I continue to be amazed

Rush Limbaugh is fond of saying that for people who lack historical perspective that “history begins when they were born.”

That to me, is the only possible explanation why Bill Clinton would be listed as the greatest president (or even in the top anything) by democrats or that Jimmy Carter even garnered 3% of the overall vote.

Then there is Eisenhower. How can you not like Eisenhower? As bad as traffic is today, imagine how much worse it would be without the interstate system! And when the country, yes it was the “American public’s” opinion, to stop fighting word war 2 without confronting Stalin, Eisenhower came up with a strategy that at least held back communism. It’s a shame people like Jimmy Carter did everything they could think of to undermine that goal.

So as a political science graduate, I now submit to you my list:
1.
George Washington. He had to hold office with no history to be his guide. He was willing to listen to good advice, even when it disagreed with his own opinion. Washington also stands as the only president to be elected unanimously by the electoral college (this is a relative term, he received all the POSSIBLE votes he could receive, which was 50% that was the most you could receive at the time)

2
Abraham Lincoln. Perhaps number 1 in moral courage. Lincoln was unwilling to listen to the nelville chamberlines/jack merthas of his day. He went to war with the south to preserve the union, and when his generals wouldn’t get the job done, he fired them and found someone else who would.

3.
FDR. While his social policies set this country back in several areas and left us with a mess, he got the biggest thing of all right. FDR fought WW2 before the country would let him, realizing it’s importance before public opinion polls ever caught up to the reality of the world (I’m referring to lend/lease). I wonder how different history would have been if FDR finished the war. Would there be a UN? Would we have fought the communists? There is no telling, but FDR’s mistakes are minor in comparison to what he did right. However it’s the greatest failure of every succeeding president to not confront the social policies FDR put in place.

4.
Ronald Reagan. The collapse of the soviet union and fall of the Berlin wall both trace to Reagan’s policies. I can sum up the Presidency of Reagan like this: We are the United States, and we are right. We are not morally equivalent to a government committing mass executions and oppression of it’s own people.

5.
James K Polk. His only mistake was not claiming all of Mexico as territory of America when the Army occupied Mexico city. That would solve our illegal immigrant problem today. The Mexican people would also certainly be better off. Also he managed to get Oregon without going to war with Brittan. Finally, I like that he only served one term and went home.

6-10 are coming later this week; along with 1-5 of the worst presidents.

And of course, the greatest unelected president other then Patton is Joe.

A silly thing to worry about

I was browsing some of the news of today and ran across an article talking about the Dixie chicks winning three grammies. I am a fan of country music; I was well before maines decided to run off her mouth about politics. I can honestly say, I never liked the dixie chicks. They never had a country music sound, they always were a pop group, just one that used a fiddle from time to time. That doesn’t make you country any more then sitting in a garden makes you a rose.
I lost faith in award shows, to track it down to a single night it was night when I was watching country music awards the year Johnny Cash passed away. Needless to say, he was getting a lot of sympathy awards. That year Toby Keith put out the biggest selling album of the year, that included one of the longest running #1 songs in the country (across all formats) for an incredible stretch of time (about a year). It also had another #1 song on it. A shoe in for album of the year, right? Nope, Cash won that. Song of the year surely, after such a run at #1? No, Cash got that one to. Well at least Toby was the artist of the year? No, that went to Cash as well. From that moment on I was jaded about award shows. I realized they didn’t really reflect any reality.
But this was just silly; the dixe chicks are not a country group. Most country station in America does NOT play their music, and their audience is not country music fans. So of course, they are winning the grammy awards for country music. “Best Country Performance by a Duo or Group With Vocal” s The nominees weren’t that great to begin with. The winner should have been a song not even nominated “Life is a Highway” by Raschal Flatts (I’m NOT a fan of this group) but out of the actual nominees, the best song was Boondocks by Little Big Town; Amazingly enough, they are an actual country group that sounds like it. Instead that award went to the dixie chicks.
Best Country Album was also won by the chicks. The winner should have been Josh Turner’s “Your Man” This album featured 3 top ten hits in country music: Your man, Would you go with me?, Me and God.
Dare I accuse the grammy awards of being political?
Nah, they do it themselves, just like every other awards and hollywood show. A silly thing to worry about, but sometimes you have to call people on things they say and do, less outside observers get the impression it isn’t crazy.

I hate being lied to.

