You are currently browsing the monthly archive for October, 2008.
Two mornings a week I drive by a house on my way back from dropping a couple guys I know off at school. Well, I actually drive by a lot of houses, but this one is unique because it has a big, green, three-dimensional (as opposed to the two-dimensional kind, see above) peace sign standing out in the front yard. I think it used to be covered in astroturf, like some sort of conciliatory Chia Pet. Now, however, it appears to have lost the shag and kept the green.
I saw it again this morning and it reminded me of a brief article I read in this August’s edition of National Geographic, explaining where the peace sign came from. Apparently it is a combination of the semaphore letters for “N” and “D,” which stand for “Nuclear Disarmament.” Semaphore is the method of using flags held in various arm positions to communicate information. The letter “N” is signaled by holding the two flags opposite one another, facing downward at 45-degree angles from your body. The letter “D” comes from holding one flag straight up above your head and the other straight downward. Here’s a visual illustration to help:
This is how Helen Fields from National Geographic explained it in the article:
On a rainy Easter weekend 50 years ago, a crowd of protesters set off from London on a four-day march for the fledgling cause of nuclear disarmament. A new movement needs a new symbol, so they waved signs bearing a simple logo that has since gone on to become a universal emblem for peace.
The peace symbol is neither the track of a dove nor a chicken, as hawks have sneered. Artist Gerald Holtom based it on the semaphore initials for nuclear disarmament, although he later said that it also represented himself in despair, palms out and down.
Purposely never copyrighted, used in everything from Vietnam War protests to cigarette ads, the symbol is easy to recognize — and to misdraw. Pat Arrowsmith, 78, helped plan the 1958 march and still goes to antinuclear and antiwar events. A common mistake — leaving out the middle leg — turns a peace sign into the Mercedes-Benz logo. She fixes that: “I get out my ballpoint immediately.” (Page 22)
Semaphore images taken from Wikipedia (Here and here). You can check out the copyright info there since I don’t understand it.
Zach Nielsen at Take Your Vitamin Z has some great counsel for how to be wise in our electronic utterances:
Today in our staff meeting our executive pastor asked us to come up with a collective list of rules to generally follow when dealing with email. Here is the list we came up with followed by some comments from me:
1. Don’t confront people over email.
Non-verbal communication is too important in confrontation and tone cannot be interpreted well over email. Ask yourself if you are wanting to confront over email because you are being cowardly and have a sinful bent toward the fear of man. One push back on this principle is that when writing an email you can collect your thoughts in a cohesive way for better communication. I would say if you feel this way, write your thoughts on a pad of paper with bullet points and bring it to your confrontation appointment.
2. Use email to work on your grammar.
Text speak (lol, c ya, etc.) can merge into our email, email can merge into our more formal writing. Don’t believe this? Ask my wife, she teaches graduate school and can testify to this fact. Scary, I know.
3. Work to have a balance between email and personal contact.
I am bad at this. I have found that I would rather sit in my office and fire off a quick email to the guy in the office next door as opposed to just popping over and saying something quickly. I know it feels efficient in the short term, but I wonder about the long term effects. If we are not careful we breed a culture of isolation that is detrimental to our essential nature of God’s image bearers, created for communities of love.
4. Be professional over email.
Granted, for most of us email is not a professional medium of communication, but why not raise the bar?
5. Use subject lines.
Again, I am bad at this but working on it. It’s much easier to find old emails this way, for you and the one who receives. It also helps emails not get pushed to spam folders and gives your reader a sense of your intentions right off the bat.
6. Don’t multi-task too much with email.
I have been burned bad in the past by having too many emails flying around with different windows open and hitting reply when I should have hit forward. What a horrible feeling! It’s like you want to scratch and claw your way into the computer after hitting send to pull that one back out. Sadly, you can’t. I did this one time in college when I was wanting to forward something to JT about our religion professor, but rather sent it to the religion professor himself. The email was less than kind. The next day in class he was a good sport about it and thought it was funny, but made fun of me in front of the whole class. Mortifying.
7. Don’t email your spouse a love letter, or better yet, anything to anybody that is emotionally meaningful.
Use your own handwriting. It’s way more personal.
8. Hesitate before you hit reply all.
Do they all really need to receive your reply?
