Maybe it's wearing the genuine 1940's blue pin-striped suit today or maybe it's that the semester is almost over. Maybe it's that I just don't have enough to do during the day that I wanted something else to manage.
Whatever it is, I've decided to start a new discussion board for vintage clothing enthusiasts. You can talk about suits, ask questions of other vintage enthusiasts to sharpen your sartorial chops, post links to eBay auctions you're interested in and find out if that suit the seller is passing off as 1940's is actually 1960's, and sundry other topics.
The one thing that's annoyed me about other forums for vintage clothing enthusiasts is that you can't post links to live eBay auctions. I understand the reasoning behind that, but it's hard enough for someone just getting up-to-speed on vintage clothing to find something that's really Golden Era vintage and not '60s or '70s. This discussion board aims to complement online communities like The Fedora Lounge et al by allowing enthusiasts to post links to live eBay auctions they're interested in to solicit input from the vintage community.
This forum software also supports RSS feeds. A major deficit of other message boards, in my opinion.
If you're already a vintage clothing enthusiast, then please sign up. Send me an email and we can work on getting some articles or how-tos posted to help out new folks. If you're just looking for a community of vintage enthusiasts that want to complement what other message boards are doing, then try us out and let's see if we can't help each other figure out what Golden Era style is all about!
Bookmark it: Vintage Clothing Discussion Board
I'm reading St. Augustine's Confessions as the non-biblical text in my own personal study and I came across this fantastic quote from Book I, which seems to smack writers squarely in the forehead:
When a man seeking for the reputation of eloquence stands before a human judge while a thronging multitude surrounds him, inveighs against his enemy with the most fierce hatred, he takes most vigilant heed that his tongue slips not into grammatical error, but takes no heed lest through the fury of his spirit he cut off a man from his fellow-men.
— St. Augustine
Confessions
Expect me to quote him more as I get through the entire work.
Another towel thrown into the ring in the long-standing argument over whether Christianity is treated unfairly by Hollywood:
Are we so confident, I wonder, in how virtuous we are and how virtuously we act in and towards the rest of the world, that the only possible explanation for a negative reputation is an irrational and unfair prejudice? Could it be—I’m just asking—that one reason so many Christians are portrayed as jerks in contemporary media is that a lot of Christians act like jerks in contemporary society?
— All Things Ken
Read the whole thing. (HT: Looking Closer/Jeffrey Overstreet)
Just learning Corel Painter X. Digital mixed-media (mostly chalk and blenders).
My sermon from yesterday:
I
1 A good name is better than precious ointment,
and the day of death better than the day of birth.
2 It is better to go to the house of mourning
than to go to the house of feasting,
for this is the end of all mankind,
and the living will lay it to heart.
3 Sorrow is better than laughter,
for by sadness of face the heart is made glad.
4 The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning,
but the heart of fools is in the house of mirth.
Ecclesiastes 7 (ESV)
It turns out my Gothic sensibilities aren’t all that far off the mark after all!
It’s not that I don’t like being happy. And it’s not that I don’t like seeing others being happy. Sometimes, I’m absolutely running out the ears with happy. It’s just, well, to use a cliche: complicated.
You know, the past couple of days as I’ve been walking around the lake during lunch, I’ve postulated the theory that Jesus Christ was really an alien DNA experiment, and that the whole premise of the human race is that we are a long-running genetic experiment being conducted by a very old (by our reckoning) race of people. Maybe they have been evolving for 500 billion years, and they live for 500,000 years. Let’s say they are a very peaceful, giving people.They started this experiment say, 20 or 30 thousand years ago, and have been making repeated visits to our planet to infuse us with some sort of gene-splicing material. That’s why there were so many different people, from early ape-man, through Neanderthal to Cro-Magnon to modern Homo sapiens. Each jump in the evolutionary tree was another genetic test.
At one point, they decided to go with one race, let’s just say the Jews, maybe because they were the most cohesive, since they don’t intermingle much with other races. All the accounts you read about in the Old Testament are just the scientists trying to make sure that their control group doesn’t get destroyed.
Let’s say these alien people have evolved to the point where they can communicate through telepathy, and manipulate the elements around them using their minds. Let’s say you’re a shepherd named Moses in ancient Egypt, and you "hear" a voice telling you to do God’s will. Maybe this voice tells you his name is "Yahweh" (which could be the actual name of the lead scientist, for example), and you must do things for him and protect your people. When really what "Yahweh" wants to do is protect his experiment, and continue to get "funding" for it! It goes on and on through the years.
Read the whole theory here: Unexplained Mysteries
Sounds like somebody needs a little more to do during their lunch break.
Reading A Story On the Front Porch
Digital pencil and oil (Corel Painter X).
...my profession of faith should not understood [sic] as an assertion of holiness. Quite the opposite, in fact. My profession of faith is an admission of my sinfulness. This is something many unbelievers seem to have a hard time grasping.
—Frank WilsonFrom Frank Wilson's blog.
We're not politically correct in our household. We say Merry Christmas. Sure, Happy Holidays and all that. Be happy. I've no qualms with being Happy.
But I personally want to wish merriment on you at CHRISTmas.
Just keep in mind you can't strip Jesus from Christmas. There may be aspects of our celebration that are not scriptural. Big deal. That just means the holiday is more meaningful because it's multi-cultural and incorporates pieces and parts of the various cultures that have influenced the celebration. If it wasn't for Jesus, this holiday would have no meaning.
Personally, I wouldn't care if they moved Christmas to July. It's still a celebration of the birth of The Savior. Not "A" savior (one of several); we're not celebrating the birth of a great prophet and teacher (though He was those things). The Christmas holiday celebrates the birth of the one-and-only Savior of mankind (oddly enough, not Man himself, which seems to be the theological fad these days--that Man can save himself). The Creator of the Universe in flesh-and-blood.
You don't have to believe all this to celebrate Christmas, by the way. You don't have to stand up in church and become a Christian to join in the celebration of the holiday. It won't kill you (quite the contrary), but you can glom onto the celebration even if you don't think there's anything you need saving from. That's the great thing about a Christian celebration that incorporates elements of the cultures through which it travelled.
Believe it or not. That's up to you. I'm still going to wish you a MERRY CHRISTMAS!
Just wanted to let everyone know that Friday at 5:00 p.m. the lights came back on. Six days without electricity is something the kids will never forget, I expect. They've been walking around all day just saying "I'm so glad the power is back on." I can't agree more.
A special thanks goes to the linemen and tree trimmers from North Carolina, Texas, Louisiana, and other parts of Missouri (and quite possibly from other places around the country as well...those are the states I know utility crews came from) for working long hours in extremely bad conditions to get our power restored.
It's an utterly helpless feeling, when your power is out. There is really nothing you can do about it. You just sit around and wait on someone else. That's an unsettling feeling.
Now: the cleanup.