Don’t lie to me; I am mature enough to handle someone giving me proper correction. When I was leading singing, one of the regular attendees of our Sunday night service was a 70 year old who was a friend of mine. One night he asked me what songs we were doing, I was going down the list and named one and he said “oh no your not.” It seems that I failed to remember that song had just been done recently. So I took the correction and changed the song. Now there are a few important reasons this worked.

1) He built up credibility with me. Ken (the man’s name) was a friend of mine, I respected his opinion. He was always complimentary of me, he built up a reputation of trust with me so that I knew when he told me something, it was out of Christian love.
2) I was willing to listen. I was not so wrapped up in my own way of doing things that I was unwilling to listen to someone telling me something that differed with my own ideas.
3) He was honest, and said it to my face. He did not complain behind my back about how I was doing things. Instead he brought directly to my attention anything he thought I was doing wrong, and to the best of my knowledge he didn’t talk to other people about those things.

Because of that, I could respectfully listen to him. There are other reasons I will be willing to listen to correction, like: You approach me with a tone of friendly correction not harsh criticism, You are placed in a position of authority over me, You prove to me a level of skill or competence in a specific area that earns my respect.

If you present yourself reasonably to me, I’ll listen to anything you have to say and treat what you say, and you with proper respect. If I find out you lied to me, you will lose my respect, and probably not get it back.

If you say you want to meet me at the dunkin doughnuts at 7:30, and I’m still waiting at 8:00 because you didn’t prioritize your time right, you lied to me. If you just got caught in bad traffic, I understand and won’t hold it against you, but if you knew you weren’t coming (at least on time) in the first place, then you lied to me.

If you say you’ll be ready to go in 5 minutes, and you know full well it will take 15, you are just saying 5 because it sounds better or because you think it’s “about” 5 minutes, you have lied to me.

I don’t want to be lied to. More importantly, God doesn’t want you to lie. If you feel the need to lie to me, maybe you should really consider the reason why, it is possible the reason is not as good as you think. Maybe, just maybe, you are off about the entire issue if you must lie about it to me.

I’ve never understood pop

Pop culture has always been a mystery to me. The only “trendy” think I can recall I ever wanted was Super Mario Brothers 3. But that game was so good I can still play it today. I like things because of their individual quality, not because they are popular.

I understand pop even less in the church, and this is why singing today bothers me some. When I think of the new songs that we have starting singing in the last 10 years, I can only imagine singing a handful of them 10, 15, 30 years from now. So why I ask, are we wasting time with the other ones?

Most of the songs I like predate my lifetime entirely, one by about a thousand years. There is one common theme in the songs I like, good lyrics.

“My sin oh the bliss of this glorious thought, my sin not in part but the whole, is nailed to the cross…”

“My savior forever, He sought me and bought me with His redeeming blood.”

“There is a God, He is alive, in Him we live and we survive.”

“When nothing else could help, love lifted me.”

“He could have called ten thousand angles, but He died alone, for you and me.”

Please, someone explain to me why we must sing songs like “in moments like these, I sing out a song, I sing out a love song to Jesus” to the neglect of songs that carry a more powerful message? In my humble but correct opinion (to steal a line from Joe) singing exists for 3 reasons:

1) To worship God.
2) To communicate the message of Christ.
3) To help us memorize truths of God, because it is easier for us to memorize things in song.

Only two things we do as Christians truly involve the whole church at once, communion and singing. Other then that it is sitting there listening to one person talk. If that is not a compelling enough reason to hold your singing to a high standard, consider that there is truly only an audience of One (that matters). I doubt anyone will argue with me on that point, but I think we run in to trouble sometimes when trying to implement that.

That does NOT mean we must sing technically correct. If a sweet old lady can’t sing quit on key, it’s not the end of the world. At the same time, she has a responsibility not to hinder the worship of anyone else by trying to dominate the song with her volume.

This means we should be considerate of what people want to sing, but not patronizing. If the teenagers want to have some of the newer songs included because they know those songs better, that is absolutely fine with me, we should include songs that includes teenagers. At the same time, they have no more right to direct the worship then the 74 year old man who has been at this church for 30 years. We should not throw out the favorites of the 74 year old because we are so busy planning something to patronize to the youth group, only no one has ever bothered to ask them if they actually like those songs in the first place.

