To be able to say "Noggle," you first must be able to say "Nah."
However much we spent ensuring a US/England World Cup final where the US prevails in extra time, it will be the best money spent on the Semiquincentennial Celebration yet.
(Yes, I know this post might be negated later today when the US takes on Belgium, and, yes, I am ashamed I know what “extra time” means in Euroball, but I watched a bunch of Premier League footy twenty years ago when the NHL was locked out, so I kinda(?) have an excuse.)
UPDATE: Well, it was funny while it lasted.
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Ah, gentle reader, this story is already a week old, and it’s actually the source of the “Pop Pop” schtick (we’ll get to that by-and-by, youngin).
But a week ago, the last weekend of June, my youngest and I went to the White Hart Renaissance Faire just south of Hartville–that is, about an hour east by northeast of here. Now, I have, from time to time, seen flyers for the faire in years past, and I’ve read about them in local media, and I have even put the flyers on the refrigerator. But in years past, the faire has been a single day or a single weekend in June, and many times something else has come up or the day has come and gone before it reached my attention. And, in recent years, I have not seen the flyers for it–my seeing the flyers probably coincided with the years I visited the Comic Cave comic book store fairly frequently.
But the faire has expanded to weekends throughout June, which means I could plan ahead–and delay if needed, which happened this year. I had decided that would be our Father’s Day outing, but storms threatened, so we demurred. But that left only the weekend of the 28th this year, so despite some trepidation about how muddy the faire might be, my youngest and I headed out.
Hartville is in Amish country, so you have to be careful on the county roads out there.
The shoulders of Highway 60 as it runs through Webster and Douglas Counties are wide enough to accommodate the buggies, but you have to anticipate that you’ll find one around every curve and over every hill.
And, you know what? That’s normal here in southwest Missouri. A bit of hubbub has been made around how the Europeans have discovered America, again, and I get the sense that a lot of the Internet is reacting, but they’re still of their previous mindsets that there is one normal for America, but, really, there are many. And it’s interesting to experience the various normalities, and it’s kind of interesting to be reminded of what your normality is.
At any rate, it was a fairly small Renaissance festival, but of course I’m comparing it to the really large on in Bonner Springs which I have attended, what, six or seven times? I went once with Scott, Todd, and Lisa; once with Mike and Scott?; once with my beautiful then-girlfriend; once with my boys, my brother, and nephew; and once with the whole family and my brother’s new wife and his old son. So maybe only five times.
The parking lot was definitely muddy, but the grounds themselves were not bad. The festival featured several stages where medievally themed musical acts, with a preponderance of pirate portrayers, and magicians performed. We got roped into helping out with various tricks. My boy drew a picture on a slate along with others doing the same, and after mixing them up, the magician gave each intrepid artist his slate back. I got to help with the bed of nails bit–the magician laid on a bed of nails, and he asked me to stand on his prosthetic, weight-distributing belly. No problem, I train these balance ball drills at martial arts classes all the time. The only thing, though, is that I’m awful at them. But after a few attempts, I got up on the rotund belly to complete the trick.
The booths were the crafts you would expect. The forge-and-swords tent had a couple of broadswords and a couple of small axes, but nothing I needed for my collection, which was fortunate as they were pretty expensive (although probably I’m pretty cheap). And we did stop by the axe-throwing booth, which led me to my first recent Pop Pop moment: The guy running the booth asked for my son’s name, and then he gestured to me and said, “And this is your…. Grandfather?”
We were there under an hour, all told, and then we wended our muddy way to the highway for a return trip home.
And you know what made me feel the most Pop Pop? I really wasn’t that into it.. Years Decades ago, I enjoyed the festivals much more. I guess I was younger. I was playing role-playing games and perhaps reading more fantasy novels, so I was more in-touch with the lifestyle. I was going with friends instead of family, and to be honest, I was hoping to meet an attractive girl in period costume. A different place in my life.
I won’t say I won’t ever go again–after all, maybe I’ll be able to convince my brother to meet me out there one year–and maybe it won’t be muddy, and maybe I will be with someone who appreciates the thing more than is just going but is counting the time until the next trip into the online mines.
Or maybe Pop Pop is just too old for a good time.
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I have no idea where I got this book–I don’t see it listed on a Good Book Hunting post, and they date back to March 2007. The library markings indicate it came from the University City Library, so I definitely probably bought it in the St. Louis area before then.
