Rev. Donald Sensing of Winds of Change (and the Tennessee Conference of the United Methodist Church) recommends without reservation a recent book by his New Testament professor at Vanderbilt — an orthodox Jewish woman herself — discussing Jesus’s character as a faithful first-century Jew.
With a recommendation this strong, my purchase decision took about two minutes.
11 June 2008 / 0 Comments / Tags: life, books / TrackbackDriving down I-81 on Friday, I had my car decorated with all the usual VT football magnets, the product of an unplanned 45-minute break on I-64 West earlier in the afternoon. It was a nice afternoon, traffic slightly heavier than usual with cars full of happy families heading to graduation like us.
A fluorescent orange 15-passenger van from a North Carolina-based construction contractor passed us on the left. Nothing too remarkable about that but the color. But then it slowed down, drifted back to us, and the front-seat passenger leaned up against his window, waving his WVU hat, laughing and yelling something presumably stupid.
We laughed this off and drifted back. Then he braked again. Same act, same result… then H wished aloud for a whiteboard. Quickly, I pulled a sheet of paper and pen out of the side pocket. We only had a minute or so to get this right.
We sped up a little, and he braked to come back a third time. This time, pressed against my side window were two simple words:
GO PITT
Result: two middle fingers, five miles of uninterrupted laughter in our car and the best story of the weekend.
11 May 2008 / 1 Comment / Tags: lifeYou should be reading Ramble On right now.
Actually, you should be reading Bret’s stuff all the time. Because it’s always good. But now in particular, because he’s posting stories and pictures from his whirlwind trip last month to the underway USS Ronald Reagan, including COD rides between Naval Air Station North Island and the flight deck.
Read and enjoy.
18 April 2008 / 1 Comment / Tags: life, travel / TrackbackSo, how about that LSU game I was so looking forward to the last time I posted here?
Life moves on. The last time I posted here, I was waiting for a job offer. Well, I got it… in Charlottesville. And we bought a house. (And got a mortgage.) And the job beats my brains in enough that when I come home, the last thing I care to do is put together a well-thought-out blog entry.
As some of you have figured out, you’re better off reading my Twitter feed at this point, 140 characters being about the longest coherent thought I can muster. Plus, that format allows approximately 400% more snark, particularly helpful in a month where every day is more fun than the last if you hate WVU fans.
So there are going to be some changes to this site, in order to make it look less like a pathetically abandoned blog and more like a portal to the places I do occasionally update. I may put together the odd column from time to time, and the archives will remain up, but regular posting in blog format is probably a thing of the past at this point.
I’d say the reformat is “coming soon,” but really, that would just insult your intelligence at this point, wouldn’t it?
21 December 2007 / 0 Comments / Tags: tech, fyi, lifeIn which Josh takes a brief spin around the bloggable items in his head this evening.
Soccer
Rob tipped me off yesterday to the latest English column critical of MLS and its handling of David Beckham, by Martin Samuel of The Times. Unlike most of its genre, though, it’s actually well-thought-out (which I would expect, since it was Rob that sent it to me) and merits a response.
I can confess to being at least as confused as Samuel at the post-Beckham proliferation of coverage of MLS in the English press. The league is getting better and pulling in more stars, but it’s barely more newsworthy in the English context than, say, the Portuguese or Greek domestic leagues. They care about Beckham’s fitness for international play, and that’s all, which is fair; the variety of Premiership jerseys in my closet is entirely based on the wanderings of Claudio Reyna, Brad Friedel and Tim Howard. But the other problem is that, since Beckham plays for the Los Angeles Galaxy, the public face of MLS management in Britain is Alexi Lalas. For those of you not up on your American soccer history, consider Lalas as GM the equivalent of your favorite team in another sport hiring, say, David Wells, Sterling Sharpe, or Jeremy Roenick. He’s always been an entertaining commentator because he’s opinionated and unconcerned with public reaction. But that doesn’t make him an intelligent manager, and does make him an awful ambassador. I’ve said all along that I don’t mind having Beckham in MLS, it’s just a shame he had to go to such an incompetent organization as L.A. The image Lalas projects to an international audience is why.
31 August 2007 / 0 Comments / Tags: soccer, life, politics, football