We’re off to court today to fight our nasty landlord and nastier real estate agent. 11am. I’ve been revisiting episodes of the Practice in my mind – and the plots of every John Grisham novel I’ve ever read.
I’m going to plan B our egregious landlord. He broke the range hood. That’ll sow reasonable doubt.
I meant to post this before I retired.
Readers, I always knew this day would come. I just wasn’t sure it would come this soon. After some 3,200 posts and four years of baring my soul online – I’ve run out of interesting things to say. I’ve said it all. Sure, I could blog about bacon every day. But that would not be fulfilling.
I’m riding off in to the sunset – to blog here no more. I’ll still respond to comments, and I’ll keep the domain open – but I’ve achieved everything I wanted to achieve out of blogging. I got me a wife, I got me an audience, and I found my voice. Johnny Cash would be proud.
And besides, I peaked with this post – I can’t possibly improve on it.
Thanks for the memories.
I promise this is my last post about bacon for at least a day… but you need to read this. If you want to cook bacon like a real man.
Have you got an old machine gun lying around? With about 200 spare rounds of bacon? Then you’re set. If you don’t, then go out now, buy one, and come back. This post won’t go anywhere in the meantime.
I’ve discovered a new way of cooking bacon. All you need is: bacon, tin foil, some string, and.. oh whats it called?… oh yeah, an old worn out 7.62mm machinegun that is about to be discarded, and about 200 rounds of ammunition.
You start by wrapping the barrel in tin foil. Then you wrap bacon around it, and tie it down with some string.
you then wrap some more tin foil around it, and once again tie it down with string.
It is now ready to be inserted into the cooking device. I ripped the tin foil a little bit getting the barrel inserted. that part of the bacon got severely burned by hot gasses.
After just a few short bursts you should be able to smell the wonderful aroma of bacon.
I gave this about 250 rounds. but I think around 150 might actually be enough. But then again I don’t mind when bacon is crispy. Ahh the smell of sizzling bacon mixed with the smell of gunpowder and weapon oil.
And the end result: Crispy delicious well done bacon.
Gary shared this picture of my life… summed up as a dessert – which is kind of a metasummary – my life could be summed up as dessert anyway…
This, friends, is a glazed cinnamon donut with candied bacon bits, served with coffee icecream.
Thanks Gary.
According to Gizmodo the Bible is the most represented book app on the iPhone. There are 1000+ versions to choose from (see the infographic below for a comparison with other classics.
“The Holy Bible has more than a thousand applications at the App Store. We counted up to 1001, but it was too boring to keep on going. Of those copies, not all were free. Some of the most popular works also have multiple copies, some are free, some are paid. Pride and Prejudice is one of the most popular, with 48 copies, seven of them available for a few rupees. Dracula has 34, five being paid copies for whatever reason. And so on.”
I wrote about a professionally brewed bacon beer a while ago. It was a limited edition and had already sold out. Sorry to whet your appetite while simultaneously crushing your palatial dreams. Well today I come to your rescue – lets call this porcine bitter… the recipe is recorded in full here (it comes with an extreme language warning).
Step 1. Cook some bacon.
Step 2. Put the bacon in a jar, covered with whisky.
Step 3. Rest for 24 hours in a dark place, then chill it in the freezer for 4-6 hours.
Step 4. Strain it over and over again with a coffee filter – you’re aiming for a clear, but bacon flavoured, alcoholic liquid.
Step 5. The guy who invented this used porter – you could probably use any type of beer that you want to taste like bacon. He used 100 drops of bacon bourbon for every 350mL of beer.
One of my college buddies (and his brother) put together this pretty exceptional Easter video – they’re planning to do all of Luke.
Only at this blog will you find a post like this coming right after a post like this. One of the things I’ve been thinking about while arguing about UFC, studying at college, and grappling with the social context of the early church, is the idea of how far you can stretch a particular passage of scripture as you grapple with a particular issue. While the “context is king” hermeneutic is really useful for figuring out the “impossible application” of a passage – there are lots of circumstances that it seems we can pull a verse out of the ether (or the Bible) to address – without looking too hard at the context of the verse. Sometimes we call this ethics, other times its doctrine.
I have always hated the concept of “memory verses” as some sort of bandaid solution to every personal calamity, I get suspicious when I walk into houses that have verses stripped of context strewn all over the walls. I reckon putting big slabs of text all over your walls is much more Godly. Well, not really. As Carson famously argued “a text without a context becomes a pre text for a proof text” or something… but I think we can actually legitimately “proof text” without completely paying attention to the full “original audience” context. We don’t need every historical nuance to come up with a sound systematic understanding of an issue. The Bible doesn’t consider Climate Change – but says lots about our responsibility for the planet, its brokenness, and our new gospel priorities (and expectation of a new creation)…
I’ve been thinking about this since giving a presentation on Question One of the Westminster Shorter Catechism at church a couple of weeks ago.
