Great for so many reasons

Here's Bob at the 1998 Grammys. Fantastic performance of a killer song... and some of Bob's best lead guitar work, too.

The CK One background dancers are pretty bizarre, but wait 'til you see what happens at 2:54. Keep in mind this was on live network TV. Bob barely bats an eye, just keeps performing like it's part of the show.

Old skool - Championship Baseball

I'm not sure what made me think of this, but MAN, did I love this game. I can't even imagine how much time I spent playing it as a kid, and this was before the video game era.

It was pretty brilliant because you would roll the dice to see what happened next... and each player had a different set of dice combinations on the back. Like for Robin Yount, a roll of a 1 and a 2 would be a ground ball to the pitcher, but for Mike Schmidt it would be a triple to left. And double 6's would be a home run for anybody. Genius!

My only complaint was that there was too much offense. I guess it was more exciting that way, but not for kids like me who - get this - KEPT SCORE of the games I played against myself. On paper. I could barely get through three innings of those slugfests... home runs everywhere!

And that's not all. I've already blogged about my love of Battle Beasts. So get this - I drew my own baseball cards for my entire collection of Battle Beasts... and I copied over the dice charts from the regular baseball players... I think I even copied them by HAND onto the back of my BB cards. Then I would let them battle it out. I guess kids really have some time on their hands, huh? It's mind-boggling how much effort I put into that stuff.

Dreams and false alarms

So Amelia (the movie) is coming out soon. I'm really excited about this. For one thing, I'd love to learn more about her story, and I think Hilary Swank is just perfectly cast for this (uncanny resemblance... great actress).

Now, our Amelia wasn't named after Amelia Earhart... or after the Joni Mitchell song (more on that in a sec)... but I think it's cool that she has such a strong, trailblazing woman as her namesake. Maybe if the movie is good, we'll get the poster to put up in her room someday. :)

Now for the song...


I'm being 100% serious when I say this is probably the greatest song I've ever heard. I can't imagine anything better. Just an absolute work of art. I don't know if I can express this very eloquently, but the songs that mean the most to me are often the ones that expose a contrast... the ones that bring things into focus. Somehow Joni takes the Amelia Earhart story and makes it the most exquisite parallels to our common spiritual hunger... the longing for something more.

In Joni's song, it's all "just a false alarm" - relationships, life ambition, spiritual seeking. "Like me, she had a dream to fly." Basically she uses Amelia's final flight to show the limitations of our own humanity... our mortality. It's sad enough to take the wind out of you. And it's a lot more intellectually honest than Lennon's "Imagine" (utopian nonsense, in my opinion).

But here's why I love, love, love it. I can totally relate to the "false alarms." I know all about human limitations. But my faith is one thing that will never be a false alarm. From the outside, it seems like it could be. But it's not. The glorious poetic sadness of this song puts it in sharp relief for me. As a Christian, I have the blessed assurance - of something beyond human limitations. Something bigger, something greater, and something that will always be true.

It's really quite a song. You should give it a listen if you have an extra 7 minutes. :)

...and I REALLY want to go here.

I want to go here

Heard Island, in the middle of nowhere, South Indian Ocean. It's between Madagascar and Antarctica, but closer to Antarctica. From what I read, it's an Australian territory, so the volcano's peak is considered Australia's point (over 9,000 feet - can you believe that?).

I've got a world map on my cube wall at work. One of my strange hobbies is looking up remote islands that catch my eye. There are a ton of them in the Pacific, of course, but I'm fascinated by the ones that are totally isolated... like Bouvet, between South America and Africa. If we do ever get to go to Hawaii, I think I'm going to love that part of it - being on an island chain in the middle of a gigantic ocean.

Oh, and then there's Pitcairn. It's a Pacific Island that was settled by the mutineers of the HMS Bounty (Mutiny on the Bounty). Now their descendants live there, on this tiny little island. Amazing story. One of these days I want to read Captain Cook's biography. Now that was an interesting life!

Fun with the g-parents!

All the way through

In the iTunes era, it's pretty rare that I listen to an album the old-fashioned way... all the way through. I get easily fed up with the album filler that I used to just accept as part of the experience. This can be a good or bad thing... one really nice result of this new way of listening is that it drives up the quality of what artists put out, because it's all about the individual song. On the other hand, you don't have the same sense of a cohesive, artistic whole like you did with an entire album.

Here are three albums that, against the odds, I prefer to listen to the old-school way - track 1 through the end. What are yours?