9. Don’t forward cheesy emails with winged angels and dancing bears.
Barf.
10. Learn people’s style.
Some people just don’t like email. Serve them by not trying to force them into your style and then being angry when they don’t reply to your email. Call or go and see them. This is most loving. Also, don’t be offended when you write a four paragraph book email and they only reply with two sentences. They might not have had time to reciprocate with equivalent size and would rather just talk on the phone.
11. Use blind copy (BCC:) when sending to a large group.
If you don’t you could expose people to spam from insensitive spammers who like to collect email addresses to add people to random lists.
HT: James Grant
Two stick out noticeably from my past. I remember the first for its infamy. The second was just awesome. When I was probably seven years old or so, I actually dressed up as Satan for Halloween. I had a freakish, horned mask and a plastic pitchfork. My grandma was living with us at the time because she had cancer and wasn’t doing well. She saw me wearing the mask in another room while I was playing with my brother and it really scared her. Let’s just say that costume won’t be resurfacing in future Bowers generations. At least not if I can help it.
All of that is only gloriously contrasted by the Halloween where my brother and I dressed up as Ninja Turtles. I was Leonardo and my brother was Michaelangelo. My super-creative mom made us shells out of cardboard that looked incredible. We had eye masks and belts and plastic weapons. It was turtleiscious.
How about you? What was your favorite costume?
According to Wikipedia, the term “blogosphere” was coined in 1999 by a man named Brad L. Graham. I take this with a grain of salt — dictionary.com lists its beginning in 1997 — but here is the full report for what it’s worth:
The term was coined on September 10, 1999 by Brad L. Graham, as a joke. It was re-coined in 2002 by William Quick, and was quickly adopted and propagated by the warblog community. The term resembles the older word logosphere (from Greek logos meaning word, and sphere, interpreted as world), the “the world of words”, the universe of discourse.
Despite the term’s humorous intent, CNN, the BBC, and National Public Radio’s programs Morning Edition, Day To Day, and All Things Considered have used it several times to discuss public opinion. A number of media outlets in recent years have started treating the blogosphere as a gauge of public opinion, and it has been cited in both academic and non-academic work as evidence of rising or falling resistance to globalization, voter fatigue, and many other phenomena, and also in reference to identifying influential bloggers and “familiar strangers” in the blogosphere.
What are some other words we could use to refer to refer to the amoeba of blogdom? The blog pound? The blogocylinder? The blog jam? I’m all ears.
Friday night Crystal and I sat down and read what has been released of “Porn-Again Christian,” an online booklet written by Mark Driscoll to address issues of pornography and masturbation. Mark has a deep burden for the men in his church to know what biblical manhood looks like, and he is sharply aware of the crippling effect pornography has on embracing that vision.
Here is an excerpt from the introduction to give you a flavor of the booklet:
As the pastor of a large and growing church filled with strong men, many of them young, I have seen the secret sins of pornography and masturbation paralyze many men with shame, guilt, and embarrassment. I have written this booklet to discuss these matters in a manner that is both theological and practical, in hopes of contributing to each of you experiencing the power of the gospel to forgive, renew, and empower you by grace. Because I am speaking to fellow men, my tone may not be well suited for some women and, therefore, I would request that they not read this booklet, unless they are a wife whose husband has read it first and he can discuss its contents with her in love. For men wanting to encourage other men to lives of purity, I pray this booklet would be a useful and readable piece of literature that you could pass on to as many dudes as possible as a pedagogical tool for cranial-rectal extraction.
Mark’s language is raw at times, but that’s exactly what I appreciate about him. He speaks frankly about issues that can be awkward to address and doesn’t pull any punches. If you meet the criteria he mentions above, I would encourage you to read this booklet. All the chapters haven’t been released yet, but everything up through chapter 9 is available, and chapter 10 should be coming out today.
In Hebrew class we’re translating through the book of Jonah. Yesterday, Jonah 1:7 (“And they said to one another, ‘Come, let us cast lots, that we may know on whose account this evil has come upon us’”) spurred a lively discussion about whether or not it is valid for a Christian today to use lots (which for us would be something like flipping a coin or maybe throwing dice) to discern God’s will about a particular situation.
