Tom Tebow Ad - Major Dissapointment

My wife and I don't have cable; those funds are better served adding to our down payment. So we haven't been watching the super bowl. (Yep, I used lower case. It's a football game folks.)

I did, however, see folks twittering about the ad. An example:

That Tim Tebow commercial was freaking stupid.. someone please slap that family.. #Fail

So, with much hope and some trepidation, I trekked over to the FocusOnTheFamily website, and sure enough, they have the video available right off of the main page.

The tweets are correct; that ad was a disappointment.

• The struggle to get the kind of funding for that ad was gigantic.
• This was the first time an ad on a topic like this has ever been allowed during the stupid super bowl. The Pro Choice side won't hesitate to take advantage of this gap, and their better funded.

See the problem? This chance will never come again. The ad FotF aired built up a huge amount of controversy, and then aired with no mention of the very notion of a choice existing, of Pam Tebow choosing to bring Tom into the world.

The missus suggested that perhaps FotF pulled a rope-a-dope; after having seen NOW throw a fit, they toned down the ad to take the high road and make the opposition look foolish. Alternatively, perhaps the networks refused any ad that mentioned certain vocabulary.

In either case, Focus failed their mission miserably. The goal was to bring a message to the largest single television audience that life is a choice, and to illustrate the amazing potential every single human life has. Instead, they brought a cryptic bit of nonsense that, if anything, seems to be an ad about health awareness, not abortion.

If this was indeed a rope-a-dope, shame on them. It was a false supposition that that audience knew about the ad before they saw it; it's exactly that audience that hadn't heard, because they don't watch the news, they don't take the time to follow up, that they need to reach. Those folks aren't going to get anything from the millions of dollars Focus spent.

If it was the networks, then Focus wasted the political position of opening the wedge into super bowl ads. The opposition will waste no time in gearing up for next year, and they will play hard ball (no pun intended, sorry) to make certain that they can use whatever vocabulary and imagery they can to get their message through.

I am deeply saddened by this. In the commercial, Pam gets tackled by her son, which comes as a nasty surprise, but she recovers well. I think Pro Life will have to do the same.

Tim Tebow and NOW

Tim Tebow's very existence is a tribute to the faith in Jesus, and the bravery of his mother, Pam.

His parents were serving as Christian missionaries in the Philippines. Pam was in a coma due to a sever amoebic dysentery, and the treatment they'd given her to bring her up caused her to have a placental abruption. Anyone who's ever heard that term knows it's a horrific problem that can easily end the lives of mother and child very quickly. The doctors told her that they certainly expected a stilbirth and urged her to abort the baby. Pam said no.

"We were grieved," she said. "And so my husband just prayed that if the Lord would give us a son, that he would let us raise him." -- The Gainseville Sun

Much to the chagrin of the National Organization for Women, the Lord answered that prayer. Tim represents many things that run contrary to the grain of popular culture. He's a highly successful athlete raised by a woman who stayed at home to do so, all the while teaching him about the love of Christ along with algebra and alphabet. And now, to top it all off, he has the temerity to try and speak while a Christian organization called Focus on the Family pays the astronomical tab for the air time during the Super Bowl so that he can thank his mother for his life.

Oh, the humanity.

The Colorado Spring Independent carried an article that's just vitriol masked as sarcasm. Reducing it to it's lowest elements (no mean feat), it's a puling rant on how 'this is our cess pit, you have no right bringing your ethics into it!' Funny how when that argument came about back when cable began it's descent into filth, the consensus of the day was 'change the channel'. Gentlemen, I hand you back your words.

Our society rails on about "tolerance", but it's fascinating how fast that flies out the window. "Pro-Choice" is all a veneer, it turns out. When the choice to keep a child, to become a parent, is made, people get antsy:

Make no mistake about this ad: it's offensive to women. Yes, it features Heisman trophy winner Tim Tebow and his mother, who had been advised to have an abortion after a serious illness. Standing alone, it sends the message that all women who give birth are heroes; it sends a message that abortion is always a mistake; and it is insulting to the one in three women in this country who have abortions. -- now.org

Does it? "Methinks the lady doth protest too much."

I never hear these same ladies boycotting romantic films and novels about marriages that last the lifetime of the spouses, yet surely the number of women in the country who've had divorces is as high. Perhaps they're a bit more secure in their positions on that front. I would be; an ex-husband can move on; a 'fetus'...

Besides, how many National Women are alienated by NOW's statement? Every woman takes a risk when delivering a baby. Every mother undergoes pain, sacrifice, and hardship. All Tim Tebow wants to do is offer the praise his mother and Father deserve, and illustrate the other side of a debate. NOW is trying to stifle debate rather than answer it at the cost of belittling mothers.