It’s a book targeted to the youth, or that is the youth of 1965 who read books and might have to do a report or paper on Aristotle. For school. Without construction paper, glue sticks, and scissors. Or, maybe, sometimes those kids were interested in the life of the mind. The past is a different place, even for those of us who came along not that long after.
The book is 109 pages, and it’s about half biography and then half digging into (as a survey or summary dig, which is not really digging, but let me sum up:) his thought and works–what we have of them as well as talking about some of the the mentions of other works of his which did not survive. So, you know, not a bad survey, reminding me that although I listen to audiocourses about him (see The Ethics of Aristotle, Aristotle, and Great Authors of the Western Literary Tradition, 2nd Edition), I’m not sure I have a lot of Aristotle source material available in the Nogglestead stacks. Certainly not multiple copies like I have of Alexander Pope (believe it or not, I have found another collection of Pope in the past two weeks) or Augustine. I’ll have to look for them.
Also, given that the other titles in this series deal with Charles Darwin and Mohammed, yeah, the set is probably left in nature. But you don’t get the straight-up Marxism of the comic books in the For Beginners series (Einstein for Beginners, Sartre for Beginners) or the modern Taylor-Swift-Loving British Pseudo-Stoic books. They were more even-handed in those days. Maybe even interested in knowledge for its own sake instead of as a tool to use to lever themselves to power (or to keep from the young so they, the They, could lever themselves to Marxist power).
At any rate, it is a decent primer akin to the aforementioned single-tape Aristotle (read by Charlton Heston) as an introduction. And it has a good bibliography for additional reading. For me, I need to look for anything in the wild, but where I go cheap book hunting these days, Aristotle is not.
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I was finta be all up in this:
A fast-moving, destructive storm ripped through southern Wisconsin Friday, leaving three people dead after their boat overturned on Geneva Lake during the busy Fourth of July holiday weekend.
And say Ackshually, it’s Lake Geneva, but:
The town is Lake Geneva, and the lake is just south of Lake Como, but the Internet maps show Geneva Lake for the body of water.
I guess I have just been warped by playing Advanced Dungeons and Dragons before the editions were enumerated, when TSR was located in the town of Lake Geneva.
ACKSHUALLY, I probably have learned this sometime in the past and forgot it, and I’ll probably forget it again. Until I complete my collection of going to places where middle class Milwaukeeans travel for vacation (current total: 1, Wisconsin Dells).
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So after a couple of morning BJJ classes which were humbling in more ways than one, I decided to prove that I’m still a young hep cat by going to Relics and spending the remaining gift certificate I received for my birthday (I got four, and I spent the others in February and March. As they only are good six months, I had to spend this remaining one before the end of August, and I hoped for some exercise, since two hours on the BJJ mats and having my youngest son dig his hands into my kidneys don’t count because I take my watch off.
Oh, but no. For there’s a new record booth in the first row, and it had an organized and fairly well-stocked Jazz section.
I made it to K before realizing I’d overshot my $25.
I got:
I spent about $14 in cash on them. Now that I’m out of gift cards, it’s back to $3 and under records for me. These were $5-7, so not terrible, and they were in much better shape than the ratty ones I fish out of estate sales and on Saturdays at the Friends of the Library book sale. So I suppose I should go listen to them now (and by the time you’re done reading this, I will likely have listened to one or more, but not all.
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Sorry, gentle reader, if you’re getting tired of the Pop Pop schtick, but….
Today at my second BJJ class of the day, which featured more advanced belts than white belts and focused on a variety of escapes that involved explosively folding your body in half, I received the “Bless your heart, do the best you can, old man” from the instructor who I think said he is only a couple years younger than I am.
Meanwhile, please remind me in a couple of days that I am not actually coming down with a stomach virus. Any time I have a good ab workout (which, clearly, is not often enough), the stiffness/soreness makes me think I’m getting sick instead of stronger.
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My first publication credit isn’t on LinkedIn.
In the early 1980s, middle school me found an ad in the back of a writing magazine for a poetry contest. The laddie reckoned himself a poet, so he (or his mom) ponied up an entry fee. Although I did not win a cash prize, I was awarded an honorable mention. The company compiled a book of the winners and honorable mentions and offered it for sale for an exhorbitant sum. When I got it, I found that it was 800 pages of honorable mention poems, a dozen or more per page. Some people opted (spent a little money) to include a dedication and/or a photo. The company also offered the chance to attend a conference to accept the award in person at something like $500 in 1980s money. This company was making money hand over fist. Legally, but squickily. The whole business model was built on extracting money from trusting aspiring poets out there who did not know the whole story about the publisher they were dealing with–that the whole enterprise was not to sell books to poetry readers, but rather to extract money from the aspirants.
