How did he die, again?

It turns out that Wikipedia keeps an interesting of list of people who have died unusual deaths. I found it while looking up information on the pizza delivery guy who was killed by a bomb attached to a metal collar that was screwed onto his neck. (Wierd stuff.)

Anyway, I found the list interesting and posted a few of my favorites, here. To quote Glenn Reynolds, read the whole thing.

- 458 BC: The Greek playwright Aeschylus was killed when an eagle dropped a live tortoise on him, mistaking his bald head for a stone.

- 1841: William Henry Harrison, the 9th President of the United States, died of pneumonia one month after delivering his two-hour inauguration speech in cold weather without an overcoat.

- 1884: Allan Pinkerton, detective, died of gangrene resulting from having bitten his tongue after stumbling on the sidewalk.

- 1958: Gareth Jones, actor, collapsed and died while in make-up between scenes of a live television play, Underground, at the studios of Associated British Corporation in Manchester. Director Ted Kotcheff continued the play to its conclusion, improvising around Jones's absence.

- 1916: Grigori Rasputin, Russian mystic, was poisoned while dining with a political enemy, and supposedly he was given enough poison to kill three men his size. When he did not die, the assassin snuck up behind him and shot him in the head, and while checking Grigori's pulse the mystic grabbed him by the neck and strangled him. He proceeded to run away, while the other assassins chased. He was caught up to, lying on the ground having been hit with three shots during the chase. The pursuers bludgeoned him then threw him into a river (in Russia in the winter). When his body washed ashore, an autopsy showed the cause of death to be drowning.

- 1960: In the Nedelin disaster, over 100 Soviet missile technicians and officials died when a switch was turned on unintentionally igniting the rocket, including Red Army Marshal Nedelin who was seated in a deck chair just 40 meters away overseeing launch preparations. The events were filmed by automatic cameras. (This one's interesting because this sad event had the effect of getting the U.S. further ahead in the space race. -Adam)

- 1943: Lady be Good, a USAAF B-24 bomber lost its way and crash landed in the Libyan Desert. Mummified remains of its crew, who struggled for a week without water, were not found until 1960.

I hope this wasn't too morbid for anyone.

Bad News from Iran

It’s complicated at first, but something unfortunate has been happening in Iraq in the last few days; it has been under attack from Iran.

This isn’t good. Don’t be fooled into thinking that Iran is fighting the same battle as the U.S. Iran has dropped bombs on the Northern Kurdish region of Iraq, a place where there has been no fighting and no violence for some time. The Kurds who inhabit the area have had shopping malls and coffee shops open there for more than a year and it is becoming a thriving metropolis where families could visit and feel safe.

Who are the Kurds? You may remember them as the people who were tortured by Saddam Hussein. Saddam was a Sunni Muslim and believed that killing the Kurds was his religious duty; like a terrible cult leader at the helm of a powerful country. Now, unemployed Sunnis travel to Kurdistan to ask the Kurds for jobs. Do you have any openings for a window cleaner? No hard feelings about the Mustard Gas, right?

After enduring previous years of hardship the Kurds secured their own part of Iraq and established the first new oil drilling in the New Iraq, Iran has simply decided to attack them. The people of Iran are enduring a terrible economy and a severe lack of jobs and their leader can only respond by attacking a peaceful neighbor.

Here are some pictures of Kurdistan Iraq from Michael Totten’s website. (It’s now how the media portrays Iraq, is it?) They’re from an older post, but he’s done some of the best work on Iraq so his site is one of the best places to go for real news about the war when you aren’t in the mood for the media’s seemingly endless coverage of wartime approval ratings.

Hurricanes and Guitars

Before I get to the part about music, I found this intellegent post about the current hurricane's path and it's obvious part in the Republican party's plans to kill off minorities and win elections. Good stuff.

Anyway, next Saturday I am playing guitar with my wife at a show in Fort Worth. It's fun to learn new songs (her new ones are great) but I can't help feeling nervous. I used to play in front of people all the time and it never bothered me, but these days I get scared just thinking about it. And sometimes people request that I sing. (Poor fools.)

It worries me and I made a lot of mistakes at our last show, but maybe I will get back into the swing of it.

Speaking of swing, I listen to a station that plays Jazz when I drive home (Jazz stations are impossible to find) and apparently they need money. So, any of you wanting to support a small Jazz station, they are taking pledges.

I Don't Think So

A Bishop from the place of Breda has come up with a plan he says will make terrorists happy:

"Let's call God Allah."

Great idea, Tiny. (Yeah, the Bishop's name is Tiny Muskens. Weird.) We'll just call God by the name of a completely different God and combine all or our religions into one big religion like a big rubber band ball. And that will make Muslims happy.

But it won't. Statements like these show a great amount of ignorance of the Muslim faith and great desire to spread a very universalist faith around.

For one thing, Islam is not a universalist religion at all. Surah 9:29 says, "Fight those who believe not in Allah nor the last day." And the Hadith says, "Whoever changes his Islamic religion, kill him." (9:57)

More problems arise when the Christian begins to pray directly to Jesus. According to the Qur'an, Jesus is not the Son of God. Surah 19:88-92 teaches us that Allah has no children, Surah 4:157-8 tells us that Jesus didn't rise from the grave but that Allah brought him up to be with him. The central teaching about Jesus is that He is not the Son of God and not part of the Godhead but that he wanted us all to worship Allah.

Furthermore, one of the most important Christian doctrines says that those who are followers of Christ are children of God. What would a Muslim make of Christians praying to Allah as a father? Does this bishop think that this will make Muslims happy?