Granted, the sailors in Jonah were pagans. However, the apostles cast lots to determine whether Joseph called Barsabbas or Matthias would take the place of Judas as the twelfth apostle (Acts 1:24-26). They asked God to show them which one of the two he had chosen, they cast lots, the lot fell on Matthias, and he was numbered with the twelve.
The situation we had in mind was a situation in which all other avenues of discernment have been exhausted (prayer, searching the Scriptures, godly counsel, using wisdom) and there are still two viable and equally desirable alternatives on the table. Is it appropriate in that situation to pray that God would make known his will and then flip a coin, casting yourself on his sovereignty as it is described in Proverbs 16:33:
“The lot is cast into the lap, but its every decision is from the LORD.”
What do you think?
I just added a page in the bar above called “About the Gold.” It’s my effort to explain the purpose of The Fool’s Gold, summed up in the phrase “sifting and gifting.” I hope it’s helpful.
Doug Wilson has an insightful post today about an implication of the story of the widow’s mite:
This last Lord’s Day, something occurred to me in the course of the sermon, something which I mentioned in passing. But then as I was reading the Scriptures this last week, the same point jumped off the page at me, and in a far more explicit way than what I had seen before.
I was making a standard point about generosity, and mentioned the widow who had put her “two mites” into the Temple treasury, and who had been praised by Jesus for the proportions in her generosity. I then went on to point out that she was actually donating to a thoroughly corrupt ministry, one that was going to be judged in a severe way by God in the course of just a few years. Jesus didn’t rush up to the widow, and tell her to save her money for a more worthy cause, or to keep it herself.
I then compared this to the well-intentioned widows today who live in poverty, but who send more money than they can afford off to television stations where the thrones are gold and the women have big hair. God receives the intention, and not just the money.
What do you think? Do you think this could also apply to a believer who gives money in good conscience to a con artist who claims to be in need?
I was sitting at my desk yesterday and Crystal was standing over me doing whatever wives do when they stand over their husbands sitting at their desks. She was kind enough to point out to me (again) that my scalp is shining a little more than it used to at the top of my head. This has set me to thinking. Given that I may very well lose some hair in the coming years, how does a man go bald with dignity? I see at least six options that don’t involve some sort of surgical or medicinal procedure:
- Buy a wig now so that people are used to it by the time I’m 50.
- Wear very tall shoes and refuse to sit down unless everyone around me is seated.
- Always wear a hat. Even when I’m sleeping.
- Grow a big, nasty beard so people don’t even think about my head.
- Sport a sweet combover with strategically-spaced, well-greased strands.
- Shave it all. Better yet, get it waxed.
What do you think? What’s the best way for a man to lose his hair in style?
Saturday night my wife and I went with some friends from church to see Call + Response, a rockumentary (hadn’t heard that one before) about the human trafficking industry. The DG Blog promoted it a week ago yesterday. It was well done and sobered me to the fact that, among other types of slavery, there are real-life girls who are being forced to have sex with real-life perverts who have real-life money to burn on their defiling passions. It’s a sick trade.
Here’s a description from the movie’s website:
CALL+RESPONSE is a first of its kind feature documentary film that reveals the world’s 27 million dirtiest secrets: there are more slaves today than ever before in human history. CALL+RESPONSE goes deep undercover where slavery is thriving from the child brothels of Cambodia to the slave brick kilns of rural India to reveal that in 2007, Slave Traders made more money than Google, Nike and Starbucks combined.
Luminaries on the issue such as Cornel West, Madeleine Albright, Daryl Hannah, Julia Ormond, Ashley Judd, Nicholas Kristof, and many other prominent political and cultural figures offer first hand account of this 21st century trade. Performances from Grammy-winning and critically acclaimed artists including Moby, Natasha Bedingfield, Cold War Kids, Matisyahu, Imogen Heap, Talib Kweli, Five For Fighting, Switchfoot, members of Nickel Creek and Tom Petty’s Heartbreakers, Rocco Deluca move this chilling information into inspiration for stopping it.
Music is part of the movement against human slavery. Dr. Cornel West connects the music of the American slave fields to the popular music we listen to today, and offers this connection as a rallying cry for the modern abolitionist movement currently brewing.
If it’s in your area and still showing, I’d encourage you to see it. Better hurry, though. Most of the show times have come and gone, and the latest I saw was this Thursday the 23rd.
Did anybody else go? What did you think?
