I’m pretty late to the party on this, but I’m going to throw it out there anyway before I move on to bigger and more awesome posts later on.
Many years ago there was a wondrous show on television called Knight Rider. I oughtn’t have to explain to anyone here how completely awesome that show and its star – the super car called KITT – were.
Recently, a vain attempt to resurrect the show was made and I unfortunately watched the first episode. They do have a talking car, but that is about it. The entire first episode was 50% propaganda for social liberalism and 50% commercial (not counting the actual commercials).
When we first meet (the guy who will become) the new Michael Knight, red flags go up immediately. Far from the suave character of the original – whom you might have believed gave a crap about something besides not shaving – this Michael is a scruffy, long-haired, sarcastic punk. This is, of course, merely following the trend that seems to be dominating TV lately. There is only one other kind of young male lead character in rotation today, and all you have to do is replace the sarcasm of the former boilerplate with a healthy dose of being moody and looking like you want to cry all the time. I digress.
We first meet him in bed with a girl. That is fine – then his dopey friend comes in, Michael says something ‘clever’, and then his other girl joins him in bed. Nice – the nicest thing we might be able to call him at this point is a frat-boy.
We are also introduced to a female FBI agent who lives in a house by the beach. She has been out for a swim, showers off, and returns to her room to be greeted by the girl she slept with the night before. She has a couple throwaway lines, including one to make sure the audience realizes that they don’t know each other. It is important, you see, for your talking car action show to take a stand on homosexuality (twice) and promote anonymous sex.
Fast-forward, and our female lead is now riding around in KITT with Michael. Michael makes a snide comment about how romantic relationships don’t last. KITT backs him up stating that it is true relationships don’t last and that 53% of marriages fail. He even has a nifty graph. Thank God we got that information out..
The action finally picks up, and we discover that Michael was part of a special forces team in Iraq. This comes out as part of a discussion about all the fighting he has done and how fighting never makes any difference. He WILL be doing some fighting though, because an evil security contracting company called Blackwater.. er.. BlackRIVER is after KITT.
KITT, this time around, is a Ford. I think it is a Ford Mustang – a Mustang Cobra to be exact. I’m not sure, but that is what I am guessing based on the CONSTANT CLOSEUPS of the Cobra emblem that are liberally interspersed throughout every scene that the car is in. There was probably some sweet action going on, but I wouldn’t be able to tell you about it. I can tell you; however, that it was probably a Mustang.
It is not just any Mustang, though! It is later discovered that since alternative fuels are too rare for a super car that needs to fight crime all over the country, KITT still runs on gas. Al Gore would NOT like this, but what are you going to do? According to the show, KITT can do around 200mph – covering about 600 miles in about 3 hours. Thankfully, KITT is super-efficient and mainly solar-powered and therefore gets about 161 miles to the gallon – at 200 mph.
There are 128 fluid ounces in a gallon. At this rate (going top speed at 200mph mind you), approximately .795 ounces of gas is being used per mile. That means that just over 1.5 TABLESPOONS of gasoline is all that is required to propel a Mustang 5,280 feet at a rate of 200 mph. It isn’t mainly solar-powered. It’s completely solar-powered, and that opens a whole new book of stupid.
It’s the same book of stupid that allows KITT to be hacked later on. The bad men start hacking into KITT’s firewall. This access must be wireless, because I didn’t see any biodegradable CAT5 trailing behind him. Apparently, this top secret super car does not have a switch that allows the driver to simply turn off the WiFi access. The only option is to take the entire computer down.
Of course, with the computer down, you lose all the nifty benefits provided by all the nanomachines that coat the entire car. You see, you can’t even scratch the body or even windows of this car because of the nanomachines. They will resist your ballistic advances and immedialy repair the car, keeping the inhabitants feeling safe and stylish. You need go really fast, but KITT doesn’t have a spoiler? That is no sweat, because he can just grow one – out of the nanomachines.
That is a lot of complaining about one TV show, I know. But much like the new Dukes of Hazzard movie, nothing about Knight Rider was made for fans of the show. It was made to get a laugh out of the MTV kids by defiling everything that made the series good in the first place.
It took a little doing towards the end, but I wrapped up Thomas J Stanley’s The Millionaire Next Door this past evening.