Forgive a pooh of little brain, but who's offensive to women again?

Amazon, Apple, McMillan

Amazon is one of my favorite companies. I buy my music from them instead of Apple because they know that DRM is ridiculous. They understand their market. That's why they're such a behemoth.

Apple is trying to edge into eBooks. I've already voiced other reasons why I think they're going to tank at it. To say nothing of Apple blatantly stealing the bookstore technology from Wil Shipley.

Now there's a new twist happening. A pricing war. I couldn't be happier.

Allegedly (don't hear that often enough, do you?) Apple is trying to woo publishers by telling them "we're not as restrictive as Amazon! Amazon wants you to charge 9.99 for eBooks, but we'll let you charge higher if you like! Go ahead and support that bloated middle management infrastructure you're tugging behind you thanks to the deteriorating print model, we'll help!"

So of course the publishing house, resistant to change, smell money. Macmillan wants to up the ante to 15 dollars. So they spun round to Amazon and said "Apple will let us sell for 15 bucks a pop for digital media. So will you."

Like I said, Amazon knows their market. We can't resell ebooks. There's a lot of reduced value for us with the missing tactile value of that embossed cover, paper smell, or that spine on the shelf. We don't want to pay anywhere near the cost of a hardcover, and we're not happy as it is paying more than the 7.99 average on a mass market paperback. So how did Amazon respond?

Remember what happened when some states insisted on state taxes to be invoked against internet purchases? Amazon simply stopped dealing with dealers out of those states. See it coming?

Authors started noticing that ebook links from Macmillan published books had vanished. Entirely. No explanation, no apology.

I love this about Amazon. They will not be bullied, they will not submit to pressure. They acknowledge the power they have and they're willing to use it. In a world filled of fearful PC passive aggressiveness, I find it refreshing.

Here's what I keep wondering; if this escalates, what's to stop Amazon from cutting Macmillan's print links as well? "Ah," says the skeptic, "but that's a lot of authors left out in the cold, Amazon couldn't afford to eliminate such a large section of their stock." I think you fail to understand the implications. The more likely scenario is that those authors would leap from Macmillan and renegotiate contracts with other publishing houses, who would be waiting with open arms and firmer commitments with Amazon.

Amazon is synonymous with books, folks. It's the reason why brick and mortars are looking more like sticks and straws, and no aged black sweater hipster with a third trimester LCD and stolen software playing fast and lose with a pricing model is going to unseat that.

If you want small government, stop taking the bribes

Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother's eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye?

Matt 7:3

I try to keep that in mind. You'd be amazed how often it comes into play when you're paying attention.

For example, I think a lot of us are thinking a lot about the size of our government, and how much it costs. My own company loses quite literally half its profit to Uncle Sam. Congress wants more. Half's a lot. We could use part of that to hire more people, expand our product line and become more profitable, thus generate more taxable revenue.

I got sick looking at the money pouring through government jobs. Lavish retirements, brand new equipment beyond the needs of the people sporting it, comp time running into the months. It's enough to make anyone in the private sector choke.

Then I started thinking about me. And people like me.

"You can't cut the budget on Parks and Rec. We use those." "Don't cut Library funding; how would I get along with the library?" "You can't cut Education! We need our schools!" "I can't imagine our country without the Arts." "I'm where I am today thanks to government grants."

Government surplus fuels a dizzying array of odds and ends markets in everything from boots to laptops to houses (to say nothing of criminal seizures), grant programs will pay your ride through college for being part Indian, left handed, or good at duck calling.

My wife and I have been repeatedly urged to sign up for government assistance programs that we don't need, like WIC and Foodstamps, which tells me that plenty of folks are, ah, subsidizing their grocery budget.

How many of us bought a Digital Signal Converter on a federal chit? How many of us sent back those Federal Stimulus checks?

We are as much the reason the federal government feels obligated to spend into more zeros than most of us knew existed. Before any of us can truly rail on about the size of the Fed, we should first examine how much of it we're willing to release.

iPad; Umm, no.

I've been wrong about Apple products before. It's a lot like my experiences with watching Project Runway with my wife (and no, idontwanna). I'll see it and think, 'man, that bites' and the judges will rave about it. So my taste compared to modern aesthetes is not to trusted.

That said, look at the thing, and be honest with yourself. Tell me this doesn't look like a bad Photoshop? All that cool that Apple is famous for, and the best design they could come up with was to take the iPhone and swell it up? "NO, WAIT" says mac-zealot, "it's got a bezel round the screen, see? It's different from the iPhone!"

