Top 10 Funniest Super Bowl Commercials
What team are you siding with this weekend? I’ve gotta pull for the team led by an old guy…you understand:
“Kurt Warner's autobiography is titled, All Things Possible: My Story of Faith, Football and the Miracle Season. Warner is at the center of yet another miracle season, leading his underdog Arizona Cardinals to their first-ever Super Bowl appearance” (article).
“What you do on social media leaves traces and cannot be easily removed from the Web. Information can fairly easily be tracked back to you and what you say and do will be public for a long time.” (ReadWriteWeb explains in “The Unforeseen Consequences of the Social Web”)
You're a book hoarder. How do you stop the insanity? Ten steps.
“Lots of organizations need public money now, but Planned Parenthood—with a $1 billion budget and a $114 million operating surplus—isn’t one of them” (story). The $337 million in public funding to the nation’s largest abortion provider could be better spent in this tough economy.
“TinyURL, one of the most popular URL-shortening services [which shows up on Facebook user’s posts frequently] is now being used by cybercriminals to redirect web surfers to pages that contain viruses, trojans, and other sorts of malware.” (story)
Why you can't find a library book in your search engine.
“Is the party too conservative or not conservative enough? The Perry-Hutchison smackdown brings this question to the forefront; it is a proxy fight for the future of the GOP.” You should read “The Thrilla in Vanilla,” Paul Burka’s coverage of the anticipated Republican primary fight for the 2010 Texas Governor race. This is a rare Texas Monthly article available for free online; the other articles are available only to subscribers (what is this, 1999?). Burka’s coverage is worth the read, despite his annoying jab that concerns such as abortion—where Hutchison is somewhat vulnerable— “have little impact on the serious problems facing the country, but they arouse voters—and especially Republican primary voters—to a degree that the great policy questions of the day do not.” Ignore this too-typical bias of liberal journalists (at least he didn’t trot out the tired old labels “hot button” and “culture war”) but cull the worthwhile insights this veteran of Texas political coverage.
“The remains of an ancient gate have pinpointed the location of the biblical city Sha'arayim, say archaeologists working in Israel. In the Bible young David, a future king, is described as battling Goliath in the Elah Valley near Sha'arayim.” (Nat’l Geographic News)
USA Today: Ministry tends to the feet, dignity of city's homeless
The NY Times writes, “Your Nest is Empty? Enjoy Each Other”
“Barack Obama's decision to use the same Bible for his inauguration that Abraham Lincoln used at his first inauguration in 1861 forges an intriguing connection between these two presidents….As with all symbols, the use of the Lincoln Bible — gilt-edged, covered in burgundy-colored velvet — does much more than physically link two administrations. Lincoln made surprising and controversial use of the Bible and faith as president. Will Obama, whose religious beliefs have already played a role in American politics, do the same?” You should read this piece from Ronald White, author of the just-released biography A. Lincoln: A Biography. The book is on my to-read list.
“According to the paleontologist Peter Ward…the earth's history makes clear that, left to run its course, life isn't naturally nourishing - it's poisonous. Rather than a supple system of checks and balances, he argues, the natural world is a doomsday device careening from one cataclysm to another…. Ward, a paleontologist at the University of Washington and a scholar of the earth's great extinctions, calls his model the Medea Hypothesis, after the mythological Greek sorceress who killed her own children. The name makes clear Ward's ambition: To challenge and eventually replace the Gaia Hypothesis, the well-known 1970s scientific model that posits that every living thing on earth is part of a gargantuan, self-regulating super-organism” (“Dark Green,” from the Boston Globe)
“Over the past several years, studies have consistently shown that people on the political right outperform those on the left when it comes to charity. This pattern appears to have held -- increased, even -- in 2008….But here's where the charity gap really starts to make a difference for the recession of 2009: Conservatives don't just give more; they also decrease their giving less than liberals do in response to lousy economic conditions.” (Arthur Brooks, WSJ)
I imagine it’s tough to appear dignified when you tell people you live in towns and on roads with these unfortunate names.
WSJ: Boomer grandparents want to pick what grandkids call them, and “Grandma” and “Grandpa” won’t do.
In the Chronicle of Higher Education, read Tim Clydesdale’s “Wake Up and Smell the New Epistemology.” It’s written for college professors, but it has application to everyone—pastors included--who want to communicate with a 20-something audience:
Today's students know full well that authorities can be found for every position and any knowledge claim, and consequently the students are dubious (privately, that is) about anything we claim to be true or important….
