car shopping

Today I went car shopping with my cousin. His car, a VW Jetta, has a lease expiring soon. His new car:



That's right, a 2002 Porsche Boxster S. We took it for a test drive and they are a fast car, no doubt about it. Sporty, quick, a convertible, everything a guy wants minus the convenience. Glove box? Nope. Trunk space? 2 grocery bags. Quiet? Not with that engine. A place for a 20oz Pepsi bottle? Wedge it between the engine (behind the seats) firewall and the seat. Those crafty Germans...

fire

I was on call this weekend for the first time in months. Thanks to the massive amount of wedding planning that has concluded, I now had some free time to resume normal life. Well, as luck would have it I got called my first weekend night back on the job. 5am I got woken up out a dead slumber to a fire in Saint Paul. 4 DAT's plus a lead were called up for this one, so I figured it was pretty serious. Well, as it turns out the clients consisted of two parents and one juvenile (17). 5 people to aid a family of 3, a little OVERKILL - thanks Red Cross. Anyways, so I get on scene about 5:30 and there are 5 fire trucks packing gear up. The house - a total loss. From the outside it doesn't look too bad, but inside it's all gone. I'm always amazed at the power of a fire.

ben stein last column

I'm not a fan of spam and was sure this was a hoax when I received it... turns out I was wrong. Good stuff.

For many years Ben Stein has written a biweekly column called "Monday Night At Morton's." (Morton's is a famous chain of Steakhouses known to be frequented by movie stars and famous people from around the globe.) Now, Ben is terminating the column to move on to other things in his life. Reading his final column is worth a few minutes of your time.

Ben Stein's Last Column...

How Can Someone Who Lives in Insane Luxury Be a Star in Today's World?

As I begin to write this, I "slug" it, as we writers say, which means I put a heading on top of the document to identify it. This heading is "eonlineFINAL," and it gives me a shiver to write it. I have been doing this column for so long that I cannot even recall when I started.

Lew Harris, who founded this great site, asked me to do it maybe seven or eight years ago, and I loved writing this column so much for so long I came to believe it would never end.

But again, all things must pass, and my column for E! Online must pass. In a way, it is actually the perfect time for it to pass. Lew, whom I have known forever, was impressed that I knew so many stars at Morton's on Monday nights.

He could not get over it, in fact. So, he said I should write a column about the stars I saw at Morton's and what they had to say.

It worked well for a long time, but gradually, my changing as a person and the world's change have overtaken it. On a small scale, Morton's, while better than ever, no longer attracts as many stars as it used to. It still brings in the rich people in droves and definitely some stars.

I saw Samuel L. Jackson there a few days ago, and we had a nice visit, and right before that, I saw and had a splendid talk with Warren Beatty in an elevator, in which we agreed that Splendor in the Grass was a super movie.

But Morton's is not the star galaxy it once was, though it probably will be again.

Beyond that, a bigger change has happened. I no longer think Hollywood stars are terribly important. They are uniformly pleasant, friendly people, and they treat me better than I deserve to be treated. But a man or woman who makes a huge wage for memorizing lines and reciting them in front of a camera is no longer my idea of a shining star we should all look up to.

How can a man or woman who makes an eight-figure wage and lives in insane luxury really be a star in today's world, if by a "star" we mean someone bright and powerful and attractive as a role model?

Real stars are not riding around in the backs of limousines or in Porsches or getting trained in yoga or Pilates and eating only raw fruit while they have Vietnamese girls do their nails. They can be interesting, nice people, but they are not heroes to me any longer.

A real star is the soldier of the 4th Infantry Division who poked his head into a hole on a farm near Tikrit, Iraq. He could have been met by a bomb or a hail of AK-47 bullets. Instead, he faced an abject Saddam Hussein and the gratitude of all of the decent people of the world.

A real star is the U.S. soldier who was sent to disarm a bomb next to a road north of Baghdad. He approached it, and the bomb went off and killed him.

