I have to admit that I didn’t get to see the “controversial” Tim Tebow commercial as we were driving to a Superbowl party and arrived late.  Such is life with kids.

I thought the commercials were a bit lame this year.  The two underwear themed commercials back to back were a bit much.

I think my favorite one was the Volkswagon commercial where everyone was playing punch-bug.  The close runner up was the Griswold family.

I stand corrected.  I missed this one when it aired.  Classic!

Which Superbowl ads were your favorite?

With the server swapping I haven’t been able to update folks on our adoption status.

We received our approval from the US Department of Homeland Security for adoption of a child from a Hague Country.  That basically means that we’ve passed all the checks on the US side of things.  Hopefully our dossier will be headed to China this week.  There’s still no way to accurately know when we will travel, but May/June/July seems realistic.

We also received an update on Shepherd.  He has grown some and he is actually on the curve in some respects.  He also has either chicken pox or something called Molluscum contagiosum.  Not a huge deal either way, but that up to 18 months of being contagious doesn’t sound like fun.  Pray for a quick healing, whichever one he has.

We still can’t post pictures yet, but hopefully we can soon.  We’ve got some good ones.

Thanks for your prayers.

I’ve added some forums to Infinity and Jelly Donuts.  Feel free to register and look around.

http://infinityandjellydonuts.com/phpBB3/index.php

A couple of the forums are password protected.  I’m involved in a couple of book studies and I’m providing the place for the group discussion.  If you want to read along with us and discuss, let me know and I’ll let you in.

Expect minor tweaks to the layout, but I’m pretty happy with the theme.

Any other categories you’d like to see?

I had it called to my attention that somehow registration was disabled on the blog.  I also had a setting checked where someone had to be a registered user and logged in to post a comment.  I think I have it fixed for now.  I’m looking into some plugins that will double check the humanity of any registering users and posters to discourage spam bots.

I’m really, really sorry about that.

Sign up and comment away.

Sorry we were down for a few days.  I moved my website from one server to another.  I think we’ve got the kinks out now.

Welcome back, Internet!

This is a pretty amazing App.  Shazam will listen to whatever music you are listening to and then fetch the title and album information. Ever hear the last part of a song on the radio that’s catchy and the DJ doesn’t say the name? Let Shazam listen.

I put it to the test.  Katie had quite a few songs in her iTunes that were mix CD’s and therefore they just said “Track 1″ etc.  In fact I think she had about three albums that were all in there as track numbers.  I put Shazam to work and it was able to find almost all of them just by listening.  It seems to have the most trouble with percussion, guitar, etc. because some of Katie’s folk songs were unrecognized.  I skipped over to the middle of the song and had better results than Shazam listening to the beginning.  I *think* it puts the music it hears into a mathematical algorithm and then matches it to a database: musical gene sequencing if you will.  Despite it not handling voices or live music, it was good enough to distinguish between the Queen/David Bowie song “Under Pressure” and “Ice Ice Baby”. That’s right.  I put it to the test.

Shazam is free in the App Store.  You can buy the (RED) version for $4.99 and a portion goes to fight AIDS in Africa and you have the added ability to look up concert tours.

What are some of *your* favorite apps?

Today we received our I-797C, Notice of Action.

That means that the government has cashed our check and we are in the system.  Next we will receive a date to go and get our fingerprints taken.  Excuse me, “biometrics”.

Closer and closer.

Well, I did it.  I think this might be the only New Year’s Resolution I have ever kept.  I got off schedule a bit, and I didn’t stick to the original idea of having each week correspond to a particular theme, but I managed to read through 52 books in 2009.  I did enjoy it and I enjoyed sharing my thoughts on them with you.

I’m not making a 2010 book-based New Year’s resolution, but I do have reading plans.  I think after a year of new books, that it might be time to revisit some old favorites, and some that I’ve been promising myself to read and couldn’t get to in 2009 because I knew I couldn’t finish them in a week.

So what’s on tap for 2010?  I’m not entirely sure, but I hope it can include:

The Brothers Karamozov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky.  I read this once several years ago.  It was one of the hardest and one of the best books I have read.

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee.  This is my favorite American novel and quite possibly my favorite novel, period.  I try to reread it every few years and it’s due.

Watership Down: A Novel by Richard Adams.  Another favorite.  The last page makes me cry.  Every time.  It is the rabbit equivalent of “Well done, though good and faithful servant.”

Ivanhoe (Penguin Classics) by Sir Walter Scott.  I’ve started this one several times, but never got through it.

That’s fiction.  I also plan to read some non-fiction.  I think one thing I have learned from the past year of reading is that I like biographies more than I thought I did.

I’ll probably post the occasional book review here just to keep myself honest.  Right now I have about 6 months of Field & Stream to catch up on.

Keep reading.

