Now I’m done for. The same fabulous site has an old maps section. (Sheeeeeeeila!)
Here’s one I’m loony about — not surprisingly — The Strait of Magellan:
I’m gonna get lost over there. Someone come get me. I’ll leave bread crumbs.
how ’bout them chargers???
Wow. My normally hapless SD Chargers are smokin’ hot this year, peeps! Every week, I nearly wet myself watching them play.
And yesterday’s game was just …. insane. 48 to 20 over the Denver Broncos. Clinched the AFC West. Right now, the #1 team in the NFL. I don’t think this has EVER happened in my lifetime.
But that LaDainian Tomlinson was the clincher. He set a new NFL record for most TD’s scored in a season — 29 — AND did it with 3 games left in the regular season. I absolutely have a sports crush on him. He’s always so humble about it, doesn’t showboat in the end zone at all, just scores the TD and throws the ball back to the ref. So when he scored that record-breaking TD and THIS happened instantly, I just started to bawl, peeps. Literally, the very next sound you heard was the clacking of all those helmets together. Beautiful. All those big guys just charging at him, raising him on their shoulders, the deafening roar of the home crowd, the massive spontaneous explosion of love and appreciation for this amazing, humble player. Look at the crowd behind him, cheering and snapping pictures. I’m telling you. SD fans are incredibly loyal. It was just an electric, thrilling moment.
Bawling. I was bawling at a damn football game.
Also, please notice the butt of my other SD sports crush, Antonio Gates.
my head is spinning
My sister called Friday night to tell me this tidbit that I still can’t get over:
Piper and her dad were at a father/daughter banquet:
The Sugar Plum Fairy Ball.
There would be cookies and punch and dancing. Piper was wearing a velvet dress that she’d been begging to wear since noon that day.
Seriously, if there are no pictures of The Sugar Plum Fairy Ball, I just don’t know what I will do.
birth: the visited planet, part 2
Continuing my chapter excerpt from The Jesus I Never Knew:
Christmas art depicts Jesus’ family as icons stamped in gold foil, with a calm Mary receiving the tidings of the Annunciation as a kind of benediction. But that is not at all how Luke tells the story. Mary was “greatly troubled” and “afraid” at the angel’s appearance, and when the angel pronounced the sublime words about the Son of the Most High whose kingdom will never end, Mary had something far more mundane on her mind: But I’m a virgin!
Once, a young unmarried lawyer named Cynthia bravely stood before my church in Chicago and told of a sin we already knew about: we had seen her hyperactive son running up and down the aisles every Sunday. Cynthia had taken the lonely road of bearing an illegitimate child and caring for him after his father decided to skip town. Cynthia’s sin was no worse than many others, and yet, as she told us, it had such conspicuous consequences. She could not hide the result of that single act of passion, sticking out as it did from her abdomen for months until a child emerged to change every hour of every day of the rest of her life. No wonder the Jewish teenager Mary felt greatly troubled: she faced the same prospects even without the act of passion.
In the modern United States, where each year a million teenage girls get pregnant out of wedlock, Mary’s predicament has undoubtedly lost some of its force, but in a closely knit Jewish community in the first century, the news an angel brought could not have been entirely welcome. The law regarded a betrothed woman who became pregnant as an adulteress, subject to death by stoning.
Matthew tells of Joseph magnanimously agreeing to divorce Mary in private rather than press charges, until an angel shows up to correct his perception of betrayal. Luke tells of a tremulous Mary hurrying off to the one person who could possibly understand what she was going through: her relative Elizabeth, who miraculously got pregnant in old age after another angelic annunciation. Elizabeth believes Mary and shares her joy, and yet the scene poignantly highlights the contrast between the two women: the whole countryside is talking about Elizabeth’s healed womb even as Mary must hide the shame of her own miracle.
In a few months, the birth of John the Baptist took place amid great fanfare, complete with midwives, doting relatives, and the traditional village chorus celebrating the birth of a Jewish male. Six months later, Jesus was born far from home, with no midwife, extended family or village chorus present. A male head of household would have sufficed for the Roman census; did Joseph drag his pregnant wife along to Bethlehem in order to spare her the ignominy of childbirth in her home village?