A real star, the kind who haunts my memory night and day, is the U.S. soldier in Baghdad who saw a little girl playing with a piece of unexploded ordnance on a street near where he was guarding a station. He pushed her aside and threw himself on it just as it exploded. He left a family desolate in California and a little girl alive in Baghdad.

The stars who deserve media attention are not the ones who have lavish weddings on TV but the ones who patrol the streets of Mosul even after two of their buddies were murdered and their bodies battered and stripped for the sin of trying to protect Iraqis from terrorists.

We put couples with incomes of $100 million a year on the covers of our magazines. The noncoms and officers who barely scrape by on military pay but stand on guard in Afghanistan and Iraq and on ships and in submarines and near the Arctic Circle are anonymous as they live and die.

I am no longer comfortable being a part of the system that has such poor values, and I do not want to perpetuate those values by pretending that who is eating at Morton's is a big subject.

There are plenty of other stars in the American firmament. The policemen and women who go off on patrol in South Central and have no idea if they will return alive. The orderlies and paramedics who bring in people who have been in terrible accidents and prepare them for surgery. The teachers and nurses who throw their whole spirits into caring for autistic children. The kind men and women who work in hospices and in cancer wards.

Think of each and every fireman who was running up the stairs at the World Trade Center as the towers began to collapse.

Now you have my idea of a real hero.

Last column, I told you a few of the rules I had learned to keep my sanity. Well, here is a final one to help you keep your sanity and keep you in the running for stardom: We are puny, insignificant creatures.

We are not responsible for the operation of the universe, and what happens to us is not terribly important. God is real, not a fiction, and when we turn over our lives to Him, he takes far better care of us than we could ever do for ourselves.

In a word, we make ourselves sane when we fire ourselves as the directors of the movie of our lives and turn the power over to Him.

I can put it another way. Years ago, I realized I could never be as great an actor as Olivier or as good a comic as Steve Martin--or Martin Mull or Fred Willard--or as good an economist as Samuelson or Friedman or as good a writer as Fitzgerald. Or even remotely close to any of them.

But I could be a devoted father to my son, husband to my wife and, above all, a good son to the parents who had done so much for me. This came to be my main task in life.

I did it moderately well with my son, pretty well with my wife and well indeed with my parents (with my sister's help). I cared for and paid attention to them in their declining years. I stayed with my father as he got sick, went into extremis and then into a coma and then entered immortality with my sister and me reading him the Psalms.

This was the only point at which my life touched the lives of the soldiers in Iraq or the firefighters in New York. I came to realize that life lived to help others is the only one that matters and that it is my duty, in return for the lavish life God has devolved upon me, to help others He has placed in my path. This is my highest and best use as a human.

As so many of you know, I am an avid Bush fan and a Republican. But I think the best guidance I ever got was from the inauguration speech of Democrat John F. Kennedy in January of 1961.

On a very cold and bright day in D.C., he said, "With a good conscience our only sure reward, with history the final judge of our deeds, let us go forth...asking His blessing and His help but knowing that here on Earth, God's work must surely be our own."

And then to paraphrase my favorite president, my boss and friend Richard Nixon, when he left the White House in August 1974, with me standing a few feet away, "This is not goodbye. The French have a word for it--au revoir. We'll see you again."

Au revoir, and thank you for reading me for so long. God bless every one of you. We'll see you again.


By Ben Stein

tea

Just giving a shout out to the Tazo Chia organic spiced black tea. This is some of the best tea I've ever had. I'm no connoisseur of tea that's for sure, but I do enjoy drinking it. I try to drink two cups of it a day here at work because a) I don't drink coffee and b) drinking water all day blows.

local pastor

So I was reading to other day in the news about a rally at the state capital where a Baptist church was going to protest in support of passing a law that defines marriage as an act between one man and one woman. In the next paragraph it stated that another Baptist group the following day was going to protest the opposite. Here is the excerpt from the article.

