This is a video of Yale punking Harvard. They get 1800 harvard fans to hose themselves. Check out the video and web site at www.harvardsucks.org

Had a pretty uneventful morning. The kids and I let Cathie sleep in for a while and then I went to the gym and then picked up Riley from Nicki's (Thanks Nik!). Nate and I went out to buy the gifts for the Angel Tree child we were helping out and then out to lunch. We had a great time, getting lots of unhealthy food, like milk shakes. We have great conversations when we go out, coming up with hypothetical questions for each other like "If you could choose between shooting a rocket laucher or a sniper rifle, which would you choose and why?" As we're driving, our favorite past-time is for me to pick random songs on my iPod and tell him the story behind the song. Today, we were talking about and listening to songs by Peter Gabriel, U2 and Yes.

We got back last night from our Thanksgiving extravaganza. On Thursday, we got together at my parent's house and had our annual Kurt Family Thanksgiving dinner. Between my mom, dad, grandma, brothers, sisters, spouses, nieces and nephews there are 19 1/2 of us. My mom cooked an amazing meal with 5 or 6 different desserts. We ate our fill as we watched the Lions lose miserably. That evening, we headed over to Cathie's parents house in Dewitt.

The next morning we got up and a bunch of us went on our annual Christmas Tree Farm expedition. We chopped down a tree as usual. We headed back to Cathie's parents where we began the annual Lebbon Thanksgiving extravaganza. Cathie's brother Ed and his wife Stacy were both there and we had a meal that could have easily fed twice the number of people there. Again, an awesome meal. We hung out there until about 7ish and most of us headed back. Madeline stuck around to spend the night.

I got back last night and met up with Matt, Will and Jason to play some Halo 2 at our church office on the big screen. What a game! I sucked, but not as bad as Will, so there's some solace in that for me.

We had our first big snow, so the kids and I went out first thing this morning to play while Cathie got things packed and ready to head out for Thanksgiving. Our dog Riley was having a great time until Emily tried to hook the sled up to her, convinced that she's a sled dog.

Reason #437 why you don't let a 3 year old maker her own hot choclate:

Couple of pictures from Monday Night Football:
This Ross, Matt and I - a couple of my good friends from work who I went to the game with:

This old gal is one of the die hard Cheifs fans I saw at the game. The cigarette completes the picture:

I've been listening to this message from Rob Bell at Mars Hills Church in Grand Rapids, part of the series 15 part on Mastering the Art of Living. Great series, but there are two messages on truth that have really caused me to think, which I guess is what a good sermon does. Part 11 deals with finding and claiming truth in the world around us as Christians. It was a concept I'd heard, but taken to a new point that I hadn't. Part 12 takes it quite a bit further, talking about God in terms of the definition of Ultimate Reality. I've been reading about this same idea in the book I just started called The Divine Conspiracy, by Dallas Willard.

In Rob's message, he makes a leap somewhere in the message iin how he interprets John 14:6 which is where Jesus states:

"I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. 7If you really knew me, you would know my Father as well. From now on, you do know him and have seen him."

I'm just not sure I'm tracking with where he takes this. Rob seems to take the position that this is not about Jesus saying that he's the gatekeeper to heaven but that he's pointing to the ultimate reality that is God and himself. It seems to be such a fine line between Christianity and Universalism. It's caused me to do a lot of thinking and studying, which I guess is the goal of a great message. Take a listen and let me know what you think. I've had some great conversations with a friend of mine Mark who's been looking into Kaballah, about this verse and how it lines up with what he thinks, but I still can't follow how Rob Bell comes to the conclusions that he does with this.

As a family, we're participating in the Angel Tree program through church. Angel Tree helps prison inmates to provide Christmas gifts to their kids while their in prison. Cathie and Madeline, Nate and I each picked an family to help. I was talking with Nate tonight and he had a choice between getting the boy we chose one gift, or getting him two gifts at the expense of giving up one of his own christmas gifts. Being 7, I figured he'd go with giving the boy one gift and take the extra christmas gift. He didn't even hestitate to say that he wanted to get the boy the extra gifts. I'm a proud dad.

