Archives for the month of: September, 2008

I came to U2 later in life.

Back in the day, my musical tastes tended towards post-punk, indie and hardcore.  To me, U2 was white-hat jock territory.  Then again, I’m completely ahistorical in my musical influences — I thought “Mrs. Robinson” was a Lemonheads song the first time I heard it and, to my cultural Philistine ears, there was no discernible difference between the Beatles and the Monkees.  Sad, I know.

My wife, who has made me a better man in so many ways, introduced me to U2 (and the Beatles, Nick Drake, Simon & Garfunkel and many other seminal artists.  I can’t get her to like Depeche Mode, though.  Yet.).  She is smart and cool.

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A pre-“Kiss Me” album from Sixpence None the Richer

An amazing Dutch post-rock band

A great book by Rick McKinley up at Imago Dei in Portland

…and our next worship series at United.  Below, you can see the graphic I designed for this series:

The 80s were a rough time for haircuts.

Although Thom Yorke seemed like he was trying to single-handedly rescuscitate the mullet (see photo below), most of these hairstyles only live on in our memories:

The AC Slater:

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That I actually still post over at Next Gener.Asian Church — check out Our Band Needs a Phonoharp.  Might be some other writing opportunities in the near future… I’ll keep you posted.

In other news, the Detroit Lions — owners of the worst record over the past seven seasons in the NFL (31-84, if you care to share in my pain) — have finally given ol’ Matt Millen the boot.  Hopefully, the Lions can finally stop their automatic three-touchdown deficit (as they’ve falled behind 21-0, 21-0 and 21-3 in their first three games).  I’m not asking for victories, just a little bit of dignity in defeat.

But that begs the question, What, exactly, qualifies as small stuff?

Last week, my wife and I met with someone from our denomination.  Although we’ve exchanged emails and phone calls, this was our first face to face meeting with this person.

After giving some personal background, along with some of the difficulties we’ve experienced along the way, that were relevant to our conversation, this person stopped and remarked:

Oh, you both speak English so well!

Ugh.

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