Well, if you’re a LOST nut like I am, then by now I’m sure you’ve heard of a Spanish trailer for the upcoming final season, a cryptic, weird, fun, dark, awsome combination of poetry and special effects, it’s so hard to explain, you just need to watch it for yourself. If this doesn’t get you psyched for LOST, then I am afraid nothing will!
From the Archives – “Control of Me”
I found my brother’s journal again today, and I realized it’s been awhile since I posted something about him, so I thought I would do something cool tonight – I hope this works. Some of you may know that Keith actually recorded a song using his laptop and some digital recording tools only months before he died. I actually had it playing on a CD player at his memorial service. Turns out I have stumbled upon the lyrics to the song, and apparently, this blog site has the capability for me to insert audio, so here it is, Keith’s first and last, one and only song. He never gave it a title, but after reading the lyrics, I call it “Control of Me.” This song gives me chills, I hope you all find it a good way to remember him. Just click on the link below to listen to it. Hit me up if you want the mp3 – I’ll gladly give it up.
LYRICS: “Control of Me,” by Keith Minor
Surrounded by my emotions; They take control of me; Forcing me to surrender; Making it harder to see; This path that I should take; Filled with all my mistakes; Simply to remind me; Remind me of all the pain; I try to lock it up; And throw away the key; Somehow it finds a way out; And takes control of me; These thought I cannot take it; My heart, why did you break it?; So many good times shared; And you run away ’cause you’re scared?
Who Wants to be a Celebrity?
It’s been a while since my last post, the reasons for which are a combination of laziness and forgetfulness — so no worries — no more Mickey Mouse, although I have to add, the mouse count has gone up considerably since December. Since then, we have nabbed 11 more critters in our traps, bringing our grand winter total to 27. Oh what a bloody killing spree it was, too. Good times.
The reason I am posting this message today is that I find myself amazed at just how stupid this country has become, and in particular, our country’s media. Now, one would think I am biased because I myself am a member of said media, but seriously — we don’t have to look far for people who are famous “just because” — Paris Hilton and the entire Kardashian family stand out, as well as just about everyone who has ever starred on any garbage reality TV show. But lately, the latest fad the media has implemented is finding the most ridiculous “viral web videos” — aka, stars of homemade YouTube movies — and making them stars, just because they probably have a slow news day.
I remember the other day, I was walking out to the living room after I got out of bed, and I find my wife on the couch with our laptop open. I forget now how we started talking about the subject, but our conversation turned to a viral video making the rounds of a recent wedding in which members of the wedding party came down the aisle with choreographed dancing to a hip hop song — during the CEREMONY. Like just about every other person in the world, I watched the video and chuckled lightly to myself, mildly entertained by it. For those of you who missed it, the video is below:
Now, by itself, the video is good for a few laughs on a boring Saturday morning — but, no — our media can’t leave it at that. THE TODAY SHOW somehow gets a hold of the wedding party and flies them all out to New York to RE-ENACT the entire dance routine for a group of “we have nothing else better to do because we are probably out of work” New Yorkers in Times Square. Again, the video of this is below:
Does anyone else think this is a waste of time? I laughed at the video because, well, it was funny (one of the members of the wedding party apparantly was injured and had to his part of the routine in a wheelchair, haha), but I also laughed because these people, who recorded the video just to have something fun to remember, are now national (and probably international) celebrities because of it.
So remember kids, if you want to be a celebrity — do something ridiculous at your next public gathering of family and friends. You may just end up being a millionaire!
The Great Mouse Hunt 2008
I killed Mickey Mouse.
OK, I didn’t kill the ACTUAL Mickey Mouse, but recently I did get the pleasure of killing A mouse, or to be more exact, 16 mice – you see, lately, my home has become overrun with these annoying creatures, so I decided it was time to put my foot down.
It all started, well, when I moved into this place. I started noticing little mouse poops everywhere – in my closet, in the kitchen, in the drawers, on the floor – I even noticed holes in my clothes (including one of my favorite Kutless T-shirts – THE NERVE!). Last winter, we didn’t have much luck catching them, but I could hear them moving around, taunting me with their little scratches behind the walls.
