Beer Me Another 75 Years!!

If you didn't know it, today's the 75th anniversary of the passing of the Twenty-first Amendment. It repealed the infamous Eighteenth Amendment, otherwise known as the Volstead Act, otherwise known as the Prohibition.

Praise the Lord. Let me tell you, beer, when made properly, is absolutely wonderful. I'm not a big liquor guy, mainly because of what shall henceforth be referred to as the "Jagermeister Incident of '01." No, I won't tell you about it, but I will hint that it happened in college, and I was building my testimony at the time, and that I can't stomach liquor anymore. But beer, my, that's good stuff.

So, in honor of 75 years of hops, malted barley, fermentation, and moderationism, I submit to you one of the better drinks I've ever encountered. It's not quite a family recipe, but it's most certainly a family favorite. I bestow upon you...

The Snakebite

Pour yourself 1/2 a glass of your preferred hard cider (I will recommend Hornsby's Amber Draft) making sure not to let it head (foam up). Then get a bent spoon and "float" (or pour on the spoon in the glass above the cider to layer it on top) 1/2 a glass of a heavy lager (Guinness Stout for this one). Use the other halves to make another one, and give it to your buddy. Cheers, and give praise to the Lord, for He is Good!

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Farewell, Dear Beard...

...I hardly knew ye. After getting some hard jabs from the family about how unprofessional beards were, I made the tough decision to let it go for a while--at least until I got another job.

It was great while it lasted, and the more it grew, the more I liked it! Sure, it was only a month, but it felt great.

So, in retrospection, I took a gander on what Wikipedia had to say about the History of the Beard, and it was pretty interesting! Here's some things to think about:

• The Spartans punished cowards by shaving off a portion of their beards.
• The Lombards derived their fame from the great length of their beards (Longobards - Long Beards - Langbarten). When Otho the Great said anything serious, he swore by his beard, which covered his breast.
• When a priest became convinced of the doctrines of the Protestant Reformation he would often signal this by allowing his beard to grow, showing that he rejected the tradition of the church and perhaps also its stance on clerical celibacy. The longer the beard, the more striking the statement.
• Veterans of the French Emperor's Army were known as "Vieux Moustaches" (Old Moustaches), while greener conscripts were forbidden to grow them, thus making them especially coveted and prestigious.
• "For God wished women to be smooth and to rejoice in their locks alone growing spontaneously, as a horse in his mane. But He adorned man like the lions, with a beard, and endowed him as an attribute of manhood, with a hairy chest--a sign of strength and rule." St. Clement of Alexandria, 2.275
• "A kiss without a moustache, is like soup without salt." - Breton saying.

Ready, Set, CHRISTMAS MUSIC!!!

Happy Holidays, everyone! I hope you all had an awesome Thanksgiving--I know I did. I know the Christmas season started two months ago, but I suppose late is better than never to start listening to Christmas music.

Here's a little something special to kick off the season!

Great New Game Ideas

A friend and I were reminiscing the other day about the sorry state of games with an explicit Christian target audience. And, since I consider game designing to be one of my bigger hobbies, I figured..."Hey, why not?" That could definitely bring in some extra income! After thinking about it for a bit, I realized it's not very fun to make any truly edifying games, and it certainly wouldn't be very profitable. I had way more fun making up some games that...well, I won't spoil the fun.

Now, I know what you're thinking. I'm going to put these on here, and you're going to come along and snatch up my game ideas! Well, it happened before (see here), and I'm ready for it this time. Chances are, by the time you read this, I'll be halfway back from the permit office, cackling all the way!

Now, without further ado, here are the most awesome 'Christian' games to never hit the market! Read them and bask in their awesomeness!