How well would the Lord's prayer fit into the average Mosque?

Father who art in heaven.. (Allah has no children)
...forgive us our sins... (salvation is through works in Islam)
...as we forgive those who sin against us...(Islam teaches defeating and converting enemies)

And let's not forget intimacy. There is not a single verse in the Islamic texts that teaches that Allah is an intimate god, except for one verse that says Allah is as close as your jugular (vein) . Not the same God I know who cares for the sparrow.

In these cases, we find that Universalism is not so tolerant. A very casual glance at the different religious writings of Christians and Muslims shows Allah and Jehovah to be very different, but Universalists would have us erase our religious identities and all follow their beliefs while teaching that we are the intolerant ones.

Now, what am I going to read in the checkout lane?

My trips to the grocery store are going to get more boring; the beloved World Weekly News is going out of print. Their website is still up, but apparently they are ending their 28 year run of printing, what they call, 'the world's only reliable newspaper.'

I'll be in the checkout line wondering what's going on with Bat Boy and which alien planet sent a physician to give the President a face-lift.

Check out my wife (I do)

My wife just revamped her webpage. It's cool and it shows you the upcoming events where you can see her/us perform.

You should also sign up for the newsletter because it's not something that will be in your inbox often, it's a rare reminder of upcoming shows, not one of those annoying things that just adds more junk to your already annoying daily emails. No, this is much different.

Most importantly, we are working on new material which you will see at some upcoming shows. Right now, we are proud of a new song called 'Girl on a String' which you can hear us perform at our shows. It's really my favorite song we do and I always look forward to it as we go through our set.

Here's my wife at a show a few years ago:



And here's me and some cool guys trying to bring Jazz to our whitebread campus back in the day...

Be Kind to Animals

When I was young, I read in the Bible that "A righteous man cares for the needs of his animal, but the kindest acts of the wicked are cruel." This shaped how I looked at animals and how I treated them.

This morning I read an article by Lisa Fabrizio (I always look for her articles) about caring for animals in which Senator Byrd quotes the same verse, probably in reference to the terrible dog fighting rings that have surfaced in the news, recently.

Anyway, the article went on to compare this view of animal rights to our views of human rights. Why shouldn't an unborn child have the same rights as my wife's cats? To quote Lisa Fabrizio,

"While the passion of the venerable senator is worthy of admiration, one also wishes that he and his party would apply the same sentiments to God's most supreme creatures; human beings, and more specifically, to their babies."

You can start all over, again

One mistake after another; my life was falling apart. As I tried to pick up the broken pieces that were left I only made things worse. As I watched the immutable passage of time sweep me from one disaster to another I could only look behind me and try my best to salvage what was left.

I was looking at a wasteland, in my path I had left destruction. Failed hopes and missed chances were all I could see. The worst part was that the steady march of time pushed me on, past those things, so I could only look back on them; I could fix nothing. As time went on, I only destroyed more of my life. As I tried to solve one problem I would see more of them pass me by. Things were crumbling all around and moving past me in defiance of my will to live a better life. The only thing that changed as I looked behind me was that I was destroying more and more things every day.

Then He put His hand on my shoulder and tried to turn me around. He said, "Stop looking back there, turn around, look in front of you."

But I wouldn't. I was afraid. I found only the smallest comfort in my suffering, but at least I knew what to expect there, I had no idea what lay ahead of me.

But He persisted. "Turn around, it's going to be alright. I promise." I didn't want to admit that I was scared, but I knew that Jesus already knew how I felt. I didn't want to change, I didn't want to do anything different, but I finally grew tired of what I was seeing.

I turned around to see what lay before me. In front of me, everything was fine. It was not a wasteland, it was perfect.

"You can start all over, again," He said, "Just as if nothing ever happened."

There was a tenderness in his voice that went beyond any love I had ever known. I tried to look behind me, but he wouldn't let me.

"It's over," He said, as he led me onward, "It's over. You can start from here. Your life is not a wreck, it's perfect, just look ahead of you."

"But, Lord," I pleaded, "I am only going to mess it up again. Look at what I did before!"

"Then I will help you. I won't let you destroy the rest of your life. We are going to walk together the rest of the way. I have plans for you."

It was the best day of my life.

Earmark Reform?

The Senate just passed a bill which is intended to make our representatives in Washington more honest by forcing them to disclose all earmarks to the public. It sounded good to me, at first, but some people have been skeptical.

Including Porkbusters, I think the Porkbusters group is great and on their website they list the claims of the skeptics, which include the following:

Senator Jim DeMint (R-SC)

“There’s a lot of smoke and mirrors in the new ethics bill...Senator Reid has given himself and a few committee chairmen the authority to determine whether congressional earmarks have been properly disclosed to the public...[t]his bill allows the fox to guard the henhouse and makes a joke of ethics reform.”

Sounds scary. If he is telling the truth, it puts too much power in the hands of one person who can allow earmarks a certain amount of invisibility. That's not good. However, it might be a step in the right direction. That's good; we'll have to keep an eye on this.

It's not a good enough bill to make me sleep better at night when I think about Washington wasting money.

Helpful words about the bridge incident

My good friend Brian posted some wonderful words about the bridge incident in Minnesota. I know people in that area and I don't know if they are OK. I hope they are.

By now you've probably heard all about the accident, but in case you haven't, keep in mind that no one is suspecting terrorism and that this was simply an accident. We'll keep them in our prayers.