Archive for May 2005

May 30, 2005

Memorial Day

12:35 am | Culture | War | Comments: 3

U.S. troops land at Omaha Beach, 6 June 1944

I began Memorial Day at midnight by watching Saving Private Ryan. Some people might take issue with the fictional story, but the film really brings to mind exactly what we in the United States are memorializing today: the men and women of this nation who have “laid so costly a sacrifice on the altar of freedom”.

May 28, 2005

Changing

9:46 pm | College | Thoughts | Wisdom | Comments: 4

Last Sunday I was talking to a girl from my church who has just graduated high school and has decided to go to college in Rhode Island (a long ways away from Michigan). She seems equally nervous and excited about the proposition, and with good reason. It might not be apparent to her now, but in a few months her entire life will begin a dramatic change. She asked me, “Do you think I’m going to change?” What I told her, and what I believe on the subject of leaving everything behind you and skipping off to a distant college, is that she will never come back. That might sound a little extreme but it’s the truth.

There’s a fundamental problem with sending an 18-year-old kid off to a place where he or she has nothing but peers to rely on for advice, accountability, and example. If you’re 18 and you think you’ve really got life sorted out, think again. The college years are very much “forming years” for any person; it’s a time when you should be sinking down church and familial roots and learning about life from older, wiser, more experienced Christian people. You can’t really learn anything from your peer group (trust me on this one), because they’re simply all in the same boat as you. I take it back; there is one way that you learn by interacting with your peer group: trial and error, which is generally a bad way to go about learning things.

Thus, the problem is that our society thinks that 18-year-olds are prepared to handle the responsibility of independence; nothing could be further from the truth. On top of all this, lots of kids in this country rack up tens of thousands of dollars in tuition debt. Often a person has no choice in the matter, either because they live far away from any colleges at all, or far away from the one college they need to go to. I understand this. I’m sympathetic to this. I’m not saying that it’s actually wrong to move away from your family and everything you know and go to college when you’re only 18. I am saying, however, that it’s not a great idea. Sure, it’ll probably be lots of fun; but exactly what kind of fun will it be? God-honoring fun? Probably not.

Going off to college will change you; in fact, you will not be the same person when you get out. The key, as always, is to seek after what God wants for you, not what you want for you. And when you’re at college and you find yourself faced by scores of temptations you’ve never encountered before, you’ll need plenty of God’s help to deny yourself and keep yourself pure and focused on glorifying him.

May 26, 2005

Jinga-lame

8:40 pm | Thoughts | Comments: 11

Talk radio season is upon us. During the summer, I’ll listen to any number of talk shows. In the early morning (6-9) as I’m eating breakfast I listen to a bit of Mike & Mike in the Morning, especially these days with the Detroit Pistons playing for the NBA’s Eastern Conference Championship. The Free Beer and Hotwings morning show is on from 9-12. Now, I generally think morning shows to be incredibly lame. However, I like these guys. They are funny guys. Recently I’ve begun listening to Glenn Beck who is on in that same time slot. The guy has lots of funny stuff on his show, even though he sometimes gets onto some really strange tangents. The 12-3 segment brings with it the heavy hitters; I switch back and forth between Rush Limbaugh and Jim Rome (especially when Rome has any kind of callers on his show… his callers are mostly ridiculous). Rush speaks for himself as the king of talk radio, and in addition to being really entertaining Jim Rome does the best sports interviews in the business. I will sometimes listen to some of Sean Hannity’s 3-6 talk show, although he grates on my nerves mostly. He’s always plugging some kind of book or live show or something like that, he makes the same points over and over again like the classic old broken record, and he’s really bad with callers.

But all that is neither here nor there. The real point of this post is to point out that radio commercials are for the most part really lame. About 70% of all commercial ads on radio are plagued by what me and my people call “really stupid jingles”. The Jingle, as you know, is a gimmick that is as old as radio itself to help you remember a particular brand name or product. There have been some classic jingles in time past; Quaker Puffed Oats and Quaker Puffed Rice’s jingle was “This is the cereal that’s shot from guns!” sung to the tune of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture, complete with cannon sound effects.

Jingles can work wonders. The better ones will stick in your head like a disease; “Modernis-tic, simple and quick, we’re the first with experience and quality!”, and so on. These days, jingles are getting more and more ridiculous. There are two types of bad jingles. The first is generally somebody with a really bad voice singing one or two words to a random “tune”, if you could call it that; if the jingle were for Bob’s Used Cars, you might hear “BAHHHHHhhhhh-ahhhHHHHahhhhb’s, the place for cars!” The other kind of “ridicu-jingle”, as I like to say, is that which proceeds for a good paragraph or more about how “we’re the best, we’re the cheapest price, everybody loves us and the world is great, so come on dowwwwwn and then you’ll be happy happy happy all the time!” As you can see, either of these craptastic jingles has no chance of being remembered and if they were, it would only serve as a reminder to avoid those places (this was the case with “Save big money at Menard’s!”, although we avoided that place more because of the crazy old man and banjo music they used to have doing their commercials).

