Friday in the Wild: May 23, 2014

This being Friday, once again it is my pleasure to present the various goodness from the Web that made me laugh, pay attention, agree heartily, or just think.

I don't agree with Douglas Wilson on the finer points of theology, but I enjoy reading his writing; he uses well-pointed sarcasm as an art medium. He makes a very good point in last Saturday's post about the whole Michael Sam gay-kiss thing, the revulsion of some at the kiss, and the revulsion of the leftist literati at the revulsion:

As to the charge that I am fighting for Christian privilege, the reply is “you bet I am.” When the Christian faith is privileged, then freedom for everyone becomes a possibility. When Christian privilege is made illegal, and its denunciation mandatory, as it has been in our time, the first thing that happens is that we see the essentially coercive nature of unbelief revealed. Unbelievers have never built a free society and they never will. They have been running this one for just a few minutes now, and they are already driving up and down the streets with their Coercion Trucks, loudspeakers blaring that it is past curfew and we are all supposed to go inside now, place our noses on the specially designated freedom wall, and think grateful thoughts about how much Uplift Congress will be able to generate next session. When we wake up in the morning, we can all have a breakfast of liberty gruel, designed by the first lady’s personal nutritionist and national sadist.

[Read The Gaylag Archipelago]

Friday in the wild: May 16, 2014

Another Friday means another great opportunity to share all sorts of goodness from the Web and blogosphere. Out there, they do FridayFollow; here, we do Friday in the Wild. This week, three articles caught my attention.

Yesterday, May 15, was the 30th anniversary of the death of my personal favourite Christian apologist, Francis A. Schaeffer. (As I write this, I have two of his books, The God Who Is There and The Church at the End of the 20th Century, on loan from the library.) I first read Schaeffer in my university years; he was the first step toward my trying to adopt a comprehensive Christian worldview. Over the years I've adopted a certain number of his frequent catchphrases, including "true truth" and "brute fact." Ray Ortlund at The Gospel Coalition expressed his gratitude for Schaeffer's ministry:

All my life I’d been exposed to conventional people using conventional methods, and I don’t mean that in a condescending way. I had the privilege of knowing men of true greatness, like my dad. But Schaeffer was just different. He located the gospel within a total Christian worldview. He talked about modern art and films and books. He spoke with prophetic insight about cultural trends. He worked out fresh ways to articulate old truths, even coining new expressions like "true truth." He had a beard and long hair and dressed like a European. He had Christian radicalism all over him, called for by those radical times. I found him non-ignorable. To this day, I dislike conventionality, partly because I saw in Francis Schaeffer a man who made an impact not by conforming and fitting in but by standing out as the man God made him to be, the man the world needed him to be.

[Read Gratitude for Francis Schaeffer]

It: it's the protagonist of It

A lightning review of It by Stephen King (New York: Signet, 1987). Mass-market paperback, 1104 pp.

I have just finished reading Stephen King's It for the second time.

There's a weird feeling about it. It's not the same feeling as the first time, back when It was still on the bestseller lists. Nor is it a sense of accomplishment for making it through a monster novel—at over 1,100 pages, it's one of the longest books most people will ever read—I didn't feel the same thing when I finished Les Misérables in February, and it's longer than It by the length of another entire long novel. For some reason, it was rather like seeing off an old friend you haven't seen in years, after an all-too-brief visit. Closing the novel and putting it down compelled me to sit for about five minutes, pause, and consider. Selah.

An ancient evil lives under the town of Derry, Maine, and every 27 years It comes out of hibernation to feed on local children. It recounts two of these awakenings in parallel. In 1958, the cycle began with the murder of protagonist Bill Denborough's brother George, by a strange clown figure living in the sewer. Bill and a band of his social-outcast friends, drawn together through mutual enmity with the town's gang of bullies, all confront their own manifestations of It. They realize it is up to them to try and stop It. In 1985, the adult Bill (now a bestselling horror novelist and clearly a kind of Mary Sue for King himself) and his friends are reunited when the cycle of death starts again, and they resolve to end It's reign of terror once and for all.

It isn't my favourite of Stephen King's novels (that distinction belongs to his earlier epic The Stand), but I've often remarked that of all Stephen King's books, it's the Stephen Kingiest. It has all the trademarks of a good King yarn: ordinary people, often children or teenagers, thrust into extraordinary circumstances; a haunted town in Maine; an unspeakable horror lurking there; and antagonists who are (to varying degrees) violent, sadistic, or flat-out insane. And lots and lots of death.

Is It worth reading? Oh yes. Of course, if you're a Stephen King fan, you already have. But if you're wondering whether King is worth getting into, and you have the patience for an 1,100-page epic, then I can't think of a better introduction.

Friday in the wild: May 9, 2014

Hello! This might be a longer installment than usual, simply because I was unable to post last week, so I have about two weeks of interesting (and now, slightly stale) stuff to pass around. Which is fine with me.