The last straw came almost a month ago now. At about 4 a.m. I awoke with a start, hearing rustling in the kitchen. Turning the lights on, I heard rustling coming from an open shopping bag in our pantry. As I looked into the bag, there I saw little Mickey Mouse, running around haplessly.
“Aww, look what you gone and did?” I asked the filthy beast, taunting it, as it has no doubt taunted me in the past. Thoughts of unimaginable cruelty came over me…ways to torture this poor animal, to teach it (as well as its friends) a lesson. Then I thought to myself…
“It’s 4 a.m. – it can wait until morning…” and with that, I removed the bag from the pantry and moved it across the kitchen so I could think about what to do with it in the morning.
When I woke up, I walked with a purpose to the kitchen and moved right to the bag, and sure enough, there it was, sitting there, afraid…
“Good…” I said, doing my best impression of a James Bond villain. “Now you will feel the wrath of Adam Minor!”
I didn’t particularly care to do anything incredibly violent to the thing…after all, I didn’t want to make a mess, and also because I am not COMPLETELY brutal and heartless. So I decided on a more humane death. I filled up our bathroom trash container about halfway with water, tipped the bag upside down and sent our furry little friend for a little swim. Then, I proceeded to get ready for work and leave the mouse to swim around for a while, so it could think about what it did.
When I returned home, about 8 hours later, I checked in on my furry friend, half expecting him to be doing laps, perhaps a backstroke – instead, the mouse was dead and floating in the water like a buoy.
“Eh, oh well,” I said to myself as I tossed the carcass in the woods behind the house as a message to his furry little friends. THIS IS WHAT WILL HAPPEN IF YOU ENTER MY DOMAIN.
However, I was about to learn – mice don’t take to threats very well.
After the “November Mouse Drowning Incident,” Sarah and I decided it was a little thing we like to call “GO TIME.” We went to Wal-Mart and bought four De-Con traps, which trap the mouse inside so all you have to do is throw them away when they are trapped. Within 24 hours of setting them up, all four traps were snapped. Kill count: 5.
“It’s going to be a long winter.”
Seeing that we had just spent nearly $10 on traps and they were already all used up, we knew we couldn’t go on spending crazy amounts of money on traps – after all, there’s this thing called RENT that needs to get taken of - so we searched out some re-usable De-Con snap traps, which contain a housing over a traditional old-fashioned “don’t-you-dare-get-your-finger-caught-in-that-trap” trap. Just throw in a little peanut butter, pull the trap back, and wait for that glorious sound.
SNAP!
Sure enough, over the course of a week, our traps were a flurry of activity – every morning, I would wake up to dead mice in our traps in our kitchen and closet area. Eventually, the kill count was up to 15, with 10 kills over a period of five days, and we knew we had an epidemic on our hands. I remember waking up one night as one of our traps went off (it had to be like 4 a.m.) and just smiling as I knew we had one less beast to worry about, then drifting off to sleep…
Our last kill, to this point, is byfar the most unique, and maybe that’s because I didn’t even use a trap. You see, last Tuesday, Sarah and I were watching my favorite television program, Hannah Montana (OK I’m just kidding – or am I?) and out of nowhere a kamikaze mouse comes bounding out from underneath the couch.
After recovering from the initial shock and a mild heart attack (and after completing a shrill girl scream that made my wife’s eyes roll), I decided that enough was enough. The mouse had to die. After finally hunting down the nearest broom (the best weapon I could come up with at the time) I hunted down that mouse like a crazed lion stalking a gazelle. Finally, I trapped the thing in our office, and it just sat there, no doubt saying its final words to itself, which were most likely, “Squeak Squeaken Squeaky,” which is Mouse-Speak for “AHHHHHH!” because no sooner than I saw him, I had the broom high over my head, and with a primal scream stolen straight out of a heavy metal chorus, I brought down the wrath of God on that mouse. Kill count: 16.