May 24, 2005

Random Announcements

9:52 pm | Culture | Health | SIO | Comments: 5

Great news, folks; SIO has a new address! Please adjust all your links, bookmarks, and other paraphernalia for SIO to http://sio.jameswlanning.com/. You can still reach us at the old address, but the sub-domain looks cooler and is more like the original SIO address (which as many will recall was sio.blogspot.com).

Not to scare anybody here, but the H5N1 Avian (Bird) Influenza (Flu) virus has now spread to China! The government of China has already begun detaining any chickens within a 40 mile radius of suspected outbreaks for interrogation and torture.

I need some opinions on this next bit. While chilling with my old buddy Ben the other night, we were talking about the music that we’ve been into lately. Ben starts playing the song “Mad World” by Tears for Fears, and I nearly mistook it for a cover of Offspring’s “Gone Away”. Listen to both those songs right now and tell me they don’t sound almost exactly the same. Although that may be an exaggeration, you have to admit that the similarities go beyond mere coincidence.

May 23, 2005

Rogue River Leaping

9:00 pm | My Life | Pictures | Comments: 9

Ben and I doing the old skater jump into the Rogue River. This is one of the coolest pictures of all time (many thanks to John Sikma for the scan and Wendy VdZ for taking it way back when).

May 22, 2005

Settle Down

12:08 am | Relationships | Religion | Wisdom | Comments: 12

Every now and then I will share some of my priceless gems of wisdom relating to relationships. I don’t touch on the subject very much, as nobody seems to listen anyway. Irregardless, once again I am here to beat you all on the head with a stick in the hopes of getting some learning into those cute little collective noggins of yours.

A while ago I heard a term the meaning of which, when used in the particular context of relationships, was foreign to me. The word was “settling”, as in “Stanislav is settling.” I came to find out that the word meant a chap dating someone who was for some strange reason less of an individual than the first chap might otherwise have been dating. The whole idea is an incredibly petty one, which places tremendous emphasis on physical aspects of a relationship. I didn’t vote for any of this.

God ordains these kinds of things; thusly, I believe that if you truly seek God’s guidance in picking somebody to marry, you’ll end up with nothing less than what God wants for you. To say that you’re “settling” at that point would be to say, “Well God, this person actually doesn’t really do much for me, but I’ll cut you some slack and marry them anyways even though I deserve somebody a whole lot hotter, smarter, funnier, and more sensitive.” It’s an inherently selfish concept. Here’s a novel idea, boys and girls: if you think you can’t be happy with a particular individual, don’t marry them. Better yet, don’t date them, either (this is what I like to call a “relationskip”). Maybe your opinion of an individual will change in the future, but last I checked the crystal ball market wasn’t doing a very brisk business.

I think it’s important to remember as Christians that God is powerfully inclined to the happiness of his people. As cliche as it may sound, he does actually want you to be happy. Just don’t forget what true happiness is: denying yourself, taking up your cross, and following Jesus Christ. These must always be first on your priority list.

Delight thyself also in the LORD; and he shall give thee the desires of thine heart.
- Psalm 37:4

May 21, 2005

Murphy’s Law

12:34 am | My Life | Politics | Sci/Tech | Comments: 5

I can’t decide who’s having a rougher time of it. My dad’s computer has been completely overrun by spyware after a campaign of terror which began many months ago. Today I finally decided to end the war once and for all by backing up vital information and formatting the hard drive completely. My ace in the hole (as it were) was a free copy of the Microsoft Windows XP Professional operating system, provided by my school. Unfortunately, I need a serial number for that. Doubly unfortunately, I did not have it in an email as I expected I did. Rather, it was waiting for me online on my student MSDNAA account. Triply unfortunately, that account has been disabled for the summer months. So now I have a formatted hard drive with a church bulletin due to be printed by tomorrow backed up on a hard drive without access to a printer or the software to open the documents.

To get back to my thesis statement, I don’t know who has it worse right now; me, or the people that are getting sued by Saddam Hussein. That has got to be the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard of, and is something up with which this great nation should not put.

