CONTEST: Guess the Pumpkin

PUMPKIN: Look, it's Umberto Eco

And yes, there will be a prize. Unless cheating is involved. Then I will simply award myself for being neat-o.

Update: I am officially neat-o.

So I was perusing my checking account online yesterday and I came across something that stopped me cold. It looked as if someone was using my card to pay for some of dat dem dere parnagraphy.

After getting myself all prepped to cancel my account, I took another look and discovered the truth. PAYPORNCHO is actually short for PAYPOint RaNCHO Santa Margarita. It was my gas charge at an Arco. Tragedy averted!

I woulda hated to cancel that account.

Amiably contra The Jollyblogger:
I've written about this several years running, but while I think it interesting to remark on the Reformation and some of the benefits I enjoy due to it, I think it inappropriate to celebrate something - that in my eyes - is an example of Christian division. While schism may not have been on Luther's heart when he pinned his Top 95 on a door that's likely only famous because it was the resting place of those theses, schism is the overriding stigma of the Reformation. The doctrines of grace and the authority of Scripture must always take a back seat to the real and lasting change brought about by the Reformation: the church failed to maintain unity in such a way that division and splintering everafter seemed so commonplace and normal that Protestant Christianity never seems to grieved by the presence of one million and three denomination scattered across the American landscape.

Despite all the little ways in which Protestant Christianity has and does fail in its Christianity, the hallmark failure of the Protestant reality - which sits, as a pall, over the whole of Protestant history is that its birth is one of disunity and schism. It's a legacy that affects the Protestant church even today.

In reality, I recognize that many people are wishing to celebrate more the doctrines of grace more than anything when they speak of Reformation Day - something I'm fine with. But by recalling history in the celebration, they bring up something that is not remotely commendable by the responsible believer (i.e., divisiveness). Rather than celebrating the Reformation, I think we should be celebrating Christianity, or at least the principle of responsible reformation (the idea that our beliefs are always being reformed in order that they might conform more stringently to elusive Fact of the gospel). Celebrating Reformation Day smacks too much our typical M.O. of believing that our Christian tradition is the only worthwhile tradition - that other churches are lesser churches.

I am reformed. I despise Reformation Day. Go figger, huh?

God's Blogs: it's really a horrifying little book, but it's worth having for Dolly Parton's endorsement alone:

This book went through me like liquid fire.

I had that happen to me once - but it was a plate of bad kielbasa.

An End to RSS/Atom Feeds

Just so you know, I stopped liking syndication for my site and will be discontinuing it tomorrow. Syndication robs at least this site of much of its flavour. I have been wholly disappointed with the experience.

Pumpkin Time Again
So I'm taking nominations for who should be graven into mortal pumpkin flesh on Sunday. Feel free to make recommendations. Below are some of my recent creations (and they definitely get better the further down the list they are). The only recent pumpkins I don't have pictures of are Plato, Santa Claus, and Greg Bahnsen.

At the recent GodBlogCon, I met a young fellah whom I probably wouldn't have run across otherwise. His name's Charlie and he is in the midst of what I think is a highly valuable series on illegal immigration (mostly focusing on our porous southern border. He is seeking to humanize a struggle that for too many of us is simply either a question of dry statistics or a dryer legalism. I'll probably have more comments as he wraps it up, but for those interested, I recommend jumping on now while the jumping is good.

• Part 1
• Part 2
• Tangent 1
• Tangent 2

Somebody named Tod Bolsinger doesn't like blog authors to dabble in anonymity. He goes so far as to wonder if it's very Christian of them at all. I think Tod is doing something that bloggers are far too wont to do - especially, it seems, within Christian circles.

It appears he wants all Christian bloggers to blog like him. Not that he believes his is the model blog, but more, he thinks there is a "right" way to blog and believes he is pursuing that way - and so believes that others should pursue that path too.

Or so one would gather from the single post of his I've read.

I don't know, but maybe he's not as bad as he sounds. Of course, the view does seem pretty common within the diaspora of Christians who blog, so for the sake of argument, I'll not give him the benefit of the doubt.

With the talk I hear from Christian bloggers around the net and specifically from some sound bites I heard preceding the GodBlogCon, there seems to be the idea floating around that Christians who blog must blog with a specific goal: the strengthening of the kingdom of God. I'm not sure that's the case. I'm not sure the goal of Christians blogging needs to be universalized.