OK, the final book of the A Book A Week series and I wish I had something spectacular for you, but I don’t.  I downloaded this book to my iPod’s Kindle reader because it was free.  I have been reading it slowly since October or so.  I really want some of you to read this book, or to hear from some of you who have read this book because I can’t tell if Farley is a genius or a heretic.

OK, maybe heretic is a bit too much, but some of the stuff he says in here makes good, biblical sense, and it makes biblical sense in a scary sort of way.  I just finished it this morning, and I am still processing, and it might get a reread.  On the one hand he lays out the gospel in a very straightforward and easy to understand way.  he tries to free us from some of the ‘religion’ that many of us grew up with.  I know I am a recovering Pharisee and it will be a battle I struggle with for a long time.  Farley does a good job of explaining being dead to sin and what Christ did for us on the cross.  Maybe my hesitation is me trying to hold on to that legalism I put myself under for so many years, or maybe it’s my common sense tingling.  I don’t know.

If you’ve read this one, chime in.  I’d love to hear your take.

Sophie got me this book for Christmas.  That needs some explanation.

This year we wanted to teach Sophie about giving gifts as well as getting them, so we loaded up the car on Christmas Eve and headed to Thrift Smart.  Then Katie and I took turns taking Sophie around and shopping for the other parent.  It was a lot of fun and on Christmas Eve teachers got 50% off.  There was some guidance from us, but some things Sophie just picked on her own.

If you have ever watched Al Roker on television, then what you see is what you get.  Reading this book I could hear his voice in my head speaking.  There were some corny jokes (that’s Al), and his love of cartoons came shining through (I think Sophie picked it because of the cover that’s not shown in the image above, but one Al drew for the paperback), but there was a little more depth than you get from us watching him do the weather.  I disagreed with some of what he had to say on parenting, but I found his opening up to share about his world of divorce, adoption, infertility, and marriage quite touching (not necessarily in that order).

If you like Al, give this one a try.  I’m not a Roker fan, but I am a Sophie fan, and that’s why I read it.  Through that, I came to appreciate Al Roker a little more.

If you’ve lived in Nashville for a while and consider yourselves even slightly political, you’ve probably heard of Teddy Bart’s Round Table.  It was a show that aired on both radio and the local public access channel.  I enjoyed it, even though I found myself disagreeing as much as agreeing because Teddy and crew discussed the issues rationally and without a lot of rhetoric.  It was entertaining and educational.  Teddy’s cohost was a lady named Karlen Evins.

Karlen has written a few books, and I think they all deal with etymology.  If you like word origins and phrase origins you might want to check her out.  This book, her latest, was my first foray into her world.  It was a quick read, but it was enjoyable.  A lot of the phrases I was familiar with, but she gives some good insight into a lot of the meanings behind the phrases (She has an MDiv from Vanderbilt).  I found myself thinking about a few passages in a way I hadn’t before and that alone was worth the read.

“The beauty of the star [in the east] smote Sam’s heart, as he looked up out of the forsaken land, and hope returned to him.”  J.R.R. Tolkien
“The birth, death, and resurrection of Jesus means that one day everything sad will come untrue.”  J.R.R. Tolkien

“He who has not Christmas in his heart will never find it under a tree.”  Roy L. Smith

“I have always thought of Christmas time, when it has come round, as a good time; a kind, forgiving, charitable time; the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys.”  ~Charles Dickens

“There has been only one Christmas – the rest are anniversaries.”  ~W.J. Cameron

We sent our paperwork off to Texas (USCIS) and Utah (our agency) yesterday and overnighted it via FedEx.  Marilyn, our contact at our agency emailed me and said she sent it on to Washington.  It will be authenticated by the US Secretary of State and then it will go to the Chinese Embassy.  After that it will be sent to Beijing for translation and processing.

We have both been a bit nervous because we’re not officially matched with Shepherd yet, but that day is getting closer.

I’ve got a couple more books to post about, but if I don’t get to it before Friday, Merry Christmas.

I am an optimist.  Many of you are too, I would bet (see how that works).  Sometimes, when I have something coming up, like a home improvement project, I think ahead to what it will actually be like.  What usually happens is I get frustrated because the reality is not like my vision and I’ve made three more trips to Home Depot and spent twice as much as I had planned.

I think More was an optimist.  His description of the perfect society looks great on paper with a cursory reading, but is not only optmistic, but also unrealistic.  He paints a civilization that seems free of normal human vices like greed, and seems to make the claim that penalties, laws, and proper training can remove these  things from humanity.

It’s an interesting book and I’m glad I read it.  I can see how it might influence some to try to create a utopian society, but it is incredibly flawed.  As satire, it works pretty well in how it pokes fun at some of the European culture and leaders of the time, and there were some decent ideas on how to do things, but I found most of it to be fantasy, and not the good kind.

Keep Reading.

I have mixed feelings about this book.  On the plus side, I cut my teeth on stories of King Arthur and this book would serve as a good introduction to some of the highlights of the stories.

On the negative side, this book only serves as an introduction to some of the highlights of the stories.

