bierkergaard

Artistically, Winehouse was a talent of generational significance. Her life and her art was in the same glass. She drank from it until it was empty. I can't say that I was real familiar with her work or life before she passed. I never got past Rehab. Sadly, neither did she in real life. Since her death, I have read up about her and listened to her music. Punk, Jazz, and Motown. She mixed styles like a musical bartendress and it worked. Here is the video from Tears Dry On Their Own . Man, what she did was original. Drunk on talent, drunk on alcohol. It is true that tears dry on their own. But that is often not a good thing. The tears for Amy Winehouse will dry soon enough, for most of the world is already depressed, distracted, or dismayed about something else. I tell my students that "You don't want to live in a world where no one cries for you." Or, where no one hears our cries. How much more comforting is this: Psalm 56:8 Thou tellest my wanderings: put thou my t...

This morning I wheeled out the two trashcans for pick-up. Until a few years, I had a different trashcan. One without wheels. Every Wednesday night I would hoist the wheel-less can and risk a hernia or drag it along the ground as a hunter does with a deer in the woods (preferably not alive). I found that to be not good for the bottom of the can...after a while such scraping caused it wear down and crack. I noticed that many of our suburban neighbors had wheels on their trashcans. Hmmm....looks like a good idea. And it is. Hard to articulate how much easier it is to take out the trash with wheels on the bottom of the load. In a continuing effort to make the mundane meaningful, there is a parallel to our lives here. The confession of our sin is enhanced by utilizing the design that the Lord has provided in His Model Prayer: "Forgive our sins as we forgive those who sin against us." It is also important to make certain that we confess specific sins. It is too easy to say somethin...

I quite like the Kindle iconic picture. The night and starry sky, a boy reading, and a leafy tree. Suggests a more simpler time and it is a clever compensation for the technocratic and impersonal vibe of Amazon where there is no night. Open for business 24-7 like the noonday sun blazing. I have been downloading more ebooks. Most of them are out of copyright so I am obtaining them at no cost. Although I don't actually have a Kindle reader, I do have the Kindle app for my iPhone (no issue for me reading it on the screen; I don't need to ogle the pages, etc.) and the PC Kindle version. I still love the smaller traditional niche bookstore. But, it needs to be quirky and creative. A book bistro rather than a buffet book-o-rama. When Lina shops, I read. Better than sitting in the man chair looking like a spaced out dog leashed to a post waiting for his owner to return. Not that she is much of a shopper except on forays to cool places. I am all for ebooks, if for no other re...

Anders Behring Breivik, unlike Jared Lee Loughner who shot congresswoman Giffords and killed several others (and who looked insane) appears startling in his Nordic normalcy; a madness far hotter and far colder. Breivik's act of methodical mass murder was a distilled and refined rage purified by ideological fires long burning. His systematic execution of innocents shows the evil efficiency of Auschwitz-Birkenau. Breivik's purported defense of Christendom from Islam, and the media promoting this as his justification, shows a demonic inversion of what Christianity means . Michael Horton, in his essay A Tale of Two Kingdoms , writes: "The kingdom of God advances through the proclamation of the Gospel... Instead of driving out the Romans, Jesus commanded a love for our enemies." Read Horton's essay as it is a clear explanation of the Two Cities (God and Man) first developed by Augustine. Dark lies are best dispelled by Truth's light. May light shine out of darkness...

Captain America has hit the theaters, the summer genre comic superhero flick. I recall a conversation that I had with a comic book store owner in Elizabethtown a few years ago about comics. He shared with me--a comic book novice--that many of the creators of comic book characters were Jewish. I found this article that provides additional details on this history . And the time period was the before or close to WW II for most of the lasting characters, Captain America included. In this first issue (1940), Captain America clocks Hitler with a right. Besides a brief stint one summer and I where my brothers and I had a babysitter whose contributions to our well-being were to make us lunch, keep an eye for excessive trouble-making, and giving us access to her massive collection of comic books which I read for about three weeks straight and then moved on (I got burned out on Richie Rich, the poor little rich boy), I never really became a devotee of comic books. So I found the conversation wit...