Superbowl Half Time Entertainment

If you're like me, you can't remember too many specifics about the acts during the half time show through the years. We all remember the famous Janet Jackson and Justin Timberlake incident - but what year was that? We might remember last year's half time show, but probably not too many others.

Well this site will help you remember who and when.

This year Jordan Sparks (American Idol) performs the National Anthem, Ryan Seacrest is scheduled to host the pregame and the half time show features Bon Jovi, Tom Petty, The Eagles and Bruce Springsteen.

What has been your fav half time show?

I NEED one of these!

Here's a little formula for pure fun.
One little, itty bitty smart car PLUS one of the most powerful motorcycle engines ever produced EQUALS great fun.




Yea, I need one.

Mad Skills

I'm not sure what you do with this skill - other than impress everyone at the local picnic. But it's still cool anyway. If there was a professional wheelbarrow racing league, I think these guys would be in it.




What mad skills, that are mostly worthless, do you have?

More Difficult Than It Needs To Be

I recently had the pleasure of flying back into LAX for the first time in quite a while. [heavy sarcasm] I’ve been fortunate to not have to fly commercially for quite some time. I don’t mind flying per se, but I rather dislike all the hassle of lines, security checks, etc., that flying requires.

As any air traveler into LAX knows, there are an amazing number of options for ground transportation when you leave the terminal. There are shuttles to hotels, shuttles to parking garages, shuttles to rental car agencies, shuttles to take you home, and who knows how many other options. To help prevent complete chaos at the terminal, someone decided to make different color stops for the different type of transportation desired. At first glance that seems like a reasonable solution, however let’s check the implementation.

There’s a Green stop, a Blue stop, a Purple stop, a Red stop and an Orange stop. Apparently they didn’t think too long when they were picking the colors. Somewhere between 9 and 12 percent of the male population suffers from some kind color blindness and maybe 1 to 2 percent of the female population. Plus when you consider the majority of the male population just doesn’t really care about color and basically can’t identify all the colors in the 16 box of Crayolas, you have a huge percentage of people who don’t do color.

Red/Green color blindness is the most common form of color blindness. But some people suffer from Blue/Green color blindness too. So that means Red, Green, Blue and probably the Purple are rather poor colors to pick for van stops. But the real killer is the Red and Orange. At the terminal I was at, they are at opposite ends of the area where vans can stop. It was impossible to tell which one was Red and which one was Orange. I had to walk to one and ask the attendant who was working at the stop what color that stop was. Naturally it was the wrong one so I had to walk all the way down to the other end to the other stop. When I mentioned this to the van driver, he said a huge number of people couldn’t tell the difference in the signs. Apparently many people make the mistake and some get quite upset when the van won’t stop for them because they are at the wrong stop. And if the vans stop at the wrong location, they get fined. If they do it twice, they get suspended. So the vans don’t stop at the wrong location, and the travelers don’t understand and naturally get upset. What a great way to treat the people who are making your business possible.

There are some real easy fixes to this. Maybe use colors that don’t cause an issue. Strangely enough the two best colors, white and black, were absent from the list of colors. No one get’s those two colors mixed up. Or use colors of different intensity, like yellow and dark green. Another option might be to write the word Orange, Red, Blue, etc on sign so every one would know which is which. Maybe numbering the stops could be effective too. It’s pretty hard to mix up Stop #1 with Stop #5.

What are you doing that maybe making life unnecessarily difficult for someone else? Maybe you have customers, co-workers, club members, church members or some other group that you are unintentionally inconveniencing. Try looking through someone else’s eyes and see what you can improve to make it easier for them.

That's worth pondering about.

Happy New Year!

I really don't do resolutions. About the only resolution I make is 'to resolve not to resolve.' It's not that I think it's not good to improve one's self, but I don't think New Year's resolutions are the correct method for affecting change.

The real problem with New Year’s resolutions is that you have to measure yourself to see what needs to change. In some cases that measurement is fairly straightforward. If you want to lose weight, we all know how to measure that change. If you want longer hair, we all know how to measure that change. But what if you want to be a better parent, or spouse? What if you want to improve your spiritual side? How do you measure that? Often we grab at something like, ‘I won’t yell at the kids’ or ‘I’ll read my Bible every day.’ While these things may be measurable, and even a good thing, they don’t really fully measure our goal. That’s a problem. Not necessarily the best way to improve ourselves.

I think the real question is this, how are you measuring yourself? There is no way you can improve yourself without knowing what, and how, you are measuring. Are you measuring yourself by what popular culture says is good or bad? By what a family member or close friend says is good or bad? Are you measuring temporal things or eternal things? The list of possibilities is long. But knowing what you are measuring will tell you what you value.