Obviously, my blog is fairly eclectic. Sometimes I talk about theology, sometimes I talk about art, sometimes I talk about comics or books or movies or music or animals. Sometimes I show art. Sometimes I sing a song. Sometimes I become a cartoon. And sometimes I sing about a bat that may or may not exist. There is no particular goal to this blog save to entertain (and usually, just to entertain myself). If education occurs, then great - but that would be an indirect benefit of what my purpose is.

And with that in mind, I'm not sure how blogging under an anonymous identity detracts from that. The one thing you can count on is that if I'm talking about something from my personal life, I'm maybe probably lying (see the Disclaimer). And of course my goal in that is pedagogical - to teach people to expect lies on the internet. Because of course, that's mostly what's there. That's the fruit of self-publication. Inaccuracies. Slanders. Mistakes. Lies. Exaggerations. And tom-fooleries.

We can't forget the tom-fooleries.

In the end, why should it matter who I am or who I claim to be? Why should it matter that I, as a Christian, promote a blog that is a fiction? Is it because I'm better than you? Maybe. Or maybe it's just that I have a different goal, a different purpose. I like to think there's enough room for diversity within the arena of Christians who blog that people can blog anonymously for reasons no more satisfying than that they enjoy calling themselve BigWookieLove79. It doesn't have to be about protection or Truth. It is, after all, just the internet.

My name is Seth and that is a lie.

Vidblog #43: Little Bat
Just in time for Halloween!

A response to The Jollyblogger's post on the affects of technology on moral choices (cross-posted in his comments there)

I think that one of the most common non-moral solutions that is really nothing more than a glorified filter comes from the pre-tech era. Discipline. I've heard it time and gain described a valuable counter to the immorality that plagues the human frame. The problem is: discipline no more engages the moral being and brings about moral choices than does an internet filth-filter.

The habits of a disciplined heart and mind are as mechanical as any filter. But worse, I think, is that they persuade users into believing that they are making moral choices when really they are acting only as well-behaved zombies. If I have programmed myself to react a certain way in the presence of a given stimulus (e.g., flee sin), then there is nothing moral (or even noble) about acting in the way I have programmed myself to act. Part of the goal of a good discipline or habit is to remove other action from the realm of potential - to make a given course likely with as little thought or consideration as possible.

For it's when we give consideration to the things we can do that we show ourselves weak. It's all well and good that I have trained myself to rise and go to work without thought when the alarm wakes me every morning - but how much more valuable the choice to work when I actually give consideration to the possibility of sleeping in. It is not a Good choice I make when I automatically rise, but it is when I go anyway after stopping to consider that one day of laziness probably won't kill me.

I'm not saying discipline isn't a helpful thing. Just that it doesn't promote morality. Just that it is no better than the filter to block yucky sites from browsability. The seed intention behind the discipline (as with that behind the filter) can be morally good, but its hallmark disaster is that it alleviates us of the responsibility to act morally (while aiding us in believing that we actually are acting morally).

* note: I am not saying that to flee sin is a bad thing, just that it would be more heroic to flee sin out of genuine distaste for it rather than out of some knee-jerk reaction.

One of the hallmark problems with Top 10 lists of design "mistakes" is that they are written from the perspective of a single individual who will, inevitably, include his own personal tastes and in so doing diminish the usefulness of his list to a broad audience. Such is the case with this particular list of the Top 10 Design Mistakes in Weblogs (thanks brownpau). While some of his issues with blog design ring true, several things he mentions are not mistakes and one item is just plain wrong (well, in another man's opinion).

His list is as follows (my comments follow each point):

