Category: hmm… thoughts

  • Batman isn’t Gay

    Since I’m on an 80s kick anyway. Here’s an 80s based comic.

    HT to Dave

  • Yowsers…

    That’s pretty much how I felt about last night’s MainStreet. In one night we had some of our best stuff and some things we’ll put under our cap as lessons learned.

    The kids who came were way more fired up than I’d ever seen. (Obviously this is good from a kid perspective and scary from an adult one.) I think the cold weather had something to do with this as they were running around the auditorium like bees outside the hive. The room was filled with energy before we even began.
    Then we got them really excited. I said in the pre-event meeting that my goal was to get everyone engaged and excited in the first five minutes.  So imagine the bee hive… and then stirring them up with dancing, loud music, and silliness.

    Then we got them too excited.  About half way through the night we did a skit that was insane with a twist. During the scene I dumped a lot of packing peanuts on the stage (55 gallons) and then at the end of the scene I grabbed a leaf blower and blew about half of those into the audience. It was crazy hilarious, unexpected, and the kids loved it. Unfortunately… this got them a little too excited right at the half way point. The ADD kicked in and it was absolutely nuts from there! (Can you believe we ended the night with a crazy game and cookies?)

    The rest of the night was pretty good, just not our best. After every event we do I instantly think of things we did right, things we did wrong, and ways to improve. My mind races for hours through all the details of it. And last nights MainStreet is like that… there were things that were great and things that need to be better.

    As this post reveals, my mind is still racing about it and it ended almost 12 hours ago. Yowsers…

  • Children of the 80s Unite, part 3

    What, you thought I’d leave out music videos? From the 80s? Are you nuts? Watch out for parachute pants and big hair.

  • Vanity’s Pain

    There isn’t really any way to intro this video. Let’s just say that there was a lady who paid $5500 for some butt cheek implants and the results weren’t what she desired. Make sure you catch the anchors attitude about the story. Priceless!

    http://view.break.com/409510 – Watch more free videos

  • Google Vernacular

    MeganMy daughter is 6. She’s pretty smart. I don’t know if she is the smartest kid in her class but I tell her she is all the time.

    Tonight she and I were talking and she told me something very cool.

    “When you want to find something on the computer, you google it.“

    I don’t know if a lot of people realize it, but Google has become so much more than a company we use to search the internet. When a company has gotten to the point in its brand identification that it is no longer a company, it’s a part of your vernacular… you’ve reached a plain reserved for a few companies in the world.

    Coke. Play-Doh. Frisbee. Ping Pong. Things like this are not just brands… they are nouns.

    Imagine this. Today’s 1st graders were born after 9-11-2001, may have never seen a house phone, and never used a computer without WiFi. And you don’t hear them say things like “Let’s see it on Yahoo.” or “Check it out on MSN.”

    It’s really all about Google. Pretty soon we will say “The Goog” just like Ted Nugent fans say “The Nuge.” Well, maybe not that far.

    We’ve come a long way from my first computer. It was a laptop, the Kaypro 2, and weighed about 90 pounds.  I was pretty young when my mom’s boyfriend hooked this thing up. I remember it had a state of the art 1200 baud dial-up external modem and we dialed into the bulletin boards at Notre Dame. (Not sure why) So, you can see I’ve had my hands in computers for a long time. I hope/pray that my kids grow up with the opportunity to embrace technology through play like I did.

  • Children of the 80s Unite

    This is 30 minutes of the cartoon intros that ruled our lies. How many of us had to run home from school to catch Duck Tales and GI Joe?

  • Ah…

    That’s how I felt at church today. I love kicking off a new series. This one is rockin’ in my opinion. It’s really fun when the team conceives of a series together and then we just run with it.

    I was especially happy with the response to the MainStreet video. More than anything… the rest of the service was so good that I didn’t feel like the video was even a major part of the service. The worship today was a slam dunk. Mega-good.

  • Googe Reader’s New Feature: Recommended Feeds

    I am a major fan of Google’s Feed Reader, Google Reader. A mini-feed lives on my iGoogle page and my many feed subscriptions make keeping up with my favorite sites a snap.

    Now Google Reader has a brand new feature called Top Recommendations. It takes a look at your reader history and what you subscribe to and recommends things it thinks you will like.  Just go to your Google reader home tab and you’ll see your recommended reads in the top right hand corner. It will then allow you to preview the last 10 posts from that feed and decide whether or not you’d like to subscribe to it. Best yet, if you don’t like it just click on “No Thanks” and poof it is gone!

    Of course, it’s from Google so this ultra swanky new toy is free. Even cooler it lists the feed count!

  • December message series: Closer

    This week launches a new sermon series at Romeo. With it we’re launching new imagery, new music, a bulletin redesign, and this video… all goes along with a very cool message series.

    The general idea is, at the core, the gospel message. That we are born seperate from God and that God’s sending of Immanuel was God craving a relationship with his creation… He wanted us to be closer. I won’t steal any more of Bob’s thunder on this series. (But if you want to hear one of the funniest things in church history, check out this jingle.)

  • Strange Green Bedfellows

    GreenIn Christian circles it is en vogue to be green.

    It won’t be long before the first Bible with a low carbon footprint is on the market. And more and more churches are considering ways that they can lower their churches energy loads with LED and other low wattage uses. For that, I celebrate. I think churches should be on the cutting edge of technology and limiting waste.

    And yet, this pull towards all things green brings with it some odd bedfellows. While green may be hip, it still carries the same baggage from the far left. You know, the types that throw paint on fur coat wearing ladies in New York City, the people who chase fishing boats with Greenpeace ships, the type who blow up cars at dealerships just to prove a point, the type that fight the building of a life-saving overpass in order to protect a rare sponge, and the type that take to trees to protect trees and call trespassing in the name of the tree OK.

    As Christians sort out how to be both green and redeemed, they have a whole new slough of stuff to sort through. Enter Toni Vernelli.

    Toni chose to have a child aborted and was later sterilized to save the environment.  That’s right… she murdered an unborn human being in the name of green.

    While some might think it strange to celebrate the reversal of nature and denial of motherhood, Toni relishes her decision with an almost religious zeal.

    “Having children is selfish. It’s all about maintaining your genetic line at the expense of the planet,” says Toni, 35.

    “Every person who is born uses more food, more water, more land, more fossil fuels, more trees and produces more rubbish, more pollution, more greenhouse gases, and adds to the problem of over-population.”

    While most parents view their children as the ultimate miracle of nature, Toni seems to see them as a sinister threat to the future. Story

    Let’s call this what it is. This lady is deranged. Her logic isn’t logical. It makes no difference what epistemology you run it through… she is messed up. This is why I think there should be a deliniation somewhere between “practical green” and “radical green.”

    See, I’m all in favor of encouraging people to buy better cars and turn off lights. I’m even in favor of making it easy and giving people tax credits to swap light bulbs and put in more efficient heating/cooling systems. I’m even in favor of people getting solar systems and wind power and whatever else we can do to lessen our dependency on fossil fuels in favor of more sustainable energy sources. I’m in favor of all that. These are practical green things. But I stand against radical antisocial behavior.

    So I ask my Christian friends. How far into “green” is far enough? And how do we delimit the radicals in order to keep the good in being green?