Greene was an Alabama author, so I vaguely remember hearing about her in Alabama history.  She was not as prolific as Truman Capote or Harper Lee, but evidently she was well read enough that Teddy Roosevelt mentioned this book as one of his boyhood favorites in his writings.  Keeping with early 20th century writing for kids, this book waters down a lot of stuff the author would rather not get into.  The problem is that some of these issues are central to the Aurthurian legends.

…Merlin, though not a bad man, was at one time persuaded to help the king do an evil deed.

That’s how the author describes the events leading up to the birth of Arthur.  That one sentence.  Now, I’m not advocating telling 6 or 7 year olds all the sordid details of Merlin using magic to make Uther look like another woman’s husband, but light shines best in darkness.  The author states she wrote this book (based on Tennyson’s Idylls of the King) to help preserve the ideas of chilvalry.  Chlvalry is no good if everyone in the world is chilvalrous.  I’m probably in the minority on this.  I also dislike a lot of Disney’s ‘fairy tales’ because they are watered down, sanitized versions of the original.  Tolkien’s “On Fairy Stories” goes into this quite well.

In short, decent book, but it’s kind of like the sample scoop of ice cream at Baskin Robbins.  The little pink spoon only let’s you know if you want a bigger scoop.  Treat this book accordingly.

I’m torn about this book.  While I enjoyed reading it, I’m glad I didn’t pay any money for it.  It seems to be full of some common sense business applications.  Perhaps in a society that has an underlying victim mentality this book does have some usefulness.  There’s a lot of personal responsibility information, which I can appreciate.  And, to be honest, I do find myself asking some “Improper Questions” or IQs in my head at times.

The focus of the book is to train yourself to ask what you can do to improve the situation rather than asking yourself who you can blame for the situation.  As I said, some common sense stuff.  If your library has this book, check it out.  If you see it in the quarter bin at a yard sale or at Thriftsmart, get it.  Otherwise, save your money.

I have read many, many books on the Creation/Evolution debate over the years.  While this book does a good job of defining terms, it does not make the open and shut case that it, and many other books on both sides of the issue, claims that it does.  It’s a good book, and it lays out some nice arguments, but I believe that these kinds of arguments are fundamentally presuppositional in nature.  That is, the best place to begin your discussion is with your groundwork beliefs about the *nature* of science and its role in determining reality.  The best place to start is not with facts and figures about the universe because, as the creationist like to argue about the evolutionists, the “facts” (be they tidbits about how the Earth is fine tuned to support life or fossils of long dead organisms) are not evidence.  They are data, and data must be interpreted.

Don’t get me wrong.  There’s some good tools here, but this is far from the only book you should read to try to convince a friend, professor, or stranger in the coffee shop that totally naturalistic evolution is fundamentally flawed (I chose my words carefully there, so if you’re tempted to send me a nasty email on either side of the issue, “read it again before you click send”).

I am not usually one that enjoys entrepreneurial autobiographies.  So many times is actually a subtle plug for products, or a self-glorifying tale.  Not so with Truett Cathy’s work.  I used to really like Chik-Fil-A as a restaurant, but now I love it.  Cathy is old school, growing up during the Depression selling Cokes door to door.  He truly comes across as caring more about people than profit.  I actually came away form this book wondering how I could better apply some of these principles in the classroom.

This is a quick read (a recurring theme as we near the end of 2009 and I am behind on a few books), but a good one.

I don’t get to teach English as much as I would like.  I find ways to keep my hand in, figuratively speaking.  Each year I pick a few books that are in the 11th grade ‘canon’ and then when I hear one of my anatomy students are going to choose one of those ‘mystery books’ for their research paper then I offer to read it with them and be a resource to bounce ideas off of.  I love coming up with paper topics as long as I don’t have to write them.

This was a short story/novella that I read to help a student with their paper.  It’s been years since I read Willa Cather.  I went into it knowing that Faulkner was not a fan, which probably meant I would like it.  I was right.

Faulkner didn’t like this story because, as he argued, Cather portrays a life of simplicity and being out of debt as all you need for happiness.  After reading it, I disagree.  There’s another element that the main character has that is his true source of happiness–relationships.  It’s no wonder Faulkner missed that. (Yes, that was a dig at Faulkner.)

This was a touching story with a nice ending.  It can be found online and it’s an easy read.

Patrick Morley wrote a book called  The Man in the Mirror.  I think he’s pretty famous for that.

This is a short book with a lot of good advice.  It’s not just about economics.  Morley gives some good tips for coping with any life-altering crisis, but frames it within the current economic troubles.  Granted, a lot of his advice is common sense, but when you are going through a huge crisis, common sense sometimes takes a backseat to panic, unclear thinking, and fight or flight response.

What I also like is that while Morley does allude to his other products, this isn’t a disguised catalog for his Man in the Mirror line of self-help items that you can sometimes find in other prolific author’s tendencies.

It’s an easy read.  You can knock it out in an afternoon.