We haven’t had a mouse since. Perhaps tales of the latest victim’s violent end has reached its home village, and his friends are now retreating in terror of my power. Maybe Mayor Mouse has decreed that Minortopia is no longer a suitable habitat for his people because of his tribe’s heavy losses. Maybe I killed the entire tribe. Maybe I killed Mayor Mouse himself. Who knows? They all look the same to me.
Is there a lesson to be learned from this story? Perhaps. Maybe the lesson is that I take WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY too much pleasure in killing mice. Maybe I should see someone about that (is it wrong that I currently have a competition going on with a co-worker to see who can kill the most mice this winter?). Maybe the lesson is that I need to block the many openings there may be into the house (and believe me, there are many).
Maybe not. After all, I think I’d rather get rid of them. I’m not sick. I’m just defensive. You don’t mess with my Kutless T-Shirt! Once that happens, you and your family will experience my wrath, it’s as simple as that. So, to all you mouse lovers out there, sorry, I guess I’m a natural born mouse killer. No regrets.
Anywho, if you’ve killed more than 16 mice this winter so far, please, let me know, so I don’t feel like the only one dealing with this!
R.I.P. Mickey
Setting the trap, and waiting patiently for number 17,
Adam
Happy Fourth!
Yeah, yeah…technically, it’s July 6, but I thought this is as good a time as any to wish all ya’ll a happy Independence Day! Happy Birthday, America!
WMD – Words of Mass Deception
“We all stumble in many ways. If anyone is never at fault in what he says, he is a perfect man, able to keep his whole body in check. When we put bits into the mouths of horses to make them obey us, we can turn the whole animal. Or take ships as an example. Although they are so large and are driven by strong winds, they are steered by a very small rudder wherever the pilot wants to go. Likewise the tongue is a small part of the body, but it makes great boasts. Consider what a great forest is set on fire by a small spark. The tongue also is a fire, a world of evil among the parts of the body. It corrupts the whole person, sets the whole course of his life on fire, and is itself set on fire by hell. All kinds of animals, birds, reptiles and creatures of the sea are being tamed and have been tamed by man, but no man can tame the tongue. It is a restless evil, full of deadly poison. With the tongue we praise our Lord and Father, and with it we curse men, who have been made in God’s likeness. Out of the same mouth come praise and cursing. My brothers, this should not be. Can both fresh water and salt water flow from the same spring? My brothers, can a fig tree bear olives, or a grapevine bear figs? Neither can a salt spring produce fresh water.” -James 3:2-12
I heard a story today, and it’s because of this story that I feel compelled to write about what’s on my heart. We all know the old rhyme, “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me.” It’s a great rhyme in theory, but the sad truth is that words do hurt. In some cases, they hurt the most.
This story is about a person who is enduring something someone should never have to endure. You see, a couple years ago, this Christian girl (we will call this individual “Jamie”) chose to rebel – against family, friends, and most importantly, God – and indulged in a life of sin. Jamie did drugs, had sex, drank alcohol – and turned on God. But our Lord, being so full of incomprehensible grace and love, never gave up on Jamie, and when she realized that she was in the middle of a downward spiral, Jamie asked God for forgiveness. She was given a second chance, and she chose to make the most of it. Jamie repented and began to seek more active involvement in her church, teaching Sunday School and becoming a youth leader, growing in God.
However, as hard as she tried to escape her past and the mistakes she made, the rumors lingered. Her peers remained quiet, unsure about how to approach her. Two years passed. Every time she came to church, she felt as though she was being watched, talked about – judged. One day, she became friends with someone she felt was beginning to head down the same path she had traveled, and she opened her heart, telling this person everything she did and how it negatively affected her life. She tried to share how the decisions she made could have been avoided if her relationship with Christ was stronger, trying to convince her new friend that she was heading down the wrong path. As good as her intentions were, however, the talk didn’t go as planned.
Word began to spread around the church about her past transgressions. The congregation became worried, and started to become more direct with their assessments of Jamie. Some parents even called the pastor, worried that Jamie was “a bad example” for their children because of her mistakes. Judgments were coming from left and right, overwhelming Jamie with shame. Instead of love, her church showed her wrath, and Jamie, over come with emotion, eventually left her church, unsure of where to head next, and leaving her with serious doubts about her life, her church and about her God.