I hope you are measuring the things that REALLY matter. “Man looks at the outward appearance, but the Lord looks at the heart.” 1 Samuel 16:7 (NIV)

Happy New Year and may God bless you in 2008.

Thesis on Gift Wrapping

A friend sent me this. Enjoy! A Merry Christmas!


This is the time of year when we think back to the very first Christmas, when the Wise Men; Gaspar, Balthazar and Herb, went to see the baby Jesus and, according to the Book of Matthew, "presented unto Him gifts; gold, frankincense, and myrrh."

These are simple words, but if we analyze them carefully, we discover an important, yet often overlooked, theological fact: There is no mention of wrapping paper. If there had been wrapping paper, Matthew would have said so: "And lo, the gifts were inside 600 square cubits of paper. And the paper was festooned with pictures of Frosty the Snowman. And Joseph was going to throweth it away, but Mary saideth unto him, she saideth, 'Holdeth it! That is nice paper! Saveth it for next year!' And Joseph did rolleth his eyeballs. And the baby Jesus was more interested in the paper than the frankincense."

But these words do not appear in the Bible, which means that the very first Christmas gifts were NOT wrapped. This is because the people giving those gifts had two important characteristics:

1. They were wise.

2. They were men.

Men are not big gift wrappers. Men do not understand the point of putting paper on a gift just so somebody else can tear it off. This is not just my opinion: This is a scientific fact based on a statistical survey of two guys I know.

One is Rob, who said the only time he ever wraps a gift is "if it's such a poor gift that I don't want to be there when the person opens it." The other is Gene, who told me he does wrap gifts, but as a matter of principle never takes more than 15 seconds per gift. "No one ever had to wonder which presents daddy wrapped at Christmas," Gene said. "They were the ones that looked like enormous spitballs."

I also wrap gifts, but because of some defect in my motor skills, I can never completely wrap them. I can take a gift the size of a deck of cards and put it in the exact center of a piece of wrapping paper the size of a regulation volleyball court, but when I am done folding and taping, you can still see a sector of the gift peeking out. (Sometimes I camouflage this sector with a marking pen.)

If I had been an ancient Egyptian in the field of mummies, the lower half of the Pharaoh's body would be covered only by Scotch tape.

On the other hand, if you give my wife a 12-inch square of wrapping paper, she can wrap a C-130 cargo plane. My wife, like many women, actually likes wrapping things. If she gives you a gift that requires batteries, she wraps the batteries separately, which to me is very close to being a symptom of mental illness. If it were possible, my wife would wrap each individual volt.

My point is that gift-wrapping is one of those skills like having babies that come more naturally to women than to men. That is why today I am presenting:

GIFT-WRAPPING TIPS FOR MEN:

Whenever possible, buy gifts that are already wrapped. If, when the recipient opens the gift, neither one of you recognizes it, you can claim that it's myrrh.

The editors of Woman's Day magazine recently ran an item on how to make your own wrapping paper by printing a design on it with an apple sliced in half horizontally and dipped in a mixture of food coloring and liquid starch. They must be smoking crack!

If you're giving a hard-to-wrap gift, skip the wrapping paper! Just put it inside a bag and stick one of those little adhesive bows on it. This creates a festive visual effect that is sure to delight the lucky recipient on Christmas morning:

MY WIFE: Why is there a Hefty trash bag under the tree?

ME: It's a gift! See? It has a bow!

MY WIFE (peering into the trash bag): It's a leaf blower.

ME: Gas-powered! Five horsepower!

MY WIFE: I want a divorce.

ME: I also got you some myrrh.

In conclusion, remember that the important thing is not what you give, or how you wrap it.

The important thing, during this very special time of year, is that you save the receipt.

Merry Christmas

I love it when people do something unexpected with music. These guys do the unexpected with this song.



Can you name the 80's song they end with?

[HT MicroExplosion]

WallE

The next Pixar movie looks interesting. If it's as good as some of their others, it should be good.

WallE

That's potentially the worst commerical ever at the beginning of the clip.

[HT Cries of the Heart]

Ugly with a captial UG

The new Wizards uniform is the worst thing I've EVER seen. When the team walked out onto the court wearing these, I was completely in shock. These are a complete and total disgrace to basketball, sports, and man-kind.

Hideous!

Have you ever seen anything worse?

