02.28.06
for all you cynics out there
This just goes to show that the news isn’t ALL bad.
[Note: Have Kleenex handy.]
02.27.06
two years too late
Heavens to Betsy, is it ever a shame that I didn’t happen on this guy’s website sooner. This guy puts that TMI guy to shame (and by the phrase “puts to shame” I mean, “is WAY holier than”.)
On the plus side, though, it would seem that he, too, has a fondness for Christianizing song lyrics. Here’s one that was penned to be sung to the tune of “Smells like Teen Spirit” by Nirvana. (Evidently, Cobain’s anthem about apathy, ambivalence, and consumerism didn’t quite qualify as holy…):
Smells like Holy Spirit
In His Glory, it’s less dangerous
He is risen, exon’rate us
Jesus’s love is so contagious
He is risen, exon’rate usThe Messiah
He’s no liah
Praise Him or face
Eternal FireYeah
Halle-Halle-Halle-lujah
Halle-Halle-Halle-lujah
Halle-Halle-Halle-lujah
Halle-Halle-HalleI’m inspired, I’ve aflatus
Two thousand years; that’s some hiatus
Evolutionary theorists, come debate us
God’s the Man, He…did create us
We’re His fish - watch Him come bait usYeah
Comic genius, buddy, comic genius. If only you meant it to be funny, *sigh*.
02.26.06
to 61 percent of the people that read this blog
It would seem (based on my calculations) that 61 percent of you use Microsoft’s Internet Explorer to visit this site. Now, I’m not trying to wish any ill will on people for using but Microsoft Internet Explorer. In fact, if you want to keep visiting this site, using Internet Explorer to do your browsing dirty work, I can honestly say I don’t care a bit. I’ll think no less of you.
However, if you were curious about why about 30 percent of my current browsing public has switched to Firefox, (and another 9 or so percent browses on a different platform altogether) here’s what I think might be going on.
First, this blog is not designed to be seen in Internet Explorer (IE). I have given no thought to the way the design appears in IE and I don’t really ever plan on taking the time to do it. If things get messed up in IE, so be it.
Second, IE let a whole host of spyware sorts of programs run amok on your computer, thus slowing down your performance and increasing the likelihood of a system crash. Since I started using Firefox about 2 years ago, I haven’t had a single piece of spyware get onto my computer. I’ve heard of IE users who can rack up over 100 spyware programs on their machines in less than 3 months.
Third, for what I use it for, Firefox offers greater functionality and add ons than are available through the Microsoft browser. For example, I make use of the Web Developers Toolbar from Firefox that allows me to be able to see layout features, alter stylesheets, and view source code for other sites (among many other things.)
If you care about system performance, browsing speed, fewer popups, and less spyware, Firefox might be for you. And, here’s the best part: It’s free. That’s right you don’t have to pay for it.
All it takes is about 10 minutes of your time to download and install the program. You’ll be glad you did.
02.25.06
frighteningly accurate
| What Your Underwear Says About You |
 You tend to buy new underwear instead of doing laundry. You’re not afraid to lay around resting your hand in your pants. |
02.17.06
of the seemingly endless wisdom of the woman i call Jen
Friends, I may not be incredibly smart. (And, that’s probably no shocker to many of you.) And, honestly, I’m a man of quite some loquaciousness. My wife is not. But, if there’s one thing I’ve learned in the about 5 or so years my wife and I have been together, when she takes the time to say something, you’d damn well better listen because it’s going to be good.
Thus, when my wife offered a comment with regard to my post “if they sang their theology,” I knew, even without reading it, that it would be worth the time of frequent visitors to this blog. Here’s what she had to say:
As the supreme lurker on this blog, I’ll step out once and stick up for Brandon. Is Brandon overgeneralizing about fundamentalism? Of course! Is this satire? Well, I probably won’t teach it to my freshmen, but yes, he is blowing something out of proportion in a humorous way to make a point. And this might be an overgeneralization, but knowing the context Brandon comes from, he’s not doing it with the mean spirit that Jacke might suggest.
You see, Brandon has to live with me, a woman who grew up fundamentalist, whose family still is, and whose college friends still are. All of these people come from several denominations, so it is not a denominational thing but rather a life attitude. And all of these people, and myself to some extent, even though I live with Brandon, tend to separate ourselves in some way from the world and culture that God created because we see some parts of it as evil. So the “withdrawn from the world” part of the song rang very true to me. We also can be very judgmental; maybe “may the rest of the world burn in hell” is a bit extreme (but it is satire…Jonathan Swift didn’t really want people to eat their babies), but I certainly looked down on other Christians who did things that I didn’t consider very Christian, and one of my college friends mentioned at Christmas that she now thinks less of Heath Ledger because he played a gay man. So I definitely know others, and myself, have condemned others to hell.
