Category: random thoughts

for some reason i have been receiving lots of search engine “hits” to the blog concerning “the average speed of a pinewood derby car”. i think this is pretty funny but i figured i would put a little bit of info on the page just to help whoever has been coming to the site. here it is and i hope it helps:

• all of the statistics below assume an 80 foot long track – track length varies so this info will vary also
• a really good time on a such pinewood derby track is below 4 seconds
• if you are below 4.1 seconds on your average time you’ll be in the running for placing within the competition
• if you are at 4.6 seconds you’ll be in the middle to milddle/rear part of the pack
• 4.6 seconds translates into the real life speed of about 60 miles per hour
• 4.6 seconds in scaled speed translates to about 325 miles per hour

to the unknown searcher – i hope this helps

please don’t let new england win! please don’t let new england win! please don’t let new england win! please don’t let new england win! please don’t let new england win! please don’t let new england win! please don’t let new england win! please don’t let new england win! please don’t let new england win! please don’t let new england win! please don’t let new england win! please don’t let new england win! please don’t let new england win! please don’t let new england win! please don’t let new england win! please don’t let new england win!

i don’t care who actually wins but PLEASE DON”T LET NEW ENGLAND WIN!

at the age of 79 johnny carson has died of emphysema. for my younger readers i would explain who johnny carson was, but i know that i don’t have any younger readers because the only people who actually read this blog are my parents and pam, my wife (all the comments made by other people are just me faking it).

carson was the greatest, the king of late night. he didn’t originate the late night experience but he perfected it. i remember watching from my childhood till i was a young married guy (1992). as a kid i remember hoping that he would do “carnack” or that jim fowler would be on the show with some of his animals. i loved it when carson had animals on the show. as an adult i remember watching his last show and seeing bette midler sing “wind benigth my wings” to carson. ah, good times.

carson should have been succeded on the tonight show by david letterman but no nbc thought it could do better with jay leno. how stupid can you get. who would actually think that leno was funnier than letterman? funnier looking maybe, but that’s about it. even carson recognized that letterman was better than leno because after carson retired he still wrote jokes every now and then for letterman’s monologue. nbc’s stupidity in bringing in leno to succeed carson still floors me.

anyways a popular culture icon passed away today and that makes me sad. you can read more about carson here.

in december i learned about the world of flickr, a photoblogging community. it’s fascinating to look around and see everyone’s photos and thereby see different aspects of people’s lives. one of the coolest parts of the flickr community is seeing different themes in some of the member’s lives. one example of this is what i would like to talk about now.

a flickr member named “micon” has decided to take a photo of every meal that he eats. his meals are amazing. not because of him making anything fancy (though some of his meals look incredibly gourmet) rather it is the presentation of his meal that impresses me so much. it would appear from his pictures that micon wants each meal that he fixes for himself to be a thing of beauty. one of his meals is titled “whatever is left in the freezer” which is just fish sticks, french fires, and garbonzo beans (i think). this is definitely nothing fancy yet look at the way he has it set up. it’s amazing.

this impresses me. i love the fact that this guy wants his meals to be a thing of beauty. too often when i fix something i just do it merely for sustenance rather than as an enjoyable moment of my day. when i come home for lunch i’ll fix myself a sandwich, eat it off of a paper towel, and eat some chips straight from the bag. it wouldn’t take much more effort to arrange my food on a plate in an appealing fashion. that little bit of effort would change the whole meal.

we don’t enjoy enough beauty in life because we don’t focus on it.

i’m presently at cc’s coffeehouse working on the sermon i’m supposed to preach at the 9:30 a.m. worship service tomorrow and i’ve reached the point of needing a mental break so i’m decided to right in the blog for a second or two. as many of you know we have a new member of our family, montana. she’s a great dog and was already very well trained by the time we adopted her. even though she’s housebroken she’s had a few “accidents” getting familiar with our home and we’ve had to clean up a little bit of urine. one of those accidents happened this morning. it was really no big deal and was very easy to clean up because it was on a shirt that i was going to iron for church tomorrow. up until a few minutes ago i did not realize that the urine had seeped through the shirt on to what was below it.

