How to not save newspapers

This week, Candorville is making all the obvious points on the connections between the comics page and the future of journalism, albeit with far more wit than I might.

And now I'm drinking Coors

Decades ago, Coors had a legendary status in these United States. Being available only in Colorado, people (okay, men) would buy cases to bring home to lower altitudes. Since it went nationwide, though, its cachet in colorful Colorado has diminished more than somewhat. The new standard has become Fat Tire, brewed in Ft. Collins. Next time you're in our great state, ask the server what any ale or lager on the beer menu tastes like. Odds are, the answer will be "Kind of like Fat Tire," and never, never "Coors." Despite having resided here well over a decade, I think the only time I ever sampled the latter was upon a visit to the brewery in Golden.

When I was recently in the Argonaut liquor store (yes, I have a loyalty card) with Thing 2 (who began loudly proclaiming "I like beer!"- great moments in parenting), I ran across a display of Colorado Native Lager. Being the father of three to four Colorado natives myself, I decided to pick up a six-pack. Reading the label, I was particularly interested by finishing hops in a lager, but what triggered alarm bells in my Colorado-trained mind was its praise of water from the Rocky Mountains. Sure enough, the brewery turned out to be "AC Golden Brewing Company:" i.e., Coors. The beer has its own website (of course), and while it's no more forthcoming than the bottle about its provenance in the MillerCoorsMolson empire, it doesn't completely hide it, either. Anybody who has ever driven along west along I-70 knows what brewery is in that picture.

Having completely abandoned its Colorado native identity by allowing itself to be absorbed first by Canadians and then by midwesterners, it appears Coors is attempting to reclaim its Rocky Mountain pride through a pseudo-craft brewery hidden deep within the bowels of Golden. I can't quite figured out their marketing strategy, but I must say I like the lager. The Rocky Mountain water is, unsurprisingly, overrated as an ingredient. However, it has lovely citrus notes and the hops give it a nice kick on the back end, a pleasant surprise in a lager. I've always wondered what the mysterious appeal of Coors was back in the day, but if Colorado Native Lager is a return to that recipe of yore, I might finally understand.

A curmudgeonly turn to which I can only aspire

David Hart demonstrates what a finely tuned theological mind and a well-trained pen can accomplish when turned to the necessary task of despising golf over on the First Things website.

Draw a picture, then

Driving to work today, I immediately changed the radio station when I heard a song in which the singer praised himself for the childhood habit of coloring outside the lines when his mother gave him a coloring book and crayons. Pray tell, how did "coloring outside the lines" become a dominant metaphor for being a creative free spirit instead of, as is self-evident, lacking the common sense with which the average kumquat is gifted? The purpose of coloring books is, well, to color the pictures therein. Coloring outside the lines produces an unsightly mess, not a work of art.

If you're such a creative individual, draw a picture. And apologize to your mother for being such an ungrateful ingrate.

(T-shirt compliments of woot.)

There's an app for that high-Church Presbyterian

I realized I would need a calendar to stay on top of my schedule during a summer internship while still in seminary. For a couple years I used a day planner (only the Far Side calendar inserts started the week with Sundays; I have no idea what that tells us about the decadence of the business community, but I am sure it tells us something), and then got all high-tech with a Palm Pilot. A couple years into the pastorate I conceded to the inevitable and got a cell phone; when I got sick of carrying around two electronic devices, I moved on to a Palm Treo.

Actually, I was very happy with my successive Treos, but Palm stopped supporting its Desktop application for the Mac OS several years ago, and it got to the point where I had to restart my computer almost daily in order to sync the two devices. Thus, a few months ago I got as hip as a presbyterian pastor can possibly get via the purchase of a refurbished iPhone 4. From the start, I found it a very efficient mobile computing device, but not so much functional as a PDA. It's great to have all my podcasts and a sample of my embarrassingly large music library right on my phone. The Maps app has almost entirely replaced my reliance on Mapquest, and the Starbucks mobile card app makes my caffeine dependency a fun hobby.

On the pastoral front, I love the Lectionary app. Based off the Episcopalian Book of Common Prayer, but following the readings of the Revised Common Lectionary, it provides not only the lections for each Lord's Day, but daily readings which also follow the Church year. For three bucks, you can keep up on your devotional reading all within this app.

