Lotsa Little Bits vol. 19

ITEM:  Time for all of you to go over and check out some new members of the beer cap collection on the caps blog, along with the plug for the blogger who sent them.  Stephen T. McCarthy (you can get the link on the caps blog- another good reason to go) is intelligent and irreverent, well-versed but not perverse, and though you might not always agree with him, you'd better have your stuff together if you wanna challenge (or agree, for that matter) with him.  So go, check the caps out, check out his blog, and find out why his favorite beer sucks!

ITEM:  You'll also see that there is something else he sent me (and can't thank him enough for his generosity), which I am listening to as I type this.  You see, the whole thing got started when the name Walter Egan got brought up.  For the seventies-challenged among you, go Youtube his hit Magnet And Steel.  Well, before that- and after- he was involved in a surf band called the Malibooz.  In 1999, they reunited to do an lp called Living Water (The Surfer's Mass).  Basically it is Catholic mass done in surf music.  I'm on my second play, and still absorbing the entirety of it.  What I can tell you is what I've said before in many ways- worship is when you are so in tune with what you love, that the love becomes aimed at He who allowed what you love to exist.  Music, nature, surfing... I have a friend who finds it in fishing.  It is the purest form of praise, praise not needing the words.  The inexpressible groanings of the Spirit.  Eventually, I may have more to say on the subject, but for now let me close by adding that I think a new layer has just been added to my Christmas Vigil ritual.

ITEM:  As long as I'm pimping, you should all check out Bobby G.'s latest post.  I told him in all seriousness, it is one of his best.  Not surprising as he conjures the wisdom of his father to look at today's world.  Take a look, really.

ITEM:  Anybody out there see what happened to the Heat last night?  Hee Hee....

ITEM:  An upcoming Sunday message is going to talk about 2 Kings 4 ( which I thank Lorraine for bringing up via text message.  In the upcoming talk, I'm going to look at it in a slightly untraditional way... but I bring it up today because the conventional interpretation applies.  You see, this was the passage where Elisha has the widow borrow jars from the whole neighborhood, and then fill them up with the little bit of oil she had in her jar.  The resultant miracle paid her rent and gave her and her sons something to live on.

Last month's rent was made difficult by two rounds of tooth extractions and about 3 3-day weekends.  This week, I get even better news- due to lack of orders and other difficulties, this work week is Tuesday, 1/2 Wednesday, Friday, and whatever we end up working on Saturday.  Next week, Tuesday and Thursday, that's it.  So I'm borrowing jars- hoping to get them filled with some prayers that God will, indeed, see us through, giving us the wisdom to ride out this storm in His hands.  Anyone who can "lend a jar", it would be appreciated.  And since I have to pour something IN those jars, be sure to send along your prayer requests as well.  Thank you in advance.

ITEM:  Here's one for the baseball books:

A busted pipe under the infield at Rangers Ballpark created a sinkhole right behind the mound. On-field batting practice Tuesday for both the Texas Rangers and Cleveland Indians was canceled so the grounds crew could fix the problem.
Workers had to dig more than 3 feet deep to try to fix the pipe under the field that is used to water the infield. One of the workers could only been seen from the waist up after getting down into the hole.

Hold it... I think we've hit Dave Hostetler!

(And you'll have to dig to get THAT line!)

ITEM:  Looking over at the news, I see it's just posted that 10-year-old Sarah Murgnahan is getting her new lungs as we speak!  Thank you, Jesus, for letting common sense beat bureaucracy this once.  Now guide her surgeon's hands and heal her.

ITEM:   Also on the news, 72-year-old Jan Cooper of Anaheim was watching a burglar trying to break into her home.  It was up to her to defend herself and her wheelchair bound 85-year-old WWII vet husband.  She warned him off called 911, even had her Rottweiler barking at the burglar, but still he came.  So she fired her .357 mag S&W revolver at the idiot, one Brandon Alexander Perez, 31, a career burglar who was living in a nearby halfway house.  The bullet, police said, had to have missed his left cheek by inches.  His response?

The stunned intruder apologized to Cooper after she fired, she recalled, telling her, "I'm sorry, ma'am. I'm leaving. Please don't shoot."

See, my liberal friends?  Not only do guns prevent crime, they increase politeness!

ITEM:  Next, the strange case of  Edward Snowden, who says his conscience led him to blow the whistle on government eavesdropping.  He is currently hiding somewhere in Hong Kong, while "patriots" like John Boehner call him a traitor.  And today, not surprisingly, international skunk Julian Ass-ange called him a hero.

I cringe that I must agree this once with him.  But look at the facts.

Ass-ange's other hero Bradley Manning, leaked information not to the American people, but to a foreign website, Ass-ange's Wikileaks.  He leaked information that could have cost lives among the men he was serving with, men whose efforts to keep him safe in his support job were repaid by sticking their heads on the block.  Manning is a full blown traitor, a little leftist smartass who just wanted to stick it to "the Establishment".  Those that do that rarely care who get hurt along the way.

Snowden did not compromise lives here.  He pointed out that the Obutthole administration was playing Big Brother with our phones, our computers, even the news media.  Because every possible source of opposition MUST be snuffed out- that's Chicago politics, and that's why the IRS went after Mitt Romney, the Koch brothers, and the Tea Party.  He was, in his own words, not a traitor or a hero, but an American, who decided:

 'I don't want to live in a society that does these sort of things'.


So to Ass-ange, he's a hero for the same reasons that Bradley Manning is.  To me, he's a hero for that last quote.


ITEM:  With that in mind:  OBAMA!!! I'M RIGHT HERE!  I am not scared of anything you can do to me, because, I have a reward in heaven.  As the famous philosopher Van Zant once said, "Does your conscience bother you, tell me true..."