Readers of a certain age will understand the Bob Seger reference. I am in fact heading to Nepal in a few days. Work is taking me there to document the amazing work of a couple of organizations combatting human trafficking there. Like this one.

For that and several other reasons, blogging will continue to be pitifully sparse around here for a while. But one of my resolutions for this next trip around the sun is to at least post frequent little links here to things I find interesting, after the fashion of Instapundit.

Here’s a down payment: An amazing shot for shot comparison of the iconic opening sequence of Raiders of the Lost Ark, revealing how very much  Spielberg borrowed from the only adventure serials of the 1930s.

Check it out!

Dear 2012,

Welcome. Please be gentle.

So Tim Tebow has become a verb. To “Tebow” is to kneel in prayer in the course of of a football game. I can certainly understand why this has become a huge internet meme and the source of endless questions and sports talk discussion and mockery. After all, no high-profile player has ever done that before:

Okay. So perhaps it’s not all THAT rare. Maybe it just the fact that Tebow is seen praying on the sidelines that’s so unprecedented. Or not:

The fact is, although there may be no crying in baseball, but there has always been praying in football. And lot’s of thanking of my Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.

Remember how the Minnesota Vikings’ great Cris Carter used to begin every postgame interview with a thirty-second “praise the Lord” before answering the question he was asked. You could almost hear the TV director’s eyes rolling out in the trailer, but I loved it. And to my knowledge, Carter’s expressions of faith–both vocal and visual–were never a source of controversy or high-profile mockery.

Cris Carter

For years I watched former OU Sooner tight end Keith Jackson take a knee to thank God after every touchdown–something the six-time Pro Bowler had occasion to do 49 times in his nine stellar seasons in the NFL. And I don’t recall anyone ever having a problem with Jackson’s kneeling. And it certainly wouldn’t have become an internet meme even if there had been such a thing as the internet when he burst on the scene.

And then there was perennial All-Pro defensive lineman Reggie White:

White’s faith only became controversial after he committed the unpardonable sin, i.e.,  made some politically incorrect remarks about homosexuality.

So in the light of all this, why is Tim Tebow’s faith suddenly a huge honking deal? Why is Tim “wearing his faith on his sleeve,” and “jamming his Christianity down our throats” as I heard one profanity-spewing ESPN Radio guest describe it a few days ago, while dozens of other NFL players who make the same kinds of statements of and exhibit very similar displays get a pass?

Here’s a hypothesis. Take a look at Tebow and the other pictures above and then play a quick game of “One of the These Things is Not Like the Others.”

Is it possible that the popular culture is much more likely to accept/overlook expressions of faith in God from black folks than from white folks? Is there a double standard in the media? I suspect that’s the case. In fact, this is a phenomenon I first start noticing several years ago in the movie and music business.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m thrilled that black artists and actors can openly express a Christian faith without becoming pariahs in Hollywood. I just wish other Christians had the same experience.

Frankly, there is something subtly condescending and patronizing in a “oh, aren’t they adorable” way about the manner in which Hollywood and the media elites ignore or even praise Christian faith in African-American celebrities and athletes even while mocking or condemning it in others.

It doesn’t surprise me when the popular media trains fire hoses of scorn and vicious mockery on politicians who are outspoken about their Christian faith (see: George W. Bush, Sarah Palin, Michelle Bachman, et. al.) I recognize there is an invisible, spiritual component fueling the animus. Nor does surprise me that Tim Tebow, whose John 3:16 face paint became a media meme back when Florida played for the national championship against Oklahoma, comes in for special derision from a fallen culture.

But it would be nice if some of the critics would at least have the decency to recognize that the reason Tim keeps talking about his faith is that he keeps getting asked about it.

Today marked the 48th anniversary of the Kennedy assassination. Over the last few days you may have seen a few of the documentaries and specials recounting and re-examining the event.

Recent advancements in the sciences of 3-D computer modeling and forensics have pretty much put to rest the major conspiracy theories that have thrived over the last four decades–at least for those who are persuadable. For many, it’s just too psychologically painful to accept the fact that a lone nutburger with cheese can change the course of history.

Here’s a great site that calmly, methodically debunks virtually all of the major conspiratorialist theories.

Of course, any attempt to persuade will invariably be met with a hail storm of cited “anomalies” and “wildly improbable coincidences.”

• What happened to Kennedy’s brain?
• What about the three “suspicious” tramps that were rounded up?
• Why did several people see puffs of steam or smoke rising from behind the fence by “the grassy knoll.”
• And why was a man standing by the road under an open umbrella on a clear, sunny day at the very spot Kennedy was shot. (see photo above.)

Indeed that last item on the list, the man with the umbrella, has been the source of endless speculation and theorizing. Well, today I came across a wonderful little segment (at the New York Times site, of all places), that reveals the secret of the “Umbrella Man.”