C.S. Lewis has written about God’s plan, “The whole thing narrows and narrows, until at last it comes down to a little point, small as the point of a spear — a Jewish girl at her prayers,” Today as I read the accounts of Jesus’ birth, I tremble to think of the fate of the world resting of the responses of two rural teenagers. How many times did Mary review the angel’s words as she felt the Son of God kicking against the walls of her uterus? How many times did Joseph second-guess his own encounter with an angel — just a dream? — as he endured the hot shame of living among villagers who could plainly see the changing shape of his fiancee?
We know nothing of Jesus’ grandparents. What must they have felt? Did they respond like so many parents of unmarried teenagers today, with an outburst of moral fury and then a period of sullen silence until at last the bright-eyed newborn arrives to melt the ice and arrange a fragile family truce? Or did they, like many inner-city grandparents today, graciously offer to take the child under their own roof?
Nine months of awkward explanations, the lingering scent of scandal — it seems God arranged the most humiliating circumstances possible for his entrance, as if to avoid any charge of favoritism. I am impressed that when the Son of God became a human being he played by the rules: small towns do not treat kindly young boys who grow up with questionable paternity.
Malcom Muggeridge observed that in our day, with family planning clinics offering convenient way to correct “mistakes” that might disgrace a family name, “It is, in point of fact, extremely improbable, under existing conditions, that Jesus would have been permitted to be born at all. Mary’s pregnancy, in poor circumstances, and with the father unknown, would have been an obvious case for abortion; and her talk of having conceived as a result of the intervention of the Holy Ghost would have pointed to the need for psychiatric treatment, and made the case for terminating her pregnancy even stronger. Thus, our generation, needing a Savior more, perhaps, than any that has ever existed, would be too humane to allow one to be born.”
The virgin Mary, though, whose parenthood was unplanned, had a different response. She heard the angel out, pondered the repercussions, and replied, “I am the Lord’s servant May it be to me as you have said.” Often a work of God comes with two edges, great joy and great pain, and in that matter-of-fact response Mary embraced both. She was the first person to accept Jesus on his own terms, regardless of the personal cost.
more to come …
googling “it’s a wonderful life”
Day … whatever. I think I missed a day here.
Random stars keep popping up in the Googling “It’s a Wonderful Life” experiment. Look at Lana Turner. Good Lord. She kinda sizzles. Although the curly fry bangs are cracking me up now that I look at it all again. If you have curly fry bangs and can still look HOT, you, my friend, are a star.
your hairy bumble hide!
I am home alone. Last time I was home alone of an evenin’, this happened. Thank God I do not have any of this. There’d be trouble.
So what am I doing tonight? Well, peeps, I am watching Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. And I AM NOT ASHAMED!! I love that little freak. You put the names “Rankin-Bass” on a show and I am there.
A few observations while I watch, if I may. Okay, so I’m basically live-blogging Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. So … I should not be left alone. Whatevs.
Anyway …
— I kinda have a crush on that Burl Ives glide-y snowman. Not really an observation. More of a confession. It’s the gliding, really, just the gliding. Like the Norelco razor Santa, the most awesome Santa ever!
— I love it that when Hermie, the elf-who-would-be-a-dentist, is asked what is wrong with him, he glumly admits, “Not very happy in my work, I guess.”
— Head Elf is clearly a rage-aholic. All his lines ARE SAID LIKE THIS!! WITH CAPITAL LETTERS AND LOTS OF EXCLAMATION POINTS!! You know, “WHY WEREN’T YOU AT ELF PRACTICE???” and nosy crap like that. Listen, Head Elf Dude, you are basically running a toymaking sweatshop here where tiny little people are forced to make crappy handpainted wooden toys 23 hours a day. Toys that just end up on AN ISLAND in the frozen Arctic whining about what pieces of crap they are. They don’t want to exist and yet you force people to bring them into existence. So what these tiny people do on their time away from making suicidal toys is their own damn business!!
— Donner, Rudolph’s dad, is an abusive ass. When he puts that black mud nose — or whatever — on Rudolph to cover up his deformity and Rudolph can’t breathe and snuffs to him, “It’s not very comfortable,” Donner barks (barks?) back, “There are more important things than comfort. Like SELF-RESPECT! Santa can’t object to you now!”
— Clarice, Rudoph’s would-be lover, wears a Minnie Mouse bow on her head in the middle of the frozen tundra. I have never understood that.
— Wow. Santa’s an ass, too! Rudolph’s real nose was just uncovered and Santa said, “Donner, you ought to be ashamed of yourself!!”