It's different in other ways, too. They left off the camera. An absolutely perfect platform for video teleconference a la 2001, and they left the bloody camera off. Genius. But it is similar in that, like the iPhone, they trick the eye into thinking it's slimmer than it is by making it rounded on the back. That's going to make this thing a joy to use while resting on a table. Tap screen for key press, iPad rocks. Rinse and repeat. Yeehaw.

Apple's alleged megamarket here is ebooks. I'm skeptical. Two reasons.

I've been reading electronic books for twelve years. I started out on CRTs, then when the first PDAs became accessible to mere mortals, I used Apple Newtons, Handspring Visors, Compaqs, Sharp Zaurus (Zaurii?), and more recently, a Sony eBook and an Amazon Kindle.

eInk isn't going anywhere anytime soon. Backlit screens are monumentally horribly hard on the human eye. Sure, they're great for television, they're good for movement such as flash enabled pages, they're decent for short blurbish functions like twitter and such. But most human beings without cybernetic implants cannot handle long haul documents on a back light without lots of breaks, attention deficit, eye strain, and so on.

Ever since I moved to eInk, it's been a blessing. The difference is incredible, and I will never go back to trying to read for long periods of time that way again. I'm fairly certain that reading novel length docs on backlit LCD is the reason why I'm sporting specs these days; I urge folks looking to buy this thing as a book reader to reconsider. If you happen to know me, I'd be happy to lend you one of my old hand helds as a test run, then let you try my eBook reader for an hour or so. You'll see what I mean.

The other reason I'm skeptical about Apple making a dent in this market is Amazon. Taking on a giant like that is quite an ambitious undertaking, and frankly, I just don't think Apple has the balls to do the job.

Granted, they can handle music. But music and books are very different fields. Books are more like software, and we've seen repeatedly that Apple has no qualms about restricting access to software for political motivations. You might be able to get away with that in the App Store, but you pull that off on what folks can read, and they'll bury your supposed 'cool' company hype faster than you can say book burner.

I hope it doesn't pan out that way, though. Apple stock jumped like salmon during mating season on pure hype alone when rumors leaked that Apple was selling a great big ol iPhone. Let's hope it works for the stockholders' sakes, eh?

Thanks Massachusetts

I grew up moving between New England and North Carolina. In New England, I spent many years in Everett, Massachusetts. It was a suburb just outside of Boston. Nice place, I suppose; I was really small then, so I don't remember it well beyond a few blocks.

One story I do remember, though. My family and I walked up to Broadway to see a parade one Fourth of July when along comes the then Governer Mike Dukakis (yeah, the shrimp on the tank who ran against Bush that year). I believe this was in 84, so this would have been his second term, making me just shy of seven years old. He's glad handing the crowd, all smiles. We'd just moved up from NC, and my accent had reset back to Deep South mode. Sure enough, he makes a beeline for me.

"How ah yah?" says the great man.

"Hah," says I.

"Woah, weah you from?" he says, hearing my accent.

"North Carolina."
"I have a friend down theyah named Jim Hunt, have you evah heard of him?" he ask me.

"Yes sir," I say, "my daddy says he's an as***le."

Off goes Mr. Dukakis, leaving my laughing family to buy a very confused little boy ice cream without explaining why.

I never, ever would have expected Mass to elect Scott Brown. I remember learning to call my home state "Taxachusetts" in grade school, all the while hearing about the virtues of labor unions. Now that it's happened, though, it makes perfect sense.

I think Obama won the election because we expected him to come through on his promises of change. Yet a year later, we see more promises broken. He promised us that these health care negotiations would be open to the public, that he would lead a non partisan effort yet the last round has been behind closed doors and strictly partisan.

I'm still confused as to why health care is the issue we're all being distracted by, when the economic disaster we were all so terrified of has not been addressed for a year, but merely postponed. The foreclosure rate is increasing, the jobless rates are getting worse, and the best the administration can come up with is to punish the banking industry for offering bonuses? Health care might be an important issue, but it lacks the urgency the economy needs.

I think Massachusetts knows that, and that's why Scott Brown won.

Of course, the talking heads this morning were full of spin on how this is all because of how Obama took over a host of problems from previous administrations. Well of course he did, he asked us for them. Begged us for them, told us he could handle them. Then spent a year ignoring the most urgent of them, except for pulling out these ridiculous statements like "green jobs." Oh sure, they sound great until you examine them. For example, "let's build wind farms." The first government sponsored wind farm is to be built in Texas, and they're buying the turbines from China. Pray explain to me how this will create jobs in the USA? How it will do anything but send our dwindling cash value out of the country to the same people we already owe money to? That and his lunacy about "caulking our windows", yeah that'll create jobs. For a month.

