Last week, I risked offended our readers and my fellow blogger by recklessly posting a poem lightly referred to by one of the world’s finest, Michael. Let me attempt to make up for that misjudgment by posting something beautiful, a bridal march.
All posts by Phil
Is This the End?!?!?!?!?!?!?!
At first I thought this was ALL THE Evidence YOU’LL EVER NEED to see the World is going to Hell in a Handbasket. Some Sadist asked people whose coffee they preferred, McDonald’s or Starbucks. “Overall, McDonald’s won 43 percent to 35 percent, but if you break down the numbers, you’ll find the stereotypes about ‘latte-drinking liberals’ prevailing. Self-described liberals favored Starbucks 46 percent to 33 percent, while conservatives favored McDonald’s 50 percent to 28 percent. Moderates fall in between, with 44 percent favoring McDonald’s and 37 percent going for Starbucks. Protestants and Catholics favor McDonald’s, while the religiously unaffiliated choose Starbucks.”
But there is a touch of hope. Alisa Harris, the coffee shop beat reporter, writes, “In independent coffee shops, people get their coffee in actual mugs and sit down in actual chairs, and look at art or create it on laptops, and have actual conversations.”
What’s Wrong with Newspapers
Two Philadelphia newspapers filed for bankruptcy today, and Frank Wilson, who used to work on the book pages for the Philadelphia Inquirer, explains why the papers and any other newspapers are in trouble. He says the front page has no news. “One of the abiding problems with contemporary journalism – most obvious in the broadcast variety,” Frank states, “is this insistence on providing commentary on what the rest of us have witnessed.”
Pass on the Good Life
A new public service announcement from the federal government’s new National Coordinator of Health Information Technology.
[Camera pans over empty rooms in a dimly lit, well-furnished house. Senior male voiceover begins.]
I’ve lived a good life. I don’t want to be a burden on my family or the good taxpayers of America . . .
[Pan over unused swimming pool and immaculate yard]
Working hard a McDonald’s, Jiffy Lube, or Waffle House just to make ends meet.
[Cut to old man at a kitchen table with a glass of wine, speaking into the camera. Shake the camera to add realism.]
My doctor told me medication for people my age was becoming scarcer by the day, so I asked him what I could do to help ease me onto the next life. He said, “Try salt.”
[Cut to salt pouring slowly, gracefully, from 5 lb. container.]
He said, “Salt tastes great, and eating more salt can raise your blood pressure which will shorten your life.”
[Show old man salting his steak, salting his wine, taking of the lid off the shaker and pouring it down his throat. Continue voiceover.]
Now, I eat salt with everything. And I eat more processed foods, because they’re rich in wonderful, life-affirming salt.
[Cut to man speaking to camera]
You know, I’ve lived a good, long life, and with salt, I can pass on that life to my children and yours. Cheers.
[compassionate female voiceover] One in four men will probably have a stroke by age 85. Get yours over with sooner by using more salt. Pass on the good life. A message from thoughtful people at the office of the National Coordinator of Health Information Technology.
The Cure by Athol Dickson
Athol Dickson’s 2007 novel, The Cure, captures the atmosphere of a Maine small town in an exciting tale of man-made redemption.
Riley Keep has been burying the shame of his past for years in alcohol, but now that his friend is drinking himself to death, he remembers a rumor that a cure can be found in their hometown. They drag themselves to Dublin, Maine, and find a place in the homeless shelter.
When Riley stumbles across a white powder with a note claiming it will cure alcoholism, he tries it, shares it, and becomes a hunted man for it. Some won’t believe he ever had a miracle drug for alcoholics, and those who do won’t believe he can’t make it for them. On the one hand, he wants people to believe he just found the formula, and on the other hand, he doesn’t correct their assumption that he discovered it himself. Every attempt he makes to repent or make up for his years of failure turns against him. When hundreds of homeless alcoholics arrive in Dublin, looking for a miracle, has the cure Riley hoped to find become a curse?
This is Athol Dickson’s fifth novel and the one that follows his popular story based in Louisiana, River Rising. He beautifully brings out the nature and people of a small, fishing town in Maine, much like he does in Winter Haven. For instance, the man Riley hires for legal council is a full-time lobsterman who had trained in the law several years ago but would rather live off the ocean. The dark story of Riley Keep, the alcoholic, failed professor and failed missionary, is as much a part of The Cure as the miracle formula is. The history of the intertwined characters is revealed piece by piece as memories and conversations arise, building to a great climax at the end.
This novel spoke to me, perhaps because of my familiarity with some counseling techniques. Dickson says he was a drug and alcohol abuser early in life, so it may be out of personal experience he draws the metaphor of the homeless feeling like ghosts. That’s hasn’t been my experience, but I feel I’ve rubbed up against it. That nagging perception of failure, that desire to apologize for something undefined—I know those feelings. It’s akin to hoping for a cure apart from the work of Christ Jesus. But there is none.
Is Milk Good For You?
Carl Trueman states, “Some weeks ago, I penned a piece on Ref21, arguing that the trendy Christian infatuation with cultural interaction was problematic at a number of levels. Well, a review of the film, Milk over at the Gospel and Culture project is good evidence of a number of my points.”
Bridging the Chasm
Author Bret Lott at the 2006 Christy Awards:
Christ’s stories surprised His listeners. They were unexpected, yet the surprise of them was totally logical and clear and, finally, the kind of surprise that makes good literature good literature: the surprise turn in a story—not of plot, but of character—when the reader must come face to face with himself, and his own failures, and the dust of his own life, a dust with which we are each of us fully familiar, but which we forget about or ignore or accommodate ourselves to. The dust of our lives that we have grown accustomed to, and which it takes a piece
of art created in the spirit of Christ to remind us of ourselves, and our distance from our Creator—and the chasm that is bridged by Grace.
The Friday Fight: Broadswords
Power of the Internet: Spot Translation
Have you seen the websites on which you have type out the misshapen letters in a little box before you leave a comment? In that moment, you are doing the work of translation.
In fact, your brain has deciphered words that had baffled the scanning software used for an enormous project to digitize every public domain book in the world.
“We can coordinate literally millions of people on the Internet to work together to do something that computers cannot do,” says Luis von Ahn, an assistant professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.
… Some 200 million of these words, dubbed “Captchas” for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart, are typed every day by people around the world.
Buy It Only at Barnes & Noble
Store-exclusive books?
Britain’s Waterstones, the biggest bookseller in the United Kingdom, may be working a direct deal with publishers.