Thursday, January 22, 2009

Godpleaser

 


"I just want my life to glorify His Son
And make my Father proud that I'm His child before I'm done.
No need to pat me on the back
Or stop and shake my hand
I just wanna hear the Father say 'Well done, well done!' "
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Wednesday, January 21, 2009

Who Took My Earring?

 
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I Always Sleep With My Dali

 
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A Van Gogh Piece

 
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The Rock Band Kimes Kids

 
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From L to R: Nikki, Mercy and Ian

This is during a 24 hour period in which all my kids did was play Rock Band on Wii. They loved it! Okay, I loved it too, especially doing well on the vocals of "Won't Get Fooled Again"

Honestly, it's just a really great pic of them, although Diane says they look all "Saturday morningish"

Monday, January 19, 2009

Which Way Is Up?

 
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Litter

 


"We have landed on the moon
But we'll clutter that up soon
Our sense of freedom's gotten out of hand..."

-Larry Norman
"Nightmare" from the album "So Long Ago The Garden"
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Thursday, January 15, 2009

A New Muppet!

 


Jim Henson was reincarnated as a macaque! I'm sure he's happy, though.
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You Know I Hate It When You Kiss Like That!

 
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Wednesday, January 14, 2009

Not For Kids

 


Paprika is a Japanese anime-- an animated movie-- but it is certainly not for children. Nevertheless, it is an excellent movie-- fantastic animation, a gripping story and interesting characters. I highly recommend it, if you don't mind some disturbing scenes.
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My Beloved Son, Ian

 


With his backpack, which somewhat dwarfs him.
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Tuesday, January 13, 2009

Friday, January 9, 2009

Connection

 


There is no background. There is no foreground. Everything is equal in reality. We are just as important as everyone else. And they are just as important as us. We are not staring in our own autobiographical movie. Everyone is all together in a Robert Altman film, yet we all think we are the star. What we haven't figured out yet is that there ARE NO STARS. There's only us.
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Thursday, January 8, 2009

Not Just Africa, but the Homeless, Too

An article from the London Times:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/matthew_parris/article5400568.ece


As an atheist, I truly believe Africa needs God


By Matthew Parris

Before Christmas I returned, after 45 years, to the country that as a boy I knew as Nyasaland. Today it's Malawi, and The Times Christmas Appeal includes a small British charity working there. Pump Aid helps rural communities to install a simple pump, letting people keep their village wells sealed and clean. I went to see this work.

It inspired me, renewing my flagging faith in development charities. But travelling in Malawi refreshed another belief, too: one I've been trying to banish all my life, but an observation I've been unable to avoid since my African childhood. It confounds my ideological beliefs, stubbornly refuses to fit my world view, and has embarrassed my growing belief that there is no God.

Now a confirmed atheist, I've become convinced of the enormous contribution that Christian evangelism makes in Africa: sharply distinct from the work of secular NGOs, government projects and international aid efforts. These alone will not do. Education and training alone will not do. In Africa Christianity changes people's hearts. It brings a spiritual transformation. The rebirth is real. The change is good.

I used to avoid this truth by applauding - as you can - the practical work of mission churches in Africa. It's a pity, I would say, that salvation is part of the package, but Christians black and white, working in Africa, do heal the sick, do teach people to read and write; and only the severest kind of secularist could see a mission hospital or school and say the world would be better without it. I would allow that if faith was needed to motivate missionaries to help, then, fine: but what counted was the help, not the faith.

But this doesn't fit the facts. Faith does more than support the missionary; it is also transferred to his flock. This is the effect that matters so immensely, and which I cannot help observing.

First, then, the observation. We had friends who were missionaries, and as a child I stayed often with them; I also stayed, alone with my little brother, in a traditional rural African village. In the city we had working for us Africans who had converted and were strong believers. The Christians were always different. Far from having cowed or confined its converts, their faith appeared to have liberated and relaxed them. There was a liveliness, a curiosity, an engagement with the world - a directness in their dealings with others - that seemed to be missing in traditional African life. They stood tall.

At 24, travelling by land across the continent reinforced this impression. From Algiers to Niger, Nigeria, Cameroon and the Central African Republic, then right through the Congo to Rwanda, Tanzania and Kenya, four student friends and I drove our old Land Rover to Nairobi.

We slept under the stars, so it was important as we reached the more populated and lawless parts of the sub-Sahara that every day we find somewhere safe by nightfall. Often near a mission.

Whenever we entered a territory worked by missionaries, we had to acknowledge that something changed in the faces of the people we passed and spoke to: something in their eyes, the way they approached you direct, man-to-man, without looking down or away. They had not become more deferential towards strangers - in some ways less so - but more open.