May 19, 2005

The Dork Side of the Farce

7:31 pm | Culture | Pictures | Thoughts | Comments: 13

I’m going to completely avoid giving a point-for-point review of the final Star Wars film, as well as any comparison between it and the other 5. Why? Couple reasons. First, to be honest I never was a huge fan of the originals in the first place. Great films, especially for their time period, but that’s about it. Second, everybody and their mom (and possibly their 2nd cousin) is reviewing/comparing. I want to take the obligatory Star Wars post (and all you bloggers out there know that you must make a Star Wars post within a week or so) in a bit of a different direction.

What I want to talk about is some philosophy found in the movies. Did you know that Jedi are postmodern relativists? It’s true! A Jedi’s truth is based on his perspective. The earliest revelation of this actually comes during Return of the Jedi, when an aged Obi-wan Kenobi defends his terminological inexactitudes by saying, “what I said was true… from a certain point of view”. A quality example of the Relativist Jedi in Revenge of the Sith comes during the showdown between Obi-wan and Anakin on the volcanic planet of somesuch or other.

Near the beginning of the confrontation, Obi-wan chides his former apprentice by saying, “Only the Sith (the bad guys, for all those of you who aren’t in the know, as it were) deal in absolutes!” Darn those Sith and their blasted absolutes. Going to destroy the galaxy one of these days if they keep up with that nonsense! At any rate, later on in the fight Obi-wan is attempting to dissuade Anakin from walking down the dark path. He shouts out, “The Sith are evil!”. Whoa, hold the phone a minute there, chief. All the Sith are evil? Not only that, but they are completely evil? Sounds like two absolute statements in one sentence to me. This can mean two things: A) The Jedi need to rethink their position on the nature of universal truth, or B) Obi-wan is actually an evil Sith lord who wants to kill us all!

This is yet another example of how completely ridiculous relativist thinking actually is. It’s bunk, it’s tripe, it’s poppycock. It needs to be destroyed. Nice film though, otherwise. Here’s a pic taken in theater from the midnight showing of the actual movie! It’s, well, it’s only the end credits and it’s pretty blurry because they were scrolling. Come on, though. It’s Star Wars.

Best line of the night came from John Jurries. “I hear the next one is coming out about twenty years ago.” I must also give many special thanks to Jamie, to whom this post is dedicated. I couldn’t have done it without you.

May 17, 2005

More Great Motion Picture News

7:47 pm | Culture | Comments: 6

Things are just getting better all the time. My sources have learned that George Lucas has already begun production of a fourth Indiana Jones movie. I have always suspected he would go for a fourth, even though I would say that The Last Crusade is one of the best movies ever made. The Indiana Jones trilogy would be about 33% better if you could just completely cut out the Temple of Doom. That film was total crap; compared to the other two, the main character hardly even seemed like Indiana Jones. It’s a blot, a scab, a pustulent mass. It needs to be destroyed!

I am not surprised by the plot of the new film. Apparently it’s about Indy going after Atlantis, with Nazis looking for the same thing. That’s only an adaptation of the plot of a grand computer adventure game called Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, probably one of the greatest games of all time (if you haven’t played it, you really ought to). The plot was easily the best thing about the game. There is hope, therefore, that the 4th Indiana Jones movie will be pretty interesting.

The new film will also include the return of John Rhys-Davies, one of my favorite actors, and possibly Sean Connery as well. There’s a small trailer up at iFilm. It says viritually nothing about the actual movie beyond the fact that it’s an Indiana Jones film. Although, what more needs be said, really?

May 16, 2005

The Charitable Mindframe

11:21 pm | Culture | Thoughts | Comments: 11

Having worked for 3 summers in the mission/thrift store business, I’ve had plenty of exposure to some elements of our great nation that some people don’t usually see. The main thing I’ve noticed is junk. We move tons and tons of junk every day. Our nation has produced so many worthless things it’s almost ridiculous. Romance novels, slide screens, bowling balls, 8-tracks, vinyl records, golf clubs, exercise equipment, baby toys, wicker baskets, fake christmas trees, knick-knacks, toilet seats, and other random assorted bric-a-brak gets “charitably donated” every day to organizations like Salvation Army and Goodwill.

Now I realize that yes, they’re giving it away for free. The problem is, though, that the stuff is mostly worthless and usually broken. About 60-70% of the stuff that people donate goes straight to the landfill. Clothing is generally a different story. Since clothing becomes unuseful only after becoming too small or old, it’s not necessarily in really bad shape when people donate it. Other stuff, however, becomes a donation item only after A) it gets replaced, which usually means the unit is 25 years old, or B) it breaks.

I generally have a problem with dropping broken junk off at a mission and calling it a “donation”. It’s not my style. I would like to think of a donation as being something that is actually going to be useful and helpful to people later on down the line. If I have trash and junk, I’ll spend a couple bucks and dump it where it actually belongs. All that aside, I think the U.S. needs to realize that it simply has too much stuff.