Month: October 2005

Completely Random Dream

I nev­er remem­ber my dreams, and so I was very sur­prised this morn­ing when I woke up and remem­bered an extreme­ly bizarre dream sequence.

In my dream I was read­ing an op-ed piece by someone–I’m pret­ty sure it was Vic­tor Davis Han­son. As I read a sen­tence stuck in my mind, “If you sneak around on pri­vate prop­er­ty long enough, you will con­vince your­self you have a right to be there.”

How bizarre.

Tonight I’ll prob­a­bly have a dream about hear­ing Hugh Hewitt say some­thing like, “If you trash-talk a nom­i­nee long enough, you will con­vince your­self she is unqual­i­fied to be a jan­i­tor.”

Great T‑Shirt On Campus

Hats off to this guy–what an awe­some slo­gan. I’m tempt­ed to make them our offi­cial Chi Alpha shirts.

By the way–clicking on the pic­ture reveals the gen­tle­man so garbed. He suits the shirt.

Induced Combustion

Lind­sey Haw­ley (who will soon escape the frozen tun­dra of Alak­sa and move in with Paula and I) burst into flame the oth­er day, prompt­ing reflec­tion (and no small amount of laugh­ter) on our part.

Our thoughts:

  • We’re for­tu­nate not to have a gas stove.
  • We’re for­tu­nate not to favor flam­ma­ble sleep­wear.
  • We’re for­tu­nate not to have large win­dows in our kitchen.
  • We’re for­tu­nate to have learned of Lind­sey’s pro­cliv­i­ties so ear­ly. New rule: Lind­sey can’t cook coed. And we’ll start stor­ing a spare robe next to the fire extin­guish­er.

What All Religions Have In Common

At a three-hour Stan­ford Asso­ci­at­ed Reli­gions meet­ing last Fri­day I final­ly dis­cov­ered what all reli­gions have in com­mon: an aver­sion to meet­ings, par­tic­u­lary the long and bureau­crat­ic sort. Espe­cial­ly meet­ings in which the rules fall like man­na from heav­en. For instance, the Office For Reli­gious Life (an office I gen­er­al­ly and gen­uine­ly enjoy work­ing with), decid­ed that last year’s “Uni­fied Chris­t­ian Gath­er­ing” was decep­tive­ly titled because the Mor­mons (and a few oth­er groups) were not invit­ed to help plan the event and so now we have new rules gov­ern­ing event titles. And for a few min­utes there I thought we were about to be required to clear all guest speak­ers with the stu­dent activ­i­ti­ties staff. Yeesh!

Serenity

I went to go see Seren­i­ty with two stu­dents tonight.

It was real­ly, real­ly, real­ly good. The audi­ence burst into applause when it was over.

It was fun­ny. The humor was MUCH more amus­ing than most come­dies man­age.

It was sus­pense­ful. One girl in the audi­ence screamed at one par­tic­u­lar tense moment.

It was well-writ­ten. Very well-writ­ten. Every char­ac­ter was unique, made sense, and need­ed to be there.

I loved this movie.

A Dartmouth Double Standard?

Noah Riner, the stu­dent body pres­i­dent of Dart­mouth, told incom­ing stu­dents that they should focus on devel­op­ing moral­ly as much as aca­d­e­m­i­cal­ly and that Jesus can bring moral trans­for­ma­tion. A ruckus ensued, with the appar­ent jus­ti­fi­ca­tion being that stu­dent pres­i­dents should­n’t use such occa­sions to pro­mote their own idio­syn­crat­ic views of the world.

Odd­ly enough, a sim­i­lar ruckus does not seem to have fol­lowed the then stu­dent body pres­i­den­t’s call for the legal­iza­tion of pot two years ear­li­er.

Per­haps the issue isn’t that Mr. Riner prop­a­gat­ed his own views, but that the mes­sage of Jesus still makes peo­ple uncom­fort­able after two mil­lenia.

Just a the­o­ry, mind you.