Cryptic Praise
Remember those days when the WWJD and FROG trinkets were cool? It was way sweet to walk around with an acronym that nobody knew tagged to your wrist/ankle/neck, and when they asked you, you got to boast your faith to the unsuspecting stranger! What fun! It's a shame that everybody knows what those mean nowadays...but with this game, you get the chance to wear fashionable phylacteries all over again! There are several dice with letters that are rolled into a grid (not unlike Boggle), and the players come up with some sly sayings with the letters in the grid! All the phrases are written down and voted on, and the winner gets to make a bracelet (with the companion "Cryptic Praise Craft Kit," of course)! First to make ten bracelets wins! Come out with such zingers as WYGMBSR (When You Get More Better; Sanctification Rocks!) or PLMSP (Please Let Me Say Prayers)! The possibilities are endless, as well as the fun of being smug about your covert holiness!

Prosperopoly (Tagline: "Get ahead without being left behind!")
Remember the parable about the servants and the talents? Well, that was really about how Jesus wants us to be rich and happy on Earth before we meet him in Heaven. What better way to be happy than to be richer than everyone you know? In this Monopoly-esque board game, each player is trying to amass a bigger fortune than his brotherly rivals. Sometimes it's a tough world out there, and 'liberties' need to be taken to make sure you can maximize your returns. Just draw a Sin Token and bend the rules to your liking--you can always earn back your salvation with good works (or a 10% donation between Park Place Ministries and the Boardwalk Church Campus)! But be careful to look for the end-times (Such as 'Rumor of Wars,'  'Euro Increases in Value,' and the dead giveaway, 'Popular National Leader Elected'). If the "Rapture" Card is drawn, and if you have even one Sin Token left, you're left behind, and lose immediately! The winner is the raptured player with the most capital!

Sinspotting - The DVD Game
This great family game now harnesses the latest technology to teach us how different we are from those who don't know Jesus! Players split into two teams and a randomly selected vignette is played on the DVD player. Teams have thirty seconds to identify as many sins as they can before time runs out--your team gets a point for every sin noticed that the other team failed to (Note: "Bad Acting," while prevalent, is not a sin). Points are amassed quickly, so the first to 153 (a very important Biblical number) wins the game! *UPDATE* Sinspotting now comes in a brand new "Travel Edition" you can take along with you next time you venture into the pagan populous! It includes sinpads, pencils, and a timer. Just point at a person or group of people near you, observe, and start condemning!

Battleground: Denomi-Nation
The Great Commission can be pretty difficult to accomplish at times, especially with so many other denominations out there trying to beat us to the punch, so why not play this game to feel as if you're converting the world?! Although it may seem somewhat similar to Risk, the stakes are ever so much higher! The board is a map of a generic city (you can name it whatever you like--name it the town you live in for your first game, but it can be somewhere more exotic, like "Seattle" or "London" if you're feeling more dangerous!) Each player takes a set of wooden colored cubes and a denomination card. Then the dark, sinner-colored cubes are placed randomly around the map. The players then take turns placing their faithful, converting sinner-cubes into their specific saint-color cubes. The game really takes off when each player utilizes their denomination's super-powers!  Is your revenue dwindling with your church membership? Hold pageants and programs to lure in the other player's cubes to make them your own! Are the remaining sin-cubes in your area making your faithful feel unsafe? Play a "Cultural Suppression" card and push those difficult cubes into the other player's back yard! Worried about losing your denomination's tax-exempt status? Just succeed at a Get-Out-The-Vote dice roll and install local government leaders that agree with you, and watch the other denominations scurry! Who needs to be part of a body, when you can be the biggest, baddest ear around?! Of course, Battleground:Denomi-Nation will have future expansion packs, granting in-depth abilities to the denominations, and allowing you to create your own! Who can stand against an army of faithful saints when they have "Contemporary Worship," "Political Connections," and "Works-Based Theology" on their side!?

Coming soon to a Christian Book store near you!

I Don't Like Decisions, Decisions, Decisions

I've been getting into a lot more reading nowadays than I have been in the past couple of years. And while I'm ahead, I'm trying to read through books one at a time, in the order that I receive them. It sounds like a small nit-picky thing, and it kinda is, but I want to hold out on some semblance of structure for this quasi-leisure activity as long as I can.