I have been using the powerful Accordance Bible program since 2000; its recently released app puts my entire library of resources onto my iPhone. It's unbelievably cool to do Greek and Hebrew word studies while waiting in line for my caffeine fix. (Well, so long as "cool" is defined by ministerial professionals.) The Accordance app is free, and comes packaged with the ESV and a number of tools for those who haven't invested hundreds of dollars into the desktop program.

In my naivete, I had assumed Apple would provide me with what Palm had: a single interface which would display my appointments and daily tasks. Nope, and for some reason to-do app developers don't for the organization of tasks by date, which of course is what any sane person does. After much searching, I replaced the iPhone's Calendar with the Calvetica app, which displays events' color codes (an extraordinarily important visual shortcut for me). Then I found Todo, which allows me to sync with iCal to-do items, and EVEN LETS ME CREATE REPEATING TASKS. (Believe you me, that's the El Dorado of app features.) Once I added XpenseTracker (which contains the also strangely-rare-but-necessary feature of creating expense report printouts), I finally was able to turn my slick-looking iPhone into a functional PDA.

I do the legwork, you do the downloading. You're welcome, vast reading public.

How to Write a Sentence

On today's Talk of the Nation, host Neal Conan interviewed Stanley Fish on his new book How to Write a Sentence. Fish's emphasis on the intuitive learning of style is helpful and insightful, although he commits the blasphemy of suggesting Strunk and White's The Elements of Style is not entirely helpful. To that, one can only note that perhaps some are, sadly, beyond help.

You can read more and listen here.

Ring of Fire

Social Distortion delivers an urgent and powerful cover of the Johnny Cash classic, itself (properly speaking) a cover of June Carter Cash's original vision.

Whatever. It rocks. Download and listen repeatedly.

Deep insights on marriage

from Rich Bledsoe at the Biblical Horizons blog. He not only recognizes that the phrase "marriage problems" is a redundancy, he knows what to do about it. Read.

"The Anti-Hank"

was what Kinky Friedman called Garth Brooks, and over the years I've come to realize Friedman wasn't just being funny, but also tremendously profound. One ought remember Garth Brooks did not only produce abominable pop treacle like "The Dance" or "Standing Outside the Fire," harbingers of the adolescent nonsense heard all over "country" music stations in metropolitan areas even here in the great American West. And while his blatant manipulation of album sales and introduction of heavy metal-style theatrics into country concerts are certainly tasteless, they're also not the root of his perfidy.

Pause to remember Garth Brooks gave us two great contributions to the "cheatin' is a real bad idea" genre: "Papa Loved Mama" (sub-category: humorous) and "The Thunder Rolls" (sub-category: ominous). Besides the truly awesome song, he was also more than capable of delivering the bread-and-butter wry irony possible only within country music, as "Not Counting You" so ably demonstrates.

His great gift for what is truly country makes his lewd proselytizing for pop shallowness and arena extravaganzas truly objectionable. "They went out from us, but they were not of us; for if they had been of us, they would have continued with us. But they went out, that it might become plain that they all are not of us." The anti-Hank, indeed.

What marriage is

As court orders and legislation authorizing civil marriage for homosexual couples multiply, many Christians are uncertain as to what position they ought take on the question. As a controversy within the Orthodox Presbyterian Church a few years ago illustrated, one can simultaneously object to violations of the 7th Commandment and believe that marriage is a civil right to which all are entitled, regardless of whom one chooses to marry. Thus, a much deeper question lies beneath that of homosexual unions: namely, what is marriage?

In thinking through this question over the last number of years, I have been greatly helped by essays appearing in First Things. As a Protestant, I think these can occasionally lean too much on Roman Catholic natural law assumptions, but generally I find them useful guides to getting past the rhetorical exaggerations which pass for public debate today. The most recent of these was recently posted on the First Things website: "Deciding Not to Decide What Marriage Is." It helps us see the real problem is not gay marriage, but no-fault divorce and the entirely self-centered assumptions of Americans who enter into marriages in these dark days.

The case against homosexual marriage can't be conveniently summarized on a bumper sticker, which is why it behooves Christians, today more than ever, to begin reflecting on their own contributions to the cultural decay which has led us to this pass.