S. Hamley Bildebrandt
“Morningstar is my hot stewardess.”Archive for April, 2008
List of Awesome: Part 1
Thomas Dubay once said, “People like awesome.” Mike Bickle echoed Dubay’s statement in Seven Longings of the Human Heart. In fact, the great minds in every epoch of human history seem to agree: People like awesome. But awesome comes in many forms, some less obvious than others. Certain incarnations of awesome or easily discernible by anyone: a beautiful sunset, a Mozart concerto, kittens, ninjas, chocolate sprinkles. Nobody needs to be told ninjas are awesome. They just know. I think Thomas Dubay said that as well. It is not, therefore, my goal to tell you what you already know. Rather, it is my hope to draw attention to the awesome you might have overlooked. And in doing so, I hope to make the world a better place. For the children.
So with no further ado, the List: Part I.
1) OVO/Peter Gabriel
“Scientists agree that in the future…” the narrator booms over the stadium in a deep British baritone, “people will be birds.” Thus begins Peter Gabriel’s masterful tribute to post-apocalyptic mutations. Part Road Warrior, part Cats, part avian flu, OVO is an epic tale of loss and redemption, love and betrayal, and people with wings.
Or so I can only assume. I haven’t actually seen one minute of Peter Gabriel’s over-the-top avian extravaganza, but how can it not be good? The British government considered it good enough to put a permanent blight on the otherwise old-world landscape of London in the form of the Millennium Dome just so they could house Gabriel’s flock of mad bird people, like an aviary from the future. And that makes it awesome.
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2) Christopher Lambert
A wise man I knew once said, “The problem with Steven Seagal movies is once you’ve seen one of them, you’ve seen them all. They’re all terrible and they’re all terrible in the same way.
“But,” he went on, “Christopher Lambert movies are all terrible in completely different ways.” Making them infinitely enjoyable.
Lambert’s movies might be terrible in different ways, but his acting is consistently awful. Whether he’s an immortal Scottish highlander, a lonely American businessman, or a futuristic Beowulf fighting off Grendel in a post-apocalyptic wasteland, Christopher Lambert is always the same wooden, weird looking Frenchman with a stare that could melt iron. Or at least I think that’s what it’s supposed to be.
Such consistent awfulness in acting in the midst of such varied awfulness in film is nearly impossible to pull off. And that makes Christopher Lambert awesome.
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3) Stephen Chow
Stephen Chow is a genius. Director, actor, auteur, he stands as a beacon of pure creativity beside a darkened sea of mediocrity. I will let his filmography speak for itself.
In The God of Cookery Chow plays a disgraced Hong Kong celebrity-chef who must learn the secrets of kung fu in order to challenge the pupil who betrayed him in the ultimate kung fu cooking competition. Only then does he regain his title as The God of Cookery and discover he is in fact a fairy descended from the abode of the gods.
In Shaolin soccer Chow plays a down-and-out Shaolin monk who must reunite his fellow monks to use their gravity defying kung fu to help a cursed soccer star get revenge on his former aid, who is now the owner of the Evil Soccer Team.
In a film industry that churns out cliche after cliche in an attempt to be original, Stephen Chow is original by combining every Hong Kong cliche into a ridiculous mix of Chinese wire-fu and Looney Tunes slapstick. And that makes Stephen Chow awesome.
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Men and women of awesome everywhere, I salute you.
Only the strong survive
This was a headline on CNN today: Artillery crashes into N.J. girl’s bed.
That’s how it is in Jersey. You’re not even safe in your bed.
P.S. – The girl wasn’t at home so she was unharmed.
Olympic torch relay
I’ve been reading reports of protests against the Beijing Olympics during torch relays in London, Paris and San Francisco. The governments of each of these cities all seem to have adopted the same, negative stance. They commend the exercise of free speech but they condemn the protests themselves as “disruptive and violent.” Violent? I think “rowdy” is a bit more of an apt description. Do you know what’s disruptive and violent? Killing Tibetan people.
I think the protests are funny. They make me happy. I hope no one gets hurt, but I hope they continue. I hope it is as inconvenient as possible to get that stupid torch back to Beijing. I hope enough people get upset about China’s recent actions to decide not to attend this year’s games. I hope the governments of the West will stop making googly eyes at China and actually find the moxy to condemn her for being flipping evil.
I was considering attending the Beijing games. I’m not anymore.
The point of no return
I was sitting at a table in the hall at the Daniel Academy between classes preparing lecture notes and browsing the web on my laptop. One of my students came up to me to say hi. He noticed I was online and he asked me what I was doing. I told him I was checking my facebook. He looked at my profile for a minute.
“Wait,” he said. “You’re a person?” He paused. “I thought you were a teacher all the time.”
Then I had one of those “Oh my God. I’m a teacher,” moments. I remember being his age and thinking that there was no way my teachers were real people. And now my students are looking at me and thinking the same things. It doesn’t matter how young I am. It doesn’t matter how cool I am. Teacher cool is not the same kind of cool used to describe “real people.”
