It all depends where you stand

Hanna Rosin's article in Friday's Washington Post about Soulforce, a group of gay evangelicals who visit Christian colleges, had the following amazing quote from Patrick Henry College president Michael Farris, on learning a friend of his is gay:

David Hazard, a friend of college founder Farris who had edited one of his books, also told Reynolds he was gay. When Farris heard that during an interview in his office, his jaw fell open, and he stared for a long time. "Oh. I'm so sorry for David," he said. "I think he's deluded." The place for someone like that, he added, "is on their knees repenting of their sin."

Let's just enjoy that advice.

Unpopular rules

The missus and I were sitting under a giant sign for $1 frozen yogurt at Ikea, and we started to talk about unpopular rules--unlike, say, keeping your seatbelt fastened until the plane comes to a complete stop, the kind almost nobody thinks is reasonable. (I'm actually with the airlines on this one, but the symphony of clicks I hear upon touchdown suggests I'm in the minority.)

Anyway, here are our three; looking for more in the comments section.

• You break it, you buy it
  
• No free refills
  
• Refunds for store credit only

Gong Hits for Jesus

I wrote a review of the Trees Community's The Christ Tree box set, just in time for it to go out of print. It's here.

Since you put it that way

Every morning my 2 1/2-year-old son wakes me up with a request. The other morning went like this:

HIM: I want a lollipop.

ME: (Groggily) You can't have a lollipop. It's 6 a.m.

HIM: I want a lollipop...and a beer.

Hard limit, a wall of love

Just over a year ago, I missed out on the perfect way to die. Seriously. Now I'm gonna have to have cancer or get hit by a car or something.

That happened as we were preparing to move to the D.C. area. Since then, my LPs have been in boxes--organizing them just never moved up the priority list. Until this weekend. Went to Ikea, bought some Ivar....

Well, I guess my old shelves were bigger. I still had three big boxes to unpack when I filled the top shelf. I was gonna just drive back down this morning, but then I thought that the still quite large number of albums that fit on this new shelf ought to be enough for anyone.

So I culled. Mercilessly. The easy stuff was the dupes and the joke records. Then a little friend rock. Then some stuff I never really liked but kept in case I might someday. And by the time I was done I had three boxes to bring to the thrift store, maybe 1,000 albums total.

Now my record collection is once again lean and awesome. Going through them brought back a few memories, such as the one about the French rock group Téléphone. I lived in France for a while when I was in high school, and Téléphone was the only decent band over there at the time. I bought every Téléphone record I could and was overjoyed when I returned home to meet a complicated guy in my English class named Kip who later went punk, not in the way that would be expected of someone who grew up in the D.C. suburbs in the '80s: No, Kip decided to emulate Billy Idol, wearing leather outfits with lots of zippers and spiky hair and mascara.

Anyway, Kip had a Téléphone record that I didn't (did I mention Kip was from Connecticut? I don't know if that explains anything). It was such an amazing idea that I still can't believe that it ever happened--someone thought it would be great if a band whose members barely spoke English rerecorded some of the songs from their breakthrough 1982 LP, Dure Limite, in an attempt to break the U.K. and U.S. markets.

It was, of course, a disaster, and not just because, as Wikipedia tells me, Lou Reed punched up the English lyrics. The problem was the group's Savoir-Faire accents, as well as the fact that the group's biggest hit, "Ça (ç'est vraiment toi)" was translated word for word, for the nonsense chorus "That (Is Really You)"--or, as it sounded, "Zat ees rrreally yo."

Unfortunately, I don't have a copy of Téléphone's English EP. As I recall, it looked like the French version of Dure Limite but with a different color in the background. I'd love to hear it again--it's the kind of thing I could even see making space for.

Ministry of Silly Names

This isn't possible, is it? (Thanks to Jeff, Jason & Scott for pointing it out):

"They did exactly as they should have done from start to finish and we are proud of them," said Air Chief Marshal Jock Stirrup, the head of Britain's armed forces and top military adviser.

I guess a career in the military is really the only reasonable course of action with a handle like that.

P.S.

Flicker user KarenAbad has some photos up of the conference; they're probably the only evidence of my terribly unfortunate attempt at a beard, which I shaved off last night, returning my entire head to its usual cueball-like state. I liked having a beard, but the missus HATED it, and I like to think I know how to pick my battles.

Plus I was terrified of getting food stuck in it.

Grand Rapids

I had a cracking time at the Festival of Faith and Music, and I very nearly became a Christian myself when I saw how many people showed up for my workshop. Thanks to Ken Heffner and the Calvin Kru for organizing this thing so well that my only complaint was how little sleep I got because I was having too much fun.

One wee point I want to make about my speech--when I was talking about Christians being too serious about music, I was talking about people at the festival, too. Searching for too much meaning in three-minute pop songs turns you into a weird old guy. Trust me on this one.