Clicking on the picture will get you two more zoom levels out of the gallery.

Yesterday Rev. McCain posted about the upcoming Lutheran Study Bible, which uses the ESV Bible text but has study notes that bring out Lutheran perspectives that any Christian can appreciate such as the fulfillment of messianic prophecies, sacramental theology, and end times theology. It looks so good, theological liberals in the LCMS may cry that it needs “doctrinal review,” as they did with Concordia: the Lutheran Confessions.

Speaking of doctrinal review:

There was one blog, completely taken down now, that noted the CPH web site listed the availability of a book on women’s ordination as “We no longer carry this product.” Unfortunately, that blog then went on to postulate that the book was censored. Pastor McCain has assured me though email and others through blog comments that the erroneous availability message was a function of the automated web inventory system. The good news is that instead of being censored, a second edition/third printing of the book has been ordered.

This reminded me about the first time I’d heard of another “point-two”…weak beer.

Three of us from the University of Missouri-Rolla (as it was named back then) were hired out of college to take a job at HAL, in Duncan, OK. Rolla had a 4:1 guys to girl ratio at the time, so drinking was still a popular thing to do. One of us in particular was a fraternity boy on top of that, so his alcohol tolerance was pretty high.

In Duncan, one could buy beer at the grocery store, but it was 3.2% alcohol rather that Missouri’s 5%.  In order to get real beer, one had to buy it at the liquor store. Poor Ben didn’t know that.

After his first weekend off, Ben reported to work, and he was quite mad. He had bought a 12-pack at the store and sat down to drink. To use his words, he downed the whole 12-pack, and he couldn’t feel a buzz.

Welcome to Oklahoma.

I took the Fascinating Facts quiz at ConstitutionFacts.com, and I was surprised to miss a question. The maximum number of years one can serve as President is 10, not 8.

Based upon Amendment Twenty-Two of the Constitution, no person can be elected to the office of President more than twice or serve more than two years of a term to which some other person was elected President. Therefore, the total length of time that any person could serve as President is ten years.

The advanced quiz is 50 questions. Questions I missed:

The Constitution became the law of the land in 1788:

Article 7 identified the number of states that had to ratify the Constitution in order for it to be considered the “law of the land”. “The Ratification of the Conventions of nine States, shall be sufficient for the Establishment of this Constitution between the States so ratifying the Same.” Delaware was the first state to ratify the Constitution by a unanimous vote on December 7, 1787. New Hampshire became the ninth state to ratify the Constitution on June 21, 1788 by a vote of 57-47. The vote by New Hampshire officially made the Constitution the “law of the land.”

I’d forgotten that someone running for Senator needed to be a citizen for 9 years.

Neither House may adjourn without the consent of the other House for more than three days:

This stipulation is found in Article 1, Section 5, Clause 4: “Neither House, during the Session of Congress, shall, without the Consent of the other, adjourn for more than three days, nor to any other Place than that in which the two Houses shall be sitting.

47 out of 50 isn’t bad.

Drought is expected to slash Iran’s domestic production by one-third this year. Iran is forecast to produce 10 million tons of wheat this year, down from 15 million tons in 2007-08, and to import 4.5 million tons, up from 200,000 tons last year, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

ADM and others need to drive that demand up. Have the French bring in bakeries and patisseries. Maybe Poupart’s could open a branch in Tehran. That would be all good.

Is it lunch time yet?

At Murphy’s we ordered our wings at the counter and sat at our table. The wait was a little longer than I would have expected, but there were several take-out orders that may have slowed things down. There was no service, so we had to get our own drinks. The person manning the register had trouble describing what was in the sauces.

The wings arrived steaming hot. They were crispy and cooked just right. The sauces were drizzled over the wings, whereas I usually prefer them spun in the sauce. I tried three sauces: Hot, Cajun, and Irish Pride. Hot was the standard buffalo sauce, which was pretty good. The Cajun wings weren’t a sauce but a pepper powder that was sprinkled on. The Irish Pride sauce, a garlic barbecue sauce, was surprisingly good. I could have eaten more of that sauce.

I wouldn’t buy lunch for the class at this location because they didn’t take American Express. If that doesn’t faze you and you don’t mind getting your own refills, this is a good place to get wings.