So as a former fundamentalist (and always will be, a little, I’m sure), this song rings true to me, in a very blown out of proportion way. And if Brandon is honest with himself, he would probably say that Jacke’s song rings true too (we certainly have some big ticket items in our house that aren’t helping the poor any). I think we have to all be okay with some finger-pointing in the Christian community, as long as it’s meant to help people see God and our world from different points of view. We all have a lot to learn from each other, and we can all help each other change to be more like who God wants us to be. I know that this has been the case for Brandon and I, in this marriage of two very different people. Heck, I even got a Calvinist to question predestination! But, in all seriousness, I hope this blog can also be a place where people from different backgrounds can point fingers a little bit as long as the goal is to help each other.
So feel free to point the finger back at Brandon (he often needs it, and it makes my job a bit easier), but understand he does speak from a context of having to live life with me!
It occurs to me that in that comment lies some serious truth. Truth as it relates to the discussions we’ve had over at Zalm’s blog about ethical dialogue, and truth as it relates to the discussions we’ve had at this place.
In a nutshell, what I’ve learned from my wife tonight might be summed up like this: When we dialogue (and sometimes that dialogue consists of frustration) there needs to be an ethic of what I’m going to term a “prophetic humility.” In our dialogue, we seek to tell the truth. Often in a written medium, that truth may consist of satire and hyperbole. Telling the truth, the truth that sometimes is hard to hear, especially, is prophetic. But, I suspect, the most appropriate companion of prophesy is humility.
Humility allows us to, amid our truth searching, approach life with the understanding that we’re all in need of a little prophesy from time to time. Yeah, even me…probably especially me–God knows, humility ain’t my forte.
The humble prophet knows herself (or himself) to be a hypocrite. Pointing out the hypocrisy of a world and life view probably shouldn’t be as jarring as it is in the Christian community. Telling me I’m a hypocrite is sort of like telling me I breathe air. And, sometimes, I think that’s what the Christian community, even the blogging Christian community is quite fond of doing. Perhaps, we all should be a little less fond of finding chinks in eachothers armour.
So, late tonight, as I write this, I’m going to be quite thankful. Thankful because I’ve been blessed with my very own real life prophetess, a prophetess who is ever so good at knowing the truth when she sees it, and a prophetess who is quite willing to tell the truth to her oft-bumbling-idiot of a husband.
02.16.06
a harmless little prank
Holy crap. I write one post about whining about how I don’t have the time to blog and I get a day or two where I’ve got both the time and topics to write about. Let this be a lesson to all of you: Whining works!
Anyway, I had a stroke of genius recently. Well, maybe not genius, but this could be fun nonetheless.
You probably all get fake emails from Paypal and Ebay with ruthless and conniving internet sharks who are trying to ‘phish’ usernames and passwords from unsuspecting internet users. I thought it might be fun if we all fought back a little. I mean, there’s very little that either Paypal or Ebay can actually do to STOP account phishing. However, I suspect that an intrepid group of bloggers could actually prove to be, at very least, an annoyance to these illicit password phishing schemes.
Here’s how the scheme works: you’ll be sent an email from a company posing to be either Paypal or Ebay. They’ll request that you “update your records” or that you “have been bidding on an auction” (which you haven’t really). And, they’ll send you to a spoof website that is something other than paypal.com or ebay.com.
Here’s what I propose:
- Remain diligent about detecting fake Paypal and Ebay pages. When you find one, email the URL to me at fake@badchristian.com. (You’ll be able to find this post by clicking on the Phished password fun category on the right sidebar.)
- Here’s the fun part. Visit a few of the links that intrepid internet users have posted and go to those pages and fill out random bad information into the fake form (which looks like a real ebay or paypal site.) We may not be able to stop password phishers, but it would seem like a good idea to make them sort through huge quantities of useless information!
- Be sure not to use your own, or any real information.
- It would probably be best to make up new information for each time you visit a ‘phishing’ site. That way phishers wouldn’t be able to sort out repeat bad information.
- Google bomb this post with something like “fake ebay email”.
- Tell all your friends that in their spare internet time, the should make some trouble! Feel free to link to this post.
Questions? Let me know!
And, just to kick things off with a bang, here’s the first fake paypal phishing site:
http://ns1.bms.ac.th/~index/.confirm/index.php?MfcISAPICommand=SignInFPP
(Cut and paste the URL so as to avoid too much referrer garbage that could be picked up by the phishing site.)
ADDENDUM: Due to the sage advice of both James and Joe, who are clearly both more web saavy than I, I’ve offered a few suggestions. Instead of creating hyperlinks to the phishing sites, it would be most helpful, I think, to simply paste the URL in question into your comment. Also, if you do decide to participate in a little Googlebomb action, be sure NOT to include the “rel=”nofollow” ” tag in that URL so that this post IS registered with Google.
Also, if at some point you DO link to one of these phishing sites, be certain to include the aforementioned tag so that this site doesn’t get any extra ’search-engine-love’.
Finally, it might be most helpful email me the URL rather than to post it here…this will allow me to put your suggestion in the main post up in lights.
