I'm a big fan of Billy Graham. I so respect the way the guy has lived, the way he communicates his message and how he's stood the test of time. This audio photo album in USA Today is cool. Here's the associated article. When he's asked how he hasn't fallen into the Mark Freier or Jimmy Swaggert trap of infidelity as a pastor, he explains "I told God that if I was ever unfaithful to my wife, I wanted him to strike me dead." Pretty decent motivation if you ask me.

In the article, he talks about his lack of involvement in politics,

"If I took sides in all these different divisive areas, I would cut off a great part of the people that I really want to reach. So I've felt that the Lord would have me just present the Gospel" and stay out of politics, he says.

Televangelist Pat Robertson asserts that God has lifted his "hedge of protection" around the judges, legislators and voters who agree with allowing abortion or gay marriage or physician-assisted suicide. But asked whether God has forsaken America, Graham's answer is fast and firm: "Noooo!" His reply stands on faith.

"The Lord said, 'I will never forsake you.' No matter how sinful we are, how bad we are, God loves us. At least from my point of view, I believe he sent his son Jesus Christ to die on the cross for us because he loves us and he doesn't have any termination to that love."

Actual line from Sunday's Simpsons episode:
Bart: "Look at me, I'm a grad student, I'm 30 years old and I made $600 last year."
Marge: "Bart, don't make fun of Grad students, they just made a horrible life choice."

Nate and I went to see Star Wars yesterday afternoon. My flight got in around 11 and I picked Nate up from school and we went to the 1:30 showing. We loved the movie, and whispered back and forth throughout the whole thing about the stuff we noticed. It was great to get the closure on everything and have the things come back around to an end-point in the story.

On the way home, Nate and I had a couple of great discussion about the movie. A little background on the discussion: Since our kids were little, we've tried to teach the idea from Proverbs 4:23 "Above all things, guard your heart, for it affects everything you do." We've tried to teach the kids to look at what they do, say, watch, read, listen to and hang out with in this context. Nate and I had a great conversation about the gradual decline of Anakin Skywalker in the movie as he slowly gives into one small step across the line at a time. We then talked about how Sidius was like the snake in the garden, tempting Luke with power and the belief that the Jedi Council did not have his best interest in mind. Cool abstract thinking for an 8 year old.

As we talked, Nate through out there, "Dad, Jesus wasn't perfect." I responded quickly with "Sure he was. What makes you say that." Nate replied back, "No he wasn't, he did things that were wrong, like ditching his parents to teach at the temple and throwing the tables around in the temple." We talked about these for a while, and he stuck to his point. We agreed we'd go look the stories up in the bible and try and understand them better. I'd proud that he's such an independent thinker on this stuff, not satisfied with easy answers on his faith and willing to go dig deeper at an 8 year old level. I'd rather have a critical thinker who owns his faith than a puppet who can recite all of the bible verses but doesn't process what he believes to make it his own.

I went on this ride called the Slingshot today. Twice. The towers are 300 feet tall with a giant cable stretched to the bottom of the ride with two seats attached. You sit in them and it launches you straight up at 96 miles per hour to a height of 365 feet. You flip over, face downward and fall 200 feet, bounce and repeat. None of the guys I work would go until I went the first time and then Ross decided to join me. We got the DVD of it.


After the Slingshot, we went over to Disney Town over by Pleasure Island. It's a collection of resturants and other Disney crap. People were in line for Star Wars, dressed the part. They'd walk by and I'd say "I'll bet your going to the new Star Trek movie tonight, right?" They all acted pretty offended that I didn't know what movie they were there to see. It amused me and that's about all that matters. I'm flying out tomorrow morning at 8. Going to see Star Wars with Nate at 1:30.

Anyone out there enough of a css guru to figure out how to set up the bloglines script to output li list tags with each bloglines item? This is about the closest I've found to changing the output, but it doesn't add the li tags in. The best solution I've seen so far is to do a nightly dump of my OPML file and then parse it using perl scripts at night into the appropriate HTML code. Seems like it'd be a lot easier for bloglines to just insert the appropriate list tags in their output. This one has potential, but I don't think I can embed PHP into my blogger hosted blog.