We had a couple of problems with the venue, the UltraScreen at Marcus Cinemas. I thought it was their answer to IMAX, but it was simply a larger screen. I enjoyed watching it on the bigger movie screen, but the audio cut out one time, and whispered dialogue was easily overpowered by the bass in the theater. I’ll have to get the DVD and listen with my Bose headphones or at worst turn on closed captioning.

Some reviewers I have read saw Satanic elements in the Joker and Christological components in Batman. While I would agree about the Joker as the ultimate corrupter, Batman is more scapegoat than messiah, right down to letting the cops chase him into the end of the movie.

Director Chris Nolan handles the corruption of Harvey Dent a lot more believably than George Lucas’s poorly contrived and infantile corruption of Anakin Skywalker in the Star Wars series. It is interesting study that alone makes the movie worthwhile, besides the terrific action and the dilemma of the two ferry boats.

Heath Ledger may get his posthumous Oscar, but I enjoyed Aaron Eckhardt’s performance as well. Morgan Freeman handled his character’s ethical challenge flawlessly.

The movie does redeem itself with good characters. Wall-E, a trash compactor with treads and cameras, is cute to a fault. Eve the probe droid starts out tough with her laser cannon but softens up and begins to fancy Wall-E. The captain of the ship in exile is the only positive and engaged human character in this film, and he has a couple of good lines with the auto-pilot, who is basically HAL 9000 with a lower voice and a laser of its own.

Mild spoilers follow…

photo credit: kyz

Mankind has somehow trashed Earth to the point where the planet is inhabitable. Wall-E and one cockroach are the only native characters to Earth, and the robot has a directive to compact trash and form it into buildings. 700 years have passed since the rich purchased a 5-year cruise to escape Earth while robots like Wall-E cleaned it up. During said time in space the humans move about on antigravity carts looking at monitors in front of their faces and talking to each other, without even taking advantage of pools on the ship. Nobody lifts a finger to do anything, and everyone is morbidly obese. The captain is the only human who takes any initiative, ultimately deciding to return the exile ship to Earth when it is found that plants can live there again.

The kids enjoyed the cute characters, the occasional physical comedy, and the interaction between the two main characters, but the film on the whole has a sad tone. It is interesting how humans manage to trash the entire planet Earth but yet manage to live for 700 years in a confined paradise floating through space. Do the chores of cleaning robots not scale well?

Children will like the movie, but adults will feel like they’re being talked at.

Health-minded, too.

Yeshua is now 30, and in first person the book takes him through four situations: he is accused of defiling a virgin, his baptism at the hands of John the Baptizer, his 40-day fast and temptation by Satan, and the wedding at Cana. The book mostly deals with Yeshua and a girl he would like to have but cannot, who ends up being the bride at Cana.

Yeshua undergoes an almost complete personality change when he is baptized, moving from a person who merely gets his prayers answered by his Father to the Son of God who commands things himself. This newly baptized Yeshua goes into the wilderness for 40 days to get used to having to hear the desires of everyone and his new command of his powers.

It is this Yeshua who gets tempted by the Devil, and Rice’s expansion of the Biblical account (Matt. 4:1-11) is a quite interesting part of the book. The author’s Satan also challenges who Jesus thinks he is, demanding how he didn’t know his father Joseph had died during Jesus’s fast, and how he can lead great armies into battle. Satan begs Jesus to stop time for all time, an interesting temptation. The formerly humble Yeshua launches into a confident tirade, how he will defeat Satan not with war but “heart by heart” and “soul by soul” — yet with no apparent foreknowledge of the cross.

The author pushes hard to make her Yeshua feel the whole gamut of emotions, including desire and heartbreak. Despite Biblical accounts like Jesus weeping at Lazarus’s death and weeping over Jerusalem, as well as the entire Song of Solomon, the Son of God desiring a girl to the point of weeping when he knows he can’t marry her may find to be less than plausible stretch for the reader. In an ironic twist he is actually accused of defiling the virgin he cannot have, and one must ask, how can this happen to a sinless person. Does reputation (much less the reputation of someone who has done nothing wrong ever) count for nothing?

The final account of the wedding is plausible and nicely done. It is almost too quick.

The book is easy to follow, but the balance between God and man maintained in the first book is more separated, more of a multiple personality than a mystical union. I can’t recommend it as much as the first.