Some Blog Site

Now that no one is talking about Font-fil-A anymore, it’s time to announce that Font Grill has released a new font.

Introducing: Beast Font

Go download Beast.

Why Beast? People will remember that more easily than BeEast, which is the logo it was based on.

For some reason or another, the song Baby Shark is very popular with our kids. All our kids, from the high-schooler down to the second-grader.

The problem is, after hearing one or more of them singing/humming/whistling Baby Shark, I find it is easily stuck in my head too.

In order to share this wonderful experience with all of you, I present ways to help keep the song foremost in one’s mind.

Try asking your kids the following questions:

• What’s the best Mario Kart track?
• Why is that room scary?
• How do you know which tree is a dogwood tree?
• Why won’t my car start?
• What do the herald angels sing?

Trust me, after a few of those questions, the kids will be begging you to stop.

If you want the answers, scroll down.

• Baby Park
• Cause it’s dark
• By its bark
• There’s no spark
• They sing hark

My opinion has been that Brave New World was much more on point than 1984, yet for some reason 1984 got all the press and is the default example of dystopia.

After the election results of yesterday, I am beginning to think that Lord of the Flies is a more appropriate analogy to today. Just think of it – my state just legalized a psychoactive drug. I’m trying to live peacefully in my little part of the island, and the other kids are running around crazily and messing everything up. When are the adults going to show up and restore order?

Okay, maybe it’s not that bad. But it certainly isn’t good. I’m not going to rehash (haha) all the arguments around the legalization debate here. It’s bad enough that the vape store opened up a block away from our middle school, now my parenting trek is even more uphill with the passage of this proposal.

I’m hoping that it doesn’t take as long for society to recognize the problems of smoking cannabis as it did to recognize the problems of smoking tobacco. Tobacco was popular for quite some time before people came to their senses and got a number of restrictions enacted. Related side note: my kids will never experience the standard procedure that I grew up with to ask for a non-smoking table when walking into a restaurant. Back in my day…

Anyway, that’s enough rambling for now. If the mobs start acting up, just spray some more soma at them.

I had another post lined up, but I realized this publication date happens to be a holiday – Reformation Day. It is when kids get dressed up and go door to door handing out their lists of grievances against the church, or something like that.

In case you’re wondering, the kids’ costumes of choice this year are a ninja, a mummy, Ranger’s Apprentice, and a traffic cone.

Nothing to see here today. I’m trying to catch up on sleep after changing time zones. More posts on that will be coming up soon. Plus today is a holiday, at least where I am it is.

One of the options at my accent-generating website is an Irish accent. It’s a tough one, because much of the Irish accent can’t be spelled – it’s intonation and such. But that doesn’t stop people from trying to sound Irish. The following image is a graph of website traffic during the month of March. Without looking at the dates at the bottom, can you guess which day was St. Patrick’s Day?

If only there were a popular Australian holiday in the US, that would certainly bump up the stats then too.

As you may know, today is the 500th anniversary of the Reformation. I won’t go into all the history and details of the reformation, as there are many other knowledgeable sites with good information if you’re so inclined.

Today’s topic is actually better suited to John Wycliffe than Martin Luther, but I think they would share the same sentiment, along with a bit of Aldous Huxley.

Luther (and Wycliffe) was fighting against church officials and the rules they imposed. Not because they rules per se, but because they were not part of the Bible. Luther’s cause was to obey God, and if man’s rules didn’t comply with God’s then it was man’s rules that lost out.

The reformation started by Luther and continued by Wycliffe included putting God’s words in the hands of the people. Rather than needing a priest to tell the people what God thought, the people should read the scripture for themselves. The main point being that people should read the Bible for themselves, pray to God themselves, and generally interact with God directly rather than through a middleman.

Luther was known for writing songs that were to be sung by the congregation, rather than sung by a choir and heard by the congregation. Wycliffe was known for translating the Bible into the common language of the people, rather than keeping it in the fancy academic languages of Latin/Greek/Hebrew.

What do we see happening today? Rather than church leaders forbidding people to sing themselves or read their own Bibles for themselves, we have the Brave New World approach: have an entertaining worship band that is so loud that it doesn’t matter if the congregation sings or not, and put the Bible verses on the screen so the congregation doesn’t need to look in their own Bibles.

I don’t think it’s being done on purpose to make lazy/uninformed Christians, but it can get there pretty easily. Make things so convenient that congregants don’t need to practice any individual disciplines.

To throw a little bit of Orwell here (more Animal Farm than 1984), what’s to keep the pastor from rephrasing the verse he puts on the screen, to better make his point? What’s to keep him from dropping Bible verses from the slides after a while? Put something on a giant screen, and people will pay attention to it.

We’re coming full circle from the start of the reformation in that people are happy to have a middleman do the work of reading, singing, and praying for them so they don’t have to.