What is the best way to accomplish this? Sing everything, in balance. The balance does not have to be exact, just make an attempt at it. Joe has a good system for this in pulling out his cards to be sure he is rotating the music. Later this year my congregation will have it’s new building, Lord willing that is, when it happens we will start having Sunday night worship again. I am going to be a song leader (we use more then one) on Sunday nights, and I have a plan for what I want to do.

I will take a long list of songs on the computer, everyone I know. It will then be my effort to go through that entire list, without repeating a song (exceptions made for invitation and closing songs). By taking this approach, I know there will be something for everyone, which is what it is really all about. Worship isn’t about you, and it isn’t about me, it’s about us rejoicing to God. Singing lets us tell those who don’t know Jesus about the joy we have. If a song accomplishes that, I like it. If a song does not accomplish it, I don’t like it.

Some of the new(er) songs I like are: Lamb of God, Greatest Command, There’s a stirring. They are songs that effectively tell biblical truth, and for that reason we should sing them, not because they are new.

Because I was told to

Parker said I should open commenting to people without blogger accounts. First let me say it was news to me this was even a setting. Secondly, this has now been corrected so that anyone can post.

The Comrex chose to work properly this weekend. That I take as very good news, it’s one less thing to worry about.

This morning on another radio station (yes, I do listen to other stations) I heard a promotional spot for the annual Edison Parade of light. Thomas Edison had a winter estate in Fort Myers, so every year we have a big parade on the Saturday nearest to his birthday. To give you an idea of the size of this thing the 5k run before the parade will get over one thousand runners. Personally I’ve run it about 6 times, but won’t this year. It is mainly an excuse to have some fun with friends for one night and it works quite well for that.

I still can’t get over that Harry Potter thing. I want to know: 1)what deviant wrote this “play” he is going to be in and why they weren’t thrown out in the street, 2)why he thought this was a good idea, 3)why anyone would think attending that play would be a good idea. For any of you are parents, if you were okay with your children reading/watching Harry Potter before, will you still be in light of this?

Well, I think that is enough rambling for one blog.

Have a good day.

“Live” updates

This blog report is brought to you by Welch’s purple grade juice. No wait, that’s the next traffic report I have to record. Let’s just skip ahead to the actual content of the blog.

On Sunday mornings our station airs a live broadcast from a local church. They call us via a “Comrex” box, our Comrex answers, and if all goes well it is broadcast out on the air. It sounds simple put that way, really it is a simple setup that should work without any problems. That however, is only in theory.

In reality, Murphy loves to stop by on Sunday mornings on his way to steal a sock out of your dryer.

So this week, the line was busy, and there was an open mic in the studio picking up random noise. Upon further review we have discovered this:

-Even though the mic is not supposed to go out over the air (but is wired in to the Comrex) that is in fact what is happening. So it seems the studio mic volume was left up, even though the mic was “off” which caused it to pick up the noise heard on Sunday.

-If the line is busy, the Comrex needs to be turned off and then turned on again.

The only thing I can do anything about is leave a note for Veronica to be sure the mic is turned down for the weekend.

Will it work this weekend? Your guess is as good as mine.

This has been the bulk of my afternoon, all to get to the point of saying “veronica, please be sure the fader volume is all the way off when you leave.”

Boy it sounds a little empty when you say it that way, I should come up with something more impressive. However, that seems to be typical of problems around here.

Testing 1 2 3

Well if you are reading this, you are probably Joe, or a friend of Joe.

In light of that, I will say "Hi Joe, or friend of Joe as the case may be"

I have blogged on other sites before, but I thought I would give this one a try.

I work with Joe at WJYO in Fort Myers Florida, at 11 o clock I kick him out of his chair and tell him to go home. If I didn't I think his wife might never see him again. No wait, he would go home at some point to log some flight hours. :)

I have been working at Kingdom FM for just over a year now, overall it has been a great experience. My first, six weeks or so were spent trying to figure out how to work the NexGen system. My next six weeks were spent trying to figure out why NexGen didn't do x y or z. From that time on, I seem to have spent trying to figure out how to MAKE NexGen do what it should. Today for example, it takes a 4 minute radio feature (loaded by cd) and put a 2 minute feature that plays in the afternoon (loaded by ftp) in it's place. At least one listener was upset and called about that.

Well, let me see if I can get back on topic now, that is of course assuming I had a topic. I'm new to blogger, I'll give this a try for a while. More then anything this will probably be related to life here at the station. I'll head off now, there is more spam email messages waiting to be deleted in our inbox.

Caleb