One of my favorite all-time movies was Karate Kid, released 25 years ago! Mr. Myagi, the wise handyman and old karate master, agreed to teach Danel a thing or two about defense, about standing up to the bully. So he had Daniel sand his deck. “Left the circle. Right the circle.” He had him paint his fence. “Brush stroke up. Brush stroke down.” And he had him buff his car. “Wax on. Wax Off.” It was excruciating to the boy.... Read more
Have you noticed? Men are fools. For proof, just look at the jokes, the innuendo of stupidity, and the subject of thousands of sitcom gags. The fool, the oaf, the bumbling male is so common in movies that it’s expected. Jim Carrey, Jack Black, Ray Romano, and Owen Wilson have made millions strutting this persona. They are the complete opposite of the Archie Bunker-George Jefferson-Fred Flinstone buffonery that dominated the airwaves a generation ago. Admittedly, for thousands of years, men dominated and put down femininity. Women... Read more
It was a living room circus and my boys were in the center stage. My back was flat on the carpet and the sheer delight was evident from the peals of laughter. One at a time, they leaned forward on my legs, and with a kick upward, I would vault them into a mini-backwards summersault, only to catch them with my hands and give them a soft landing above my head. They circled around, again and again, to perform the... Read more
Despite the fact that there are more than a million English words, sometimes you are left wordless. Mental Floss has assembled a few foreign words that simply have no English equivalent. In Yiddish, a Luftmensch is someone who is a dreamer, with no practical business sense. In Turkish, the word Gumusservi is used to describe moonlight glimmering off water. In German, Kummerspeck is the word to describe excess weight gained from emotional overeating. It literally translates “grief bacon.” In Japanese, there’s a word to describe gazing... Read more
Nancy Franson, who blogs at the delightful Out of My Alleged Mind, recently reflected on a job she had as a teenager. It was at a pizza joint and it was definitely without glamor. The back room was kept at such a high heat that the employees baked, along with the pies. The owner mainly sat in a corner and chain-smoked, glowering at his employees and barking out orders in Greek. It wasn’t fun. She had poor training, zero prospects... Read more
Throughout the history of mankind, there has never been a period of genuine peace. If swords were not drawn or if gun powder wasn’t wafting in the air, then certainly angry words were being flung back and forth between nations, tribes and peoples. Wars and rumors of wars reverberate across shaky borders, separated by the barbed wire that defines temporal lines on the map. The ancients fought wars with crude weapons – spears, arrows, boiling oil and rocks flung on... Read more
The discussion this week on technology has launched a whole string of thoughts, angles and impacts on how it is impacting our culture, our spiritual lives and our children. Photo via Flikr by Delta Whiskey For me, it started on Wednesday with my comment, “We don’t need technology. We need each other.” Yesterday, there was quite a bit of discussion about How Smart Phones Make Us Dumb. Michelle DeRusha over at Graceful thinks that technology “is changing the way my brain processes... Read more
Interesting that there is a whole buzz right now about technology, and the fear that it is ruining us. Yesterday, I wrote about the four girls in Wendy’s who were sitting at a table together, so entrenched in music and texting that they ignored each other. The social implications of all our “devices” is untold, yet frightening. Glenn Young, over at Faith Fiction and Friends wrote about a similiar incident, while he stood in line with six other people who... Read more
Four girls, sitting in a booth in Wendy’s. Biggie Size drinks dominating the tables, wrappers in a pile, the meal was done. But they weren’t talking about boys, fashion or school. It was… silent. They all wore earbuds plugged into iPods, while they were tapping text messages into their cell phones. Zero interaction. It was quite a sight. Four girls together — and so far apart from each other.I remember my brother and I camped out in front of the television, watching... Read more
The trends in society are staggering. My, how far we’ve fallen since I’ve first been cognizant of the world around me. Here in the Denver area, there are more medical marijuana dispensaries than there are Starbucks. And we have a lot of Starbucks. I read about the military gay pride parade in San Diego that drew more than 200 members of our military who proudly wear the uniform and yet are now open in their homosexuality. We have amazing connectedness with smart phones, Facebook, Twitter and other... Read more
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