— I love how all the reindeer have little skinny legs and these giant clonky hooves. Those things are like manhole covers. THAT’S the real deformity here, critters, and you ALL have ’em!!
— Clarice comforts Rudolph with “There’s always tomorrow for dreams to come true.” Kinda the reindeer version of my personal favorite: “The sun’ll come out …. tomorrrrrow!!”
— The monstrous swoop in Hermie’s hair is one of my favorite things in the whole show. That, and his lisp. Oh, and BTW, Hermie: YOU’RE GAAAAAAY!!
— I am still kinda scared of The Abominable Snowman. And he looks exactly like a particularly annoying kid I know.
— Why does Burl Ives Snowman hold up an umbrella to protect himself from Abominable? Do those things have previously undisclosed powers? Dude, it’s a stick with a circle of fabric on the end against a huge, man-eating Yeti. Look! He is taller than those giant cardboard mountains over there! What is with the umbrella? Oh, I know what, Burl Ives Snowman: YOU’RE GAAAAAAY!!
— Burl Ives Snowman croons that detestable ditty, “Silver and Gold,” whilst accompanying himself on a BANJO. As the crooning continues, little woodland creatures randomly munch on golden nuggets. “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre” starring …. Mister Squirrel! Weird. I did not know that song was about ingesting golden nuggets.
— Hey, Yukon Cornelius: If Bumble’s one weakness is that they sink, how come the Bumble sinks and then pops right up to wreak more havoc and eventually have his teeth pulled? Why is he still alive after sinking? I mean, that didn’t happen on the Titanic.
— Look, “Charlie-in-the-Box,” don’t be such a blubbering baby. “My name is allll wrong! No child wants to play with a Charlie-in-the-Box!” Shut up. SHUT UP! Go down to your local courthouse and change your damn name to JACK! Lord. I hate that victim mentality.
— The whole Island of Misfit Toys is really just the Island of Useless Enablers. It totally pisses me off. That freaky Winged Lion King just allows all those toys to lounge around and whine and whine and sing horrible dirges to unsuspecting strangers. “Can you IMAGINE being an ELEPHANT with POLKA DOTS??” Yes. Yes, I can. I think it would be neato and you need to embrace that Jesus loves the little children AND the polka-dotted elephants. Personally, I don’t think ANY of you whiners is fit company for a kid. You’re all downers. It’s not that you’re “a choo-choo with square wheels” or “a bird that swims”; those things are not the problem here. It’s that you’re all hopeless, helpless narcissists who can only think about how life impacts you. And, also, WHY is it up to Rudolph to tell Santa about the toys, Lion King? Why aren’t you doing something for your whiny misfit subjects? What kind of king are you, anyway? Do you just have the title and no real power? I mean, what are you? British??
— Oh, Burl Ives Snowman just did the “Protect me, Mister Umbrella” move again. “Ooooh, telllll me when it’s over.”
— I like how Rudolph’s pupils roll around like marbles when the Bumble hits him.
— Hermie pretends to be pork in order to save Rudolph from the Bumble. Oink oink oink. Unfathomable.
— “God blast your hairy Bumble hide!” Hahahahahaha, Yukon.
— Yukon just cacked it. And all Burl Ives Snowman says is, “They are all sad at the loss of their friend.” Uhm, ingrates, he saved your lives. So lemme get this straight: You can sing no end of gloomy ditties regarding square wheels and stupid names, but there’s nothing — no feeling — about your friend tumbling to his death?? Where is the Anthem for Lost Cornelius or something? Sick. Selfish and SICK.
— Okay, well, Yukon just came back from the dead — with the Bumble in tow. “He’s a reformed Bumble. He wants a job. Looky what he can do!” Hm. Where have I heard something similar? “Look! It’s her poop! Look what she did! It was inside her and now it’s here!” Beware, Yukon Cornelius, the Timothy Treadwell delusion of perceived cuddliness.
— Santa. Okay, look. You obviously have a hormonal imbalance. You gained, like, 50 pounds overnight. Anyone who did that should go immediately to a doctor, not spend all night delivering choo choo trains with square wheels to all the kiddos of the world.
Finally, Rudolph is the hero and Santa exploits him.
Annnnnnnd ….. scene.
the airplane
Oh, people!
PEOPLE!!