The proof texts for the “chief end of man” are, in my opinion, pretty weak. If you consider the context of those passages it’s almost impossible to argue that this is the “big idea” of any of the specific passages, but it’s a “big idea” from the Bible, and we seem to feel like we need a good proof text for every position – we can’t just argue on the basis of “the vibe”… you can stretch a fair bit of Bible over the idea that one of our chief purposes being to glorify God. We have this correct concept that we get to by doing our systematics properly, but no great proof text, so we pull all the little bits of Bible into a paper mache type shape to build our idea, or we have an idea and we stretch (like a balloon) passages over it to give it a Biblical flavour.
Pacifism is not specifically mandated in the Bible, but I can see how one might reach that end by stringing together the teachings of Jesus, the fruits of the Spirit, and also our understanding of church history (how the early church acted based on the teachings of the Apostles) – but I think you can equally look at the Bible and come to a just war/justifiable violence position. Depending on what passages you want to string together. I can see why systematic sermons are hard – but they’re also, as forms of communication, heaps more compelling and much better for application.
But just how far can we stretch “scripture” when building a systematic framework? And where does context fit into this picture of systematising? If we’re Mark Driscoll we just talk about the idea without bothering using the Bible – which may, in the end, be preferable (and possibly prophetic).
What do you reckon? How far is too far when it comes to proof texting?
No, that’s not some bizarre new inoffensive curse… or at least that’s not my intention. Check this out…
Mr. Goltstein, 43 years old, had moved his wife and their three children from the Netherlands to Winchester, population 4,600, about 90 miles east of Indianapolis. They planned to build a dairy farm with 1,650 cows on 180 acres.
He had installed a black plastic liner to keep the manure from seeping into the ground during the flush days of the dairy business, when prices and demand were growing.
The plastic liner has since detached from the floor of the stinky, open-air pool, and Mr. Goltstein says he can’t afford to repair the liner properly. But he says he’s game to pop the bubbles before the manure pool overflows and causes an even bigger stink.
His neighbors aren’t happy with the plan.
“If that thing back there blows, God help us all for miles,” said Allen Hutchison, whose corn and soybean farm is next door. He and other neighbors worry that puncturing the bubbles could cause an explosion of manure and toxic gases.
Hilarious.
This is cool. I’m not sure if it’s really one of the world’s 100 best pranks – but it’s very clever…
This photo cost less than $1,000. But how? You ask. Rockets cost heaps more than that…
“Space enthusiast Robert Harrison managed to send his home-made contraption 22 miles – or 116,160 feet – above the earth’s surface from his back garden.”
Here’s the rig, in infographic style:
The @ symbol is so hot right now – almost as hot as block letters filled with a scribble effect. It’s so in that the New York Museum of Modern Art has added it to the Architecture and Design collection. Go @.
Here are some @ facts:
Let’s start by looking at the @. No one knows for sure when it first appeared. One suggestion is that it dates to the sixth or seventh century when it was adopted as an abbreviation of “ad,” the Latin word for “at” or “toward.” (The scribes of the day are said to have saved time by merging two letters and curling the stroke of the “d” around the “a.”) Another theory is that it was introduced in 16th-century Venice as shorthand for the “amphora,” a measuring device used by local tradesmen.
Whatever its origins, the @ appeared on the keyboard of the first typewriter, the American Underwood, in 1885 and was used, mostly in accounting documents, as shorthand for “at the rate of.” It remained an obscure keyboard character until 1971 when an American programmer, Raymond Tomlinson, added it to the address of the first e-mail message to be sent from one computer to another.
You know that famous painting – the one the Da Vinci code is all about… well, there have actually been a bunch of “last supper” paintings over the years – and it seems Jesus and the 12 (or 11 depending on what time of the evening the painting captures) are eating a little bit more each time.
That’s the subject of a new study of 52 of the paintings, conducted by a pair of American brothers.
Using computer-aided design technology, the pair scanned the main dish, bread and plates and calculated the size of portion relative to the size of the average head in the painting.
Over a thousand years, the size of the main dish progressively grew by 69.2%, plate size by 65.6%and bread size by 23.1%, they found.
The study, published in Britain’s International Journal of Obesity, is co-authored by Mr. Wansink’s brother, Craig, a professor of religious studies at Virginia Wesleyan College in Norfolk, Virginia, and an ordained Presbyterian minister.
I haven’t updated my blacklist for a long time. But that’s ok. Because the head of one of America’s ailing media conglomerates has spent his time (that probably should have been used bailing out the company) writing a list of 119 words his employees are no longer allowed to use.
Here are some of them (and here are the rest).
So in summary, avoid redundancy and cliche. But what about you – what words do you think should be taken out the back and shot? I’d say anybody over the age of 35 saying “funky” – I do not think that word means what they think it means…
This Mario is made entirely out of paper. Which is pretty awesome. And if you want to make your own (but who would? Seriously?) then you can get the template file here.