1. No Author Biographies - this is something I go halvesies on. I certainly like to get a quick synopsis of who writes the blog I'm visiting, but I'm not going to fault them for preferring a relative stake in anonymity. I solve this for my own site by providing a bio, but one that is lies (to one degree or another).
2. No Author Photo - really, I think the photo can go either way. It can make you popular, but if you are unattractive (or at least not interestingly quirky), the photo can actually lose an audience. Especially if you are a female blogger. If there is no photo, readers can romanticize their vision of you with whatever text description you provide. Blond hair, blue eyes, and athletic can sound H-O-T, but the reality is that you probably look like the rest of us.
3. Nondescript Posting Titles - obviously, I don't care much for this rule, as I only even sporadically give any of my posts titles. I don't run a newspaper, it's a blog. Headlines are acceptable, not necessary.
4. Links Don't Say Where They Go - this is the one where the author is just plain missing the point. He complains about links that simply point someone where to go without telling them where they're going. The problem is that I think he's forgetting how links ideally work. I see links as footnotes - ties to more information. Now a footnote reference never tells you anny more information than the simple number of the note.⁷ The references never themselves spell out the content of the note. This is how links often work. It's not a big deal.
5. Classic Hits are Buried - *shrug* He thinks important posts should be referenced in such a way in the archiving that the new reader is easily drawn to them. This is fine for people who haven't been blogging long, but you get a few years under your belt and you'll have so much "important" content (important to you anyway) that it becomes impossible to draw a new reader to all of it.
6. The Calendar is the Only Navigation - uhm, he's talking about me, huh? He likes the idea of post categories and to some degree, I agree. This kind of folksonomy can be helpful, I suppose, but in the end, I can't remember a single time I've gone to someone's site and clicked on a post category link.
7. Irregular Publishing Frequency - uh, shuddup.
8. Mixing Topics - again, he seems to have targeted my site. Sure, I could have a far more pop blog if I stuck to a single topic like politics or something. I could be insanely pop if I wrote on politics only. Oh, but then my blog would suck and I'd be too embarrassed for it to actually post. And that would be slightly self-defeating, huh?
9. Forgetting That You Write for Your Future Boss - a very, very good point... but it has nothing to do with design.
10. Having a Domain Name Owned by a Weblog Service - I don't really have anything to say about this.

In any case, food for thought. Well, maybe just a snack.

Inexplicably, Alan Moore's and Dave Gibbon's Watchmen is the only graphic novel to be listed on Time Magazine's list of 100 Greatest works of English literature from 1923 to the present (thanks The Beat).

I do not say "inexpicably" and "only" because I am shocked that there was only one graphic novel on the list. In truth, I think it's kinda dumb that a comic should be counted as literature; it's like counting ballet as art. Comics, as great as they are, are a different medium and should no more be considered literature than movies should. But I digress.

m.s. Don't you think it's cheese when people say, "But I digress"? Yeah, I do too.

What is inexplicable is this: Out of all the great and amazing comics out there, Time picked Watchmen as the most amazing, the most literary. Watchmen. WATCHMEN?! Have you read it? Don't you wish you had back those couple of hours spent finishing it? Out of all the amazing comics out there...

Jimmy Corrigan, sorry. Blankets, no luck bro, sorry. Palomar, hah! Maus, suckah punched! Goodbye Chunky Rice, possumed!! There are others. Sorry guys, you got chumped by a mediocre treatment of trite and typical deconstruction. I know it stopped being a fresh idea maybe sixty years ago, but you know how it is... I mean, c'mon, lookit Time's list. Out of all Vonnegut's good books they picked one that wasn't: Slaughterhouse Five. If that's not evidence that this is a typical list by degenerate souls, I dunno what is.

Incidentally, I went back and looked up my rating for Watchmen. It looks like I gave it 2 1/2 stars out of 4. That sounds about right. It wasn't great, but it wasn't bad either. Just slightly above average. Anyone who loves comics could miss it without feeling like they were missing something that anyone who says they love comics should read.

Went into the Vespa shop on Saturday to pick up some gear and was shocked when I entered the showroom. When usually there are only about ten or fifteen of the Italian motorscooters scattered around the floor, Saturday there were about seventy, all packed in very tightly. This is actually amazing since the Fall rainy season has begun - its definitely off-season for casual scooter-riding. There is only one answer to this question of Why Now with the Popularity: $3.25 per gallon of gas. Also the big "Gets up to 70 Miles per Gallon" sign out front was a clue. If gas prices stay up, America may soon begin to look a little more like Europe and Asia in its around-town travel.

Now while I don't usually respond to the whole tagging thing, I found the subject matter fun, so I think I'll take Emeth up on this one. Hard to limit to just five, but...

5 Songs I’m Currently Loving

(in no order beyond alphabetical)

"Mammal" - They Might Be Giants

"Only in Dreams" - Weezer

"Stickshifts and Safetybelts" - Cake

"There'll Never Be Goodbye" - Toshiyuki Honda

"Time after Time" - Eva Cassidy

There were others of course (Nina Simone, INXS, Diana Krall, MMW, Havalina Rail Co., etc.) but... another time, perhaps.

Hey B, I was a little disappointed that you had comments turned off on your manifest destiny post as I found it interesting and had some tidbits to add.

