A digital commonplace for a Regular Guy called Charlie Pharis
UPDATE: Wednesday, 12.13.2006, 3:33 p.m….Uh-oh, now the TV news is in on it! We’ll never hear the end of it now!
OK, so I’m a little bit late to this party, but did you hear the one about the church with the bad rap video promoting their Christmas Eve service?
Seems the local paper has picked up on it along with the usual detractors.
It’s not the “blasphemous dingbats in the Santa suits” that concern me.
It’s the unforgivable “whiteness” and lack of rhythm and coordination!
This great quote about coaching appeared yesterday, courtesy of Troy Worman…
What I need is someone who will make me do what I can.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
Today’s quote from John Quincy Adams…
If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader.
I forgot to mention this in the last post. One of these days, real soon, I’m going to be trying to clean out some of the clutter and revamp the blog. May move it, may keep it here, who knows yet?
Today has been a “clean out the clutter” day…in more than one way!
I got up this morning and went to the office to wait for a meeting, and while I was there, I just started throwing out junk that has accumulated over the last while. Just that little bit of cleaning out freed up some space in my office and made it a bit neater and more usable.
When my day started today, I had 338 feeds on Google Reader! 338! Now, I love this whole blogging thing, but I’ve come to realize lately that the value in blogging (at least for me) is actually blogging. Writing. Contributing. Not the sometimes mindless monitoring of over 300 blog feeds. Don’t get me wrong: I do find quite a bit of information that makes me go “hmmmm!” and “a-ha!” But I discovered (admitted?) that I really have gotten caught up in the whole echo chamber thing. So I cleaned out my feeds. For now, at least, I’ve pared it down to 197. That’s still a lot, and the potential for wasted time is great. But it’s manageable. The Turk may strike again before it’s over.
Finally, tonight, back at the office, I had a good, long time of praying, reading, thinking, reflecting, etc. And I got to clean out some clutter from my mind and my soul. Funny how cleaning out the clutter in one area often leads to more of the same in others.
Taking a little break from the Christmas music tonight. Got a little Camille Saint-Saëns going on, for one reason: the grandiose organ part in the final movement of the Third Symphony!
OK, make it two reasons: The organ part in the Third Symphony and the Danse bacchanale from Samson and Delilah!
Just a random collection of stuff I’m thinking about…
OK, that’s enough for one night. What’s occupying your thoughts tonight?
The pound cake turned out really, really good! That’s the first “real” cake I’ve ever made! A Southern Living recipe and some Alton Brown know-how…makes for good cake!
Anyway, now my favorite Christmas music of all is playing, and the Chocolate Chip Cheesecake Bars are in the oven!
The rain has stopped, the lovely and gracious “Mrs. Just Charlie” will be home in a bit, and we’re probably going to hit the early bird special for dinner!
Yes!
Featured today on Garrison Keillor’s The Writer’s Almanac…
C.S. Lewis was born in Belfast, Ireland (1898). He said of his childhood, “I am a product …[of] books. There were books in the study, books in the drawing-room, books in the cloak room, books in a bedroom, books piled as high as my shoulder in the attic, books of all kinds reflecting every transient stage of my parents’ interests, books readable and unreadable, books suitable for a child and books most emphatically not. Nothing was forbidden me. In the seemingly endless rainy afternoons I took volume after volume from the shelves.”
Lewis’s parents were Anglicans and took him to church as a boy, but he found religion cold and boring. He preferred pagan mythology: Irish, Norse, and Greek myths he read in storybooks. He created an imaginary country called ‘Boxen’ and wrote stories about it. He said, ‘My early stories were an attempt to combine my two chief literary pleasures — ‘dressed animals’ and ‘knights in armour.’ As a result, I wrote about chivalrous mice and rabbits who rode out in complete mail to kill not giants but cats.’
He began teaching philosophy at Oxford, where he met J.R.R. Tolkien. Tolkien was a devout Christian and Lewis was an atheist, but they shared a love for mythology. They took a long walks around the Oxford grounds, debating the existence of God. Tolkien tried to persuade Lewis that the story of Jesus was a myth but that it had also actually happened.
The morning after one of those walks, Lewis went with his brother to the zoo. He said, ‘When we set out [for the zoo] I did not believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, and when we reached the zoo I did. Yet I had not exactly spent the journey in thought. Nor in great emotion.’ He became the most prominent Christian apologist in the world. He recorded a series of lectures for radio, which were broadcast in England during World War II, and many people gathered around their radios to take comfort from his ideas in the midst of bombing raids. The lectures were collected into his book Mere Christianity (1952).
But he is best remembered for the seven books in the Chronicles of Narnia, which he started publishing in 1950. Lewis decided to write for children, even though he never had any children himself and had never had any strong relationships with children. He wanted to give children what he had gotten himself from fairytales when he was a child.
C.S. Lewis said, ‘You can’t get a cup of tea big enough or a book long enough to suit me.'”