Lift Up Your Hearts!

My to-do list is too long for me to indulge much in long stories or philosophical musings, so today you get just plain fun.  Sometimes I think I'm the last person in the world to see things that have apparently been circulating on the Internet for years, but just in case I'm only the second-to-last, don't miss this.

Be sure to check out Matt's site for more details and other videos.  You know how many teenaged boys dream of getting paid to play and design video games?  Well, Matt had that dream job, and chucked it over for this.  And I thought Janet was good at getting paid to travel.

(Parental advisory note:  Once you get past the name of the site, which only matters if you can read, the video is perfectly safe and enjoyable for all ages.  At least this one is; I haven't checked them all.  See above comment about time limitations.)

We celebrated my birthday with a three-way phone call (Florida/Pittsburgh/Basel), good wishes from family and friends, and a dinner at the Kobé Japanese Steakhouse.  We'd been to the Kobé before, but that was probably 15 years ago.  Their teppanyaki service doesn't remind me in the least of our experiences in Japan, but that doesn't mean the food wasn't good.  We didn't even spring for the $80 Wagyu beef; the $18 sirloin was quite delicious enough.  And the $15 birthday bribe was worth a bit of mild embarrassment.

Today was a bigger birthday, with a slightly bigger celebration.  For our part, we once again joined the Greater Geneva Grande Award Marching Band for Geneva, Florida's genuine, old-fashioned, small-town Independence Day celebration, the only Independence Day parade in Central Florida to occur on July 4th.  I love Geneva's celebration—I hope that it is not a bad sign that the cow-chip toss game used plastic "chips" this year—and I love the band even more.  It was 15 years ago that we first marched with some of those great folks! (More)

For a monolingual person, I have an inordinate love of languages.  Not only is multi-lingualism increasingly important in today's world, but it does wonderful things for the brain—from increased brain growth in babies to decreased dementia in the elderly.  I wish the great resources available for teaching young children another language had been around when our kids were little, and I wish I had more aggressively pursued what there was.  Be that as it may, I am only a language dilettante, enjoying learning a few phrases of Japanese before our trip there, brushing up on my minimal high school French, and listening to the language CDs from the Hippo Family Clubs.  I wish I were multi-lingual, but face the reality that at my age it just isn't going to happen.

Nonetheless, I should be able to learn, if I put the time and effort into it, enough of a language to get along reasonably well with basic, necessary communication.  Which brings me to the question of why I find myself attracted to almost any language other than the two that would be of the most immediate practical use to learn: Spanish and German. (More)

I shouldn't be surprised when what is said in comic strips mirrors opinions expressed by essayists in more serious venues.  After all, both get their inspiration from the same human condition, and humor is an efficient and effective way to make a point.  Nonetheless, I always take note when I hear the same message from widely divergent sources, as happened when I read in close succession Francis Schaeffer's The God Who Is There and John Taylor Gatto's The Underground History of American Education. When an evangelical Protestant theologian living in Switzerland and a self-described lapsed Catholic schoolteacher from Pittsburgh, writing on issues that apparently differ markedly, make the same historical and philosophical point, perhaps I had better listen.

The conjunction of Mallard Fillmore and Mike Thomas, about which I wrote yesterday, is less portentous, perhaps, but today's has signficant social and philosophical implications. (More)

Mike Thomas, an Orlando Sentinel columnist, has had a special place in our hearts ever since he interviewed Heather for a magazine article about her summer camp experiences.  That I often disagree with his opinions in no way keeps me from appreciating his intelligence and writing skills.

His recent column, The Sea Is Coming, makes the excellent point that, whatever we do or don't do about global warming, or global cooling, we in Florida are fighting a losing battle against natural forces.  Florida's coastline comes and goes, advances and retreats, and the worst thing we can do is to cover it with lots of big, expensive buildings.  The second worst is to encourage that overgrowth, as we do, with government-subsidized property insurance—considered necessary because real insurance companies know how foolish it is to build one's house upon the sand while standing in a hurricane's path. (More)

[Insert whistling here]  (More)

Sophie Scholl: The Final Days is a simply made but powerful German film (with English subtitles) about a young woman arrested for treason after distributing some anti-Nazi leaflets.  Don't expect a happy ending; the setting is Nazi Germany, where happy endings were few.  Nonetheless I recommend the movie highly.  Such depictions of goodness and heroism are rare—much less without resorting to graphic violence or sentimentalism.