Fast forward forty years and look at the business models of many companies, especially on the Internet. Are they built to help the users solve their problems, or are they designed to extract as much money from the users as they can and/or selling the users’ information to anyone who’ll pay for it? Legal, but squicky.
Which is one of the reasons I’m still “between contracts”–there are some kinds of jobs to which I won’t apply. Unfortunately, they post a lot of jobs.
For more on World of Poetry Press, the guys behind my first published poem, see this article from 1989.
Also, note the poem is kinda timely for Independence Day. Although “Standing alone since 1776/never once in a fix” shows the depths of 1970s and early 1980s elementary school history lessons. Or what an eleven-year-old will do for an end rhyme.
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Is AI in recruitment a ‘race to the bottom’?:
It’s my first job interview in more than eight years. Even though it’s a video interview, I’m still keen to impress.
When I log on, my interviewer, whose name I didn’t catch, looks relaxed and friendly.
He asks carefully articulated questions, listens intently, and even asks follow ups regarding particular examples I mention.
But then, strange things start happening.
He takes a while to process what I’m saying, and his facial expression remains unchanged. Then, halfway through asking me to explain a particular work scenario, he disappears without another word. He’s an AI – and he’s crashed.
Just yesterday, I used Indeed Apply for what looked to be a startup job which was right in my wheelhouse. However, immediately after submitting, I got a text and an email from an AI-based job board–it liked my resume and wanted to schedule an AI-screener call and have me complete an AI-assessed technical screening. I’ve avoided the particular job board, which posts a hella lotta job listings on other job boards, because I realize it was a third party trying to gather resumes and submit them to jobs to try to glean finder’s fees, and the more resumes it gathered, the better for it. I then looked closer at the company I applied to on Indeed, and it looked like a third-party platform gathering resumes to submit to the AI-based for its fee. Neither showed me the job description I had applied for. Ah, what a fool I was!
I’m working hard to dodge those job postings, which are a majority of the job boards these days–at least the big ones. These companies use technology to exceed the worst of recruiters out there who gather resumes like lottery tickets, who send out cold emails for jobs wildly incompatible with one’s background just in case, and who generally don’t follow-up after getting the resume.
I’ve done one-sided video introductions, and I’ve done on-camera, screen-sharing recorded live-coding assessments–not to mention the take-home assignments–and I’ve started to just ditch some applications that require them.
Pardon me for a moment while I ignore another text message from AI recruitment firm. Ah, now where was I?
Oh, I guess I was just going on again about the state of job-hunting and the layers of grift getting built atop it. But, as the Philosopher said, “A strange game. The only winning move is not to play.” Or, in the words of the Philosopher (a different one):
(Link to the story from…. Somewhere. I couldn’t find the source link this morning when I decided to post.)
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Um, Daily Mail, perhaps you should lay off the knife metaphors given the state of “knife crime” in the UK and because it’s not “MAGA” embracing political violence in the US.
KTHXBAI.
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The children of the well-to-do who, finding themselves not as financially viable as their parents (probably because they got worthless humanity degrees) who embrace revolutionary ideologies, particularly “democratic socialism” (that is, communism) and support violence to achieve those ends even if they’re not doing the violence themselves.
Adjective: Bolsheois.
I have an English degree. I know when to use bourgeoisie and when to use bourgeois. I won’t say that I needed to use them early and often to get a passing grade–but I might be in the last couple of graduating classes that did not and who could run counter to the prevailing orthodoxy and pass.
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IT WILL BE 90 DEGREES THIS WEEK! EVERYBODY PANIC!
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Pipeline to the CCP: Missouri State trained executives tied to China’s military-industrial complex:
A new report from Strategy Risks found that Missouri State University (MSU) spent roughly two decades training Chinese executives, including individuals who later held positions in state-owned enterprises affiliated with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
If our universities have been giving MBAs to Chinese executives running military-connected companies and taught them financialization over all, offshoring for bigger bonuses, sacrificing quality for short term profit boosts, and failing upward before the consequences of failure are felt, doesn’t that help the United States in the long run?
(Link via Instapundit.)