We’ve all heard this story in one form or another. More than likely, we all probably know someone personally who this story could be about. Someone who has lived a difficult life – one bad decision that leads to another, which makes another one easier, and the process continues like a snowball. Then we start hearing the rumors, which turns into the “G word” – gossip.
Gossip has been around since the fall of man. For some reason, our sinful nature includes the capacity to speak ill of each other behind each others’ backs. If someone is irritating us, we talk about him/her to other people. If someone has done something they regret, people make sure everyone knows about it, thinking that informing others about how “bad” someone is, it may make them look better in comparison. In the church, gossip is one of Satan’s most destructive weapons – it may even be considered one of his own “weapons of mass destruction.” How’s this for “WMD”? – Words of Mass Deception. Gossip turns friends against each other, divides groups into factions, and escalates arguments into irrational incidents. Gossip feeds our competitive nature and our primal feelings of jealousy, anger, revenge and hate. It turns best friends into worst enemies. It’s amazing how destructive words can be, isn’t it?
In the passage above, James is trying to portray, through a series of metaphors, how gossip has absolutely no place in a Christ-based church. It goes against everything Jesus is about. One word of gossip is like a small spark in a dry forest – one speck of flame can lead to ultimate destruction. It is a “restless evil, full of deadly poison.” That’s a pretty harsh comparison to something that seems so harmless at first, isn’t it? A church, one of the places that should be considered a safe haven, a sanctuary, a holy place of God for all who choose to believe, can be thrown into chaos by gossip.
It may seem that I am coming down hard on churches. Make no mistake about it – I am. I have seen first hand the damage that gossip can do and the people that it hurts. The pain it causes is psychological, emotional and takes a long time to heal. However, the first, and perhaps the most important, thing to realize is that no one of us is perfect. We have all been guilty of sin. Not one of us is righteous, especially with our tongues. All of us have been around people who have gone through struggles in their lives and made mistakes. We’ve all been around people that have rubbed us the wrong way, irritated us or wronged us. Instead of raining down judgment on them, we need to nurture them with the love of Christ, show them love, and offer them assistance, so that they may grow closer to God.
It really sickens me how so many churches (and no church is 100-percent innocent of this) create a “rumor mill” and gossip about people’s struggles to others. How utterly unfair and hurtful! At the same time, it mostly sickens me because I know I am guilty of it myself! “Out of the same mouth comes praise and cursing.” As James says, “this should not be.” The same mouth that we praise God with is the mouth we use as a weapon against each other. How is that possible? According to God, it shouldn’t be!
So what do we do? Simply, love. Like Christ, take opportunities to help those who are struggling. Instead of spreading rumors about people, we need to trust God to give us opportunities to help. Many people, more than we probably know, are struggling, whether it be alcoholism, depression, sex (and the consequences that come with it), and a host of other issues. We need to block our natural instinct to shun these people and make an extra effort to love them, help them and show them Jesus. We need to burn this rumor mill to the ground!
I’ll try my hardest to live by these words. I hope you do too.
Holding my torch as high as I can,
Adam
In loving memory…
So it turns out that in the credits for the new Batman movie, “The Dark Knight,” the producers will include the following message:
In memory of our friends
HEATH LEDGER
&
CONWAY WICKLIFFE
Pretty cool if you ask me. Oh by the way, Wickliffe is a stuntman who died on set during production in Chicago.
Kutless – Alive and Well
It’s been a long two years since Kutless’ latest effort, “The Hearts of the Innocent,” that spawned a multitude of hits on Christian rock radio, and thier latest album, “To Know That You’re Alive,” picks up right where they left off with a great step (albeit a different one) forward.
Some things have changed in the Kutless camp since we last saw them, the most important being the departure of longtime guitarist Ryan Shrout and the addition of Nick DePartee. But the same intensity and passion remains. Unlike many “Christian” rock bands (COUGH Switchfoot! P.O.D.! COUGH), Kutless has stayed true to what works – songs about their faith in Jesus Christ.