I’ve reached the point of no return. I am no longer a person. I am a teacher.
Best thing ever?
Straight from CNN.com comes the headline: Ex-presidents choose: Chicken farm or cash.
Oh please, oh please let this be a new reality show!
The Matthias A. Bryson Memorial Library
I love talking about Jesus. I love sitting with some of my brothers and sisters and discussing the beauty of our Lord. I can’t get enough of it. Especially as we embark on this covenant of purity at IHOP. Speaking of our Lord inspires me to pursue holiness. It provokes me to purity. It keeps me from watching stupid TV shows and dulling my spirit.
Here’s my personal goal: Malachi 3:16 says that every time we talk about the Lord, a book is written about it in heaven. I want to be the cause of an entire library in heaven by the time I die. Help me do it.
Charlton Heston
So Charlton Heston is dead. I don’t know why, but I was really surprised when I saw the headline. I mean, the man was 84 years old. It’s not that odd. I guess to me, and I suspect to millions of others out there, Charlton Heston was a larger-than-life, epic, almost titanic figure of a man. After all this man was Moses, Ben Hur, El Cid. He was the last surviving intelligent man who defied an entire race of talking apes. He revealed to the world the shocking fact that Soylent Green is people. Before Will Smith was the Fresh Prince of anything he single-handedly battled a horde of angry Vampire people. In real life he stood by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s side when it was dangerous for a famous white man to do so. And regardless of how you feel about his later politics, the images of a gracefully aging Heston standing before adoring crowds with rifles in his hands only added to the already heroic stature he had built throughout his productive life.
So his death does come as a shock to me. There is a part of me that doesn’t believe that people like Charlton Heston die. They just go on. Or they ride off into the sunset never to be seen or heard from again, though we suspect they’re somewhere out there. Or they hide away in the mountains only to emerge as the lone survivors of a nuclear holocaust, them and the cockroaches. But they don’t die. Not like the rest of us do, anyway.
Or so the little boy in me still wants to believe. But Charlton Heston is dead. And though I wasn’t actually his biggest fan as an actor, he represents a type of herculean, legendary character that no longer exists – on screen or off – and I fear will never exist again. Our action heroes today might be more human (if humanness is defined by brokenness and being plagued by self doubt); they might be more realistic, but Charlton Heston split the freaking Red Sea. He took Moses’ iconic staff, he raised it high and thundered a command at the behest of the Almighty and the waters did not just split, they obeyed. And as over-the-top as The Ten Commandments is; as low tech as their effects were, I believe it as I watch it.
So I will miss Charlton Heston a little bit. I don’t know where he stood with the Lord. I know he played Moses. I know he met Jesus in Ben Hur. I know he narrated the Bible on CD. So I hope he is, indeed with the Lord.
He lived a long, full life and the little boy inside of me will miss him.
The mind blowing awesomeness of Shakespeare
I’m having my students read “Hamlet” next in English class. I wasn’t honestly all that excited about it at first. I went through a Shakespeare phase in high school, but I’ve since moved on. Shakespeare was a great writer. He had a way with words for sure. But his stories were often contrived, far fetched or, in the case of MacBeth, just stupid.
But then the other day I serendipitously discovered a list of words that Shakespeare invented. Here’s what I found out: William Shakespeare alone has contributed more words to the English language than any other single man. In fact, a number of expressions introduced to the English language by the King James Bible were actually influenced by Shakespeare. All in all Shakespeare either coined, adapted or made popular around 1,700 words that we still use today. On top of that he coined hundreds of everyday phrases that we take for granted. Just as a few examples the terms alligator, compromise (the verb), skim milk, elbow room, kissing, bed and zany are all said to originate with Shakespeare. The expressions “dead as a doornail”, “It’s Greek to me”, “devil incarnate”, “no rhyme or reason” and “good riddance” all originated with Shakespeare. And where would we be at IHOP without Shakespeare? Our expressions of worship would be drastically different. For example, the words “enthroned” and “majestic” both come from Shakespeare. So any worship with the word involving the throne room would be ruined had Shakespeare never lived. Even the term Judgment Day is thanks to the Bard. It was only known as “The Day of Judgment” before he came along. So both IHOPers and Terminator fans thank him. And I’m not even including the dozens of expressions added to our language by knowingly quoting Shakespeare (I would list them, but “brevity is the soul of wit”).
Shakespeare has invented more household words than any other man in the history of our language. But here’s the best part: he even invented the phrase “household words.” That’s right. He invented so many household words he had to invent a word to describe the words he invented. That’s cool.
A mystery
I’m in the prayer room right now. For the past several hours there has been an Asian girl sitting next to me of about twelve or thirteen years of age. I just looked over at her seat about five minutes ago to see what appears to be the same Asian girl…only she’s about 20-years-old. Could it be that it’s the same girl and she’s somehow aged eight years in the past half hour? If so, what could it mean? I have earplugs in so I haven’t been paying attention to the intercession. It makes me wonder what they’ve been praying for. I should look around the room and see if it’s a widespread phenomenon. I’m a little weirded out right now…