This time in Malawi it was the same. I met no missionaries. You do not encounter missionaries in the lobbies of expensive hotels discussing development strategy documents, as you do with the big NGOs. But instead I noticed that a handful of the most impressive African members of the Pump Aid team (largely from Zimbabwe) were, privately, strong Christians. “Privately” because the charity is entirely secular and I never heard any of its team so much as mention religion while working in the villages. But I picked up the Christian references in our conversations. One, I saw, was studying a devotional textbook in the car. One, on Sunday, went off to church at dawn for a two-hour service.

It would suit me to believe that their honesty, diligence and optimism in their work was unconnected with personal faith. Their work was secular, but surely affected by what they were. What they were was, in turn, influenced by a conception of man's place in the Universe that Christianity had taught.

There's long been a fashion among Western academic sociologists for placing tribal value systems within a ring fence, beyond critiques founded in our own culture: “theirs” and therefore best for “them”; authentic and of intrinsically equal worth to ours.

I don't follow this. I observe that tribal belief is no more peaceable than ours; and that it suppresses individuality. People think collectively; first in terms of the community, extended family and tribe. This rural-traditional mindset feeds into the “big man” and gangster politics of the African city: the exaggerated respect for a swaggering leader, and the (literal) inability to understand the whole idea of loyal opposition.

Anxiety - fear of evil spirits, of ancestors, of nature and the wild, of a tribal hierarchy, of quite everyday things - strikes deep into the whole structure of rural African thought. Every man has his place and, call it fear or respect, a great weight grinds down the individual spirit, stunting curiosity. People won't take the initiative, won't take things into their own hands or on their own shoulders.

How can I, as someone with a foot in both camps, explain? When the philosophical tourist moves from one world view to another he finds - at the very moment of passing into the new - that he loses the language to describe the landscape to the old. But let me try an example: the answer given by Sir Edmund Hillary to the question: Why climb the mountain? “Because it's there,” he said.

To the rural African mind, this is an explanation of why one would not climb the mountain. It's... well, there. Just there. Why interfere? Nothing to be done about it, or with it. Hillary's further explanation - that nobody else had climbed it - would stand as a second reason for passivity.

Christianity, post-Reformation and post-Luther, with its teaching of a direct, personal, two-way link between the individual and God, unmediated by the collective, and unsubordinate to any other human being, smashes straight through the philosphical/spiritual framework I've just described. It offers something to hold on to to those anxious to cast off a crushing tribal groupthink. That is why and how it liberates.

Those who want Africa to walk tall amid 21st-century global competition must not kid themselves that providing the material means or even the knowhow that accompanies what we call development will make the change. A whole belief system must first be supplanted.

And I'm afraid it has to be supplanted by another. Removing Christian evangelism from the African equation may leave the continent at the mercy of a malign fusion of Nike, the witch doctor, the mobile phone and the machete.

Wednesday, January 7, 2009

Atheists Aren't All That Bad

Article found on Crosswalk:

Some Christians Welcome Atheist Ads on Buses

The Christian Post reports that an atheist group's ad campaign hit London buses yesterday, but some Christians aren't worried about the ads. The think tank Theos believes the ads - which read, "There's probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life" - will only encourage people to consider their faith. "Telling someone 'there's probably no God' is a bit like telling them that they've probably remembered to lock their front door. It creates the doubt that they might not have done so," said Theos Director Paul Woolley. Mike Elms, a fellow of The Marketing Society and former chief executive of ad agencies Ogilvy & Mather and Tempus/CIA, agreed. "[A]theists are challenging us to make that choice one way or another. The atheist campaign opens the door toward a very public debate on the existence and nature of God."

Monday, January 5, 2009

Orange Juice and Toothpase Hell

Why Does Everything Taste Bad After You Brush Your Teeth?

Originally posted on Mental Floss Blog:
http://blogs.static.mentalfloss.com/blogs/archives/19516.html

by Matt Soniak

If you have no idea why we’re pondering that question today, go brush your teeth real quick and grab a drink (orange juice, iced tea, beer—anything except water). Awful, isn’t it?

You can thank sodium laureth sulfate, also known as sodium lauryl ether sulfate (SLES), or sodium lauryl sulfate (SLS) for ruining your drink, depending on which toothpaste you use. Both of these chemicals are surfactants – wetting agents that lower the surface tension of a liquid – that are added to toothpastes to create foam and make the paste easier to spread around your mouth (they’re also important ingredients in detergents, fabric softeners, paints, laxatives, surfboard waxes and insecticides).

While surfactants make brushing our teeth a lot easier, they do more than make foam. Both SLES and SLS mess with our taste buds in two ways. One, they suppress the receptors on our taste buds that perceive sweetness, inhibiting our ability to pick up the sweet notes of food and drink. And, as if that wasn’t enough, they break up the phospholipids on our tongue. These fatty molecules inhibit our receptors for bitterness and keep bitter tastes from overwhelming us, but when they’re broken down by the surfactants in toothpaste, bitter tastes get enhanced.