From the introductory rock anthems “The Feeling,” and the title track ”To Know That You’re Alive,” to classic Kutless power ballads “Promise You,” and “I Do Not Belong,” Jon Micah will have you singing along no matter where you are. For Kutless fans, this is a must buy, and for non-Kutless fans, this is a must buy. So what are you waiting for? Go buy it! I can’t wait for SoulFest so I can see thier new material first hand!
“To Know That You’re Alive” : B+
Sweet 17
“I did it. I did it. I got one of my own. I hope I made you proud.”
These were the words spoken to Bill Russell by Kevin Garnett just seconds after the Boston Celtics dropped a nuclear bomb on the LA Lakers a couple weeks ago, cementing KG as an NBA champion and surefire Hall of Famer. The C’s took the NBA Finals in six games, winning their 17th NBA Championship, and with it, making Boston the sports capital of the world – if only the Patriots won the Super Bowl….*sigh*
To watch my Celtics this year (as Seth could probably tell you) was really something special. Throughout my life (although I was once a Magic fan), I looked on as the Celtics endured some tough seasons. I was only 3 when the Larry Bird Celts won in ’86, and since then, it has been a tragedy more heartbreaking than “The Notebook” (I have never seen the Notebook, but the mere mention of the movie to certain girls I know brings tears to their eyes, so I assume its pretty heartbreaking). The C’s run in 2002 to the Eastern COnference Finals was great and all, but one got the feeling they really weren;t going to get it done.
This year, however, it was a differnet story. A 66-16 regular season (completing a 42-game turn around – an NBA record, I might add), tough 7-game series against the Hawks and Cavaliers – a 6-game beat down of the Pistons, and then of course showing Kobe who his daddy was made me feel so good, I can hardly contain it.
There are so many memories, I can’t even list them….but OK I will:
Paul Pierce’s knee injury and return in Boston in the FInals, Pierce’s war (and 40-point game) against Lebron James in the C’s Game 7 win against the Cav’s, the Green’s magnificent comeback in Game 4 in LA from 24 points down in the 3rd quarter to take a 3-1 lead (and consequently watching Jack Nicholson squirm in his courtside seat), Ray Allen getting his groove back, KG’s baseball throw/and 1 shot in the C’s Game 6 massacre of LA – and the list goes on.
Speaking of Jack Nicholson, just a sidenote here – how annoying is it to watch a Lakers game in LA and see about 234 celebrities sitting courtside when none of them are probaby from LA in the first place. What a bunch of fakers! Isn’t WIll Smith from Philly? Where was he while his hometown 76ers were getting beat down by the Pistons?
So, I know it’s been a couple weeks now, and number 17 is behind us, but considering the season we had, what’s stopping us from #18? 19? With the Boston Three Party and most of our team returning next year (SIGN POSEY!), the stage is set for a repeat!
Go Celtics!
Pixar’s latest masterpiece
I know I haven’t written in a while, but I thought now would be a nice time to return to the blogosphere with a little blurb about a movie I saw today, Pixar’s latest adventure about a little robot doing big things and saving the world - “Wall-E”
I never thought I’d love a movie that didn’t have more than 20 minutes of real dialogue. That is, until I saw “Wall-E.”
I didn’t really know what to expect going in – but after watching it, I can tell you, it was worth every penny to go see it. Trust me, you will regret not going to see this film. To call it a visual adventure is a gross understatement. Pixar is truly in their prime. Whether it’s showing off a grim picture of what our world may become, or the greatest reaches of outer space, the movie’s look is ridiculously realistic (with a few cartoonish exceptions…). The movie is a love story, a sci-fi adventure and an underdog tale compacted into a cube of awesomeness. Go see it. Now…no I mean it, drop what you are doing right now and go see it. I’ll wait.
“Wall-E” : A-
Oh right, and no Pixar movie is complete without voice work by John Ratzenberger. His part is short, but it reminds all of us taht we are watching a Pixar movie, and for some reason, it’s pretty comforting.