i’ve been at cc’s since about 1:00 p.m. (it’s 4:00 now no matter what the blog clock says – it’s wrong and i can’t figure out how to change it). every so often someone would come and sit by me for a little while and then get up and move to another spot. this has happened four times. i had not really thought much of it. i personally don’t like sitting by strangers when there’s no chance to actually interact with them so i have just figured that they felt the same way and had moved because a better spot had opened up. at least that’s what i thought.

i have a lousy sense of smell. i’ve been told by a doctor that this is because i have a deviated septum. the allergist who told me this said it had probably happened during my years of football or rough housing as a kid. however it happened, i definitely messed up the inner workings of my nose sometime during my life. this has left me with a sense of smell that is sub-par. i can usually smell something for a second at most and then it’s gone. even during that second the wind has to blow in just right direction and the smell has to be pretty strong. i guess that’s why it took me so long to smell the dog pee that i had been carrying around with me.

my laptop messenger bag had been under the shirt that was peed on. when i saw the shirt i looked under it to make sure that it had only gotten on the shirt. nothing below the shirt seemed to be wet. the carpet was fine. i thought my bag had been fine because i couldn’t feel any wetness and i was unable to smell anything. well apparently dog urine takes awhile to reach it’s full potency because i began to smell the urine a few minutes ago (after my fourth coffeehouse neighbor had moved). so i lifted the laptop case up and verified that it was the recipient of montana’s marking.

on the good side montana’s urine has kept people from bothering me. since even i can now smell the urine now i think i’ll probably go home and wash the bag.

for CHRISTmas this year pam and i were given a gift certificate to ruth’s chris steak house. we were very appreciative of the gift. tonight we finally went to the restaurant to enjoy the meal that the gift certificate would buy. i had never been to ruth’s chris before and therefore all i really new to expect was high prices and ala carte meals. after eating there i can’t really understand what the big deal is. my steak was merely “okay.” it was by no means the best steak i’ve ever had – not even close to it.

pam and i actually think the whole thing is actually an emperor’s new clothes kind of a thing. i’m convinced that people must think “wow, this food is really expensive so it must be good.” people are too busy thinking this that they don’t realize that they are merely eating a slightly better than average steak. there are several places in baton rouge that serve a much better steak.

i still greatly appreciated the gift certificate.

you have to check out this link. it is the coolest radio ever. it has no buttons. you turn it on and off by pushing it up or down, you change the volume by moving it side to side, and you change the frequency by moving it from left to right.

here it is

here are a few links to help you with making and keeping your new year’s resolutions:

• 10 tips for new year’s resolutions
• top ten new year’s resolutions
• announce your new year’s resolutions to people in the youth ministry

happy resolutioning! 🙂

merry CHRISTmas to all. i hope that your CHRISTmas morning has been wonderful. mine has been great. full of family, food, and remembrance of our LORD. for us it all started last night with pam’s parents arriving. they joined us for our church’s CHRIISTmas eve service (which was wonderful because it was full of people that i love). we then came home to the terrell family tradition of an hors d’oeuvre supper – basically this is where we make all of our favorite appetizers and eat all of them for supper. then came the CHRISTmas prep, including smoking a turkey, and then bed. this morning was full of the normal stuff – opening gifts, giving thanks, eating breakfast, cleaning up, and finally playing with the gifts. it’s been a blast. the best part was probably adam and noah with the gift of “yaconelli” – our basset hound. we won’t actually pick her up until monday so we printed pictures, wrapped them up, and then made a series of clues to lead the kids to the pictures. the boys got into the hunt. it was quite fun to watch. we are presently waiting for my parents to arrive in baton rouge for “round two” to begin.

the post-unwrapping lull has started to occur around here and thus i have started surfing the net a little. i found an interesting article on the new york times magazine’s website (via jordon cooper’s blog). the article is “2004 in ideas“. the story is a list of articles on the year’s most fascinating and revolutionary ideas. there are allot of them and i haven’t read all of them yet but i have been amazed, surprised, and bewildered by the ones that i have thus far read. i figure it is only appropriate to post an article on revolutionary ideas on the day in which we remember when the WORD (logos) came and tabernacled (dwelt) with us and changed everything forever.