Here we are...

More later.

New Blog. Go There.

Here it is:

http://wheelerjd.blogspot.com

If Crowgey does it, I do it. Plain and peanuts. M&M's. Chocolate. Cocoa. Cocaine. Eric Clapton. Randy Chester. Copperpot. Chester Copperpot. The Goonies. The Boondock Saints. Troy Duffy. Donald Duck. Mickey Mouse. Looney Toons. ... I got nothin'.

Help a brotha out...

Ok people, here is how you (whoever is reading this) can help me out (on one of my gaming expeditions). Click on the link below, and go to the page and press the number that it tells you to (if you 'fail', back out and try again). That's it. You don't *have* to join or anything. Just click the link once a day (if you can) and click the number.

http://www.mediwar.com/army/22335

If you decide to join; even better. But all's I ask is that you click the link (only once a day).

Thanks!

Hilarious!

I have found the craziest group (or maybe she is just one) of Christians ever. Check out THIS. Craziness.

This kind of stuff makes me laugh. Hard. The following is from the website:

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BOYCE and BOICE are two demons that interfere with any electronic equipment, i.e., phone, computer, printer, automibile.

If something malfunctions, BIND UP these two demons, and command them to leave your equipment, in the name of Jesus.

Here is an incoming email received February 9, 2001: "Hi, Just thought I'd let you know it took me all these hours to run off your complete deliverance manual. My computer kept shutting down, the connection to the internet kept shutting off, I got signs coming up this is an illegal action, you probably have heard all this before, but the devil sure didn't want me to get hold of your material....I thought there has to be some good stuff in here if the devil is this mad.....as soon as I finished running if off, my computer is working perfect...not shutting down,....not getting unconnected. Praise Jesus, He's stronger than any devil. I had to keep taking authority over devils to get the manual printed, even the printer tried to jam up. What a praise report....really. Devil you loose!!!Praise the Lord. Thank you for your web site. Blessings"

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For the love of all that's holy and good. And you know what? Apparently over 3 million peeps have visited that site.

Scary

Theological Quiz guy

I'm Anselm. Who's that?

"Anselm is the outstanding theologian of the medieval period.He sees man's primary problem as having failed to render unto God what we owe him, so God becomes man in Christ and gives God what he is due. You should read 'Cur Deus Homo?'"

Ok.

What I'm reading:
'The Secret Societies Handbook' by Michael Bradley
'Church History In Plain Language' by Bruce L. Shelley

What I'm listening to:
Brad Mehldau - 'Live in Tokyo'
Nick Drake - 'Five Leaves Left'

What I'm watching:
CSI - so awesome
Twilight Zone - old ones in b/w on sci-fi

What I'm playing:
Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas - beat it Sunday and still can't stop playing it!

Win Ben Stein

My blog post today is Ben Stein's last article for E!Online, published 12/20/03. I never read this until today, and it is a pretty awesome article. I don't apologize for length.

-Jon

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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.


-Ben Stein, E!Online. Entire article can be found here: http://www.eonline.com/Gossip/Morton/Archive/2003/031220.html

mr. procrastinator. (second cousin to mr. roboto)

you know, i don't think it's really possible for someone to think for themselves. since everything is a learning process, everything we know is because someone taught us...even if they taught us indifference.

btw, i'm not changing my blog address. i forgot to care.