I just found out that there is a remote-controlled airplane club that meets on Saturday mornings at an airport near where I live.

I have been looking for a place to play with my remote-controlled surface-to-air missile launcher.

Playing 18 at Stonewolf today. I really hope it doesn't rain.

I have a big problem with churches that have puppet ministries. What's the point? Those fuzzy, googly-eyed imps can go to hell for all I care.

Thanks, Chris, for the bottle of Big Butt Doppelbock! It was great! I count it among the best three beers I've ever tasted.

I'm looking forward to trying Leinie's other brews.

Though I'm a St. Louis Cardinals fan, I'd love to see a Minnesota - Montreal World Series. These two teams had their necks stretched out on the chopping block in the off-season, but now have two of the best records in baseball. The Expos are on top of the National League East with a 14-9 record and the Twins are just one game behind Chicago in the American League Central.

Why do people who know the least, know it the loudest?

Where do forest rangers go to "get away from it all"?

I've discovered the definition of life. Life is anything that dies when you stomp on it.

CLICK HERE if you need an idea for something to do to keep yourself occupied while you are waiting to die.

The new Illinois license plates have a picture of Abraham Lincoln square in the middle and the slogan "Land of Lincoln" at the bottom. I suppose that the state assumes that everyone in Illinois stands in full agreement with ol' Abe's ideologies and policies and that no one minds driving around with his mug on thier car.

Though I begrudgingly bolted the plates on our car, I have stuck a piece of masking tape over the "Land of Lincoln" slogan on the rear plate and scribbled "SIC SEMPER TYRANNIS" on it with a Sharpie. On the front plate I have given the dear president a set of horns and fangs.

Another good reason for moving to Louisiana would be that there is no law there ordering folks to drive around with pictures of dead tyrants on their automobiles.

Is my behavior obsessive or compulsive?

A beer with a name like Big Butt Doppelbock just has to be good.

Last night I tried a Rogue Mocha Porter. It tasted like a glass of fizzy burned cocoa. It looks like Rogue Ales offers a number of other fine brews, but this one, as interesting as it sounds, was not one that I would recommend... unless you like fizzy burned cocoa.

Dale Earnhardt, Jr. wins his first race of the 2002 season at Talledega!

Ok. I'm a redneck.

I saw a sign today that said "Follow your dream!". Do they mean follow that one dream I keep having where I'm at work in my underwear and for some reason there are Nazis shooting at the building and Mark McGwire helps me find a secret underground passage from my office building to my living room?

Bailey took five independent steps tonight. I know that one day I will look back and wish she was a tiny baby again, but right now I am excited that she is growing and developing. I am looking forward to being able to do fun stuff with her like taking her to baseball games and the zoo or just breakfast at McDonald's. I don't want to rush her, but I really can't wait until she gets just a little bit older and a little bit more independent.

All week I have been terrified in anticipation of a doctor's appointment that I had this morning. Turns out everything is fine. I praise God.

Tell me this isn't the greatest idea you have ever heard...

How about a pizza delivery place that will also bring you a video? It would be a combination Dominoes/Blockbuster. You could call up and say, "Bring me a large sausage and mushroom with extra cheese, a 2 liter of Coke... and uh, do you have The Godfather on DVD? Great, that and Cool Hand Luke, if you have it."

What's the point of staying at home and waiting for the pizza to come to you if you have to get in the car and go get the movie? Maybe you could also sell sub sandwiches and hamburgers and stuff. Why are pizza and Chinese the only foods they are willing to bring to your door? These two foods are like those desperate socially-challenged kids in High School... always hanging around hoping that someone would be their friend, and going way out of their way to be liked. Pizza and Chinese just show up at your door saying, will you please be my friend and eat me? I won't cause you any trouble, I'll do anything for you. Oh, you want me to bring drinks? Okay, I'll grab some Coke on the way.

Okay, I thought of it first, so you can't steal my idea without a very costly law suit. You might as well just make me a partner right now. Maybe the name of the joint could be "El Conquistador Pizza and a Movie". The only hitch would be returning the video. I suggest training some sort of small furry creature as a homing-rodent to which you could fasten the video. He would find his way back to the store. He could come in a little cardboard cage, delivered right along with the movie and pizza. It would be too bad if he got hit by a car though. Then you would have to stop everytime you saw a road kill just to check to see if there's a video tape in among the guts somewhere.

Let's get on it. I'll start by training the squirrels in the tree out front. They are merry.

"...Heaven have mercy on us all - Presbyterians and Pagans alike - for we are all somehow dreadfully cracked about the head, and sadly need mending."

Herman Melville, Moby Dick

Ishmael visits a chapel in a port town and he notices the nautical influences upon the design of the interior of the building...