Dorothy Proctor

It's been a tough week. My Grandmother went missing on Saturday, December 8th, when she missed a luncheon. She left after church to make the trip to her friend's home for lunch (about 4 miles away from her church). She was next seen in Mineral (80 miles away) and then hours later in Chico. She was trying to get back to Paradise where she lived. The last people that she got directions from in Chico said she looked fine. She showed no indication that she had been lost for 8 hours. She seemed fine. They gave my Grandmother directions and she was able to repeat the directions back to them just fine. Unfortunately she was unable to get on the correct road going home. Our theory is that like most elderly people, it was hard for her to see at night and she just couldn't get to where she needed to be, even when she knew where that was.

She got onto a back road and eventually onto a dirt road where she got the car stuck in the mud. That was sometime after 7:30pm on Saturday – probably around 8 or 9.

We searched for her almost non-stop. My brother, Brett, was really instrumental in leading the whole effort. He inolved the media. A relative had access to an airplane and helped search. Several people drove and hiked the local roads where we thought she might be. Basically, we did everything we could do. The police and media and everyone in the town was very helpful. We had a lot leads to track down, so we were busy from early until late every day.

She was found right next to the car on Wednesday by a horseback rider who was out exercising the horse. We got the word Wednesday afternoon that it was my Grandmother. She didn't make it through the first night.

While we all knew that was the most likely outcome. There was still hope of a miraculous ending.

My Grandmother worked for the Adventist Church her entire career. She was an accountant for the New Jersey Conference and the Virginia Conference. Even at 87 years old she was still counting the money for her local Paradise church. I'm quite sure that I will get to see her again in heaven.

Evel Knievel

I grew up when Evel Knievel was in his prime. He was everywhere. It seemed like he was always jumping something - or at least trying to jump something. His impact on my childhood was amazing. I even had an Evel Knievel lunch box. As a boy, my friend and I were always trying to emulate Evel by jumping our bicycles over various objects. We jumped tractor tires, bales of straw, we even jumped my friend's parents car. We often emulated Evel's failed attempts too. I'm not sure how many times we ended up a pile with the bike on top of us. But we'd get up, brush ourselves off and try it again.

The fact that Evel did his jumps on a Harley Davidson street bike still amazes me to no end. He wasn't using some dirt bike with a nearly limitless suspension, it was a street bike. Wow! That's tough.

Like everyone else, I was saddened to learn of Evel's passing. They just don't make them like that anymore. Truthfully, I'm not sure if that's a good thing or a bad thing - but it's clearly the passing of a legend and an era.

Things I Hate.... (part 2)

Verizon Wireless' ordering system. Apparently no one at Verizon has ever had the thought that they should allow customers to order a phone that is currently out of stock. Could this be because they've never had a phone popular enough to be out of stock?

I just wanted to order a new Voyager and make a change to my plan. Seemed simple enough. But after an hour an half, two managers and one employee, they finally gave up (I had already given up long before this). I ordered the phone today. After the phone arrives at my house, I will have to go back to make changes to my plan.

Crazy....

Things I Hate....

Christmas lights. Actually I don't hate Christmas lights. I kind of like the soft glow that all the icicle lights give around the house. I don't even mind putting up and taking down the lights. I know where the lights go on our house and pretty much have the system down. It's usually pretty simple.

Usually being the operative word. Our lights were getting pretty old last year. Bulbs were burning out at an alarming rate and being out in the elements for several years was taking a toll. So I thought I would just buy some new strings of lights. Simple enough. The problem is, simple usually isn't.

First of all, new icicle lights are a pain in the neck. They are packed with all the icicles bunched up. So you can't just put the lights up, you must staighten out all the wires of each icicle. Even after you straighten the wires, they want to go back to their previous form. Here's an idea for the makers of icicle lights. Package the lights with the icicles pulled nice and straight. Sure the package will be bigger. But I'd pay more for lights packaged that way. I'm sure others would too.

Secondly, after straightening all the little individual icicles, we started hanging the lights and discovered that the new strings of lights were shorter than the old strings. The new strings are 22 feet long, according to the box. The old strings must have been about 25 feet long. Now my carefully planned lighting arrangement no longer works. Ugh.

A few more extension cords and some rearranging and it all worked out. But what should have been a relatively easy task of hanging the lights, turned into a pain in the neck.

Why is it the simple things in life always seem to so hard? Is it because of our expectations? When we expect something to be difficult, do we come at it with a different mental attitude than when we expect it to be simple? Is that why we often don't believe the simple things in life? We say, "That can't be right, it's too easy." We usually expect it to be difficult. I wonder if that's part of the reason why people don't believe in Jesus - it's just too simple. Certainly the creation of the world must have been more difficult than God simply speaking. Certainly salvation must be harder than just believing in Jesus. I wonder how I can tell my friends that it really is that easy...