I'm in the process of changing my blog template. Felt like it was time for a change. 10:30 at night after a long day is probably the wrong time to do it.... I feel obligated to stay up and get it right. Not gonna happen.

We went to dinner tonight at the Universal Studio's City Walk. It's a huge outdoor collection of resturants in the big theme park style. We ate at Jimmy Buffett's Margaritaville. The margarita's stunk, the food stunk, but the atmosphere was cool. Not sure how the two tied together, but there was a woman walking around on 6 foot stilts making balloon animals for the kids.

I don't typically talk to the people I sit next to on airplanes, but I struck up a conversation with the guy next to me and I'm glad I did. He was one of the more interesting people I've met in a while. He works for a conservation organization called Ducks Unlimited which I learned all about, but that wasn't the most interesting part. He grew up in Anchorage, Alaska where he worked Salmon Boats and at Salmon Cannerys. He told me all about those industries, the legalized pot up there, the 3 months of daylight and darkness and the wacked out culture up there. It was fascinating. I wanted to write down some of the stories and put them here, but I'm drawing a blank. I'll post them when I remember them.

I walked off the plane and there was a guy standing there with one giant four fingered mickey mouse hand on, holding a Disney Cruise sign in the other hand. I asked him if he was aware that he only had four fingers. He quickly responded back that he'd had five before he visited Wendy's recently.

I flew from Kansas City down to Orlando with a co-worker and friend of mine, Matt. I went through security first and saw a whole bunch of the security people standing around. I asked two of them to give my buddy the "bonus treatment", not really thinking they would. They did. Two guys searched every inch of him and his stuff for 10 minutes. Funny to me, not so funny to him.

Susan had the baby! Benjamin Kenneth Kurt was born this morning and weighs around 7lbs 2oz and 19 inches wide. More importantly, he doesn't have a really big head like Kevin and the other two kids. Kevin said that it was a pretty easy labor, I guess as easy as having a baby can be, and that's all relative to a guy's perception on labor.

Nate's excited that the boys still rule the numbers in the family!

Tom won Survivor! Am I the only one with a plutonic man-crush on Tom?

I was laughing out loud on the plane ride yesterday while I was reading this book. Most of you probably haven't heard of Kevin Smith, but he's one of my favorite directors out there. I guess he's the only director that I really give a hoot about or would bother to read one of their books. You've probably seen him on Leno doing the Roadside Attraction pieces (damn funny) if you haven't stooped low enough to see the Clerks/Mall Rats/Dogma/Jay and Silent Bob movies.

My sister Susan is on the way to the hospital to have her baby. She'd invited Cathie to come be in the delivery room with her, but since I'm on the road, it's probably not going to work out for her. Nate's rooting for a boy, because if it's a girl, that baby, combined with Beth and Jon's upcoming baby girl will tip the balance of the nieces and nephews to the feminine side. Maddie and Emily are of course hoping for a baby girl. For Kevin's sake, I'm rooting for a boy.

Susan called me a few weeks ago to bounce some names off me - not to see if I like them, but to see how much fun could be made of them. This stems from all of the nieces and nephews getting strange nick names. Heck, everyone in our family has one nick-name or another. It was a big part of our teasing each other growing up as kids and now they've stuck and become endearing. Except for Dan's nickname which he's never really take to. Ask him about it sometime. We've had Matthew - Shabadu. Gabe - Gabriella. Allie - Shiek Ali-bab-wa. If it's a boy, kevin wants to name it Luke so he can say "Luke, I am your father." Seems like a big committment for a one-liner like that, but it'd be worth it to me.

