So, any of you ever have this experience? You're standing at a urinal and you kind of space out for a moment, lost in the details of the day, and come to find, once your attention returns to the business at hand, that you've mistakenly urinated all over the wall and floor instead of into the urinal. Nah, me neither. I was just checking. And stuff.

Huh. Just noticed that today equals five years of this junk. Which also means Jett's been at it for five as well. Go us.

Huh. I also just noticed that I've posted less in the last four months than I did in the first two weeks I ever blogged.

By the way, my favourite word is, and has been for some time, syzygy. Fun to say. Fun to spell. Fun to mispell. What more is needed?

Relevance and the Pastor
This - the idea that pastors need to "maintain any realistic sense of ideas and trends in the secular world" - strikes me as something far less necessary or helpful than many of us Christians might imagine.

First of all, we should admit openly that there is nothing new under the sun, that any experience one person lives is merely derivative of the experiences of those before and around him. So really, the "cloistered" life of the pastor who is a full-time minister is not rendered useless nor even hampered by the fact of his occupational segregation. A full-time minister is just as likely to be able to speak intelligibly and wisely to the problems facing a corporate whipping boy as the pastor who also works in the corporate mailroom.

Next, if we progress down the dangerous path of imagining that the pastor needs to grasp existentially the aspects of his congregants cultures, we run into sizable dilemmas. If a pastor seeks white-collar employment in order to better empathize with his congregants, he is ignore the unique experience of those who subsist in the restaurant business. If he seeks employ in the restaurant business, he is missing out on the struggles unique to public school teachers. And truck drivers. And professional athletes. And homemakers. How can a pastor possibly relate to the unique experience of mothers as he will never in all his life be able to be a mother? The thing is - none of these experiences are as unique as we would like to imagine them. Each are analogous to each other in that the struggles inherent to each are inherent, in some form, in the others. Even in the day-to-day experience of being a full-time minister. This is why Christ is said to be able to sympathize with us all - though he was never a mother of three stuck in a dead-end job in the forty-year-old diner on the outside of town.

The thing is: "relevance" is a sham. The gospel IS relevant by its very nature. To proclaim the gospel and its exhortation is to be entirely relevant to whichever culture, group, society, or target audience happens to be in front of you. The message is the same whether speaking to a woefully single twenty-year-old internet geek or a forty-five-year-old twice-divorced woman who has been passed over for promotion in her job five times running because of a glass ceiling.

To promote individualizing the gospel (making it relevant) as much as has been done in recent years is dangerous in that it confuses the average citizen into believing that a pastor (and by extension, Christ) cannot understand him unless he's walked a mile in his shoes. We've lied to ourselves, telling ourselves that our shoes are unique - our shoes are special - and have forgotten the simple truth that we all wear the same shoes and my problems are her problems are his problems are my problems.

written in response to a portion of an interview with some lady, Nancy Pearcey, alluded to on Jollyblogger's site and posted originally in the comments there [oh, just noticed she studied at L'Abri... makes sense]

I've been playing around intermittently with Chris Coyne's Context Free Design Grammar (CFDG) [update: link] over the past couple weeks and have been able to come up with some pretty cool designs. How sweet is it that about ten to fifteen lines of simple text descriptions can come up with a dessicated tree branch like the one below? Eh?

Re: #6 - Dude. Really, there's little more to say except for that #6 makes up for the travesty that was #5. Harry's still pig-headed (as he has been through the entire series), but at least he's only a shadow of the petulant brat he was in #5. This is the Empire Strikes Back of the series. Darkness creeps from every corner. The difference in mood between The Sorceror's Stone and The Half-Blood Prince is staggering. My only regret is a oh-so-very Peter Parker moment at the end. It's tiresome to see over and over in the Spider-Man books and now to see the cliche crop up in Potter was just frustrating.

p.s. absolutely positively do not read the reviews on Amazon as it's Spoiler City over there. the morons.

Faxed recently to my insurance company:

I am officially on the verge of punting Internet Explorer through several unopened windows. This is the stage to which IE and its inexplicable CSS renderings have brought me. For the love of all that is elegant and sensible - STOP USING THE BANE OF MY EXISTENCE.

In related news, here's a scan of what my new driver's license photo will look like - only it'll have some color when it finally arrives.

Here's a question that's probably more apt for those who lived in the time of the Fathers rather than for we of today. At what point were believers to begin honouring the Founding Fathers as their government - in the midst of their rebellion against the government they should have been honouring or after Britain finally gave up trying to rule its petulant child? When would a colonial America switch his allegiance from one God-ordained government to another?

Also, does anyone know, in English, are monks named after monkeys? Or vice versa? Essentially, which came first philologically, the monk or the monkey?

In the midst of my daily web-rigour, I recently took a brief break to explore some opacity options. I like the idea of opacity in web browsers, but really only Devil IE makes use of the CSS bit, moz-opacity, so I looked for other options. My results were varying, but then, see for yourself.