre-show carnival of kid-friendly games. Refreshments will be available for purchase.
The duration of each performance will be approximately 75 minutes.
IN TENTS with RECESS MONKEY!
WHERE: Teatro ZinZanni, 222 Mercer St., Seattle, WA 98109
WHEN: 11:00 a.m. Pre-show, kid-friendly carnival games in the lobby at 10:00 a.m.
Saturday May 5 & Sunday, May 6;
Saturday, May 12; Saturday, May 19; Saturday, June 2;
Saturday, June 23 & Sunday, June 24;
Saturday, July 14 & Sunday, July 15
TICKETS: Booth seating $19. Chair seating $22. Food will be available, but is not included in the ticket price.
INFO: 206-802-0015. http://dreams.zinzanni.org/intents.htm
Photo Credit: Kevin Fry