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Or not, as it turns out. In past years (see 2016, 2017, 2024, and 2025), I’ve come away with stacks of books, videos, and records, but this year, not so much. There were no records I could find (maybe Chris Jones is still in town and went to “Lutheran Night” for $5), and the electronics section was underwhelming (one year, I bought two TI99s there, but that has been a long, long time). They did have two copies of Renoir’s Little Irène, and I was sorely tempted to buy one or both of them and replace one or more of the non-Little Irène Renoirs in the living room with the new copies to see how long before my beautiful wife said anything, but a whole year is a long time to hold on to them to donate back to the sale next year.
So here’s what I got.
I got:
Eight dollars total. Thirteen when you throw in a $5 birthday present for my wife. A whole twenty because it’s a good cause. And I didn’t have to stop by Stick It In Your Ear Records to buy a new set of mylar record sleeves and to paw through the cheap record crates. Which my youngest, whom I coshed to come with me, appreciated since time away from the glowing box is time wasted.
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Last Saturday, we went to get new phones. And what should have been the equivalent of purchasing and using a commodity became an ordeal. Continue reading “Pop Pop Needs Pudding and a Nap”
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Ah, gentle reader. When I saw ABC Books’ Facebook post about the author having a Thursday night book signing. When I bought a copy of Superstar 2020, I noted his book signings are generally on weeknights, and I learned it’s because he’s from around here but does not live in Springfield these days. As a matter of fact, when he lived in Springfield up until his early teens, he lived in a neighborhood not far from where my beautiful wife and her family would live in a decade later (and, yes, he does include a Brad Pitt story).
The book stems from a series of columns he wrote for an Internet site, basically reviews of old records that he finds at flea markets, garage sales, and other places–including a couple that he has ordered.
He leavens the columns with anecdotes of his life, from his time working in a record store to owning a record store to being a personal assistant on a couple of rock tours, his time in Springfield, his youth in Florida, and so on. He also tells (sometimes) about his purchase or acquisition experience of getting the records, a bit of history of the record’s production, and/or some approving critical appraisal of the tracks.
His tastes tend to run toward classic rock that he first heard new on vinyl when he was a kid: The Cars, Alice Cooper, The Beatles, and so on. Stuff I would have heard on album-oriented rock stations when the songs were but a decade old. He does have a Tony Bennett record, and I do own two records on his list of fifty (Sweet Talk by Boots Randolph and Heart Like a Wheel by Linda Ronstadt, both of which I purchased on May 4, 2019).
I expect our differing tastes in records we collect accumulate (in my case, anyway, as you know, gentle reader, I will buy a lot of things sound unheard for fifty cents, especially if it has a Pretty Woman on the Cover (PWoC)). First, we came up in different eras; although my sainted mother and my father had a few records, by the time I was buying albums, it was on cassette and not on vinyl. Although I did have a brief run on picking up Billy Joel, Pink Floyd, Tin Tin, and Marian Segal with Silver Jade records in college because they were cheap as older collectors moved from vinyl to CD, most of my experience with new music of my growing up would be on cassette. Many of the titles didn’t sell as many copies on vinyl, so they’re not available easily at garage sales, book sales, or even your cheap crates at antique malls or used media stores. And most of the titles he mentions in this book and the classic rockers of the 1970s and 1980s are the very ones that collectors in that Generation Jones and Generation X are snapping up.
SO: My collecting has been buying what’s available, cheep! And that’s been big bands and easy listening music that our grandparents (and some of our parents) would have bought in the 1940s through the 1960s. As I mentioned to the author, most people don’t remember that the charts were dominated by the easy listening artists in the 1960s–Herb Alpert and the had a string of giant records, sometimes several on the charts at the same time. So I’ve been able to find a lot of Andy Williams, Tony Bennett, Boots Randolph, Eydie Gorme, and even older Big Band acts for fifty cents a throw. I’ve also picked up some non-Miles Davis or Ella Fitzgerald jazz–a lot of Dave Brubeck (!), George Shearing, Nancy Wilson, Sarah Vaughan, Diana Washington, and so on. AND! I’ve had the chance to pick up a number of international artists–the Brazilian records I bought in 2016, Mireille Mathieu, Özel Türkbaş, and so on. And when I come across a new artist that has several records available for fifty cents, I buy them all just in case I like the artist.
So, where was I? Oh, yes, this is an interesting book and a good read. I liked it, and although I might have found to enthusiasm a bit forced, I did meet the guy, and I think it’s probably how he really is.
Spread over a year’s worth of columns, the enthusiasm and calling a record a “stinger” would not have seemed quite so rote. But that’s maybe the only knock I could make against the book except noting a few typos.
So I’ll have to dig out that copy of Superstar sooner rather than later. I kinda know where it is in the book stacks which are just as disorganized as the record library which is fuller than it was in 2024.