The six-and-a-half-minute piece is a beautiful little piece of film making. And it hits on a line of thought I’ve had regarding other massively culture-shocking events such as the 9/11 attacks. I can’t embed it, so go watch it by clicking the image below, then come back for my deep thoughts:

If you watched the piece, you now know that Umbrella Man was an eccentric protester carrying a beef with Joe Kennedy and Neville Chamberlain. If Oswald had had a flat tire on the way in to work that day, no one would have ever noticed umbrella man and there would not have been 48 years of wild speculation about his connection to the assassination.

This brings me to the point I want to make. For each of us, each moment of each day is almost certainly filled with anomalous or oddly coincidental events. But because these events pass by us in the constant stream of time, we almost never become aware of them. For example . . .

Perhaps at a stoplight here in Dallas today, the person in the car behind me was born in the same Oklahoma City hospital as I, and delivered by the same doctor. That would certainly be an odd coincidence. But it’s a coincidence that would never come to light. I turned right. Driver #2 went straight. And the stream of time flowed on.

We all probably miss dozens of such odd coincidences each day.

On dozens of occasions in my life I have missed a flight or changed my flight plans at the last minute. On each occasion, I booked another flight and continued to my destination and didn’t give it another thought. But what if one of those missed flights had subsequently crashed on takeoff? Suddenly my missed flight would take on massive cosmic significance in my mind and in the minds of everyone who knows me. Also, each factor in that day that led to my having to miss the flight would take on tremendous meaning.

Now extend these phenomena across a large area involving a large number of people. This is precisely what a momentous event like the Kennedy Assassination or large scale terrorist events like 9/11 do.

These events freeze the river of time. They create a frozen moment which survivors can subsequently examine, explore and study–for days, years, even decades. And this study invariably results in exposure of many anomolies and “wildly improbable coincidences.”

Take my hypothetical stoplight above, for example. If a bomb were to have gone off in that intersection taking me and that other driver at the light into the next life, some enterprising researcher might have discovered that odd birthplace link between me and Driver #2. With enough study, other commonalities would likely emerge. Perhaps the doctor that delivered us committed suicide several years later (though some in the family always wondered if it hadn’t really been a murder.) All this would certainly lead to speculation and armchair theorizing about motives, plots and something “bigger” going on.

The more people affected by an event, the more “frozen moment anomalies” there are to uncover. And the more sensational the event, the more people there will be spending time, money and energy searching for them.

Did you know that Lincoln’s personal secretary had the last name “Kennedy.” And that Kennedy’s personal secretary was named “Lincoln.” Coincidence?

Why yes. An odd one. But just a coincidence.

Well the old calendar on the wall says its time for my quarterly blog post.

I miss writing in this space on a regular basis but, for various reasons, a couple of short Twitter outbursts per day is about all I can manage these days.

As I write, the ridiculous “Occupy _________ ” (fill in the blank with the smelly, disease-ridden location of your choice) hippie nostalgia flea circus is still underway and rapidly devolving into little Lord of the Flies reenactments scattered across the country. And they’re finally getting the over-reactions from local police they’ve been craving.

“Come See the Violence Inherent in the System!”

Early on, the “Occupy Wall Street” participants were merely the usual enviro-Marxist rabble who can be counted on to show up and protest any major capitalist event–G12 summits , WTO meetings, NATO conferences, etc.. But once it became clear to the broader Left-wing sphere that TV cameras were going to remain pointed at the Wall Street protests for an extended period of time, the unions and other core constituencies of the Democrat’s base quickly rushed in to “help.”

The robust news attention can be attributed the desperation felt by the liberal media industrial complex to find a grassroots liberal corollary to the Tea Party movement. The fact that many in the media and on the Left actually view the anarchist, know-nothing OWS-ers as reciprocal to the silver-haired Tea Party conventioneers from flyover country speaks volumes about how out of touch they are.

Let’s take a closer look at the “Occupy” movement’s simultaneously hilarious and offensive core narrative–the 99% vs 1%.

No. No you’re not. If you’re spending day after day camping in Zuccotti park wearing a Guy Fawkes mask advocating the abolition of private property, an end to the free enterprise system, and government control of virtually all aspects of economic life,  you don’t speak for the 99% of Americans who earn less than $1.2 million per year (which is the economic border between the so-called 1% and the rest of us.)

This contrived and arbitrary distinction is nonsense at many levels. First of all the narrative is built around the antiquated, FDR-era notion that Republicans and conservatives are the rich and the ranks of liberal Democrats are filled by the poor. It’s the article of blind faith encapsulated by this popular OWS sign/T-shirt:

I say “blind” faith because one has to be willfully ignorant of a mountain of facts to still cling to this narrative. The Obama administration is filled with former principals at Goldman Sachs and advised by the very people that who turned Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac the primary trigger of the debt/liquidity crisis of 2008.

The donor lists of the DNC are a who’s who of the mega-rich and famous. And for every one wealthy conservative trust like that of the Koch Brothers, one can point to 30 left-leaning ones funded by liberal billionaires.