I just barely made it home from Kansas City this morning. For some reason, I woke up at about 3:30 AM and was wide awake. Since I had to leave the hotel in an hour and a half, I decided to stay up. When I looked out the window, they already had 6 inches of snow. There was none when I went to bed. I got the airport, and they'd closed it down to clear the runways. Our flight ended up taking off at 7:30 instead of 6. I'm not sure what I was thinking traveling today, the busiest travel day of the year. Rookie move on my part. Luckily, I made it home. I can't imagine the poor schmucks who travel later today with all of the weather problems going on around the country. I'm just glad we're driving for thanksgiving tomorrow.

In my message on sunday, I quoted from James 2, talking about the relationship between our faith and our actions. According to Jerry Fallwell and some of his buddies mentioned in this article, this shouldn't even be in the bible. I knew I should have checked with Jerry before using it. This is just one of those things you learn over time.

If you haven't already, check out the movies that Amazon.com's been showing. They're short features (<3 minutes) either starring or directed by big names, that have no product placement or amazon.com mention. They're very well done and worth watching.

Nothing like getting back form the gym to find that you didn't pack any changes of underwear.

I went to my first Monday Night Football game ever last night at Arrowhead stadium to wastch the Kansas City Chiefs play the New England Patriots. It was a great experience. When you first drive in, there is a huge haze over the stadium from all the barbecuing. Being Kansas City, people don't grill burgers or brats down here, there was the smell of steak in the air. People had some amazing tailgaiting setups. I've never seen a stadium so blanketed by the team's color. It was red everywhere you looked. I would guess that 98% of the fans there were wearing some kind of chiefs jacket, hat or shirt.

There was this really cool camera that was connected at four axis points over the stadium that could move three dimensionally to stay over the action. Seems like a fun job to have. My video games skills could truly be utilized there.

I thought my message today in church went well. I felt really good about the whole thing. The title of the message was "Duct Tape Christianity". It went longer than I thought, so I had to cut it on the fly to keep it to only 35 minutes. You can download it here.

I've been going back and forth with the nigerian royalty trying to figure out where he can send me the $15M. An exceprt of their e-mail to me:

IN ORDER TO FULLFIL THE WISHES OF HER LATE HUSBAND, SHE HAS DECIDED THAT SHE WILL ASSIST THE NEEDY AND THE LESS PRIVILEDGED PEOPLE IN OUR SOCIETY. BEFORE HER HUSBAND`S DEATH HE DEPOSITED SOME AMOUNT OF MONEY TO THE TUNE OF US$15.240,000(FIFTEEN MILLION TWO HUNDRED AND FORTY THOUSAND UNITED STATES DOLLARS) WITH A SECURITY COMPANY ,UNDER THE GUISE OF LOCAL GOODS TO BE PRODUCED IN EUROPE. THAT WAS WILLED TO HER AFTER HIS DEATH. WHAT SHE REQUIRES FROM YOU IS FOR YOU TO GO TO THE SECURITY COMPANY AND MAKE CLAIMS OF THE DEPOSIT , SEND 50% OF THE TOTAL SUM TO HER HERE IN AFRICA TO ASSIST THE LESS PRIVILEDGED,THEN YOU WILL DISBURSE 30% TO DO THE SAME ABROAD (SPECIFICALLY CHILDREN`S CHARITY) WHILE YOU WILL RETAIN THE REMAINDING 20%.

My latest communication with him:

My church and I would like to participate. We are in desparate need of money to feed the poor in our area. This money would be a huge help. Please advise on how we can be of assistance to you.

My son's cub scout pack collected 6,900 cans of food for our local food shelter. It's a great thing for hurting families, but it was a great thing for the kids. They got as much out of it as anyone!

I met a friend of mine for lunch yesterday. As we were leaving the resturant, my friend handed me something they'd printed out for me to read. Before heading outside, I told them I had to use the restroom. My friend then replied (rather loudly) "Can I hold it?" Of course they meant the document they'd just given me, but people turned around and stared as I laughed hysterically and my friend quickly added "....the document". We laughed very hard about this.

Like everyone else, I periodically get spam e-mails from people claiming they would like to deposit large amounts of money in my bank account in order to escape the tyranny of their country. I've started replying to the e-mails, telling them I'm all in and seeing how long I can string them along. I'm currently going back and forth with DR.EMMANUEL KUMAHLO. Occasionally I tell them I'm a pastor and my church would like to give him our bank account number in order to help them out. Suprisingly, this turns most of them off.