The book is subtitled “The Amazing Secrets of America’s Wealthy.” I think that is a little misleading, because most of what is in there isn’t really a secret. It’s just that we’re so well trained that no one bothered to stop and ask. The core message is still “live on less than you make.” It is the simplest of concepts, and yet it is uncommon to see it put into practice. I guess that is why we aren’t all millionaires!
First things first, I have absolutely no reservations in recommending this book. As far as I’m concerned, you shouldn’t be able to graduate high school without understanding the truths that live in this book, if not reading it specifically.
The bottom line is this:
Think of the people that you know that you’d describe as wealthy. Statistically speaking, you are probably wrong about those people. High net income doesn’t translate to high net worth, and the more outwardly displayed that net income is, the less likely there is any net worth backing it up. People that look rich in America usually aren’t.
This concept – the surprisingly (or maybe not so much) inverse relationship between status and wealth – is the focus of most of the material presented. Stanley divides people into PAWs (prodigious accumulators of wealth) and UAWs (underaccumulators of wealth). Each chapter presents case studies on the behavior of PAWs versus UAWs when it comes to everything from automobile purchases to clothing and how they teach their children.
One thing to keep in mind as you journey through The Millionaire Next Door is that it is written by two gentlemen that are in the business of figuring out how to market to the affluent. Everything is written from this perspective and its a good view of how the affluent handle money. There are some parts that get a little obscure. I felt like they spent an unnecessary amount of time talking about cars. There’s a long chart in this book that lists automobiles by their price per pound. I’m not sure where they were going with that…
Road bumps aside, it’s well worth reading and will provide you with a lot of great context and insight into the minds of successful wealth builders. It will challenge the way you measure success, and that challenge is well worth taking to heart.
This another long-winded overreaction to one of Pastor Donnie’s posts. I decided to put it on my own blog instead of terrorizing him with it again. I said “terror” on the internet. Does that mean the Feds are going to come beat me down with the PATRIOT Act?
Ahem.. you can read Donnie’s post here.
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I haven’t read “The Myth of a Christian Nation” in particular, but there is a part of that philosophy that I’ve been wondering about.
I’m speaking purely philosophically now (not campaigning for Huckabee), but if one were a practicing Christian and there was a sincere politician – a True Believer as it were – that got into politics would you not support him? Is your safe distance from these candidates really part of some inspired ideal or is it just cowering in the face of public opinion?
I’m speaking purely philosophically now (not campaigning for parochial public schools), but if you really believe that everyone should know about Jesus, wouldn’t you be happy that children were being taught – sincerely now – about Him in schools? I see, the schools might screw it up, or use it as leverage for some other not-very-Chirstlike agenda. Let’s not even try. Okay…
The whole power-under thing is intriguing. I’m all for it really. I’m all for reaching people wherever and however you can. That said, there’s a common flaw in this and every philosophy that seems to be present no matter how idealistic the leaders seem to be.
That flaw is money. It’s easy to pigeonhole the one side – the “right-wing”, “fundamentalists”, whatever you want to call them always get the rap for being too greedy.
No one seems to talk about the other side though. Even the most politically liberal Christians take pause on the subject of money. I hear that Jesus wouldn’t want to be taught about in schools. I hear that Jesus wouldn’t want to be spoken about in government. But Jesus WOULD want the government to be in charge of redistributing the money.
So we don’t want the faith to be associated in people’s minds with the countless and unspeakable atrocities that America commits every day (yes that was sarcasm). So we get as far away as we can from identifying as a “Christian Nation”. Great! Let’s tell the government to institute a flat tax and halt all activities that disproportionately tax the wealthy! Let’s get out there and handle the evangelism AND the giving ourselves!
“But…. oh” you say, “Geez man.. wait.. let’s not get crazy now, Bill! We can trust people to reach souls, but they can’t be trusted to give. Let’s um… let’s make an exception here. Let’s just let the government help us with just the money part. Let’s let them keep up the good and efficient work of distributing our money like Jesus would want, but discourage anyone mentioning the J-word in public. How’s that grab you?”
If you really want the government out of it, let’s get the government out of it!
Several of you have lost hope in me now. You can just imagine me sitting there counting my money and watching Fox News – taking the occasional break to go downtown and run over poor people with my car. Let me tell you I don’t get Fox News anymore and I’ve never run anyone over. I’m not against giving either. I give a fair amount, and (for now) I could certainly give more. I’m not heartless – I just don’t like inconsistency.
EPILOGUE
That is pretty unfocused. That could have really been two or three posts, but there you have it.