After interviewing some 400 students on 34 campuses nationwide, I found few in awe of their institutions or faculty, many averse to lectures, and most ambivalent about anyone's knowledge claims other than their own….
Short of fame or a lottery win, today's students recognize that a college degree is the minimum credential they will need to attain their desired standard of living (and hence "happiness"). So this new epistemology produces a rather odd kind of student — one who appears polite and dutiful but who cares little about the course work, the larger questions it raises, or the value of living an examined life. And it produces such students in overwhelming abundance.
This is where many begin the blame game, and where I part ways with them. Polite, dutiful, and disengaged students deserve neither blame nor scorn. They have become exactly what one would expect of those born during the information age and reared in America's profoundly pragmatic culture….
I am asking instructors to see the two questions that the new epistemology emblazons across the front of every classroom — "So what?" and "Who cares?" — and then to adjust their teaching accordingly.
“The Moral Accountability Project trusts that those self-identified pro-life and pro-marriage Catholics and Evangelicals who helped to put Barack Obama into a position to accomplish his goals were sincere in their admiration for him. We are willing to believe that they genuinely hope that he will go back on his pledges to attack pro-life laws and repeal pro-marriage policies. Still, actions have consequences, and the actions of these intellectuals and activists will have consequences that are all too easy to predict. With each assault of the Obama administration on laws and policies upholding the sanctity of human life and the dignity of marriage, we will ask all Catholics and Evangelicals, including those who supported Obama, to join us in resisting these assaults. That is what we will do at http://www.moralaccountability.com/.” Signatories include Francis Beckwith at Baylor University.
“Lost regularly tackles complex themes like redemption, an ordered universe, and the literal sins of the fathers with an untidy approach that fits the messy subject matter. No easy answers are offered. Characters take one step forward and two steps back as they try to grasp their purpose and overcome personal weaknesses. The mysterious sci-fi story has viewers constantly wondering what is going on: Is this island the Garden of Eden? Atlantis? Just a hub of mystical powers?” (CT Review)
Related: Read Jim White’s take on Lost and evangelism.
“Laboratory experiments using simulators, real-world road studies and accident statistics all tell the same story: drivers talking on a cellphone are four times as likely to have an accident as drivers who are not. That’s the same level of risk posed by a driver who is legally drunk.” (NY Times article)
Tired of doom-and-gloom headlines? Here are ten reasons to be grateful for the times we live in.
A while back, an ex-gang member got baptized at our church. He fell in love with Jesus and turned from his old lifestyle. But after several months at the church, he stopped attending. When we asked him why he stopped attending, he answered: ‘I had the wrong idea of what church was going to be like. When I joined the church, I thought it was going to be like joining a gang. You see, in the gangs we weren't just nice to each other once a week-we were family.’ That killed me because I knew that what he expected is what the church was intended to be. It saddened me because I realized that the gangs paint a better picture of loyalty and family than the local church body does.” (Francis Chan in the Catalyst article, “A Gathering Force.”)
“In the one corner, Steven Johnson, author of Everything Bad Is Good For You; in the other, Mark Bauerlein, author of The Dumbest Generation. Two very smart people with very different ideas about where young Americans are heading….Johnson’s basic position is that (a) today’s young people are smarter than kids of earlier generations and (b) this is largely a result of their constant exposure to varieties of pop culture that are cognitively demanding. It takes more brainpower, he would argue, to play Grand Theft Auto IV than to play Monopoly; and Lost demands levels of concentration and attention that Gunsmoke never did. Pop culture today is “good for you” because it forces you to develop a certain mental acuity in order to enjoy it. Johnson also frequently cites studies indicating that today’s teenagers are “the least violent, the most politically engaged and the most entrepreneurial since the dawn of the television era.” So when Johnson looks at the data about young people, he’s especially interested in, and encouraged by, two things: skills acquisition and activity levels .... Bauerlein, by contrast, is concerned about the content of young people’s brains, or the lack thereof. If they don’t actually know anything about American government, should we really be encouraged by their apparent political activism?” (Alan Jacobs in the first of three posts called “Johnson vs. Bauerlein”)
1 comment:
But Tom, I don't want to stop book hoarding! ;)
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