"Nor was the pulpit itself without a trace of the same sea-taste that achieved [the rest of the chapel]. Its pannelled front was in the likeness of a ship's bluff bows, and the Holy Bible rested on a projecting piece of scroll work, fashioned after a ship's fiddle-headed beak. What could be more full of meaning? - for the pulpit is ever this earth's foremost part; all the rest comes in its rear; the pulpit leads the world. From thence it is the storm of God's quick wrath is first descried, and the bow must bear the earliest brunt. From thence it is the God of breezes fair or foul is first invoked for favorable winds. Yes, the world's a ship on its passage out, and not a voyage complete; and the pulpit is its prow."

Maybe THIS has something to do with the feminization of American culture.

It contains the greatest quote I've ever read in an online news article: "I'm not saying it's safe for humans. I'm not saying its unsafe for humans. All I'm saying is it that it makes hermaphrodites of frogs."

I haven't read Moby Dick since High School, but I'm diving back into it because I read something about Melville being a Calvinist.

I just finished The Flanders Panel by Arturo Perez-Reverte. If you know anything about chess and like a good mystery, you might check this one out. It tells the story of an art restorer who goes to work on a 16th century painting depicting a lord and a knight playing chess. She learns that the knight in the picture was an historical figure who was murdered, and whose murderer was never found out. The clues to the murderer's identity are found by playing the chess game shown in the painting backwards to find out which of the pieces took the knight in the game. It made me want to pick up chess again.

But then I stepped outside, saw the green grass and felt the warm sun and said, "Chess? It's time for golf!"

Don't steal. The government hates competition.

The sentence that I am now writing is the one that you are now reading.

Define "now".

Dear Abby,

I put my sixty cents into the vending machine at work, two quarters, two nickels, and punched E3 to get the big Kit Kat bar. It gave me the big Kit Kat Bar and seventy-five cents change, a quarter, four dimes, two nickels. I took the change. This machine has taken more money from me than I can count, so I'm stickin' it to da' man. I'm keeping the change. Anything wrong with that?

Ethically Challenged in St. Louis

You can't make an omelet without ruining a few lives.

For our car trip last weekend, Sarah went to the library and checked out a couple of books on tape.

My favorite book on tape was that children's classic, "Where's Waldo?" It provided hours of good fun.

It was like: "George... Larry... Harold...Norman... Sandy... Carol... Margaret... Christopher... Waldo"

When you have listened to a book on tape, can you honestly say that you have "read it"? How is it different? What if it is unabridged?

That Pope John Paul, he's so pontificating!

Turn up your speakers and CLICK HERE.

There have been several times that I have thought of something that I didn't have the, um, guts, to say out loud for fear of being misunderstood or sounding crass, only to later read Doug Wilson expressing the very same thing.

In "Future Men", he writes:

"Music has been one of the chief culprits in the feminization of the church. Many of the "traditional" hymns of the nineteenth century are romantic, flowery and feminine. (I come, after all, to the garden alone, while the dew is still on the roses.) But the recent rejection of such hymns in favor of contemporary worship music has been a step further away from a biblical masculinity. (And here comes the shocking part) The current emphasis on "feeling worshipful" is frankly masturbatory, which in men produces a cowardly and effeminate result.

(This is too good, I have to continue.) "The fact that the church has largely abandoned the singing of psalms means that the church has abandoned a songbook that is thoroughly masculine in its lyrics. The writer of most of the psalms was a warrior, and he knew how to fight the Lord's enemies in song. With regard to the music of our psalms and hymns, we must return to a world of vigorous singing, vibrant anthems, more songs where the tenor carries the melody, open fifths, and glory. Our problem is not that such songs do not exist; our problem is that we have forgotten them."

Insert three-fold Amen here.

My experience with churches that use contemporary "worship music" is that as the music is playing and people are "getting into it" I have the strange feeling that there is some sort of orgy going on. I am afraid to look around for fear of being voyeuristic. There is something fundamentally sexual about Rock and Roll. (Research the very etymology of the term "Rock and Roll") Shaping the worship of the Triune God with the rules and forms of Rock and Roll is syncretistic sex-worship.

Do not assume that everybody you meet is participating in your version of reality.

Machines are made to break.

Things are always falling apart. I had to put a new battery in my truck yesterday, and a new tire on the car last week. Both of the vehicles each have some little thing wrong with them that I keep putting off.

Machines always need to be fixed. The only time they work exactly like they are supposed to is when they are in the store.

With today's loss to the Mets, the Cubs are now officially mathematically eliminated from the pennant race.

(For the benefit of our friends to the Canadian north, I'll explain. The Cubs and Mets are baseball teams. Baseball is sort of like hockey, except that they don't wear skates in baseball. And they play on grass instead of ice. And they play it outside. And if you fight in baseball, they make you leave the game. Not everybody gets a stick, just one guy at a time. And you swing the stick at the ball, not at other players' heads. Anyway, the Cubs are a very very bad baseball team, and have been since the 40's. Even though the season just got started, they have no chance of making it to the playoffs. I now return you to your regularly scheduled blog.)