We are encouraged every Sunday to get out there and bring Christ to the people. I don’t bring my faith to work, excepting the rare occasion that someone asks and only then when I’m sure no “offendable ears” are listening. That is partially because we (the team, not me personally) have already had unpleasantness over that sort of thing, but mainly because in most work places it just isn’t welcome.
The way they talk, it seems like a lot of people at Church would pat me on the back for this – this keeping of Christ in his place. That sounds weird when you say it like that – almost blasphemous.
I also worry about making public posts about this because I might have to interview for a job before and atheist web-surfer someday. Is that weird? Should I just redefine this fearfulness so it reads like an ideal? Would it change the fact that minding what you put online is a very real concern in today’s economy?
So many questions, but I do know a few things:
According to our founding legal documents, the “Christian Nation” in a legal sense may very well be a myth.
The “Separation Clause” is a myth too.
When the wife was off picking up Joe’s present, I had her pick up Matt Hughes new book Made in America: The Most Dominant UFC Champion of All Time.
I think this was on Friday and I started reading it when she got home after work. I ended up finishing it that night. Now there were several contributing factors in that, not the least of which was the larger than average font. Also, it was only 300 pages long. That said, it really held my attention and that made it a pretty easy read.
Any stereotypes I might have had about high school or college wrestlers were held up nicely. Mr. Hughes was pretty full of himself and got in lots of fights! Now, I say that a little tongue-in-cheek. Life was obviously not all peaches, including the bankruptcy at the farm that ultimately led to the separation of his parents.
The latter half of the book gets more into what most people are probably interested in – the fights. Hughes takes us through the issues in and outside the octagon and gives a real feel for which ones were more personal than others. In the midst of this, he illustrates his conversion from church-goer to Christ-follower which nicely rounds out his tale of fighting, family, and faith.
Whether you are already a fan of Matt Hughes or not, your mind won’t be changed after reading Made in America. There is no deep philosophy on success or any great insight about winning at life or anything like that. The best I can say is that I now know a lot more about Matt Hughes, and that it’s a pretty interesting story. With as many title fights as he has won, I can highly recommend Made in America to any fan of MMA and especially the UFC!
And as an aside… my daughter apparently has a little trouble telling Matt Hughes and Shane Gadbury apart 
Alright.. I don’t know if it is possible for a book report to have spoilers, but just in case – you’ve been warned!
Dr. Meg Meeker’s Strong Fathers, Strong Daughters: 10 Secrets Every Father Should Know is required reading for anyone that has a daughter and probably-better-read-anyway reading for those of you with just boys.
Also, on the subject of spoilers, don’t run out and buy this book if your name is Joe. There is a high probability that someone got you this as a baby present but couldn’t give it to you Saturday because the store didn’t have it in stock and it had to be ordered.
Back to business! I don’t know why the “10 Secrets” tag line is on there. It seems like books anymore can’t be content to just have a title. They have to have a summary built into the front of the book as well. Most of these principles aren’t really secrets anyway, but they do provide a lot of encouragement and reassurance that you’re doing (or are going to be doing) the right thing.
That reassurance is important as you bring up a daughter because if you are raising her right, you will be going against the cultural grain. Pop culture would have to back away from all of the challenges of child-rearing. If you and your daughter aren’t seeing eye to eye, you just need to give her space to explore and express herself. Or ruin herself.
A new born baby doesn’t know anything about money, drugs, sex, faith, clothing, culture, or anything else. Someone is going to teach her. It is going to either be you or the world outside, and that is the main focus of this book. It’s guidance for fathers that are facing the daunting task of raising children in a culture where masculinity and paternal authority are increasingly frowned upon – a culture where being the man of the house is painted as oppressive behavior.
The book isn’t all doom and gloom by any means. Dr. Meeker breaks up the pace a little bit with anecdotes from her personal practice. Some are pictures of life done right and some wrong, but nearly all of them are emotionally moving. When culture cries out for you to let your daughter be free, they are deceiving you. They don’t want her to think for herself, they want her to think like them… instead of you. Someone, somewhere is going to have the dominant influence in her life, so who is it going to be? Will it be her father who has loved her from her very first breath and for whom she is his whole life? Or will it be a consuming culture for whom she is just another abused statistic?
Strong Fathers, Strong Daughters comes highly recommended no matter where you are coming from. I already felt pretty confident about where I was going to lead my own daughter, but even so – it’s nice to get some encouragement from the pros!
