Here’s something interesting. I visited a website (to remain nameless) that offers movie reviews with a Christian world view in mind and from a parent’s perspective. The reviews do their job in that they shed some light on subject matter that interests me. If I was writing these reviews, I’d write them differently, but it’s not my web site is it? Anyway, we were going to talk about something interesting weren’t we…

Well, in these reviews, you’ll often find a comment on profanity. In one review, the author recapped a few uses of “d— and h—“. It occured to me that Christians often will strike out those words in print or say “the d word”, even though damn and Hell have very specific meanings to the Christian that are important to remember.

The point (in my humbly submitted opinion) is that by deprecating these words — instead of deprecating the misuse of them — we paint them simply as “bad words” rather than as words that have meanings and are good words when used properly. Then, we lose the real meaning of those words. We surrender more of our beautiful language. In the end, we execute a rote search for right and wrong that cannot detect real insidiousnesses.

I may illustrate it this way:

1. Regardless of context, if I say “execrated” or “confounded” you will not take notice. If I say “damned” you will be shocked and tell me to “clean it up”.

2. “Jackass” and “ass” are disagreeable insults in 2004, but “donkey” is not.

Words mean things. We should be aware of those meanings and use the right words. My advice to the movie review web site — spell out damn and Hell and perhaps explain why it’s wrong to use them flippantly.

There’s this place where I go to get a cup of coffee sometimes. It’s a coffee shop. Naturally, it’s named after the fashion of the day — “From the Ground Up”. Inside this coffee shop we find a superfluity of odd signage, aged magazine advertisements, and random jetsam.

The jetsam includes a couple of A-Team stickers on the cash register. Both stickers include BA Baracus but the second is the interesting one. In this photo, BA is wearing bibbed overalls and one of the straps has come unsnapped. However, the bib has not slouched over to the snapped side, on account of the gold mass around BA’s neck that extends down to his chest and holds the bib in place!

Along with Yellow Card’s Ocean Avenue I purchased Jimmy Eat World’s latest, Futures. I’ll write something more extensive about that later but I’m about to put Futures on my chicken skin (goose bump) music list. I bring it up because when I hear chicken skin music it always gives me an appetite to perform or write or record.

Speaking of which, I had the pleasure of playing bass guitar for Driven To One last Friday. Playing in a band is so satisfying and Drew and Caleb are so much fun to hang and work with. I really hope we can find a way to continue working together.