Author: Vince

Spiritual Journey

It’s Still the Hardest Word

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A teacher we know regaled us recently with the story of one of her elementary students telling stories. It seems that she saw said student looking onto a fellow student’s test and then copying the answers. The teacher called her to her desk; she was going to just give the student a quick “Don’t do that again” and send her on her way.

Why were you looking onto your neighbor’s paper? Oh, I wasn’t doing that. Really, how did you get these answers on your paper without showing any of the work? My cousin showed me how to do that.

Music / Spiritual Journey

Rich As Best As I Remember Him

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And the moon is a sliver of silver
Like a shaving that fell on the floor of a Carpenter’s shop

 

People say “Why do you write music?” and I always say “Well, how many of Wesley’s sermons do you know?” And I’ve talked to a lot of good Methodists and they don’t know any of them. Then I say, “Well, how many of Wesley’s hymns do you know?” and most church goers know at least a good solid dozen hymns that Wesley wrote. Most pagans know at least a couple. And I kind of go, that is why I write music and not sermons.

Books

Lessons from Dune

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I got caught at lunch without the Churchill biography I’m currently reading, so I had to find something on my iPad to read. I happened to have Dune from a Kindle sale a few months ago, so I thought I’d re-read it again since it’s probably been 10–15 years since I last did so.1

I ran across this in the first few pages:

A world is supported by four things:
the learning of the wise,
the justice of the great,
the prayers of the righteous,
and the valor of the brave.”

That was thought-provoking enough. But then it was closed with this:

But all of these are as nothing without a ruler who knows the art of ruling.

Movies / Music

Sound of (Movie) Music

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I bought a soundtrack to a fifty-year old movie this week.

Which, of course, got me thinking about my favorite movie soundtracks. (Why, doesn’t it you?) I’m going to exclude musical soundtracks; that’s kind of cheating, since the soundtrack essentially is the movie. Or a large portion of it. So, no Sound of Music (ugh), no Funny Lady (double-ugh), and most definitely no La-La Land.

Good movie soundtracks are usually unobtrusive; they make the movie better, but don’t take attention away from it. Great movie soundtracks, however, not only make the movie better, they become a character themselves, a character so good that you can’t help but notice them.

Family / Mission

Italian Invasion

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It’s pretty quiet around here.

That’s normally not that unusual1, but for the past couple of weeks it has been. Some of our kids were in town (no, not those kids, the Italy ones), and the kids have kids, and that makes for a much more exciting household. Where by “exciting” I mean “chaotic”.2

Since we spent a week in Portland with their LG replacements a couple of months ago, it’s fitting that we were able to see the Davidson’s this summer as well. When last I wrote about them, they were in the process of going back on mission to Italy; they have now been there for two years and are home on furlough for the summer, and we were fortunate to have them spend several days with us.

Current Events / Random

Because I Said So

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Someone I follow1 on Twitter posted something a couple of weeks ago along the lines of “The retail industry loses $16B a year to people wearing and then returning clothes.” I replied with something along the lines of “That’s a great Internet number, made up and completely unverifiable.”

This led to a couple of exchanges, ending with the other person saying, “there’s a lot of dumb stuff online, but a Duke & MIT study is research driven.”

I’m going to cover the specific issues first, but then we’ll get to the bigger issue, because it speaks to how we make our way through the land mine field that is the world of information today.