"We see and have a very clear biblical conviction, based on our understanding of Scripture, that marriage is between one man and one woman," said Goold, senior pastor of the Crystal Evangelical Free Church in New Hope who joined about 1,000 people Tuesday on the Capitol lawn in support of defining marriage in the state constitution.

Donley, pastor of University Baptist Church in Minneapolis, holds equally strong religious convictions. He will rally Thursday at the Capitol with potentially hundreds of people of faith against the marriage amendment, in part, to make clear that there are religious people on both sides of the debate.

"The heart of the Gospel is one of inclusion. Whenever Jesus was given the opportunity to exclude somebody, he included all people," Donley said. "I think what the supporters of this amendment are trying to do is ... write one interpretation of the Scripture into the constitution."

I was stunned. How can he think that marriage between one man and one woman is interpretation of Scripture? God says explicidly and multiple times that anything different that that is a sin. I had to write him a letter and here is what I sent:

Pastor,

I’m sure you get or are getting a ton of email lately... but I figured I’d write anyways because I guess I am confused. In reading some of the pages on your webpage, particularly the parts about marriage I have been trying to wrestle with how you justify your beliefs, because in my searching of the Bible I come up short. Mind you, I have zero formal Bible education and have only learned what I know (Biblically) by reading His word. Maybe you can help.

With your churches stance for homosexual marriage, how do you justify 1 Corinthians 6:9-10 or Romans 1:26-27? To me it seems that allowing sin and condoning sin are two different things. Allowing sinners into a church congregation (sinners as in liars, fornicators, thieves, etc) is one thing because we all fall short of His desired perfection. If we didn’t allow sinners, the churches would be empty! But, saying lying, stealing, blasphemy, or fornication (homosexuality) is OK / permissible / allowed / correct / just seems to me to be a huge contradiction of scripture.

From your letter to Regional Executive Ministers, “I pray for the day when we will find the reconciliation in Christ where, to paraphrase Paul’s letter to the Galatians, there is no male nor female, no slave nor free, Jew nor Gentile, right nor left, red nor blue and even gay nor straight for we are all one in Christ Jesus.”

I’m assuming you are quoting Galatians 3:28? Reading Galatians 3:28 in my Bibles it appears you have misquoted Paul’s writing as I saw no mention of gay or straight. You did seem to quote it correctly though is saying we all are one in Christ Jesus… if we repent and put our trust in Jesus Christ.

From Webster’s dictionary:
Repent
Pronunciation: ri-'pent
Function: verb
Etymology: Middle English, from Old French repentir, from re- + pentir to be sorry, from Latin paenitEre intransitive senses
1 : to turn from sin and dedicate oneself to the amendment of one's life

Repent means to turn from sin, not embrace it.

To quote Jesus in Matthew 9:12-13: “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. 13 But go and learn what this means: ‘I desire mercy and not sacrifice.’ For I did not come to call the righteous, but sinners, to repentance.”

Again, I am not saying that we should throw transgender / bi-sexual / homosexual / etc folks out the door and wish them luck. Without a doubt in my mind we should embrace them and show them God’s love. In the same sense of love though, isn’t it our duty to not only God, but to sinners to show sinners that God wants everyone to be cleansed of our sin in repentance?

Sincerely and humbly,

- Me

one year

It was one year ago Saint Patricks Day that I went out and had a few too many. Since then, it's been one year since I've had enough alcohol to be or feel drunk. Quite the milestone and something just a few short years ago though maybe would never happen. Wow. Praise God!

sick

So I've laying on the couch since Saturday and found our Wednesday that the cause was a bout strep. Joy.

Sat: didn't feel well
Sun: temp of 102
Mon: temp of 99-100
Tue: temp of 103
Wed: temp of 99 to normal
Thu: normal

I'm back at work today, running about 80%... hopefully I'll be feeling better by the weekend since Sunday I am heading to OR for the week for work.

dog

I took this picture a while back as I was laughing driving down the road. This dog didn't move for the half mile that I saw him as we headed in the same direction. Not one inch. He didn't look left, look right out the window, hey may not have even blinked. Very peculiar.