So I’m at The Beanhouse — of course, because everything unsettling happens there — minding my own damn barista business. Several feet in front of me, using three tables they have pushed together, huddles this group of flighty, twenty-something, first-year law students who have basically moved into The Beanhouse since September, taking advantage of the double-edged sword that is our free wireless. They hijack these tables for their impressive bank of computers, purchase the small cups of coffee they will nurse for the next 6 hours, and then, oh! then, they really get down to work. They blab and blab and blab. They lollygag. They slouch. They watch YouTube. They throw wads of paper at each other. They abandon their laptops for long stretches of time to go … lollygag elsewhere, I guess. But they always come back because, after all, they’re first-year law students and they haven’t gotten to the really important work yet.
Like making paper airplanes.
They’re all kind of annoying, but there’s something endearing and pathetic about their annoyingness. I guess I look on them with big sisterly affection. I mean, I’ve been there, in those shoes, not as a law student, but as a college student, where YOU are the whole world, where study groups are a social event having nothing whatsoever to do with studying, where your behavior is something to make a 9-year-old proud. I remember being that person. Sometimes, I am still that person, but with age comes, blessedly, a wee more self-control. These guys are all probably, oh, mid-twenties or so. Most of them are probably gay, just like 99% of Beanhouse customers and they just laze and flop around, acting like big, ol’ clumsy puppy dogs. Whatever the next impulse is, they do it.
Like making paper airplanes.
So, I’m minding my own damn barista business, as I said, when this little 3×5 card airplane comes swooping down in front of me. I glance up and one of the law students — let’s call him B — is looking at me. Grabbing the plane, I loft it back, laughing kinda absentmindedly, oh, hahaha. Silly boy. Reminds me of my grade school drama students. That kind of thing. Several seconds later, it swoops in front of me again. I’m busy at that moment, but I glance down and notice some very small writing on it this time. I take another quick glance, but with my nearsightedness, it takes several peeks for me to realize just what the darn thing says.
Here is the actual darn thing:
Uhm, whhhhhat???
My face instantly gets hot.
And you knnnnow … one thing I really wish I could control about my body is that damn blushing reflex. It shows up and gives a girl grief at the worst possible moments. And, frankly, that’s pretty much its only purpose, as far as I can tell: To out you and make matters worse. It’s not like it protects you from predators or anything, like a turtle’s bony shell or a chameleon’s mutable skin. It just makes you hot and bothered and the butt of comments from various purveyors of the obvious like, “Wow. Your face is riilllllyrillllllly red.”
Really?? You mean, like, this feeling that, like, my entire head is a bonfire means my face is red, too??? I am gobsmacked.
I’m sorry. I utterly disagree with God on this whole red-faced deal.
Okay. Hm. Where was I? As an aside here, it might be useful to know I drank sangria last night and I’ve never had sangria before and now it seems that I probably shouldn’t drink sangria. Just generally. I’m very fuzzy today. To prove my point, when I first typed “fuzzy today,” it came out “guzzy todday.”
Anyhoo …
Back to the airplane and my raging facial conflagration.
My face is burning, we’ve established, and while I’m moving about, doing my job, I feel frozen by the sheer ridiculousness of the whole thing. I am totally silent. I DO NOT KNOW what to say. He is slouched there with all his friends, head down now. My mind is swirling:
Is he kidding? He must be kidding. First of all, I’m married. He knows I’m married, right? I mean, MB is here all the time. He must have seen him. Right?? Second, dude, you’re like, 25. You seem like a kid to me. Do you think I’m in your age group? Okay. I look younger than my age, but not THAT young. Okay. This is now seriously weird because neither of us is saying ANYTHING. Gah. Third ….. dude, you actually decided — as an adult now — to throw a girl a paper airplane with “yes” and “no” boxes to ask her out on a date??? What — are you 12?? Fourth, did u really write “u”?? FIFTH, uhm, aren’t you GAAAAY??
I’m a robot now, doing my job. He’s a robot now, pretending to study. I am talking with people and have no idea what I’m saying. I can see him out of the corner of my eye, pointedly NOT looking at me. There’s now a strange electric current named “horrible” connecting us together.
Look. I am not in junior high. I am an adult. Mostly. I am NOT putting a checkmark in the “no” box and swooping a paper airplane back to where you’re sitting with your friends. If you’re actually serious, I think that would be humiliating to you. I mean, it’s not like you could shrug it off and pretend that that isn’t a paper airplane swooping towards you, right? A paper airplane heartlessly checkmarked “no.” Your friends have clearly witnessed the whole hideous hoopla and, I assume, would want to know what your little airplane said.
And if you’re joking, well, may I speak for all women here for a moment? Women generally don’t like it when you pretend to ask them out, when you do it as a joke. Women might actually think it’s a little hurtful to be the butt of some romantic dare or caper or hijinks. So, dude, if you aren’t serious and I swoop the “no” airplane back to you while you laugh and laugh because I took you seriously, that would be a little humiliating to me.
So I do …. nothing.
Moments later, a co-worker meanders by. Before I have a chance to stop him, he reads the airplane and chuckles, saying rather loudly, “So Tracey, are you gonna go out with B?”
Here comes that burning ….
Co-worker stares at me. B’s friends giggle. This is now officially the dumbest thing ever — and how, exactly, did I end up involved when I’d been carefully minding my own business? Knee-jerk, I decide B is kidding, and so I reply, rather loudly — but with a smile and my can’t-miss “good humor”:
“Oh ….. well, I’m sure that B knows I’m married.”
Out of the corner of my eye, I see him slouch even lower. Did his cheeks just redden? Ah, my can’t-miss good humor working its magic again. He lingers for another hour or so and then slinks out the other door. He usually says a big goodbye. He leaves without a word.
Ugh. Ugh. UGH.
Oh, dude! What am I supposed to do now??
googling “it’s a wonderful life”
Day 7.
birth: the visited planet, part 1
Throughout this Christmas month, I’ll be posting an entire chapter — in parts — from Philip Yancey’s The Jesus I Never Knew. I’m always so grateful for his books, for the different perspective he gives, for how he doesn’t try to gloss over the hard questions, for how he refuses to speak in the Christian platitudes I SO despise.
Anyway, I love this chapter from this book. I can’t remember when, exactly, I first read this book, but I remember how much this chapter enriched my perspective on Christmas. I read it every Christmas and I think it lifts out pretty well.
So here’s the first part:
Sorting through the stack of cards that arrived at our house last Christmas, I note that all kinds of symbols have edged their way into the celebration. Overwhelmingly, the landscape scenes render New England towns buried in snow, usually with the added touch of a horse-drawn sleigh. On other cards, animals frolic: not only reindeer, but also chipmunks, raccoons, cardinals, and cute gray mice. One card shows an African lion reclining with a foreleg draped affectionately around a lamb.
Angels have made a huge comeback in recent years, and Hallmark and American Greetings now feature them prominently, though as demure, cuddly-looking creatures, not as the type who would ever need to announce “Fear not!” The explicitly religious cards focus on the holy family and you can tell at a glance these folks are different. They seem unruffled and serene. Bright gold halos, like crowns from another world, hover just above their heads.
Inside, the cards stress sunny words like love, goodwill, cheer, happiness, and warmth. It is a fine thing, I suppose that we honor a sacred holiday with such homey sentiments. And yet, when I turn to the gospel accounts of Christmas, I hear a very different tone and sense mainly disruption at work.
I recall watching an episode of the TV show thirtysomething in which Hope, a Christian, argues with her Jewish husband, Michael, about the holidays. “Why do you even bother with Hanukkah?” she asks. “Do you really believe a handful of Jews held off a huge army by using a bunch of lamps that miraculously wouldn’t run out of oil?”
Michael exploded. “Oh, and Christmas makes more sense? Do you really believe an angel appeared to some teenage girl who then got pregnant without ever having had sex and traveled on horseback to Bethlehem where she spent the night in a barn and had a baby who turned out to be the Savior of the world?”
Frankly, Michael’s incredulity seems close to what I read in the Gospels. Mary and Joseph must face the shame and derision of family and neighbors, who react, well, much like Michael (“Do you really believe an angel
appeared ….”).Even those who accept the supernatural version of events concede that big trouble will follow: and old uncle prays for “salvation from our enemies and from the hand of all who hate us”; Simeon darkly warns the virgin that “a sword will pierce your own soul too”; Mary’s hymn of thanksgiving mentions rulers overthrown and proud men scattered.
In contrast to what the cards would have us believe, Christmas did not sentimentally simplify life on planet earth. Perhaps this is what I sense when Christmas rolls around and I turn from the cheeriness of the cards to the starkness of the Gospels.
to be continued …
googling “it’s a wonderful life”
Day 6. I love everything about this face.