First is that I think that while Manifest Destiny certainly played large role in the formation of then American nation, the concept largely played out by the early 20th century (as imperialism was on the wane). Certainly Americans largely remained convinced that their nation was the best among nations and that citizenship in it was something to be privileged among the peoples of the world (this is hardly something unique to Americans as national hubris is a trenchant problem in many, if not most, nations) - but even so, the idea that it was by God's special ordination and good pleasure that America flourished was abandoned to the point that by the Sixties, the idea of a Manifest Destiny was absolutely repellant to the culture at large. I remember my elementary school classes scoffing that anyone would be so ridiculous to buy into anything so unfeasible as a modus operendi of Manifest Destiny.

Of course, Bush has been trying to employ similar language in his goals for the Middle East. Spookily so, I believe. In any case, I think there is a segment (not a large one, but not too small either) that buys into his propaganda. But what Bush is selling isn't a Manifest Destiny of America - after all, imperialism is dead - but rather, he is hawking the idea that democracy is the manifest destiny of the world (or should be). What he means by democracy is up, of course, for debate.

I think we need to be careful in our comparison here. While their are certainly similarities between between Manifest Destiny and the current American propaganda, there are great differences as well. I think it pays to keep the two seperate (while still allowing comparison) so that we are certain to deal accurately with the problem at hand.

I think a valuable question is: should we be expecting better of a national leader than the promulgation of still more rhetoric and propaganda? Should we expect better of Bush? And really, I think not. Since there have been national leaders, there has been the use of propaganda, the use of sweetly coloured untruths and exagerrations in order to move a people toward a desired goal. This is what we should come to expect so long as we have leaders. Rather than chastise them for using such a tact, we should be chastising ourselves for giving such words such power. Really, it's like handing someone and asking them to pop our balloon and then being disillusioned when they do. We want leaders to sweep us off our feet with their illusory words and then we loath them for doing it.

As far as the American belief that the world needs "democracy," I'm not sure it has anything to do with Dominionism, much less Christian Reconstructionism (which actually dates to the Sixties as a vehicle for realizing the millennial victory of Christ). I think it rests mainly on the idea that many Americans see their lives and nation working and attribute that success to what they believe is democracy; simultaneously, they see the way certain other cultures live and behave and think that they need a solution: insert "democracy." This is, i think, a natural form of expression. We see this occur all the time when one person counsels another.

Person A has just broken up with her boyfriend and is having a really hard time of it. Person B realizes that though she has also just broken up with her boyfriend, she's not doing so bad. She realizes that her attitude springs from her knowledge that there are other men, better men, out there and that this is not a time for sadness but one for hope, knowing that this is a grand opportunity for an even better relationship. If she can convince Person A of her outlook, she knows Person A will have a better life. And so it goes.

I think the average American sees the Middle East, hears about all the civil rights issues, the way women are treated, the suicide bombings, the odd way in which everyday citizens become insta-sodiers for causes they may or may not understand. The American sees this and thinks, Man, i bet if they had what we had, none of this crap would be happening. So, yeah. Let's give 'em democracy. Let's boot their hypocritical and totalitarian leaders. Let's fix things. This form of thinking was at its peak during the '80s and the Cold War. And so it goes.

And this is why many are so easily entertained by propaganda - it speaks to people where they are. It plays on their hearts rather than on their minds. It's nothing so insidious as a national acceptance of Manifest Destiny (though stuff like the PNAC should give us pause). It's nothing so obvious as Reconstructionism. In the end, it's just the average Joe doing what the average Joe has been doing since the dawn of time - letting his leaders lead him, unconcerned with the destination because he has bigger fish to fry (his rent, his car payments, his daughters rebellious streak, how little he misses his wife when he's at work, keeping his job during corporate downsizing, getting a nice meal at the close of a long day). Do the problems of Somalia or Uganda or Sudan or Iraq or Afghanistan or the old Soviet Bloc affect any of the worries that press down on him, give him ulcers, and cause rifts within his family? They don't - and so they become secondary. He is happy to let someone else worry about them.

I know I've come pretty far afield, but I just wanted to make it known that I don't think it accurate to tie American (even Evangelical American, from which I distance myself) promotion of "democracy" as a form of Manifest Destiny. I dunno, maybe it's the ugly grand step-child of it or something.

Health permitting, I plan to stop by GodBlogCon 2005 on Saturday from 9:00 to Noon, so hopefully I'll bring you back some good, vidblogable footage of the carnage. er, menagerie. I think I only know one person who is going, but my vidblog topic should make up for that - hopefully it'll be a good icebreaker. And hopefully it won't be as political as some people make it sound.