Before I left Kansas, a good friend gave me the book "Decisions, Decisions, Decisions: Facing Crossroads" by O.D. (eye doctor slang for "Mr.") Phillip Adams. I've read some good books in my time, and this book... was not one of them. It did, however, lead to some constructive thought which I'll try to explain further down.

However let me first rant about the things that bugged me. It'll make me feel better. There were two big things that bugged me about the book.

Primarily, and most obviously, the writing style was pretty poor. I will admit that I was given a fair warning beforehand about it, and the warning proved reliable even in the first few pages of the book. The good doctor is much better at rambling than at writing. It's definitely hard sometimes to follow authors when they try to explain complicated concepts, but this guy was all over the place. I could go into detail (I actually did, but deleted it on review), but since he's an optical doctor and not a literature doctor, I'll cut it short. I will say that I finally figured out what the book was about on page 129. It was about motivating Christians to run hard after Christ. Go figure. 

I don't think it was just the literary shortcomings that prevented me from grasping the book's thesis, though. The doctor and I also have some theological differences, which made it pretty hard to translate at times. I wish Christians (specifically me) weren't hindered by how other Christians understand God, but then again we are all quite incapable of understanding a limitless God with our limited minds. Unfortunately for me, I get pretty passionate about my perceptions of God's sovereignty as well as His grace. O.D. Adams talks about 'kairos moments', which represents points of time where we turn closer or further away from God. At first, I thought he was doing a pretty good job of trying to explain God's omniscience in light of free will, but the more he talked about 'kairos moments,' the more convoluted (if not contradictory) the concept became, and the more frustrated I got. I also had a really hard time understanding that telling one or two lies doesn't make one a 'liar' (I can see it now..."But your honor, I only stole a car once! I don't normally do that--I'm not a thief!").

I'll also say I found the last chapter to be a bit...unusual. This chapter was subtitled "The Post Rapture Chapter," with the target audience being the unfortunate 'left behind' humans made commonly known from the Tim LaHaye novels (see Premillennialism). My thoughts on this: I don't believe in the 'final judgement' being two final judgements, but if I did, I could think of better books the 'left behind' should bother themselves with instead of this one. The first would most certainly be a Bible. The second should probably be a wilderness survival guide... or maybe they should just skip that one too and be the first to break into their conservative Christian neighbor's house and raid the gun closet.

Okay, I had more negative stuff to say, but I don't think it would do any good. I'm not here to totally destroy this guy's effort. As I said earlier, the point of the book was to turn the eyes of Christians evermore to God. And that, by far, is an awesome goal (I'll even encourage Dr. Adams to write another book about it, seriously). I just disagree with the motivation. What I did agree with (and definitely like) about the book was his ninth chapter, "The Rewards." Regardless of our crude concepts about the totality of God, I think we can agree that a relationship with the God of everything is possible, and absolutely the best thing ever. Nothing compares with understanding that there is a God, that He is good and just, that He wants you to know who He is, and that He loves you so much He would die for you (He did). Sometimes (as in daily, if not hourly), us Christians take that for granted. I'm sure if we didn't, we'd all act a heck of a lot more like Jesus. But we get so self-absorbed, we don't always get it--and still God pursues us, like a man pursues the one he loves. No words, no matter how skillful, could capture the 'amazing-ness' of this reality.

As for Dr. Adams, I may not like his book, but I like his earnest passion for God, and I can definitely be encouraged by that.

Resume, the Blog

Still haven't figured out how to put the little dash above the e, but I finished the resume (kind of an oxymoron). I didn't think it would take that long, but I'm generally satisfied. Now, all I have to do is get it checked, returned, rewrite it, find the 'sweet' jobs, send them out, talk nice to jerks, do some interviews, bargain for salary and benefits, and I'm in. It's like I'm practically there! Huzzah!