I flew into Kansas City yesterday, had some meetings and I'm flying down to Orlando today through Thursday. I'm taking Nate out of school on Thursday afternoon so he and I can go see Star Wars. We got 1:30PM seats for the Digital Showing at Emagine theatre. I saw the movie Sin City on the Digital Screen and was blown away. The difference between film and digital is the difference between regular TV and HDTV. Both the sound and visual quality are astounding! He and I are both pretty excited about the new Star Wars. We've been playing the game Episode III - Revenge of the Sith which is amazing! The light saber battles are the best part of it. Nate and I have daily "Champion of the World" competitions.... I've only held the title for one day - kinda embaressing.

There's a Corel User's group conference at the hotel I'm in. Who the heck still uses Corel/Wordperfect software? Who still uses it to the degree that thy would travel some distance to meet with other users to talk about Corel software. It's an odd looking group here for this conference. Lots of fellas. Gee, that's suprising. Men at a computer user's group conference?

I'm giddy as a school girl about the new XBOX 360. It's a completely high definition based system, complete with 3 core CPU's. It sounds amazing. Check here for more info.

My little sister Susan is having contractions. It's her third. They're about 8 minutes apart. They don't know if they're having a boy or a girl. My bet is it's one or the other.

I'm back from Leesburg, VA. I'm so glad to be home. 3 meals a day of bad cafeteria food (the food at this place has gone severely downhill over the past 10 years), hallways like mazes and not going outside except to hit the gym. The only nice thing was the unlimited starbucks certificates we had for the onsite Starbucks.

My nephew Gabe (Susan and Kevin's son) had to go to the hospital last night after he shoved a lego up his nose. Apparently Kevin heard Gabe screaming at bedtime, figuring he's just throwing a fit. Kevin goes up and Gabe tells him that his nose hurts. Kevin asks why and Gabe replies "Because there's a lego in it!" Kevin responded with the obvious question "Why do you have a lego in it?" His response: "Because it looked like it would fit". Urgent care couldn't get it out. It finally came out with a good nose blowing.

This goes to prove Drew and Mike's theory that "If there's a hole, something's going in it."

As I was laughing, Cathie reminded me that Nate had a similar deal happen. She'd taken him into the doctor because of an ear ache. The doctor looked in and pulled out an eraser from his ear. He couldn't remember how it got there until it suddenly came to him. He'd found it on the bus and thought it was an ear plug. People were being loud, so he put it in his ear. Makes sense.

We had a fun weekend. I met up with Bill Belanger to go mountain biking out at Island Lake. It was a good time to catch up with Bill. We don't do it enough now that we're not on the same team. I got Cathie a mountain bike for Mother's day. I'd gotten her one (in theory) when she was pregnant with Emily, but we never actually got the bike. I sized it and picked it out for her, and brought it home to suprise her. Friday night I had a Project 311 Vision meeting. On Saturday I woke up early and hung out with Emily for a while, until I started jonsing for some sugar cereal. I ran up to the store at 8 and picked up my two favorites - Captain Crunch and Golden Grahams. We had a showing that morning at 11:30, so Cathie and I brought Nate an Madeline over to a neighbor's house while we hooked the bike-buggy up and took Emily on a bike ride. We rode over to a nearby neighborhood where we checked out a model home. We had more showings that afternoon so we took the kids and their friends to 7-11 and then to the park to hang out for a couple of hours. We ended the grilling bonanza with Chicken Fajitas and Cathie and I got caught up on Tivo'd episodes of Alias that night.

On Sunday, I let Cathie sleep in and made her breakfast in bed, except I figured out too late that we no longer had a breakfast-in-bed-tray. Oops. I took the kids to church and let Cathie lounge around the house for a while. I hadn't hung out with the kids in Fusion for a while and it reminded me of how much I love those guys. After church, we headed over to Cath's Mom and Dad's house. They have an awesome in-ground pool and we had beautiful weather, so we hung out in the pool for Mother's Day, grilling out and splashing around. I was messing around with some of the new features on my new digital camera, including the speed-shot mode, which takes three pictures in a second, capturing action shots really well. Cathie's brother Ed was doing front and back flips, so I was getting stop motion shots of the action, which turned out really cool. We headed back around 6 so I could pack and get to the airport. I finished up some homework for this class on the plane and got here safe and sound.