Here’s actress Anne Hathaway marching with the OWS the other day.

One of her co-marchers was asked about her views. The reply was, “We’re demanding free higher education.”

And there you have it. The ingredients of this noxious stew are as follows:

• A gigantic sense of entitlement.
• Resentment of the successful
• A double standard that embraces those who make millions singing, writing, or pretending to be other people in front of a camera.
• Disdain for entrepreneurs, a.k.a., the money-grubbing bourgeois merchants seeking their filthy “profits.”
• Utter cluelessness about economic realities or the science of energy production.
• A cheery determination to adopt all of the policies that have the economic wheels coming off in Europe.

Obama, many congressional Democrats, and the media are eating it up.

Update: OWS has lost Jon Stewart! Check out this brilliant piece of reporting from Zuccotti Park. Watch for the delicious statement from one of the occupiers when asked why he won’t share his iPad: “I’m against private property, but not personal property.”

Princesses, Past and Present

Holland Girls

Like her two sisters before her, Female Offspring Unit #3 was in the homecoming court this last Friday night. She looked beautiful and her sisters were there to support and root. Mrs. Blather and yours truly were very proud.

The Problem of Evil

You my recall my series of posts a few months ago titled, “Tragedy: The Mother of All Bad Theology.” (Here, here and here.) They were built around the observation that the Church’s ham-handed handling of “the problem of evil” and cartoonish conceptions of God’s sovereignty are turning an entire generation off to the gospel. I was reminded of that when I read this little tidbit about the late Steve Jobs:

When Jobs was 13, he saw starving children on the cover of Life magazine.  He asked his Sunday school teacher if God knew what would happen to the children. After that he never returned to church and he never went back to Christianity.

Man Stuff

It Really is 1979 Again

All he does it eat, sleep, poop and cry. I think he’s one of those ‘occupy’ protesters.

I’m posting something to the blog. It lives!

Actually, don’t bother alerting the media. They’re obsessed with following the pronouncements of a few thousand unwashed anarchists, unrepentant Maoists, and clueless slackers with giant senses of entitlement claiming to represent you, me and the rest of the non-super-wealthy 99% of U.S. citizenry.

Note the yellow sign above which reads:

Capitalism is Organized Crime. The Whole System Has Got to Go.

Okay. And we should replace capitalism with . . . what precisely?

That particularly sign points to the web site PSLweb.org, which is the official home of the Party for Socialism and Liberation. A review of their literature suggests they would replace capitalism with something akin to Mao’s dictatorship of the proletariat and Cultural Revolution which resulted in the deaths of at least 30 million.

Puts me in mind of something Paul Harvey once said:

Capitalism has been our good servant. But some would trade a good servant for a bad master.

There is much hand-wringing about the “Zionist” “occupation” or “Palastine” in this group’s literature as well. Which brings me to . . .

It’s been amusing to contrast the media’s coverage of the Occupy Wall Street with they way they were reporting on Tea Party gatherings last year.

Whenever a large group of Tea Party activists gathered, deeply troubled reporters invariably perceived racism lurking beneath the surface, regardless of how diverse the crowd.

While the press apparently has amazing powers to perceive invisible racism wherever average working Americans gather to call for smaller, less intrusive government–they are willfully blind to blatant anti-Semitism being paraded before them at the OWS protests.

For more than 40 years we’ve been watching public service announcements exhorting us to “buckle up for safety.” We’ve seen terrifying post-crash photos with somber-voiced narrators and talking crash test dummies.

Frankly, I would have thought it impossible to come up with an utterly fresh way to promote seatbelt use. But this last week I saw spot from the UK that was not only different but possibly the most effective such spot I’ve ever seen. And there’s not a car in sight . . .

Embrace Life

Fastening your seatbelt is a “what.” Staying alive for the people who love and need you is a “why.” Whys are always more powerful that Whats. That’s what makes this little bit of message delivery so compelling.

#####

Now on to music.

I’m a fan of electric blues. Several years ago I discovered a female blues guitarist/vocalist that just blew me away. Susan Tedeschsi’s smoky voice goes places that Bonnie Raitt’s only hinted at. Raitt is a better blues guitarist. But Tedeshci’s voice is a wonder.

A couple of years ago Tedeschi married an amazing blues slide guitar player named Derek Trucks. Their marital merger resulted in a blues super-group–The Tedeschi-Trucks band. Here they are at Eric Clapton’s “Crossroads” guitar festival playing a song off of their first album.

It’s my current favorite (non-Christian) song. Enjoy . . .

Tedeschi-Trucks: It\’s Midnight in Harlem

At some point in the next few overnight hours, the temperature here will drop below 70 degrees for the first time in about three months. Our long, monotonous string on 105-ish degree afternoons and 88 degree mornings is about to come to an end.

Cooler, of course, doesn’t necessarily mean “wetter.” And we remain in desperate need of rain. Here’s the view from our balcony: