Ontario Empoblog

I briefly alluded to the Abdul Rahman story in my last post , and since Jennifer has also referred to it, I should probably explore it more. From ekklesia : Afghan Christian faces death sentence -19/03/06 An Afghan man is being prosecuted in a Kabul court and could be sentenced to death on a charge of converting from Islam to Christianity, a judge said this weekend. The news comes less than three weeks after US President George W Bush made his first visit to the country, and talked about religious liberty in the country. But it also comes shortly after the appointment of a religious affairs official of Afghanistan's former Taliban regime to the country's new parliament which prompted concern among international human rights advocates.... In a surprise visit to Afghanistan on March 1st George Bush implied in a speech that the US invasion had brought religious freedom to the country. "Under the Taliban and Osama bin Laden, there is no religious freedom. You have no chance t...

I'm sure that I'm not the first person to blog about the Dave Lenihan thingie. (I've cited other bloggers below.) Let's start with a St. Louis Post-Dispatch story about what (former) 550 KTRS morning talk show host Dave Lenihan said while discussing the possibility that Condoleezza Rice could become NFL Commissioner, replacing the man that Howard Cosell christened as Paul "I'm Too Tall" Tagliabue : She’s just got a patent resume, of somebody that’s got such serious skill. She loves football, she’s African-American, which would kind of be a big coon, a big coon – oh my God, I am totally, totally, totally, totally, totally sorry for that, OK? I didn’t mean that. That was just a slip of the tongue. In response, KTRS fired Lenihan within twenty minutes. Station manager Tim Dorsey went on the air: "It was a most unfortunate racial slur," Dorsey said on the air. "There can be no excuse for what was said. Dave Lenihan has been let go. ... There ...

Planning is important, especially when you have something to do. If you're going to claim to be a [insert faith/religion name here], then you need to know what [insert faith/religion name here] teaches. Jennifer and four of her friends are using the Internet to solve this: Chris, Julie, Doug, and I (along with Bill, a non-blogger) have been holding an online Bible study since January. I have been remiss in letting you know about it, but there were some nasty glitches that had to be worked out first. Anyway… we are now in the book of Hebrews. The model that they're using for their study is the 5 x 5 x 5 Reading Plan. In a separate blog, Rick Marshall describes this and other Bible reading plans: One of the programs I have participated in for the last 10 years is the Discipleship Journal Bible Reading Plan.... I once read that the average Christian only reads 2 chapters of the Bible per year, so it is no wonder that we get chewed up and spit out by the world when we try to rel...

On Tuesday night, my wife and I were looking over some old newspapers, including an Ontario paper from the Bicentennial. (By the way, did you help Johnny Horizon clean up America for our 200th birthday? I did.) Frankly, my major interest in looking at the paper was to look at the advertisements. Back then, a lot of businesses were on Holt Avenue. These businesses have either relocated (e.g. to the Ontario Auto Center), or disappeared entirely. For example, when I wanted to repair my Ford Granada in the 1980s, I'd take it down to the Ford dealer on Holt. That spot now houses a supermarket. While looking through the ads, I caught the name Gerald DuBois in one of them. I mentioned this to my wife (who has lived in Ontario most of her life), but she wasn't familiar with the name. "He used to be on the City Council," I said. I was wrong, but not really. Since Debbie Acker left politics, I haven't paid much attention to the doings of the City Council, but DuBois was st...

If you haven't heard the term, here's how Wikipedia defines it: RINO stands for Republican In Name Only, a disparaging term for a member of the United States Republican Party whose positions are "too far" from the party mainstream. Since the mainstream has been conservative since 1994, the term currently applies to Republicans who are too fiscally or socially moderate or liberal for their critics. The implicit suggestion is that RINOs do not belong in the party and should leave. So according to this definition, fiscal and social conservatives are not RINOs, while fiscal and social liberals are. And RINOs should be kicked out. There's a whole blog called RINO WATCH that's dedicated to outing the RINOs. Sample post : R? Salem Representative Billy Dalto Assistant Majority Leader "Billy Dalto is Oregon’s youngest serving legislator. With his election to Oregon’s 21st House District in November of 2002, he became the first Hispanic Republican to serve in the ...

Huh? Nick Webster has convinced himself that Chelsea's winning streak, broken over the weekend, is a bad thing. In recent weeks, Chelsea FC has had the look of an addict. Addicts have a dependency on certain substances and for the Blues over the last season and half that habit has been the most powerful narcotic in football ... winning. They've gorged themselves on it to the point where even loyal Blues followers are asking whether they may have overdosed. When you take that high away from addicts, they crash and what usually follows without the correct treatment is a nasty descent into the doldrums. Tempers get frayed, judgment is clouded and the addict will do just about anything to get back to that euphoric state. On Sunday at Craven Cottage, Jose Mourinho and his all stars exhibited all of the above symptoms and they were made to pay the price by a Fulham side that had in previous weeks woken up after matches with their heads kicked in. In other words, the fact that Chelse...

Oops . Big oops . From Inoperable Terran : Apparently Issac Hayes did *not* quit South Park - his Scientology handlers did it on his behalf after he suffered a stroke. From Roger Friedman of Fox News : Isaac Hayes did not quit "South Park." My sources say that someone quit it for him. I can tell you that Hayes is in no position to have quit anything. Contrary to news reports, the great writer, singer and musician suffered a stroke on Jan. 17. At the time it was said that he was hospitalized and suffering from exhaustion. Ah, the famed illness of all celebrities - exhaustion. But a stroke? If true, that does make it hard to quit stuff. Anyway, here's how Blackflix reported it in January: ISAAC HAYES HOSPITALIZED FOR EXHAUSTION January' Isaac Hayes, best known for his Oscar-winning 1971 hit "Theme From Shaft," has been hospitalized in Memphis for exhaustion, according to his longtime songwriting partner David Porter. "He's just overworked and had bee...

You'll recall that in a previous post on pastoral teams, I spent some time trying to figure out the specific role of Priscilla (Aquila's husband in the Book of Acts). It's good to hear other views on a topic, so I was delighted to read this comment from Inland Empress: I read your post on Priscilla and it sounds like she was a sort of early Christian "rebetzin" (rabbi's wife) who welcomed people to her home and taught them to live Jewishly -- or in this case, as a righteous Christian. Nice that the New Testament acknowledges this very traditional role so prominently. Well, Priscilla certainly wasn't a Gentile , but she was important: Priscilla also called Prisca, and her husband Aquila had left Rome because the Emperor of Rome had expelled all Jews.... The Jewish Christian couple settled in Corinth, Greece (Asia-Minor) and met the Apostle Paul during the time he was witnessing throughout southern Greece. They were much beloved friends of Paul and he was ...

Euthanasia. It's such a pretty word. But someone claims it's a euthanism (heh - euphemism - heh) for sumfin else: The Dutch government is furious after an Italian minister this week branded the country's euthanasia laws as akin to the policies of Adolf Hitler and the Nazis.... Dutch Prime Minister Balkenende is expected to raise the matter with Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi next week at a European summit, ANP said. "This is scandalous and unacceptable... it is not the way to get along in Europe," Balkenende said on Friday. Italian Parliamentary Relations Minister Carlo Giovanardi told a radio program on Thursday that Nazi thinking was re-emerging in Europe through Dutch euthanasia laws and a debate on the killing of children with deformities. He has refused to apologize. And he doesn't welcome every single solitary immigrant with open arms : Calls for Italy to stem the tide of foreigners do not just come from the far-right Northern League Party, bu...

Things get weird in celebritydom. Before his disgrace, Christopher Nance was the celebrity of choice for an escaped convict : KNBC(TV) Los Angeles weatherman Christopher Nance waited at Hawthorne Memorial Park late Monday, July 16 [2001], for escaped prisoner Kevin Jerome Pullum to surrender to him, but Pullum, convicted of attempted murder, never showed. The station had received a call from someone claiming to be the Pullum, who said he would surrender to Nance and a camera crew. Nance was not in the station at the time but was contacted along with the L.A. County Sheriff's Department. The man claiming to be Pullum did not appear. A second call was received at the station, a surrender set up with a camera crew as witness, but again no escapee, and the massive manhunt for Pullum continued into the latter part of last week. The station said it was unsure why it, or Nance, had been contacted. Pullum was captured a few days later: Kevin Jerome Pullum, who escaped from jail by showing...

In England, it appears that the daughters of sports stars don't become boxers or whatever - they become newscasters (or presenters or whatever they call them over there). From 15 January (McQueen has since made it to the air): HAYLEY McQUEEN, former Manchester United star Gordon's gal, is the latest daughter of a famous sporting dad to join the ranks over at Sky. Word reaches Confidential that, after a successful screen test, the former Middlesbrough FC in-house TV station presenter is doing a two-month stint as a sub-editor before she is given her chance on air. She has high hopes of following footballers' daughters Gabby Logan and Kelly Dalglish, and golfer Bernard Gallacher's lass, Kirsty, on the box. And she's already being covered in UK TV Babes Capped . Meanwhile, Dad's words are emblazoned on a t-shirt: "Ask all the players in the country which club they would like to play for and 99% would say 'Manchester United'. The other 1% are liars...

...to this post, making a point about selective quoting of scripture (in this case, my concentration on the first verses of Psalm 22). I've heard these Psalms referred to before to defend what U2 does. But you quote just a small part of the Psalm, which were making a definite Messianic prophecy, and which conclude with victory and faith in God. As I said, U2 never expresses that. They express the opposite, complete lack of faith in God. As I said even in the part that you quoted, their lack of faith in God and attacks on God for not living up to Bono's expectations of what God ought to be doing are never countered with any expressions of trust and faith in God, as the Psalmist always does. So I don't know if you thought your point was to somehow refute my point, but the Psalms are a very poor place to go for support for what U2 does. And as I said in the original post, I'm not judging the man's soul. I'm just judging the so-called "spiritual" nature ...

Yup, pirates are still around : Two U.S. Navy warships exchanged gunfire with suspected pirates Saturday off the coast of Somalia, and one suspect was killed and five others were wounded, the navy said. Seven other suspects were taken into custody after the early-morning shootout.... From the Ontario Empoblog (Latest OVVA news here )

Here's the infamous "Trapped in the Closet" episode. From the Ontario Empoblog (Latest OVVA news here )

Yes, there are questionable words in this. John Cleese's eulogy is followed by Eric Idle and friends singing "Always Look on the Bright Side of Life" (originally performed on "Life of Brian"). From the Ontario Empoblog (Latest OVVA news here )

Just discovered the site YouTube . Here's a video of Conan O'Brien being interviewed by two Finnish boys. They gave it to him, and he gave it back. From the Ontario Empoblog (Latest OVVA news here )

Followup . From Impious Digest : DoS Shuts Down Scientology Critic HollywoodInterrupted.com Apparently, some script-kiddie asshole(s) chock-full of Lord Xenu thetans have attacked HollywoodInterrupted.com with a denial of service attack, knocking it offline to all access. Journalist Mark Ebner's site was the first to break the story on Tom Cruise's blackmailing of Viacom over a South Park episode mocking Scientology and his sexuality. Until the site is up again...The original story is mirrored here: HOLLYWOOD, INTERRUPTED EXCLUSIVE!!! by Mark Ebner SCIENTOLOGIST TOM CRUISE BLACKMAILS VIACOM INTO PULLING THE "TRAPPED IN THE CLOSET" EPISODE OF SOUTH PARK Sources from inside Paramount and South Park Studios report that parent company Viacom pulled last night's scheduled repeat of the high-rated "Trapped in the Closet" episode after the humorless Scientologist movie star Tom Cruise threatened to cancel all publicity for Mission Impossible:3 if Comedy Centr...

We could create peace in my family if someone would combine the Food Network with the Fox Soccer Channel. Have Alton Brown and Michelle Lissel host a show in which English and Spanish contestants cook tasty dishes on opposite ends of the pitch. But instead they combine the WB and UPN. And there's a big tussle - about the commute, of all things. (I'm not sympathetic.) With less than six months to go before the CW's launch, a behind-the-scenes battle has been brewing over where it will be located. Most employees of the WB, who are used to driving to Burbank, want the CW to be in the San Fernando Valley, while UPN folks are lobbying to stay near their current Brentwood-adjacent address. "Between West L.A. and Burbank in the Valley, it's the two ends of the world," Moonves said this week, acknowledging the constituencies on either side of "the hill." I really don't care, since both "constituencies" hate the 909. We went to the 909 last ...

From trivia page 142 : Right-handed people live, on average, nine years longer than left-handed people do. I'm thrilled about this news. (For those who don't know, I'm left handed.) In 1955, an Argentinean named Juan Potomachi died and left more than $37,500 to a local theater on the condition that they use his skull during a performance of "Hamlet." During pregnancy, the uterus expands to 500 times its normal size. At least I'm only left handed. Here's a joke : A man is driving his five-year-old to a friend's house when another car races in front and cuts them off, nearly causing an accident. "Douchebag!" the father yells. A moment later he realizes the indiscretion, pulls over, and turns to face his son. "Your father just said a bad word," he says. "I was angry at that driver, but that was no excuse for what I said. It was wrong. But just because I said it, it doesn't make it right, and I don't ever want to hear you s...

Let me tell you a story : All of the 76 planets he controlled were overpopulated. Each planet had on average 178 billion people. He wanted to get rid of all the overpopulation so he had a plan. [He] took over complete control with the help of renegades to defeat the good people and the Loyal Officers. Then with the help of psychiatrists he called in billions of people for income tax inspections where they were instead given injections of alcohol and glycol mixed to paralyse them. Then they were put into space planes that looked exactly like DC8s (except they had rocket motors instead of propellers). These DC8 space planes then flew to planet Earth where the paralysed people were stacked around the bases of volcanoes in their hundreds of billions. When they had finished stacking them around then H-bombs were lowered into the volcanoes. [He] then detonated all the H-bombs at the same time and everyone was killed. Some more detail from a slightly different source: The psychiatrists selec...