That's aside from the rest of his wastrel activities such as trips with Oprah to pitch the Olympics in Chicago, accepting a Nobel Prize for Not Being George W Bush Whilst Fighting The Same Useless Bloody War, and of course getting nothing done in Copenhagen. I'm actually pleased with the latter, though.

This isn't over yet, but there is hope. Come mid term elections, I think the writing is very clearly on the wall in very bright neon. Obama just got the worst anniversary present ever; a lost of the filibuster-proof majority. I'm hoping next year, if he hasn't bankrupted the country in the immediate sense, or my children in the long term, he gets an even crappier one.

New Church

Cindy and I decided to try out a new church; we like our old church, but we really need to be a part of a church that's closer to home.

We attended Alliance Bible Fellowship this morning, and it was a wonderful experience. I felt as if I'd been fed for the first time without realizing I'd been hungry.

Senior Pastor Scott Andrews gave sermon from Romans 1:24-27. He spoke first humorously on the strides our society has made technologically in his own life time, summating with the line "We've come a long way."

The humor faded quickly when he counterpointed the many avenues that these advances have created to allow sin into our lives. He quoted Alexander Pope's Essay on Man:

Vice is a monster of so frightful mien
Yet seen too oft, familiar with her face,
We first endure, then pity, then embrace.

Paul spoke of a large number of vices in this very short passage, and how the ultimate expression of evil is not only the performance of sin despite the knowledge of the penalty of the act, but the approval of such acts in others. I found myself thinking back to Jesus speaking of the millstone in Capernaum.

I found myself sitting in a service that was engaging me on an intellectual level for perhaps the first time in my life. Please follow me carefully on this, because it would be very easy to insult the many pastors and churches I've known, and that's not my intention. But it must be said that a great number of churches speak largely or entirely on an emotional level. They discuss what being a Christian feels like, and to be frank, that's always left me out in the cold.

I love Jesus. I love God, and it is an experience that deepens over time. That said, I was not raised in faith, I am still somewhat new to my faith, and to attempt to witness to a convert almost solely on feelings is very much like trying to teach airline pilots the same way mother birds teach baby birds. Granted, this approach does indeed work for some people, but I found myself sitting in the pew thinking, "OK, now what? I don't feel what I'm supposed to be feeling, does that mean I wasn't really saved? Maybe I should sneak out?"

That feeling wasn't there because of the people, mind. It wasn't easy, leaving our old church, which was filled to overflowing with some of the kindest, most wonderful people I've ever met. Had it not been for the love and acceptance that they showed me, I don't believe I ever could have seen my need to ask to be baptized in that creek behind the church. I love them all, and I know that God has and will richly bless them.

Anyhow, Alliance also has Children's Church, which means that you check your children the same way you check your coat. While I'm kidding, having not experienced this before (other then one visit to a Baptist church a while back), there was a pang of guilt for a bit. Alliance, however, does this in one of the coolest ways I've ever seen.

When you arrive, they have a check in desk. We (ok, Cindy; they can read her handwriting) filled out some paperwork, and they printed out stickers for each child with names on them, and a second sticker with us w/ a matching number, then assigned us a volunteer from the congregation to show us the classrooms that our kids would be spending the service in. Alliance used to be a Christian school, so there's plenty.. more on this in a bit. The stickers have numbers. They told us that if the child should need us, then in the worship center, on the screens (still getting used to the fact that they have them), they pop up the name and number of the child, so the parent knows we need to head back to attend to the little'un. They told us that after three visits, they'd dispense with stickers and give us swipe cards for checking in; I guess they figure after three visits, we mean it.

Alliance is growing; by that, I mean you can see that the bones of what will eventually become the worship center stand outside the current one. They need it; they're currently holding three services every Sunday morning. It warms my heart to see a growing church, folks.

"Gosh," says all two of my readers, "he's certainly going on a lot about a new church, isn't he?" Yes. Yes he is. Today felt like a homecoming, and for a guy who spent his whole life moving around, that's saying something.

Geek note: Alliance has a podcast, so if we should have to miss a service, we can hear the service, which is absolutely awesome. What is not quite so awesome is that they only provide an iTunes link, not a direct RSS feed, which means that for those Linux loving Christians out there (all seven of us), subscribing is a bit of a hassle. (Alliance's web site does list using iPodder, but getting iPodder, or Juice, to work under Ubuntu 9.10 or Debian Sketch proved beyond the 30 minute threshold I allotted it; I left off at seeing that the python xmms client libraries apparently are not the same libraries provided by apt).

In case Google directs you here, or if I need it later, the link is : http://alliance.goboone.net/ABFMessages/abfmessages.xml