What the Old Testament person can know about God is not self-discoverable. It can be learned only through the community because only through the community has He revealed Himself. When Yahweh makes His presence known to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the purpose is not the enlightenmnent of those individuals. The patriarchs and prophets are those who are related to God on behalf of the community to which they, in turn, are related. In the case of Jacob, for instance, his very name, Israel, is synonymous with the community itself.

- Philip Lee, "Against the Protestant Gnostics"

Therefore, he who would find Christ, must first of all find the Church. How would one know where Christ and His faith were, if one did not know where His believers are? And he who would know something of Christ, must not trust himself, or build his own bridges into heaven through his own reason; but he must go to the church, visit and ask of the same... for outside the Christian Church is no truth, no Christ, no salvation.

- Cyprian

We've all heard that a million monkeys banging on a million typewriters will eventually reproduce the entire works of Shakespeare. Now, thanks to the internet, we know this is not true.

Five out of four people have trouble with fractions.

In November, the French government -- determined to make a stand against the Nazis -- ordered Yahoo.com to somehow make sure that no French citizens could access online auction pages carrying Nazi memorabilia. Yahoo refused.

Number of days, in 1940, it took for the French to completely surrender to the Nazis: 43
Number of days, in 2001, it took for Yahoo to completely surrender to the French: 51

Well I slept on it, and I still want to move to Monroe. Sarah is behind me 100%.

While there are a ton of positives, I can only find two negatives. First, we have to put all of our stuff in boxes, put the boxes on a truck and drive it all down to Louisiana. Upon our arrival, we must unload the truck and then unpack the boxes. I really hate moving. We don't have a lot of stuff, but the thought of doing the moving makes me tired. We just moved to a bigger apartment about a year ago, and I thought we would be there for a little while longer.

Secondly, even though we have been at Providence for about ten months, it seems like only in the last couple of months have we really gotten to know some of the people there. I was really hoping to get to know some of these wonderful people a lot better. We really love Providence and have learned so much from Pastor Meyers and Pastor Lee.

Other than those reasons, (and one of them is just pure laziness) I can think of no other reasons why we should stay in St. Louis.

We just got back home from Monroe about an hour ago. Nothing beats a ten-hour drive through the rain.

What a trip. There is so much to process. I am pretty sure that we want to move to Monroe so I can start studying at the Dabney center this Fall. I even got a job offer today before we left. There are still some details to work out, but it appears that I have the potential to make more money doing the same thing I'm doing now.

I'll probably write more tomorrow.

I'm in Monroe, LA this weekend checking out the Dabney Center. Last night I had the opportunity to eat some crawfish with Rick "Beautiful Feet" Capezza. He showed us around his crib.

Sarah is going to spend today getting to know some of the folks at Auburn Avenue and seeing a little bit of the town while I sit in on some Dabney classes.

It is beautiful down here. The weather is perfect. Far from the freezing - warming - freezing stuff in St. Louis the past few days.

I always wanted to be somebody, but I should have been more specific

Beat Blog

Yesterday I got so old
I felt like I could die
Yesterday I got so old
It made me want to cry
Go on go on
Just walk away
Go on go on
Your choice is made
Go on go on
And disappear
Go on go on
Away from here

Today's "Cheers" quote:

WOODY: "Can I pour you a beer, Mr. Peterson?"
NORM: "A little early isn't it, Woody?"
WOODY: "For a beer?"
NORM: "No, for stupid questions."

Tim Gallant, author of "Feed My Lambs" (a wonderfully comprehensive and irenic treatment of the subject of paedocommunion), has unfortunately been infected with the blog virus. HERE is his page.

By the way, if you haven't purchased a copy of his book, you really need to ORDER IT HERE.

If you are on the fence, or haven't studied the topic, this book is a great place to start. Even though I was already convinced of his central argument, I benefited quite a bit from his careful and thorough answers to the objections against Covenant communion, and his practical instruction concerning how reform must proceed.

Have you heard of Johnny A.? I heard a few of the tracks from this album spun on a local jazz station, and then I sampled the whole album at Borders. Very smooth rockabilly/jazz guitar. His music is kind of cross between Earl Klugh and Junior Brown.

This is probably the next album I'll buy.

"When you get the rite wrong, bad things happen." - Pastor Jeff Meyers, Sunday School, Easter Sunday, 2002 AD

In the not-too-distant-future you could be paying for my cat's hairball removal.

Don't believe me? CLICK HERE for the whole story.

Play Ball!

I don't mind that the Postal Service is raising postage rates. I can't remember the last time I personally bought a stamp.

I pay bills over the phone or have them debited directly from the bank account. I communicate through email with all my friends. I have birthday and Christmas presents shipped directly to folks from the supplier or catalogue, which uses either UPS or FedEx. I use a fax machine for everything else that needs to be sent quickly.

Finding and addressing an envelope, going to the post office to buy a stamp and finding a mail box is so inconvenient compared to all of the other options I have. It is the slowest possible way to send and receive documents.

Raise the price of stamps to a dollar. Doesn't matter. We don't need no stamps.