This is actually a comment I wrote in response to a post by Pastor Donnie Miller (“No Perfect People Allowed – Chapter 2“). It was getting long winded enough that I decided to use up my own space instead of his. Of course – conservationally speaking – I failed since I used both.
Anyway, he is blogging his way through a book entitled No Perfect People Allowed: Creating a Come As You Are Culture in the Church and recently wrote about some of the material in chapter two.
Also, I’m nearly ready to post a book report of my own – likely the first of many – though I’m just going to go ahead and do the entire thing in one shot
It’ll help if you take a minute to read the original post. Here is what I wrote:
I’m having some trouble reconciling
“How do we best contextualize the unchanging truths of Scripture in ways they can understand and live out in their culture?”
with
“Truth is relational.”
I’m not sure how exactly how “relational” is being used here, but the way it comes off on the surface seems a little hazardous.
It seems to say that what is necessary to reach a person and bring them into the church community is relative – changing based on the person and their circumstances.
I don’t think that is a very good way to define the Truth. The approach, as far as evangelism, would do well to adhere to that interpretation, but the core has to remain the same.
Jesus did indeed say “I am the truth.” He said, in fact “I am the way, the truth, and the life.” and then said “No one comes to the Father except through me.”
He didn’t say “No one comes to the Father except by a custom built path tailored for each individual relative to their experiences.”
I agree that a church should have wide open arms. None should ever be turned away, and it does disturb me when I see it happen. That said, it is a slippery slope to “reinterpret” too much when representing the Truth to someone.
A friend of ours says this on his blog page entitled “Emerging Me”:
“What if truth is a constant pursuit? What if it changes as we understand God’s love better? God does not change. And TRUTH does not change, but MY understanding of what I thought truth is changes.”
“What if [truth] changes…”
“…TRUTH does not change”
That doesn’t work. The truth isn’t a constant pursuit, though your understanding may be. You might, though, have been right the first time. Then you aren’t being progressive. You’re falling away.
If one has truly misunderstood, and has come closer to God by working through this misunderstanding, I think that is great!
That line of thinking; however, can be abused by rationalizing a denial of difficult truth by simply “understanding” it away. It seems like a pretty patronizing attitude to take with the King of Kings.
I think it is a matter of balance. On the cultural side, there are many ways to bring people to the Son. On the Truth side lies only one way to get to the Father.
I once asked a relative how she felt about someone dying and really not being sure if they were in heaven or not.
She said that she believes that regardless of life on earth, everyone gets a chance to accept or deny Jesus once they have died.
It isn’t true. No matter how good it makes you feel, or how much it motivates you to get up and get to church – it isn’t true.
Yesterday was the something-eth annual Christmas dinner at church. I don’t know what the number is, but it can’t be that large because the church hasn’t even been around that long. Anyhow, it was pretty good mainly due to the awesome chocolatized pretzel sticks that I made. The real food was pretty darn good as well, but I can’t take credit for any of that.
I also had the opportunity to speak to the congregation about Financial Peace University. Usually when I speak in front of people part of my brain goes away to a happy place and the mouth just does its thing until my time is up. This time; however, I actually prepared, and made notes, and thought about what I would say before I got up there. That worked out pretty good, so “sorry” to all my speech teachers in school – you were totally right and I was wrong.
I do, apparently, have to start numbering my points. Derin was cool enough to point out that I delivered first, second, second, second, and last points during the speech. Oh well, those middle ones were tied for significance anyway.
We did have a few sign-ups to come to the preview class which, by the way, is free and is taking place on January 7th, so that was encouraging. It is no secret that it comes highly recommended from me. There is something for everyone in there – even those of you that have handled every dollar perfectly from the very first – I know, that’s everybody
In his book, The Total Money Makeover, Dave Ramsey recalls a pastor he had that said living right is difficult, but not complicated. It applies to almost everything, especially money. He goes on to say there are no “secrets of the rich” because the principles they use to become so aren’t secrets. Being a movie star or founding Microsoft would be the rarest of exceptions to the rule, that being that almost every millionaire in America did it the hard way. Hard, but not complicated.
I think we (humans) like to make things more complicated than they need to be because it creates more points of failure. More points of failure means more opportunities for excuses when we fail. I should expound upon that someday…
But not today! Looks like this’ll be the last from me until after Christmas, which we’ll be spending up in Iowa with the family.
Merry Christmas to everyone and travel safe!