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Ah, Brian J., isn’t this a children’s book? So it is; so it is. As you might recall, gentle reader, I am not above reading the storybooks of 80s movies; I read Tron: The Storybook in 2020–that long ago already? And I can lay my hands on Star Wars: The Storybook easily–I did so last year for a LinkedIn post. And I just read the novelization of the film and watched the real three movies (Raiders of the Lost Ark, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade) in 2024. So the material was relatively fresh.
I mean, these storybooks: Are they for kids who haven’t seen the movie yet? Such was the case for me and Star Wars. And I read the comic book before I saw Raiders of the Lost Ark. Or is it something to help you to remember the film, kind of like a souvenir book you pick up at House on the Rock (or later because you find one in the wild)? I would guess the former rather than the latter.
Because the storybooks are built from early editions of the scripts, and you tend to have major variations. The Star Wars Storybook, for example, has a conversation between Wedge and Luke on Tatooine with a photo that indicates that the scene was shot but did not make the final cut of the film. This book never mentions the giant boulder in the South American temple that Indiana Jones has to run from–instead the temple just collapses right after he gets out. Other scenes are excised not only for brevity but because they’re not especially child friendly. We have photos from the drinking competition at The Raven in Nepal, but the scene itself is not there. The fight at the airfield that ends when the big German gets chopped up by the propeller is not there. Et cetera.
So: A quick read, a book logged on the annual list, and something like a completion–having read the comic, the novel, watched the film, and read the storybook…. Although is it really “complete” without a complete set of the trading cards and glass set that you could have gotten from a fast food restaurant (although a quick search of Ebay indicates these might not exist).
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I bought four of Billy Pearson’s books at a book signing at ABC Books seven years ago. As I mentioned then, Billy Pearson started writing when he was 80 years old and had nine books in print by the time of his book signing. So I have to admire that and to look upon his works with a certain affection even though they’re not very good. I previously reported on his novel The Chemistry of Love in 2019, not long after I bought them. The gap is as much because I have so much to read as more than I’m avoiding them.
At any rate: You know I read a lot of grandma poetry. This is the equivalent grandpa… short stories? The book title says Short Story Adventures, but I’m not 100% sure these are not just reminisciences and memories jotted down. As I said previously, I think he dictates these in text-to-speech and does not read/edit the result. So they’re in the vernacular but also the unproofed vernacular. I didn’t have trouble reading them having just gone through The Complete Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar, half of which were in a different vernacular, but I got used to reading phonetically and not based on words.
So the… stories… in this book cover a lot about growing up in rural Missouri in the middle part of the last century, so you know that’s catnip to me anyway. A couple of pieces are clearly nonfiction as they lament the current state of the country and particularly one past president (unnamed) who apparently does not love the country. Heaven help us that we don’t come to a time where someone could read the book and think “Which one?” but if that comes to pass, we probably won’t have a country anyway.
So: Okay, quick read, 158 pages of pretty good print. A quick Internet search indicates the author might still be alive. Good on’ ‘im, and I bet he’s still writing if he can.
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As I have mentioned over and over again, like a crossfitting Vegan and was all like, “Emilio! Emilio!”, I’ve been studying martial arts for–the statistician in the household told me fourteen years now. We got started with the school when my oldest went to a birthday party hosted at the school at four years old, and we got him registered for the Dragons class. A couple years later, the younger was so excited to start they let him begin his classes at 3 and 359/365. My beautiful wife and I started classes. The oldest, my wife, and I got black belts in the tae kwon do which turned into tae kwon do/American boxing/muy thai/whatever kyoshi thought looked cool at the time. As the boys got older and into middle school, they resisted more going to classes two or three nights a week. In 2020, after having dropped for a couple of years, my wife returned briefly but thinks she broke someone’s nose, and she stopped going, and the boys stopped going as well. I’ve still attended, more sporadically than before, because it wasn’t a family thing any more. But the instructors convinced me I was ready to test for a third-degree black belt in January 2025, but my attendance dwindled to once a week…. Once every two weeks…. No actual visits in last September? Wow.
At any rate, my boys have been watching UFC fights for a while now, and they expressed interest in starting classes in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. The school we attended had a BJJ program for a couple of years, but when I was looking, it disappeared.
So I signed them up for a school that one of my oldest’s friends attends, and I signed up, too.