Happy Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving. It’s probably my favorite holiday. It’s certainly the least commercialized holiday. You don’t have to buy presents for somebody, chocolates, cards, or just about anything else. It’s just a great day to hang out with your family and friends, maybe watch a little football, and enjoy each other’s company. I suppose that it may be a great day for turkey farmers and retailers, but overall it’s really not a very commercialized holiday. I like that about Thanksgiving.

Thanksgiving is a time for us to do nothing other than be thankful. But on holidays like this, I always wonder what might my atheists and agnostic friends are thankful for. Or more correctly, who they are thankful to? It seems like in the never ending battle to move God out of the public’s view, that nothing is sacred; we will remove God from everything. We even are trying to remove God from Christmas! And if we’re gonna remove God from everything, then we have to remove Him from thanksgiving to. And if we do that, then who are we thankful to? Are we just thankful to fate, the odds, or some other nebulous entity?

In all fairness, my atheist and agnostic friends have no problem with this. They believe they feel perfectly thankful and they are grateful for the things they have. They have no issue with today. But for me, it just seems odd. How can you be thankful to no one? I know that I am thankful to God for all blessings over the past year. I can’t begin to list them all.

I am also thankful that long ago, an Indian named Squanto chose to befriend some Europeans who weren’t going to make it through the winter. Squanto could help them, because previously he had been captured and had been a slave. He knew English and he knew how to help. And even though he had plenty of good reason not to help those Europeans, he did it anyway. That amazes me every time I think about it. I’m thankful he did it.

I wonder if I could do the same. Could I offer help to someone at great personal sacrifice to myself? Can I do the right thing, regardless of what has happened to me in my past?

That is worth pondering about…

The Only Way to Play Soccer

I'm not much of a soccer player. But if you're going to play, this looks a lot more fun!

Gibson Robot Guitar

So you like to play guitar, but you hate to tune it. Or you'd love to play some alternative tunings, but it's just too much effort to tune and retune your axe. Well Gibson has a guitar just for you.

Watch the video here

Kind of cool, but there's no price listed anywhere that I can find. I guess I'll be tuning my guitar the old fashioned way.

Fun with Words

Play this word game and supposedly you donate rice to the United Nations. I don't know if that is true, but it was fun to trying a figure out these words.

http://www.freerice.com/index.php

Man, I need to improve my vocabulary. Some of these words are difficult.

What's the highest Vocab Level you got?

"The Last Supper" Up Close and Personal

An online tool lets you focus in on da Vinci’s painting The Last Supper to an unbelievable level of detail. Use the zoom bar in the bottom center to zoom in and out of the painting. It only took 1677 pictures to get this amount of detail. Wow!

There’s some good info about the painting at Wikipedia if you want to learn more about the painting and the ongoing challenge of preserving it.

[HT Think Christian]

Leaning tower of Pisa loses title

According to Ananova, a German church steeple has knocked the leaning tower of Pisa from the Guinness Book of Records as the world's most lopsided building.


The tower in the village of Suurhusen applied in June for the title and has now officially beaten the famous landmark in Pisa. Guinness Book of Records confirmed the award after officials measured it leaning at a 5.19 degree angle compared to only 3.97 degree angle at which the tower of Pisa leans.

The church was built in middle of the 13th century but a 90ft tower was added in 1450. The tower was built on wooden foundations and the combination of the oak wood foundations and wet soil has caused the tower to slowly lean to one side over the years. Several attempts to stop the tower from leaning any further have been made since 1982, and it was eventually stabilized in 1996.

The church is still in use and also offers guided tours but church officials are appealing for donations to help maintain the building.

I guess if your building is falling down, you might as well make the most of it. But who really wants this record? I'm guessing the tower of Pisa will still be wildly more popular with the tourists. Maybe this church will see a slight rise in visitors, I don't know. But what will that really do? Will they make enough money to fix or replace the tower? It seems doubtful. Are they just using the money raised from tourists maintain the building, since they don't seem to have enough money from the congregation to do so? It just seems there's no real plan here.

I wonder how many things I start out with in my own life with no real plan. No real plan of what happens next. Something seems like a good idea so I set out on a course of action, without fully contemplating what the end-game is. Generally not a good idea... I think sometimes I need to more carefully ponder the entire plan, before I get started.

Wow, that was horrible!

I watched CSI Miami for the first time tonight. All I can say is ouch! That show is horrible! I'm not an expert reviewer or anything close to that, but what stiff acting. Horrible...