Four things struck me in particular: (More)

I don't recall the era of the 1960s with fondness; it wasn't all bad, but it was a messy, unkind time that accelerated our culture's decline in the areas of civility and decent behavior.  However, there must be more of the 60s in my make-up than I thought:  I'm finding good reasons to distrust The Man.  :)

Just as the National Education Association adamantly opposes home education, the American Medical Association, unnerved, perhaps, by Ricki Lake's popular home birth movie, The Business of Being Born, has taken direct aim at home birth.^*  Reaction against yet one more threat to personal freedom has come from across the political spectrum, from the far left to the far right.  Congratulations to the AMA for provoking agreement between pro-choice and pro-life groups.   (More)

In considering the Supreme Court's nullification of Louisiana's law that allows a death sentence for one convicted of raping a child, I asked, Shouldn't the question before the Court be, "Is there anything in the Constitution of the United States that prohibits the State of Louisiana from imposing this sentence?"

The Court's subsequent decision on the District of Columbia's ban on individual ownership of handguns addressed the issue in just that way:  Is there anything in the Constitution that prohibits the city from imposing such a law?  "Yes," they concluded— although the vote was shockingly close.  The Second Amendment confers a right to gun ownership that this law attempts to take away.  I applaud the decision, not because I like the idea of a gun in the hand of every irresponsible idiot, but because it was the right answer to the right question.  If our society has diverged so much from our origins that the "right of the people to keep and bear arms" is no longer tenable, we, the people of the United States, have the right and power to take it away via a new Constitutional amendment. The Court's job is to examine the law in light of the Constitution as it stands

I have not taken the time to read the entire, lengthy decision, but even a cursory glance shows how critical to sound decision-making is a good understanding of not only law, but also history, grammar, linguistics, and above all logic.

As I wrote earlier, one important idea I took from Marcus Buckingham's The One Thing You Need to Know is the value of expending more energy in our areas of strength than in where we are weak.  Self-evident?  Maybe, but in practice we often tend to do the opposite.

John Stackhouse's review of another Buckingham book, Go Put Your Strengths to Work, inspired me to reserve it at our library.  Although the "I gotta be me" philosophy taken to extremes can lead to unwholesome, selfish attitudes and dereliction of duty, we err in the other direction by not recognizing that God made us who we are and not someone else for a reason.  To ignore that design is not only to insult our Creator, but also to risk missing out on the good he would do to and through us. (More)

In an earlier post on the Lisbon Treaty, I stated

[I]n the U.S. we have seen state laws gradually subsumed more and more by national regulation, so that fleeing to Pennsylvania from a repressive law in New York is not as easy as it once was.  I'm not saying this is always bad, but it can be, and bears watching.

I"m watching, and here's an example I saw today.  The U. S. Supreme Court has nullified a Louisiana law allowing for a sentence of the death penalty following conviction for the rape of a child under 12. (More)

The role of joking in the way we deal with one another is a concern of mine, as I've said before.  Thanks to Groshlink I've found another excellent essay on the topic, The Gospel and Humor by Tim Keller, pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York City.  Unfortunately, the article is in PDF format, and you have to weave amongst some other articles to read it, but it's worthwhile.  To get you started—and to give those who won't follow the link a taste of what he says—here are some excerpts. (More)

Scott Adams strikes again, with a definitely nerdy variation on this popular saying:

You may have noticed I've been posting a lot recently.  At one point I decided to try to write a post a day for the month of June.  There were two reasons for this.  The first—and this doesn't matter for those who use feedreaders, but not everyone does—is that I want to give people a reason to stop by frequently; if you don't write anything new, people get out of the habit.  At least I did, before I let Bloglines keep track of things for me.

The second, more compelling, reason is the accumulating backlog of things impelling me to write.  Books lined up for review; interesting tidbits of news and commentary I figure folks might otherwise not encounter; and the everyday happenings in our lives, which is my attempt to close somewhat the 1000 or more (sometimes much more) mile distance between us and those we love.  The only problem with this system is that the list grows even as it shrinks.  But at least I'm holding my own this month.  I suppose I could post more often (this is actually my second post of the day), but there is more to life—like laundry, as the persistent dryer buzzer is now reminding me.

Confessions of a Medical  Heretic, by Robert S. Mendelsohn, M. D. (McGraw-Hill, 1979)

A quick review of this so I can get it off my desk and back on the bookshelf:  There's no doubt that modern medicine has lengthened and improved our lives; the underside of that story is that modern medicine has also shortened our lives, and in many ways diminished their quality.  If you're not already half convinced of the second part of that statement, you'll find Dr. Mendelsohn's style hard to get through.  I believe him, and I still wanted to scream by about the 40th time he beat to death his otherwise illuminating analogy of modern medicine as a religion. (More)