Wednesday, September 22, 2010

What is This?

Took a sick day. Home from work.

What happened to Drew Carey? And I thought Bob Barker looked ill.

After just a little checking, it turns out Drew Carey lost weight.

Can you watch The Price is Right online yet? We're thinking of getting rid of our sat TV and getting all of our entertainment pleasure from the WWW. I also want to rid myself of a land line and go 100% cellular, iPhone 4 probably. We'd save about $60 a month in the deal, though we may have to get a plan with more minutes, which would cut into the savings. I do think I'd miss the football games. It's not readily apparent to me that those are streamed live.

A few weeks ago when I was talking about skeptical pod casts I failed to mention a couple of others that I think compliment the skeptics nicely. One is Renewing Your Mind with R.C. Sproul, and the other is Unbelievable with Justin Brierley.  Unbelievable is excellent. Brierley gets believers and unbelievers of various ilks together to debate a particular topic. The debates are always well cultured and subdued. Not at all what you would find on American radio with everyone talking over each other. I assume that's because most of the guests are British chaps.

Speaking of believers, what is this?

Here's the article.

I saw this reading the bikesnobnyc blog.

Excerpts from the article:

In order to remain relevant in this new landscape, many evangelical pastors and church leaders are following the lead of the hipster trendsetters, making sure their churches can check off all the important items on the hipster checklist:
  • Get the church involved in social justice and creation care.
  • Show clips from R-rated Coen Brothers films (e.g., No Country for Old Men, Fargo) during services.
  • Sponsor church outings to microbreweries.
  • Put a worship pastor onstage decked in clothes from American Apparel.
  • Be okay with cussing.
  • Print bulletins only on recycled cardstock.
  • Use Helvetica fonts as much as possible.
  • Leverage technologies like Twitter.
I didn't realized hipsters hated serifs so much, but OK.  Here's more:

Hipster Christianity's attention to shock value manifests in others ways. Some churches hold their services in bars and nightclubs—Mosaic in L.A. meets in the Mayan nightclub, and North Brooklyn Vineyard in New York meets at a place called the Trash Bar. Some churches, like Grace Chicago, host wine tastings or schedule outings to microbreweries. I even attended an Anglican church a few years ago that sponsored a cookout with fine wines, beer, and a selection of cigars from the priest's own humidor. Other churches focus more on the shock value of sermons, delving into touchy subjects such as homosexuality, child abuse, sex trafficking, HIV/AIDS, and so on, sometimes with an f-bomb or two thrown in for good measure.

Another distinguishing mark of hipster Christianity is the music in its worship services. In keeping with the overarching "avoid doing what everyone else is doing" motif of hipsterdom at large, most of the hipster churches I visited seemed done with the U2- starry-rock style that now dominates megachurch evangelicalism. Rather than contemporary praise choruses, many of them favored centuries-old hymns.

If hipsters cannot completely overthrow the structures that bind them, they can at least destabilize them by engaging in hedonistic behavior: smoking, drinking, cursing, sexual experimentation, and so on. It's about freedom, partying, and transgression—not in the Jersey Shore, frat-party sense (unless ironically), but in the "bourbon cask ales taste good and I don't care if I get drunk" sense. Hipsters ridicule bourgeois concerns such as "cigarettes cause cancer" and "drinking should be done in moderation," opting instead to recklessly embrace such vices with "why not?" abandon. If you aren't willing to engage in at least some of this "subversive hedonism," you will have a hard time maintaining any hipster credibility.

Dude, I am totally converting to Hipsterism.

Monday, September 20, 2010

Hermann Cyclocross

Hey, got fourth place in my race at Hermann!

OK, there were eight riders, in the beginner men's race. But I was pleased as punch to get that fourth place. Again, I show up with the only bike that costs less than $250. And I'm not talking about the frame. I'm talking the whole bike.  There was one other guy that had "regular" pedals. The rest of them had their fancy clipless pedals and actual 'cross bikes. I had a Schwinn.

They started the beginner men, and then thirty seconds later they started the nine beginner women. Two of the women beat all of the men.  I finished behind the fourth place girl. That was Saturday.

I was supposed to race Sunday as well, but Saturday night the park flooded, so they canceled Sunday's race. Dang it! After it started raining I was looking forward to racing in the mud.

It was fun while it lasted, though once or twice I thought my heart was going to explode.

Later, my wife and I made an evening of it and ate German food and sampled Hermann.

Now, here are some pics.












Friday, September 3, 2010

I'm Training for Cyclocross

Well, not really. Not in a real way. My training is pretty pathetic.  I read these blogs about people going out on these 1,000 mile bike rides in the morning and I think, "I don't really know how to ride a bike, do I?"

It's hard to train for a ride when you don't know what the distance is.  The race is in Hermann, MO at the city park. There are some stairs to climb. Other than that I don't know anything else.

I have practiced jumping off my bike, picking it up, and then carrying it over an obstacle.  So far, no one's seen me do this.  I'm sure they'd think I was crazy. To add to the crazy, when I do it I act like I'm in a big hurry. So I can only imagine what that looks like.

"WTH?! What's that boy doin'?"

In my neck of the woods there's this old road that is closed off. I presume they closed it sometime after they built the dam. At any rate, it is subject to flooding, which leaves all kinds of debris in the form of logs scattered across the old pavement.  It's quite secluded, and I've only seen someone back there once, but they were fishing off the first bridge.  I'd say the entire length of the closed road is about a mile, so once you get beyond that first bridge, you're not likely to see very many people.

Where was I going? Oh yes. So I tear down that road, hopping off my bike to carry it over the logs, hopping back on riding some more.  Wow, just reading that back it does sound crazy. Perhaps if I were in the company of other cyclists it would look more normal. Alone it appears I've got some kind of obsessive compulsion. "Must carry bike and jump over log. Didn't do it right. Must do it again."

OK, enough for now. Search YouTube for Hermann Cyclocross. You'll find it. Enough for now.

Hermann Cross

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