I Want My Home Movies to Look Like This
What are your home movies like if your dad is a digital animator and visual effects specialist? They’re like awesome, is what they’re like: (Via fstoppers.com)
Month: March 2014
Unionizing Will Teach College Athletes the Law of Unintended Consequences
Economics guy Jeff Carter tells college athletes who want to unionize, “Be careful what you wish for”: Athletes see dollar signs in their eyes. But the reality will be much different. Once the dollars are spread across an entire athletic program, they will be far less than what they think. Why should a football player make more than a women’s More …
Strike That, Reverse It: Comments on World Vision’s Reversal
I hope that one day historians get to completely catalog every email, phone call, text, tweet, and Facebook message that World Vision received in response to their decision to start hiring people in same-sex marriages. For only then will we understand the full meaning of the word “blowback.” As for the reversal, Justin Taylor collects some of the early comments More …
Talent
My wife and I went out to dinner and a concert this past weekend to celebrate our 5th wedding anniversary. (The traditional gift for the 5th anniversary is wood, and the thirteen-year-old inside me is dying for someone to ask if I gave my wife some wood for our anniversary. C’mon! Ask me!) We saw a cappella singing group Pentatonix, More …
Comments on World Vision’s Capitulation
“World Vision capitulation” looks like it’s going to be a trending term for the next couple of days. Here are some early comments: Justin Taylor: Sooner rather than later every Christian leader will need to go on record as to whether or not he believes the painful truth of 1 Corinthians 6:9-10 and the glorious possibility of 1 Corinthians 6:11. More …
What to Do Now That Your NCAA Tournament Bracket is Completely Ruined
So, we’re through the first weekend of a three-week-long basketball tournament, and all my bracket is good for now is reminding me that I still don’t know how to pronounce “Creighton.” (But after they yakked up their game against Baylor, I guess I don’t have to. Yes, I had them in the Final Four.) The way I look at it, More …
Sometimes Scarcity is a Good Thing
In my single days, I streamlined my morning routine so I could stay in bed as long as possible. When I started losing my hair, there was a part of me that was kind of glad about it, because not having it to wash or comb meant that I could slap the snooze button one more time. During one period, More …
Big Bang Science Raises Questions
As it should. Raising questions is one of the main jobs of science, after all. But some of those questions are addressed straight on, and others are danced around harder than a boom box in either Breakin’ or Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo. GetReligion highlights some of the latter kind of questions in the coverage of recent Big Bang experiments. First, More …
Let’s Handicap Crazy Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 Theories
I realize this is a delicate situation to talk about, because it involves the lives of 200+ passengers and crew, and by extension all their families and friends. But let’s be real here: people love crazy speculation about strange stuff like this. And the longer we go without answers, the crazier the speculation gets. So let’s take a sober look More …
Pick a Bracket with a Guy Who Hasn’t Watched College Basketball in Two Years
They say that the odds of picking a perfect bracket in the NCAA basketball tournament is 1 in 9.2 quintillion. Even for people who study basketball all the time, the odds are something like 1 in 128 billion. So, if the odds are that long even for professional analysts, I think it’s safe to say that the success of your More …
If Anyone Wants to Make a Conservative Daily Show, I am Available for Writing Duties
A very insightful article from The Atlantic (and a surprisingly even-handed one coming from a liberal-leaning publication) about why American comedy tends to lean left: So if philosophy isn’t preventing conservative comedy from flourishing, what is? Structural, demographic, and financial issues. Successful comics often rise up out of thriving, crowded standup scenes, which tend to mainly exist in urban areas. More …
Wow, Accents
I don’t know who this girl is or how she does this, but it’s an incredible demonstration. I’ve always been fascinated by accents from other countries and people who could simulate those accents (and simulate the languages too; Sid Caesar was great at this). And I’ve always wondered how people in other countries tried to sound when they simulated English. More …
Jesus Saved Me a Parking Space
My mom prayed for everything. No matter how big or small, she prayed over every need in her life. Including parking spaces. I remember many a Saturday spent with my mom and little sister, trundling around the parking lot of a Sears or a Kmart or a Zayre (remember Zayre?) in my mom’s big, maroon van. She would peer over More …
It’s Not a Fact Argument; It’s a Perspective Argument
The re-boot of the series Cosmos (along with the recent slap fight between Bill Nye and Ken Ham) has brought science vs. religion jousting back to the front pages. And the story is exactly the same as it was the last time, and the time before that, and so on, back into infinity (or back to last Tuesday, if you’re More …
When Arguing Religion, Consider Using the Bible
David French has some observations about the hesitance of Christians to explicitly discuss faith in debates with non-believers: One has to swim in Evangelical waters to understand how completely we’ve accepted the veracity of the bad faith critiques from the secular Left. We run around wringing our hands, saying things like “we’ve got to make sure we care about children as More …
Ending Poverty the Hard (i.e., Only) Way
Justin Taylor has a whole bunch of links and videos about ending poverty through (gasp!) capitalism. It’s not the most popular solution, because it puts the power in the hands of actual poor people instead of politicians, bureaucrats, and celebrities who like to talk about all the great charity work they do. Also, because it’s a lot harder to create More …
I Demand an Apology for This Post!
What’s up with demanding that people apologize for things they say? I mean, why is that play #1 in the moral outrage playbook? Here in Alabama, we recently had a mini-scandal when, during debate over a bill restricting abortion, a black pro-abortion legislator said that the white legislators supporting the bill would make their daughters have an abortion if they More …
Upskirt Photos, Law, and Natural Law
(Hello, everyone who was brought here by a Google search for “upskirt photos!” Hope you’re not too disappointed!) The Massachusetts Supreme Court recently ruled that it was not illegal to covertly point your phone camera up the skirts of women you see in public and take pictures of their swimsuit area. So, the Massachusetts legislature then had to pass a More …
I Don’t Believe in Hippie (or Hipster) Jesus
Andrew Wilson warns against trying to shoehorn the Jesus of the Bible into our modern notions of what a cool, spiritual dude should be: …I don’t think Steve Chalke, Brian McLaren, Tony Campolo, Rob Bell and co are reading the Bible through a Jesus lens, as much as they are reading Jesus through a selective, progressive postmodern lens, and then More …
Misunderstanding Homosexuality
Our favorite former-militant-lesbian-feminist-turned-born-again-Christian-and-pastor’s-wife, Rosaria Butterfield, has a great post on how the church misunderstands homosexuality. By all means, read the whole thing, but I’ve got to share some of the best quotes: From God’s point of view, homosexuality is an identity-rooted ethical outworking of a worldview transgression inherited by all through original sin. Oof. Try and lift that sentence. Rosaria More …