About a year ago I wrote about the report Tough Choices or Tough Times (pdf) from the New Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce. I was just rereading it, and saw this line:

A world in which routine work is largely done by machines is a world in which…software engineers who are also musicians and arrtists will have an edge over those who are not as the entertainment industry evolves…

I believe in this report, and this is just some supporting evidence.  Check out this article in Wired about Harmonix, the company that designed Rock Band, to see why.

I was watching an episode of Friends the other night, and, despite the fact that I’ve seen it 20 or 30 times, I was still surprised/confused by how excited Monica got about her “two-week anniversary” with her boyfriend, Fun Bobby. I put it in quotes because anniversary can’t refer to any number of weeks or months, since it has the word year (annos) built right in. Anyway, that’s not the point. I started thinking about how the way we experience time as single people is different from the way we experience it as married people.

As single people time passes in our relationships (sometimes before and between them) because we’re always watching the clock. We count the weeks, and months because they’re milestones…something of an achievement. But more than that we spend our dating relationships lying in wait for “the next step”. When you’re dating you wait to be exclusive, when you’re exclusive you wait to say, “I love you.” Once that happens you’re waiting for a proposal. Then you wait for the wedding. And all the while you’re watching the clock. (continue reading…)

I was checking out Mike Cope’s blog, which I don’t get to read often enough, and saw this post about Philemon, aptly titled: “Philemon”. While Mike and I have some different ideas about Paul’s position on slavery, those thoughts went to the back burner when I read this comment:

I mean, seriously…I was only a sophomore at a certain college when I realized, “Hey, if God didn’t create people until later in the week, who was writing down all the things he did on days one and two?”

And then began my slow descent into something other than CoC orthodoxy. Once you open that door…

It makes me sad that he wasn’t taught much sooner about the books of Moses. How can the church allow someone to live 20 years as a member of the body and not teach them something so simple? (continue reading…)

Rule number 5 is as simple as they come. You know that time it snowed and you thought it would be fun to try to drift rally-style on the ice? Yeah, that was dumb. You shouldn’t have done it. Oh, and remember when you thought it was cool to touch your tongue to a 9-volt, so you decided to try an exposed extension cord? Again, dumb.

This doesn’t even require you to do smart things. All it requires is that you not try to catch a tiger by his toe. If only it were so simple.

I, like many others (if we’ll admit it) find myself doing dumb stuff all the time. Once recently I referred to a girl I work with as “gigantic”. I meant to acknowledge her height (she’s 6-foot) in a playful manner. She didn’t see it that way.

There are simple reasons for not doing dumb stuff.

• You’ll seem smarter.
• You’ll feel smarter.
• You’ll have less to apologize for.
• You’ll spend less on band-aids and Neosporin.
• The card in your wife’s bouquet can start with, “I love you,” instead of, “I didn’t mean to…”
• And, of course, many more…

If those aren’t enough, try this: “The wealth of the wise is their crown, but the folly of fools yields folly.” There you have it, doing dumb stuff leads to more dumb stuff, which leads away from the aforementioned benefits of not doing dumb stuff. Just say, “No!” to stupidity.

Yesterday at Garnett Greg Taylor said something that is a perfect example of the importance of context in conveying a message.

“The coats that you have that you don’t wear don’t belong to you; they belong to the poor.”

Typically I hear this kind of language from people like Jim Wallis in the context of government programs, higher taxes, and that the the wealthy owe their money to the “less fortunate”. That doesn’t work for me. I don’t think that everyone who makes more than what they need for survival owes anything to anyone. I think it’s kind of ridiculous that some Americans pay 30-40% of their income to taxes. I don’t know who did the research (because no one provides a link), but I’ve found reports that the bottom 50% of wage earners pay just under 4% of total income taxes, while the top 0.1% pays around 17% of the total. That seems a little unfair to me. But I digress.

I don’t think we should be campaigning to take more money from people who earned it to give it away. What we should be doing is giving more of our own away. I have a hard time with this, because we are well below the 50% percentile, but that doesn’t mean it’s impossible. But Greg’s statement carried a lot of weight with us, because of where and how he said it. (continue reading…)

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