02.15.06
if they sang their theology
So, as is so often the case in these here parts, the minute I write a post about being an absentee blogger is the same minute that I have an idea that I feel the need to blog about. This morning on the drive into East Lansing I got to thinking about fundagelicals, and, well, how much fun they really are.
I got to musing about how lots of fundagelicals sing a good game in church on sunday morning, but their theology isn’t really best represented. Thus, I thought I’d, you know, help them out a bit by penning some more appropriate words to popular praise songs. If this goes well, I may work on a few more fundagelical praise tunes. If it flops, well, that’ll probably be no surprise to any of us and I’ll stop.
So here we go:
Withdrawn from the World
(To the tune of Shine Jesus Shine)
Stanza 1:
Lord this world that you made is so dangerous;
We’ll form a militia so that it won’t injure us.
Movies, and gambling, and whores abound;
We’ll keep our heads in the sand unfound.
Withdrawn from the world;
All boys and girls!Chorus:
Withdrawn from the world
Hiding from all creation
Withdrawn from the world
May hell burn every nation
We’re so afraid
Come back today! (2x)Stanza 2:
Those unbelievers, Dear God, they’re so awful;
The godless bastards will burn in hell.
We’ll pay lip service to saving the lost;
Meanwhile we’ll work on trademarking the cross.
Let’s run from all sin;
Ignoring what’s within!Chorus:
Withdrawn from the world
Hiding from all creation
Withdrawn from the world
May hell burn every nation
We’re so afraid
Come back today! (2x)
an absentee blogger
Friends, I apologize for the light blogging lately. I know, according to my stats package, that there’s been somebody from Tanzania who’s been hitting the refresh button like mad. Dear friend in Tanzania, please grant me grace. School’s been insane, work’s been even worse than school, and my thesis (which somehow seems to surpass the school category due to its sheer magnitude) is turning into a black hole of time.
Not to whine about all of this. But dammit, I’m whining.
But, just to let you know, I am working on a few things for this place. First, I’m trying to write a journalistic piece. Probably, I won’t post that here, but you might get some behind the scenes looks at Brandon, the journalist. We’ll see.
Also, and somewhat related to this whole journalistic escapade I’m embarking upon, I’m thinking of doing a whole other series on Christian t-shirts. Frankly, I’m finding the community here to be a tad “fundy-less” and I think that’s sad, for obvious reasons. I mean, what’s a blog without flames, right?
So, that’s a minor recap of what’s in the works, stay tuned.
02.13.06
2 new beers
So, inspired by my own words (and, of course, my conversation with the Most High), I traipsed on down to the local liquor store to buy me some brew. It just so happens that this is the BEST PLACE TO BUY BEER ON EARTH. Why? You ask.
Well, I’ll tell you. They have beers for sale as onsies.
And, no. I’m not talking about the baby clothing “onsies” I’m talking about beer being priced by the bottle rather than by the six pack. Onsies are fantastic, especially for those of you who are afraid of committment. You know you hate to have to buy a whole six pack of beer that you may or may not be entirely fond of, and, my friends, onsies are the answer to that dilemma. (And, in addition to beer being sold in onsies, I happen to know the owners…and that also makes it the best place on earth to buy beer.)
Anyway, I picked up a number of beers, and thus far I’ve tried two of the beers that I picked out. Coincidentally, both beers hail from the greater New Orleans area, so, I suppose, you could call this my “Sufjan Stevens of Beer Goes to the Big Easy” post.
- Abita Brewing Company’s Purple Haze was a wheat brew that (despite the amberish color) I found to be reminiscent of a belgian white. This yeasty ale promised to have been flavoured by raspberry (if you believe what the bottle was telling you.) The head on this ale seemed to develop and stay nicely. However, while I loved the yeasty crisp nose of this beer, I found the finish to be watery. Also, I was hoping for a little more raspberry from this beer. I’m sad to report that I didn’t find it. Now, not all is lost with the purple haze, I will say that it is a nice way to enjoy a pretty good Belgian-ish wheat ale, and, if you’re a beer novice, you may actually find the lack of finish appealing. However, I must admit that this beer didn’t live up to all that was promised on the label. Namely, if a beer promises raspberrys, it damn well better deliver.
- Dixie Brewing Company’s Darkened Voodoo Lager fared a bit better than the first beer I tried. The head retention was a bit poor, in fact, there wasn’t really a head to speak of. The nose had detectable fruity notes of prunes and raisins. The beer started off with hints of caramel and the finish had notes of chocolate or coffee. Really, I can’t complain too much about this beer. Beyond the head retention it was pretty good, and because I don’t drink much Schwarzbier (the family to which this beer belongs) I’m not incredibly qualified to make informed comment on this one. I’d say if you like German dopplebocks (i.e. anything that ends in -ator like Optimator, Celebrator, or Salvator) you’d probably be pretty happy with Darkened Voodoo Lager. Reading between the lines here, this probably isn’t a beer novice’s first choice (or at least it shouldn’t be.)
