Category: Of Random Interest

Rick War­ren (pas­tor and author) is the sub­ject of a very favor­able arti­cle in Time.

My favorite excerpt: Remark­ably, War­ren has man­aged to spread his approach to the gospel with­out exten­sive nation­al media cov­er­age or a TV min­istry. He turned down an invi­ta­tion from Oprah to be on her show, though he says he’d like to meet her some­day. “Too many min­is­ters start out as ser­vants and end up as celebri­ties,” he says. “I want to use my influ­ence to do some good, and I can get more done out of the lime­light.”

Most of the con­tro­ver­sy about Mel Gib­son’s The Pas­sion of the Christ was pred­i­cat­ed on the assump­tion that at worst it would pro­voke pro­found anti-semi­tism and at the best it would leave peo­ple unswayed (as regards the cul­pa­bil­i­ty of the Jew­ish peo­ple for the death of Jesus).

Looks like every­one was wrong–just ask the San Fran­cis­co Chron­i­cle. The film seems to have nuanced peo­ple’s views and made them less will­ing to assign spe­cif­ic blame.

See a relat­ed arti­cle in the Wash­ing­ton Times down­load dive bomber movie .

Note: the sur­vey was pret­ty small. Read the Chron­i­cle sto­ry to get the scoop on the method­ol­o­gy.

No baby yet.

Onei­da Shen, a Chi Alpha intern in Ari­zona, just spent the last few days with us check­ing out cam­pus­es in Nor Cal and Neva­da. She’s seri­ous­ly con­sid­er­ing com­ing to work along­side Paula and I here at Stan­ford. Pret­ty cool.

Also, appar­ent­ly one of our alum­ni is cur­rent­ly in the Miss Uni­verse Sin­ga­pore finals (accord­ing to anoth­er Sin­ga­pore­an alum­nus). How wild is that?

And I just learned one more real­ly strange thing about the Bay Area–there are flocks of wild par­rots that roam San Fran­cis­co. Seriously–there’s even a book about it. Appar­ent­ly they just fly around the city. Read the FAQ. It reminds me of a chap­ter in the Life of Pi.

I saw a neat t‑shirt while I was walk­ing around cam­pus today:

“I Thank There­fore I Am.”

Food for thought.

For some strange rea­son, the MP3 encod­ing of last night’s mes­sage was com­plete­ly blank. Not a sin­gle sound was cap­tured.

Oh well, it was­n’t the best mes­sage I’ve ever preached any­way. It’s still frus­trat­ing.

We do have oth­er mes­sages for down­load, how­ev­er.

On an unre­lat­ed note, is it just me or did every­one start wear­ing a lot less all of a sud­den? I swear that some of the peo­ple on the Farm paint­ed their out­fits on, and did­n’t use much paint in the process…

I just ran across a great arti­cle that unpacks some of the dif­fer­ences between the movies and the books, and how it affects Tolkien’s mes­sage: The Return of the King: Best Pic­ture, Per­haps, But Not Best Ver­sion.

In case you’re curi­ous, we’ve got two oth­er sig­nif­i­cant entries on Tolkien:
* Splin­tered Light (from Tolkien’s eleven­ty-first birth­day)
* Saint J. R. R. The Evan­ge­list

On a com­plete­ly ran­dom note–have any of you seen the video of the pilot eject­ing right before his plane crash­es? (link takes you to a page con­tain­ing info about the crash and a link to the video).

If you’re a reg­u­lar vis­i­tor to the site, you’ve no doubt noticed the sub­stan­tial redesign. Play around with the menu (lift­ed with per­mis­sion from netscape devedge) and you’ll notice that it’s messed up. I’m going nuts try­ing to fix it. Argh!

update: the menu is func­tion­al, although ugli­er than I’d like. I’ll try to make it spiffy soon.

The NY Times had a fas­ci­nat­ing arti­cle on Gov­er­nor Arnold that includ­ed this unique lit­tle per­spec­tive: Every­body pities the weak. Jeal­ousy you have to earn. (source).

That’s an inter­est­ing way to express the nature of ambi­tion, no?

In oth­er news, Pas­tor Joss Wal­ters (of Kansas City, MO) sug­gest­ed that we screen Broth­er Cole more care­ful­ly before allow­ing him to enter the hal­lowed ranks of Chi Alpha.

I would like to sug­gest that [Broth­er Cole] would need to [pass] a test … to estab­lish whether or not he could prop­er­ly con­nect with this audi­ence. The test could begin with a Game Cube or PS2 fol­lowed by a brief ser­mon on “WHAT IS MARILYN MANSON SO UPSET ABOUT?” [edit­ed slight­ly for brevi­ty]