April Fool's Pranks

Because I'm not creative--or awake--enough to come up with my on April Fool's prank for y'all, I'm linking to a funny edition of Publisher's Weekly. Just a snippet: April 1 Bestseller = Your Best Wife Now.

Meanwhile, if you need some ideas or motivation for a joke or two, check out this archive of the best April Fool's pranks ever.

Duct Tape and Time Change

A Sad Day for Duct Tape
Duct tape made the news this week… in a bad way. Seems a middle school teacher duct taped a 12 year old girl into her desk because the student kept falling out. I want to make snide comments, but alleged teacher abuse(?) seems too touchy a subject. Suffice it to say, duct tape is not for amateur users. It must be used responsibly by people who understand that its great power is to be used for good and not evil.

PSA
This week’s public service announcement is brought to you by the fine folks at the Council for Duct Tape Abuse Prevention, of which I am a charter (and sole) member.

PSA: Just when you had gotten used to the last time change, the powers that be(?) have decided to change it up again on us. That’s right, the time changes Saturday night. Get mad, threaten to write a letter to somebody, mourn that hour of sleep lost, and then go ahead and set your clocks. We’ll see you at church an hour earlier than last week…. or is it an hour later? My parents and I spent a good 20 minutes trying to figure out last week if the time change means we have to wake up earlier or later to be at the fishing hole by daylight now. I still don't know. You can say “spring forward” 1,826 times but that doesn't help me. Would to the Good Lord they just left time the way He made it.

Lady Sports

LSU just keeps on steaming ahead. The Lady Tigers are Final Four bound just like the men’s basketball team. I guess I need to show equal support. But… that would be hard since I am not equally excited. So in today’s round of paranoid self-anxiety about sure/imagined personal shortcomings, I analyze if it’s wrong to show favoritism to men’s sports events.

I’ve just got to admit that there are no women’s sporting events I follow. Maybe that’s not a big deal since there aren’t that many men’s sporting events I follow either. But it just seems such an unprogressive viewpoint. So geaux Lady Tigers, but I probably won’t be keeping up with you. (Meanwhile we are planning a blowout party for the men’s game on Saturday night.)

It’s especially ironic since us gals have a good shot at winning the March madness pool.

Ninetyandnine's Apostolic Media Survey

This week Ninetyandnine released a new cover: "The State of the Apostolic Nation—Media Consumption: Consuming Media or Consumed by Media?"

The media survey polled Apostolics over the last two weeks and offers a look at the trends of our media intake. Commentary is offered on what these trends potentially say about the Apostolic nation.

Media Prejudices
One thing I always find interesting is our biases toward certain media. For example, 69% of Apostolics surveyed either don't watch television at all or watch less than one hour per day. That's wonderful, and I certainly respect anyone's convictions about tv and/or submission to their pastor/organization's guidelines. But 66% of Apostolics surveyed spend over an hour each day surfing the Internet for pleasure (not including e-mail or work use I assume).

I see a huge discrepancy here, and I can't help but think it's because tv has traditionally been branded with a label that has evolved into mythic proportions while new technology is not yet understood or addressed. Isn't it the message of media and not the technology that we are concerned with? If we don't develop convictions about the message conveyed via media, it won't matter which medium we ban. Guidelines can't be developed quickly enough to cover all the technology devices introduced to the market every x number of seconds. Convictions about the message can.

Blast from the Past
If you look back at the archived media survey from 2001, results to commonly polled questions haven't skyrocketed anywhere. (Although the five year difference in the surveys is evident by the new technologies that have been recently introduced and are hence missing from the 2001 survey.) Does the consistency of survey results mean we're holding the line when it comes to our convictions about media intake? Does that disprove the oft-voiced doomsday message that even the church is slipping with the passage of time? Or, again, is our media consumption changing to new forms we have yet to address?

Food and Fasting

T-5 and Counting
Only five days to Friday. I’m kidding, but I just delivered a major series of proposals, and that entailed working all weekend. So I’m dying to have a real weekend.

Yummy for My Tummy
My reward after major work triumphs: lunch at Mandina's, a much-adored seafood restaurant that just relocated here in Baton Rouge from New Orleans. You know, the thing you have to love about New Orleans is that some of the world’s most praised cuisine is housed in tiny shotgun houses with grates on the windows that the average suburbanite wouldn’t consider entering. Anyway, since Katrina, Mandina’s has moved into an upscale Baton Rouge area, but still maintains its distinct New Orleans feel.

Soup’s On
I had Trout Meuniere and Turtle Soup. Delicious, of course. This is starting to feel like a restaurant review. Let me stop and just ask the point of it all. Does anyone besides me find themselves splurging on food as a self-reward? I guess it’s not a big deal, but maybe there’s something to that gluttony thing. Ah well, if only I could put the reverse into play and punish myself with no food during failure moments.

Who’s Hungry?
That reminds me of fasting. Now that’s not how I meant that to sound. In fact, that’s my point. Have you ever noticed that without the right focus and motivation that fasting is just basically the act of going hungry? Saturday around 3 p.m. I realized I’d never gotten around to eating yet for the day and caught myself saying, “Hey in about two more hours, I can go ahead and write this one off as a fast.” I’m kidding, but it’s true we think that way sometimes, whether you’ll admit it or not.

My mission over the next two weeks: rediscover the meaning and power behind focused, anointing fasting.

Picture: Mandina's Restaurant in New Orleans before Hurricane Katrina, source: Mandinas.com

March Madness - Final Four Time!

Oh How the Mighty Have Fallen!
My precious single-digit standing in the Ninetyandnine NCAA basketball pool slipped out of reach Friday. After proudly proclaiming my 9th place standing, apparently some of my team picks didn’t come through. (I don’t know which because I’m not keeping up with any of the tourney other than LSU.) I brooded my drop to 14th place with much the same despair one would feel when getting to a crawfish boil too late and finding no crawfish left. (That was the most painful and desolate analogy I could think of.) Oh the humanity of it all!

Oh How the Mighty Have Arisen!
But I’m back! And up to 4th! It seems that my immutable Tiger spirit has paid off. LSU beat Texas in overtime to take the team to the Final Four--much thanks to Bunch’s “whoever I pick loses, so I won’t pick LSU” trick! This morning at church we ran with that logic and made Bunch proclaim “LSU can’t go all the way.” So if this reverse trick truly works, we Tiger fans are in store for quite a ride!