Entries from April 2007 ↓

After getting home from church tonight . . .

(+6 . . .)
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So this new domain and blog has been up and running for about a month now and I’m wondering . . . who are you people? If you’ve been reading regularly, leave a comment. Even if you’re a regular commenter (or I otherwise already know you’re a reader), and even (especially) if you’ve never commented. No better time than the present.

So, tell me about yourselves, folks. Even if I already know you.

Also: upgraded to WP 2.1.3 and I don’t appear to have destroyed anything. Thumbs up.

(By the way, if you’re reading this on LiveJournal or Facebook . . . hop on over to the real deal and comment there.)

Hmm.

Joe Thorn says that you guys hate SnapShots (those preview bubbles that pop up when you hover your cursor over a link).
Steve McCoy agrees.

Is it really that bad a feature? I personally dig it and it doesn’t detract from my likelyhood of re-visiting a blog at all. Then again, I do most of my blog reading via RSS on Google Reader.

So tell me . . . should I get rid of ‘em?

CNN.com ran a story the other day that intrigued me. It was about the book pictured here, titled The Dangerous Book for Boys.

It’s pretty easy to balk at the title and some of the premises. Our natural reaction as parents (and hopefully, as humans in general) is to protect our children from danger. We buy fences, gates, doorknob protectors, closet locks — all good things — to keep our kids out of harm’s way.

Still, something about this book is exciting. Beyond just teaching our boys about tying knots, skinning rodents, and great historical battles and wars, it helps to train them to be unafraid of risk. As much as we sometimes don’t want them to grow up, our boys will someday — and soon — be the men of the world, and over the past couple of decades, too many have been and are being coddled in home and school environments where competition is seen as intrinsically evil, where they are insulated against any sort of unpleasantness. The result has been an entire breed of “soft men” — men who take no risks in life, who take no responsibility for their own actions, who run from marriage and fatherhood, and who spend time defending nothing but their own foolish self-interests.

Don’t get me wrong. Not every man should get married. Not every man will be a father. Not every man will or should find things like guns, trucks, and Ultimate Fighting very appealing. That’s not my point. My point is that we are to be workers and we are to be defenders. Just as Nehemiah told his Jerusalem reconstruction crew to wield a shovel in one hand and a sword in the other, so all men are to labor and to protect what they’ve been given. I’m not the father of a boy yet, but if I’m so blessed in the future, I want him to love working with his hands. I want him to feel a duty to protect his mother and his big sister. I want him to “slay the dragons” and vanquish the bad guys when he plays.  Then (if God allows) he won’t be a lazy man. He’ll be bold enough to ask the girl out. He’ll know how to protect his wife and his children. He won’t be afraid to take risks in business or in ministry. This is the kind of man I want my daughter(s) to marry and the kind I want to raise if given the opportunity.

Don’t stifle your boy’s innate sense of adventure, parents. Let him play with toy swords to slay the bad guys. Encourage him to come to the aid of the fair maiden. If he wants to take a flying leap from the couch, don’t stop him (not every time, anyway). You may be helping to stem the growing tide of soft men.

I’m buying this book.

(No, I have not been reading John Eldredge. Hell no, in fact.)

Bought this for Zoë on Tuesday from babyGap.

Normally, this wouldn’t be a big deal. It’s a cute dress, summer is approaching, and it’s usually not a noteworthy thing for parents to buy new clothes for their kids On this trip, though, I went in there specifically looking for a pretty white dress.

For her baptism.
(And no, she has not yet made what I’d call a “credible profession” of faith in Christ.)

Buying it freaked me out a little bit. Even though Amy and I have studied and prayed through this and have come to agree that the children of believers should be baptized, it’s still a bit weird that we’re actually going through with it. Kinda like the feeling I got when I first put on my suit on my wedding day.

More on this later.

[By the way: no way was I about to get her one of those crazy ornate wedding-dress-like baptismal gowns that we often see -- check out this page for examples of what I'm talking about. No way. One -- EXPENSIVE, especially for a one-time event. Two -- we wanted something that she'd be able to wear again throughout the summer. Three -- it'd just look strange in our church, I think.]

Nancy Pelosi on partial-birth abortion (quoted in the SF Chronicle).

This is about a procedure that any parent would want her daughter to have access to if she needed it. And to frame it as an abortion issue is doing a disservice to medicine and to our young women and our country. So I hope we can get the focus back on the fact that this Supreme Court is deciding what medical procedures are necessary for child-bearing women.

Any parent. Um . . . yeah.

Wow.

(I find it telling that Speaker Pelosi — probably subconsciously — discounts, dismisses, or disdains the role of fathers by saying “her daughter” instead of “their daughter”.)

HT: JT

I’m having way too much fun with this camera.

Like the good Calvinist I am, I took some tulip shots yesterday . . .

(Click for higher resolutions, of course.)

Great article by Jason Whitlock (no relation . . . I don’t think, anyway) on the Don Imus “nappy hoes” hubbub.

An excerpt:

Thank you, Don Imus. You extended Black History Month to April, and we can once again wallow in victimhood, protest like it’s 1965 and delude ourselves into believing that fixing your hatred is more necessary than eradicating our self-hatred.

The bigots win again.

While we’re fixated on a bad joke cracked by an irrelevant, bad shock jock, I’m sure at least one of the marvelous young women on the Rutgers basketball team is somewhere snapping her fingers to the beat of 50 Cent’s or Snoop Dogg’s or Young Jeezy’s latest ode glorifying nappy-headed pimps and hos.

I ain’t saying Jesse, Al and Vivian are gold-diggas, but they don’t have the heart to mount a legitimate campaign against the real black-folk killas.

It is us. At this time, we are our own worst enemies. We have allowed our youths to buy into a culture (hip hop) that has been perverted, corrupted and overtaken by prison culture. The music, attitude and behavior expressed in this culture is anti-black, anti-education, demeaning, self-destructive, pro-drug dealing and violent.

Rather than confront this heinous enemy from within, we sit back and wait for someone like Imus to have a slip of the tongue and make the mistake of repeating the things we say about ourselves.

Yeah . . . yeah, pretty much, Mr. Whitlock. You are a credit to our race, and to our last name. I salute you.

This is one of the fountains at Easton, the huge shopping center in town.

Perhaps next time, I’ll mess with the shutter speed to get some cool freeze-frame and blur effects going.

So I went ahead and got that camera (Fujifilm FinePix S700) I mentioned the other day. I’m afraid you’ll now have to put up with my terrible photography here once in a while.

Fortunately, you’ll occasionally be greeted by a beautiful sight such as this.