So, anything you eat or drink after you brush is going to have less sweetness and more bitterness than it normally would. Is there any end to this torture? Yes. You don’t need foam for good toothpaste, and there are plenty out there that are SLES/SLS-free. You won’t get that rabid dog look that makes oral hygiene so much fun, but your breakfast won’t be ruined.

Saturday, January 3, 2009

Legomania!

 


The folks at Lego have WAY too much time on their hands! Not only have they created Lego replicas of the Statue of Liberty, Big Ben, and the Taj Mahal, now they copy major works of art. M.C. Escher has always been one of my favorites. And this popular picture was used by many, including the movie "Labyrinth", where you can see David Bowie challenging gravity in Escher's staircase. But Legos? I can just shake my head...
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Friday, January 2, 2009

Seven Simple Rules on How To Take A Nap

Posted on the Mental Floss Blog:
http://www.mentalfloss.com/blogs/archives/21376

Birds do it, bees do it (we think), even educated monkeys do it. So let’s do it, people. Let’s fall asleep. (The musical portion of this blog is over; thanks for indulging.)

But seriously: we’ve talked about the whys of taking naps on the blog before — they improve mood, creativity, memory function, heart health, and so much else — but never, to my knowledge, have we discussed how to take a nap. In fact, whenever we write about naps, we always get a few comments from people claiming they’re unable to nap during the day; they just can’t fall asleep, or when they do nap they wake up groggy and unable to work. In that case, read on, my sleepy friends.

1.The first thing you should know is, feeling sleepy in the afternoon is normal. It doesn’t mean you had a big lunch, or that you’re depressed, or you’re not getting enough exercise. That’s just how animals’ cycles work — every 24 hours, we have two periods of intense sleepiness. One is typically in the wee hours of the night, from about 2am to 4am, and the other is around 10 hours later, between 1pm and 3pm. If you’re a night owl and wake up later in the morning, that afternoon sleepiness may come later; if you’re an early bird, it may come earlier. But it happens to everyone; we’re physiologically hardwired to nap.

2.Naps provide different benefits depending on how long they are. A short nap of even 20 minutes will enhance alertness and concentration, mood and coordination. A nap of 90 minutes will get you into slow wave and REM sleep, which enhances creativity. If you sleep deeply and uninterruptedly the whole time, you’ll go through a full 90-minute sleep cycle, and recoup sleep you might not have gotten the night before (we’ve all heard it a million times, but most of us don’t get enough sleep at night).

3.Try not to sleep longer than 45 minutes but less than 90 minutes; then you’ll wake up in the middle of a slow-wave cycle, and be groggy. I used to hate taking naps during the day for just this reason — I would always wake up in a fog. My problem was I hadn’t yet perfected the art of the 20-minute catnap.

4.Find a nice dark place where you can lie down. It takes about 50% longer to fall asleep sitting up (this is why red eye flights usually live up to their name), and be armed with a blanket; you don’t want to be chilly. You also don’t want to be too warm, which can lead to oversleeping. (There was a kind of urban legend circulating when I was a kid: don’t fall asleep in the sun, or you’ll never wake up. Not true — but you might wake up three hours later with a ripe sunburn.)

5.White noise can help you fall asleep, especially during the day when construction crews, garbage trucks, barking dogs and other noisy awake-world things can conspire to destroy your nap. Keep a fan on, or turn on a nearby faucet for a pleasing rushing-river sound. (Just kidding about that last one.)

6.Don’t nap too close to bedtime, or you might not be able to fall asleep later. Remember, your inbuilt sleepy window is sometime in the early to mid-afternoon — try to nap then.

7.Quit that silly job where they don’t let you take naps during the day.

I Need A Nap!

Copied from Siesta Awareness
http://www.siestaawareness.org/

Do you ever feel a lull in energy levels after lunch?

Do you sometimes wish you could just have a little siesta to refresh you?

The post-lunch nap has not yet been adopted in Britain and is often considered a sign of weakness however the ‘Power Nap’ as it is commonly called, offers real benefits to health, productivity and wellbeing.

Research shows that we have a strong biological tendency to become tired in the early afternoon. A short 10-20 minute nap in the middle of a working day can increase productivity by over 30% and alertness by 100% as well as improve memory and concentration, according to NASA. Recent research shows that we can also reduce stress and the risk of heart disease by 34%. Sleep deprivation has been shown to make weight loss more difficult as well as cause accidents at work and on the road. Even 5 minutes can be beneficial!

Benefits of the 10-20 minute nap:

- More energy

- Improve productivity by over 30%

- Improve alertness by up to 100%

- Reduce stress and the risk of heart disease by 34%

- Better negotiation and communication

- Reduce risk of accidents at work and on the road

- Happiness and wellbeing

Also, check out the song, I Need A Nap written by Sandra Boyton and sung by Weird Al and Kate Winslet. Really funny!