Madeline was sick and out of school last week three days. On his own, Nate made her a get well card. I have no idea what the picture is on the card, but the caption read "Get well soon. I miss you very much. You're the best sister a boy could ever have. I wish you good luck getting well. From Nathan."

Lots of you are probably wondering what to get me for Christmas. Okay, not lots, probably very few. As my good deed for Christmas, I'm putting my Amazon Wishlist out there for your amusement or shopping pleasure.

If you're not using it already, this is worth checking out: Firefox. Firefox is a free browser created by a consortium of programmers that works great, has better functionality that Internet Explorer and best of all IS NOT A MICROSOFT PRODUCT. One of the best features about it is the tabbed browsing feature, which lets you have multiple sessions going concurrently in the same window.

A9 is a search engine worth looking at. It's all about how it formats the output - allowing you to select various columns against your search criteria: Movies, Music, Books, Images, etc. If you use the toolbar, Amazon.com gives you a discount on your purchases. Not a bad deal.

This article about worship struck me this morning:

Jesus says I cannot worship two gods, that I will hate the one and love the other. Since I really do want God to be God in my life, I need to smash these singing and doing worlds together. I need to seriously look at where my love-caused action towards other things supplants my love-caused action toward God … and I probably need to break out in song a little more often.

On the list of annoying things: Watching a television show while Emily has the remote. She's learned how to use Tivo's pause function and she pauses it every few seconds to look at what's on TV or tell you about what she just saw or what the characters just said. Her favorite show right now is Zoboomafoo. She starts the show off by doing a crazy dance she's made up and then pauses it every few seconds for the rest of the show. Should I be proud that my three year old is proficient with the remote, or are we just letting her watch waaaay too much tv. I'm guessing the second.

Why you can't leave a three year old unattended for 30 seconds:

Nate's cub scout pack did the second part of a can drive today. Last week the kids left bags for people to fill up with canned food on people's doors and this week they were collecting them as people left them on their porch. Nate, his friend Trevor and I went out this morning to go collect the food. As we went around, we couldn't find any bags out there. Nate was in disbelief, asking "Dad, don't people care about the poor?" We began going door-to-door asking for cans. They would go up to the door, dressed in their cub scout uniforms and Nate would go through their spiel: "Hi we're with the cub scouts collecting cans of food for poor people. Would you like to help poor people?" How could you say no to that? It turned out that the reason no cans were out in our neighborhood is because another cub scout group came through our neighborhood accidently and picked up our cans.

Here's a picture of me almost, but not actually hang gliding. At least I have a picture of me not really doing it.

Great story on choosing life over convience.

Today is Spiro Agnew's birthday. Interestingly enough, you can rearrange the letters of his name to spell Grow a Penis

This is really cool. My friend (who happens to also be my trainer) Kirk Vickers was selected by Mens Journal Magazine as one of the top 100 trainers in the country, as stated in this article. He is one of the only two trainers in the state of Michigan who got this recognition. The votes came from other fitness professionals, Doctors, Physical Therapists and other trainers. If you don't know Kirk, he used to be the head trainer for the Detroit Red Wings and now owns his own gym, Triad Performance Training Center where he trains schmoes like me as well as professional athletes. I think it would be important for Kirk that everyone know that I can bench press more than him. Frankly, it probably should have made the article.

I went out to Torrey Pines to go hang gliding this afternoon. It's a world famous glideport (is that a real word?) by the Torrey Pines golf course. It's right on the ocean and is based at on a huge cliff hundreds of feet high. I was in the tandem harness, ready to go off the cliff when suddenly the wind died down. It never picked up, and I didn't get to go. Next time.

I was in a Starbucks today in San Diego that had a pay-for-use bathroom today. I had to borrow a quarter to use it. Just as I got ready to plop it in (the quarter), a starbucks Barista saved the day and handed me a quarter.

I got up at 4:30 this morning to try and keep my internal clock square, and I'm beat, it's only 5:30. I fly out tomorrow. First class both ways. Gotta love it. Additionally, I'm gold (almost diamond) in the Hilton chain. Gold gets me all sorts of perks when I check in, like a fruit basket waiting in my room, free room service breakfasts, etc. Diamond has the nice perk of being able to walk into any Hilton hotel anywhere and get a room, regardless of whether they're booked or not. They'll actually bump someone for you to get you a room.

I'm teaching in two weeks at Crossroads. I'm looking forward to it. We're doing a series based on the movie Saved, looking at some of the concepts from the movie.