UNICEF murdered a bunch of smurfs. Gargamel should have known that one cannot wear sinister plots in the out and about but must cloak his evil in kindness and charity to get anything done. This is why UNICEF will always succeed while Gargamel is doomed to failure. Moral of this story: do not be obvious.

The other day, I saw the kookiest bumper sticker. It was one of those uber-fashionable ribbon-shaped ones that are finding themselves on cars the nation over. It was pink. And it said: "Support breast cancer."

The image immediately leapt into mind of the cars owner flitting around malls and supermarkets shooting microwaves an the chestses of unwary women going about their daily consumerism. Said car owner would, of course, be supporting the diabolical rise of cancerous breasts.

Then, nearly immediately, I understood what the sticker was really advertising. The car's owner likely worked for an undergarmet manufacturer and they were marketing a new bra designed specially with women in the grip (throes? clutches?) of breast cancer in mind.

Blue Like Jazz: A Review
I thought of several different ways in which to begin this review - several witty comparisons that would surely catch the reader's attention. But that was a month and a half ago. See, I started reading Blue Like Jazz on the 20th of July and it is now the 4th of October. I have four pages left and I'm not sure I have the strength to continue.

For you see: Donald Miller is wearying. Endlessly self-amused and self-absorbed, he seems to want nothing so much as to be hip, cool, edgy (despite his own protests that hip, edgy, and cool are vanities and wastes of time and energy). And if four years of highschool taught me anything, it is that everyone with a heart is thoroughly and deeply embarrassed when the Very Not Cool Guy walks in and tries to be cool. Think: The Offspring's "Pretty Fly for a White Guy."

The thing is: Christianity cannot be cool. There is no reason non-believers should see Christianity as anything even on the same plane as Cool. Christianity says and believes terrifying things about the non-believer. Forget the homosexuals a minute - Christianity says that the friendly, tax-paying, socially-active, community-leading paragon of virtue who doesn't bow the knee to Christ is horribly wicked and an actual enemy of God. No matter how kind and cool they are. For Christianity to become cool, it has to stop having anything to do with Christ and his message. Maybe Donald Miller wants that. It kinda seems like it, but who can say - since he's not that great at expressing anything beyond his own meandering and fleeting feelings on matters.

About two-thirds into the book, a friend (who won't receive and identity via nickname, such as Tony the Beat Poet or Andrew the Protester) ask me what kind of a book it was. I had a hard time describing it at first. Then I realized: OMG!! I'm reading a blog on paper! LOL!! Really, Miller's book is nothing more than a glorified blog in its meandering promise to get to a point that never comes. In reality, Miller would make a much better blogger than he does a writer. Unfortunately, even as a blogger, he would only be so good - because despite moments of value and bits that come close to insight, his style is heavy-handed and obvious for too much of the book's 240 pages (I know, only 240 pages and it's taken me almost two-and-a-half months!). I think his would probably sit in the Occasional Reads section of my blogroll, checked only so often for fodder for my own blog postings.

One good-but-obvious point Miller makes throughout the book is that the human expression of Christianity in the contemporary American church is lacking at best, gravely flawed at worst, but most likely, somewhere in between. This is clearly true. But also clearly known to probably most of us. And the real problems are not often the ones that Miller is pointing out - he seems frequently upset at how little the church fits in with a world filled with lovely sinners. Yet still, there is value in his critique.

But not much. Again Miller shows himself to be like too many bloggers; and like too many bloggers, he has much criticism and too few answers. If he were a blogger, this might be acceptable; after all, the only cost associated with reading a blog is time (and perhaps mental health). A book, however, is paid in currency. There is real loss if a book does not measure up to its published value - and Blue Like Jazz does not. I hate to say that because there are a few amusing stories and I get the feeling the book wants to be useful - but it just isn't.

I've been thinking that Canada needs some good marketing, perhaps a catchy slogan. With that in mind, here are some posibilities:

• "The Other America!" [I was gonna say, "The Other White America" but feared the racial tension I would create]
• "It's a nice place to live but you wouldn't want to visit."
• "Haven't we met somewhere before?"
• "It's what's happening."
• "Make a run for the border."
• "We'll put the 'Hot' in 'Hotcha.'"
• "We're like America, but the rest of the world doesn't hate us."
• "Mounties. 'Nuff said."
• "Our Satelite views on Google Maps look pretty cool."
• "We make our own paper."
• "The Other White America"