Holy cats, is that a different animal from the explosiveness and cardio-intensiveness of the tae kwon do school. Or weightlifting. A lot of the instruction, especially in the n00bs classes I’ve been taking, involves resistance and holding that resistance for a couple of minutes while the instructor explains something or corrects something. Jeez, Louise, I was left walking like a cowboy after putting opponents in closed guard for long periods of time.
It’s been three weeks, and I’ve been to the most classes out of all of us. The school has n00b classes at 9am on Mondays and Fridays which I attend, and I went to a striking (American boxing) class. I’m not eager to get into a real rolling/sparring match until I can get a better sense of not only how to work in the martial art but also what’s cricket and what’s not.
AND I have tried to be more diligent about attending my other martial arts school as well. I am hoping for five or six classes a week between them, weighted more toward the tae kwon do for as long as I can. I may not learn to play guitar with my more-open current schedule, but I can spend the time better than refreshing job boards anyway.
As the Philosopher says, “I’ll never be this young again.”
ACKSHUALLY, Shinedown in their new song talk about being young and not knowing it.
Both Shinedown and Three Days Grace have released songs about getting older (see also Don’t Wanna Go Home Tonight). C’mon, guys. I don’t listen to you because I want to feel reflective on my accruing years. I want to listen to you loudly whilst I fight against it.
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Well, maybe not mastered, but I did just read a book on it.
Now, courtesy Instapundit, we learn Nordic walking significantly reduces depression symptoms in as little as five weeks, trial finds.
Nordic walking: You know, walking with poles, like you’re cross-country skiing, not like you’re a wizard leading a party on a quest. Which would probably also help with depression unless your scrying indicated your quest was doomed to failure, but you have to try anyway.
Remember NordicTracks? They were a staple of television advertising at one point. They’re still around, part of a fitness conglomerate which has rejected my applications several times. But NordicTracking in your hovel is probably not the part that fights depression. One wonders if being part of a supervised study, thinking that you’re part of something greater than yourself even for a brief time, is enough to lift a bit of depression. But I’m not a researcher, just a blogger.
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This book marks the fifth and completing one of the Summer Reading Challenge. I picked it up from the free book cart at church which again has some books on it–the powers that be emptied and closed the library at the satellite church campus and had a mega-free-book giveaway a couple months ago, and that emptied the free book cart as well when the remainder got donated to whereever they went after the tables in the narthex. After I picked it up, it lay on my desk for a couple of weeks because I couldn’t be arsed to shelve it. Which made it easy to pick up.
I called this book a Christian self-help whitepaper, and that’s not far off. The author is a pastor of 13 years, and he has led some research in how congregants characterize their “gifts” from God. So the book is equal parts generic self-help Bible quoting, not far off of what you would get from Joyce Meyer followed by a set of charts and text explaining what the surveys said when the researchers asked churchgoers about their gifts.
The book has a couple of personal anecdotes: One is about how he misjudged the man his mother would marry; about a man who was important as a liason for students on mission trips in Argentina, a large guy with a neck tumor; and a Russian who has been a gangster, but turned his life around (and somehow ended up “running” his Russian town). The anecdotes are pretty high-level and impersonal and don’t necessarily reflect well on the author. And they’re just not that punchy or real like you would get from, say, Norman Vincent Peale whose little personal narrative asides and examples were far more effective.
I mean, I did get some good ideas from the book. He distinguishes “spiritual” gifts from “common” gifts and says that churches tend to over-emphasize and target the former rather than celebrate and share the latter. So I thought about some ways that our church could do some fellowship and neighborhood outreach by focusing on skills-based seminars and knowledge sharing.
But this book, ah, this book, is a pointer to a complete non-profit sales funnel, and wants you to complete its EveryGift survey itself (even before the author whipped out the first chart, I could tell where we were going because it talked about “research” and came up with a copyrightablemanteau for its program). And here’s the Christianeagram where you’ll find yourself:
You have one category for “technical” gifts which, presumably, would cover a hella lotta gifts from woodworking, carpentry, good with animals, gardening, understanding motors and mechanical things, and so on. But most of them are white collar or academic-style gifts, and most of the time when he talks about using your gifts, he talks about art and making music, and going to conferences. Not so much about serving at the food bank or vacuuming the sanctuary.
I dunno. Seems a little upper middle class consultant comfortable to me.
So I got a couple things from it, I guess, but probably not what the author wanted. I did pass it on to my beautiful wife who is more into this sort of thing than I am. AND! I get to take my completed Summer Reading Challenge form to the library to see what my free gift is. I wonder what it will be?
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