I started reading the book Fearless Faith by John Fischer. A friend of mine, Ken Buck, had been harping on me to read this for a long time now, telling me it would help me articulate some my frustration towards the christian subculture out there. He reams out everything from Christian radio, music, books, movies - you name it. It's a good book for the most part, a few things I don't agree with so far, but I'm still processing what he's saying.

We lost pretty severely last night in Dodgeball. I think we only won a 2 or 3 games out of 9, butwe had a great time doing it. We've gotten to know the other teams pretty well, so the trash talking and sidline conversations keep things interesting, not to mention the side bets that go on to spice things up. We hung out at Ted's afterwards to watch Monday night football and complain about how bad our arms hurt us. I know I'm whining here, but my arm is pretty much numb by the end of the game. It's the equivalent of pitching a 9 inning game, I think (since i've never really played baseball in my life), but it hurts.... A lot. Our team is on average 10 years older than all of the other teams so we're hurting pretty bad by the third game.

For the past couple of weeks I've been using allofmp3.com to download music. It's very different from the other download services for a couple of reasons:
1. There's no copy protection on the music, so you can load it anywhere you want.
2. You can download it in any format and quality that you want.
3. It charges by the Mb for music. Where most music services charge $1 per song, songs here run from $.02 - $.05 depending on their size. You end up paying about $.50 per album as opposed to $10.
4. This site has every album or artist in the world on it.

I was a little skeptical to give my credit card to a russian site at first, but from everything I've read and experienced, it's trustyworthy. Apparetly, because of Russian Copyright laws, they can offer music from all artists and labels. They have an amazing collection of music out there. I haven't found anything they DON'T have yet.

Here's a review on the service that provides a good overview and other referenes. You can download the client software here.

I've got a delimma. I've always mocked the "My child was student of the month" bumper stickers. I'm not a big fan of bumper stickers in general, really. My daughter Madeline came running into my office this afteroon sharing with me that she was selected as her school's student of the month, showing me her certificate, the letter and what else, but a student of the month bumper sticker. She told me I could even put it on my car. Thinking quickly, I told her I wanted to put it some place EVEN MORE special than my car. Thankfully, she thought my office would be even better. I'm a bad parent, huh?

Nate and I went to see The Incredibles last night. It was phenomenal!
I've got to agree with Kevin Smith, who said it's the best Super Hero movie EVER MADE. Not only were the graphics, down to the last strand of hair amazing, but the plot was great and it was almost 2 hours long! There's a great article about the movie from a geek's perspective on Slashdot. Nate and I have been playing the video game on PS2, which is a lot of fun as well. Samuel L. Jackson is cool in just about any role he plays, let alone a super hero,

Two more reasons I love being a dad:
My three year old Emily fell asleep today on the couch while holding a large dill pickle in her hand. Cathie found her asleep and took the pickle form her. Emily woke up and told my wife "I'm going to fall back asleep with a pickle and see if it disappears again."

I came up to bed the other night and found that my 6 year old daughter Madeline had left a note by my bedside that read: "Keep this with you. I love you dad and I will never stop. Remember the fun times we have. Just a reminder. Madeline"

I voted. One successful approach I've had in past years is to vote for the most whacked out parties for University of Michigan's board of trustees. I picked the Natural Law party and the Green Party. Eventually, I hope their political ideology will trickle down into the football team.

We played Dodgeball last night. Had a couple guys from the neighborhood come to the game, which is ultimately how I was hoping it would go. We're not good, but we're not in last place. We're a bunch of old guy, relative to the other teams. We start off throwing strong, and by about the 4th game (we play a total of 12 or so), our arms are rubber while everyone else is still hurling the ball at us with full strength. My arm and shoulder was dying by the end of this. Wasn't there a time I could beat the snot out of my body and not suffer any ramifications?

Cathie and I watched a new show on MTV called You've got a friend. The basic premise is this:
A person agrees to be paired up with an actor for 48 hours who poses to be their friend. This "friend" can order you to do anything, and typically does. Anything from making them dump their girlfriend, quit their job or eat a booger. If the person refueses once during that time, they lose. If they successfully complete the 48 hours, they get $15,000. The guy they pick to be the friend has an amazing ability to know exactly which buttons to push on others, how to spot the weaknesses and go after them with gusto. I think I've found a great job. Pushing people's buttons and getting paid for it!