First, an intriguing article from The Art of Manliness, which promotes traditional masculine virtues. It's intriguing not merely because of the subject matter—though as someone who enjoys the occasional glass of whiskey, of course I enjoyed reading about a shared interest—but because the blog owners are Mormons, who would not normally drink alcohol. It's a guest post. Obviously there's plenty of room in the tent for varying views on masculinity! (AoM featured articles on cocktails and pipe smoking as well in the past.)

In spite of its sometimes tumultuous history (see the Whiskey Rebellion), whiskey is a drink that men have enjoyed for centuries. Men like Mark Twain, Winston Churchill (often accompanied with a fine cigar), and Clark Gable imbibed regularly. When one thinks of masculine images, you often conjure up a picture of a man in a tweed coat with a glass of whiskey in his hand by the fire. If you’ve ever wanted to be that man and explore this manly tradition, you’re in luck. While we’ve given you a primer on Scotch whisky, today we’re going to broaden that and talk about whiskey as a whole—especially how to enjoy it!

[Read How to Drink Whiskey]

Friday in the wild: April 25, 2014

It's been a while since I've done an edition of FitW (let alone blogged anything at all, for that matter). However, in light of a few recent current events, I felt moved to post something, centred around the theme of same-sex "marriage."

Christians are often asked, "Why are you so obsessed with homosexuality?" My answer is, "Because homosexuality is the wedge issue by which a secular society is trying to vilify and marginalize Christians." Or, as a friend on Facebook has also pointed out, it is actually a sex-obsessed society that is demanding answers from us. (Similarly, Southern Baptist Theological Seminary president Albert Mohler has said that the media frequently contacts him for an opinion.) It makes you wonder who is really obsessed, doesn't it?

And now . . . this - Mar. 28/14

Something smells fishy about this "logic"

The troublesome fish currently known as Asian carp may get a new name in Minnesota over concern that the current one casts people from Asian cultures in a negative light.

Proposals advancing in the Legislature would require the Department of Natural Resources to refer to the fish as "invasive carp," a reference to the threat the non-native fish pose to Mississippi River-area ecosystems.

[Full Story]

Yep. According to Minnesota lawmakers, since Asian carp and Asian people both happen to hail from the same continent, there needs to be a law to protect Asian people from being mistaken for invasive species.

Of course, we might just as easily stereotype the carp as overachievers, violin players, and poor drivers with overbearing parents. Ridiculous thinking, it seems, is a one-way street—even if it's equally ridiculous in both directions.

And now . . . this - Mar. 20/14

I told you. Vampires.

Gov. Walker's Facebook and Twitter accounts posted "Philippians 4:13" on Sunday, an apparent reference to a Bible passage.

The FFRF sent the governor a letter Tuesday, asking him to immediately remove the message from his government social media accounts. The letter states, "It is improper for a state employee, much less for the chief executive officer of the state, to use the machinery of the State of Wisconsin to promote personal religious views."

[Source]

Hey FFRF: I realize this isn't Twitter, and it's considerably less than 140 characters, but: Psalm 53:1.

And now . . . this - Mar. 17/14

Who are you, hoo-hoo, hoo-hoo

This article is actually a couple of months old, but I came across it and thought it was too good to pass up:

An alleged drunken driver arrested while hiding 30 feet up a tree Friday on I-290 “rambled on about being an owl” when confronted, police wrote in court documents.

Troy A. Prockett, 37, of Hudson, was arraigned Monday on a slew of charges – including third-offense drunken driving – after town firefighters had to use a bucket truck to bring a cop 30 feet into a tree to arrest him.

[Full Story]

Seems like a waste of effort, when all they had to do was trap him using dea mice as bait.

The suspect was later allowed to stay in the tree, after Al Gore pointed out that he was an exceedingly rare sotted owl.

Happy birthday, WWW

On March 12, 1989, computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee submitted a proposal for a new, hypertext-based information management system at CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research) to address the problem of long-term information loss due to employee turnover. His solution was a non-linear pool of information interconnected with hyperlinks. And hence the World Wide Web was born.

Today, 25 years later, of course the WWW has evolved into a repository of Justin Bieber, pr0n, pictures of cats with amusing captions, and blogs like this one. Occasionally, academic research does still get done.

The original WWW went "live" in 1991. Although it's changed locations, it's still viewable. As an HTML coder, I was eager to view the source just to see how different the original HTML markup was from the current 5th version.

The Web has come a long way in 25 years from those plain grey pages we all discovered back in the early 90s. Sites like Blogger or Facebook simply wouldn't have been possible with the technology of the time; it took about a decade for that. I need to leave a note for myself for March 12, 2039: how will we share our LOLcats then?

And now . . . this - Mar. 12/14

A British woman says she has finally found the true meaning of marriage now that she has divorced her husband and married her dog.

Amanda Rodgers and her dog/wife Sheba appeared on British television's ITV's "This Morning" Tuesday to discuss why she decided to wed her pet in a ceremony attended by 200 people in Croatia last week, reports the Mirror.

"She was two weeks old and she was new to the world—but I fell in love with her," Rodgers, 47, told the show's hosts. "I knew that we were meant to be."

[Full Story]

Well, "marriage equality" advocates should love this one. It hits the trifecta: same-sex, inter-species, and pedophilia.