New Photo Album Posted! 
I did in fact… just this past week. I guess I can’t say that I personally drove them all, but between the wife and I we cleared a grand quite easily.
The ranch used to be a 7 hour drive if we kept moving and only stopped for fuel. When you add in kids, it turns into an 8 hour trip. When you potty train one of those kids it turns into a 9 hour trip. And when you stop in Grand Island to do some grocery shopping it comes in at a nice round 10 hours. We left on Monday afternoon and settled into our beds at about 1:30 AM on Tuesday.
Tuesday morning was Aunt Elaine’s funeral. It was about 1.5 hours back the way we came so we got to get up nice and early to make it to the church by 10:00 AM. The service was good – lots of family and it featured some excellent music. We got back home later in the afternoon and the relaxing was able to begin.
Wednesday was an “open day” where the kids got to live the ranch life without interruption. They are both big fans of cows now. Thursday was the Thanksgiving celebration which was met with much feasting and watching of the Style Network. Style Network? Not football? Yes, the Style Network. Friday saw more ranching and some pizza with friends. Saturday we hit the road again and made it home just in time for the KU vs. MU football game.
It was a good week with the obvious exception of the loss of a family member. We were blissfully disconnected from the cell phone and the internet which I found to be extremely therapeutic. We talked a lot with the brother in law about the pitfalls facing the church in this culture and got to sort our our long search for a church to call home a little bit. We got to sleep in, take naps, feed cows – I don’t think anyone could really ask for more.
Now, as soon as the computer at home is back up running there will be pictures. We even have one of Hayden hiding in my lunch box, so keep an eye out!
Today was an odd sort of day.. We should have been in Nebraska celebrating Thanksgiving with the wife’s family. These festivities were put on hold with the passing of Clarinda’s aunt Elaine. It wasn’t entirely unexpected, as she had been suffering from cancer, but it was a sad day nonetheless. We originally were going to do that gathering this weekend and head all the way home to the ranch for the holiday proper, but with the funeral on Tuesday we’ll be heading out there early and spending the whole week. I don’t think it would be disrespectful to say that in the end it sort of works out for us.
So today, I was heading to the Microcenter to try and mend my broken computer. I experienced a hard drive crash – the irreconcilable kind where it sounds like the heads are actually trying to escape from the drive. After a maddening series of roadblocks, I managed to recover our Quicken data. It had been moved to the desktop computer because the laptop had died and the desktop was, you know, more reliable. My first replacement drive, a 200GB Maxtor, refused to be recognized by its own setup software. It recognized my OLD 200GB Maxtor, but not this NEW one that came in the box with it. I now have a 250GB Hitachi Deskstar (OEM). The Deskstar line enjoyed a pretty good reputation under IBM – we’ll see if Hitachi took over the quality as well as the name.
So yea, I was heading to the Microcenter when Pastor Donnie called. He and a friend were in need of some Hawkeye football action and there was no Big Ten Network to be found. I was able to ease their pain. This was at 2:00. They came on over for the game at 2:30, and I got there at 3:00 thanks to the construction on Metcalf. The game was tragic. My guests called it a ”comedy of errors”. It was comical for a while, but then I was ready for grown-up football time. It never came. I think the “Hawkeye Highlights” section of the site is ready to retire. There won’t be anything to add this week.
I had been invited to play pool with some friends, which I’d declined in order to watch the game, but those fellows came over afterwards to watch some UFC action. Speaking of those guys – one of them mentioned that tonight was day 128 of his complete sobriety. We discussed more details than I’ll share here, but yes – this is a big deal and I’m extremely happy for him and his family! Shortly before all that, Jeff called and invited me out to Buffalo Wild Wings with some friends – to watch the UFC. I mumbled something about watching it at home, and he thanked me for inviting him. I pretty much deserved that.
And speaking of Jeff, he was one of the two friends that had wounded XBOX360s (the clean one). My 360 is currently on the way back to me – hopefully in better condition than when it left. I had gotten the RMA packing materials from Microsoft, and as I was packing it up my 3-year-old says “Are you going to send it back to Jesus?”
…
I know that Jesus solves problems. To be fair, I didn’t really give him a chance on the 360. I guess I could have prayed about it, but I figured I’d just send it off Microsoft since it was a known issue. I explained to her that fixing video games wasn’t really what Jesus did because there were some nice people in McAllen, Texas that had that job already. She understood.
