You'll be blown away

Oprah gets pwn'd

In no way is this an endorsement of either Comedy Central or Lewis Black. Unless you want it to be. In which case it is, and we can all share the laugh together.

Unless you don't want it to be, in which case I'm very concerned and disappointed and very, very, um, troubled and ... yeah. whatever.

... um ...

This just in from the Joel Osteen:

The God Kind of Faith

Today's Scripture
“…the life which I now life in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God…” (Galatians 2:20).

Today's Word from Joel and Victoria
Faith is all around us. People have faith in so many different things: faith that a friend will be true, faith that your job is taking you on a certain career path, faith that the chair you are sitting on is going to hold you up! Faith is simply believing in something. But there are different kinds, or levels, of faith. There’s a difference between having faith in God and having the faith of God. When you open your heart to the God kind of faith, you’re actually allowing Him to believe through you. The God kind of faith will cause you to believe for things when you don’t even know how they’ll happen.

And it probably won’t make sense in your mind, but you have to allow your spirit to rise higher than your thinking. Don’t talk yourself out of believing. Don’t focus on all the reasons why not, instead allow God’s faith to rise up within you. Meditate on His Word that says, you can do all things through Christ and you are strong in the Lord and the power of His might. As you allow God’s faith to flow through you, He’ll take you places you’ve never dreamed. You will rise higher and higher and live the abundant life the Lord has for you!

A Prayer for Today
Heavenly Father, today I humbly open my heart to You. Use me for Your glory and have Your way in my life. I choose to believe in You and invite You to believe through me. In Jesus’ Name. Amen.

For the record, I added the underlined, italics and the bold type in the main body. And now that you have that pearl of great price, so to speak, have a nice day.

toys

I just ordered a pizza from dominos.com, and I can watch its progress from the web site.

Somehow, that feels like too much information.

And when their site told me that 100 acres of Pizza is eaten every day by the citizens of the United States, I wanted to call off my pizza. That's gross, dude.

two things to talk about

[1] How should I feel about having a higher technorati score than Donald Miller

[2] Podcast. I am starting to get serious about doing one, and I want to do 30 minutes once a week. However, I think podcasting my sunday school class is frankly redundant and not really about the blog -- not the same brand, not the same flavor. If the non-negotiable of the podcast is a book review every week (with an author interview when possible/available), what other 10-minute segment would you like to see in a weekly podcast?

I'm a little dizzy ...

I got linked by Justin Taylor and monergism.com today ...

... I ... um ... I ...

I need a talking monkey graphic or something. I'm going to bed ...

Seriously now ...

In the last 7 days, I have had civil conversations with iMonk and Kevin Johnson, and I'm brawling in the meta with Al Sends.

I feel a little creepy.

double hockey sticks

I think I just broke Haloscan. Or the new Template did, anyway.

It works good enough to work right now, but the cool alternating thing is in the trash, and all font formatting in off.

Sheesh.

UNDER CONSTRUCTION

The Meta is undergoing some detail work, and for the next hour or so it'll be unreadable.

After that, I can't tell yet. If my scripts work, I think it'll be fun ...

UPDATED: Pheh. It's legible right now. That's the best I can hope for today. Will work more on this tomorrow and the weekend.

UPDATE #2: It's saturday morning as I type this, and I'm a little, um, vexed by the template right now. You will see all manner of weirdness in it over the next 48 hours. If at some time during that process you develop strabismus or cephalalgia, consult your doctor or join the club.

UPDATE #3: OK -- now you can see your comments, and your don't have to try to figure out who said what, and mostly the gravatars are pointed at by the dialog ballooons. And the comments logo header is in place. But I think you can't actually post comments right now as I have somehow dropped the input form. And I have to take my son to basketball this morning.

Stay tuned. Note to twitchell -- if I stopped sleeping, I'd stop waking up with stupid ideas like this which fuel my time-deficit lifestyle.

UPDATE #4: Yeah, I think I'm done now. I may add one last update to the layout this afternoon, but you-all can actually add comments again. I know you were not sleeping well knowing that you couldn't actually comment ...

He reads my blog

Pope Benedict prods the Global Warming establishment.

PUNCH LINE:

It's because Carbon Offesets are biting into Indulgences.

They read my blog

Maybe I should sue, since they obviously got the idea from me.

Maybe I should be glad I didn't get a "cease and desist" for all the cool comic images I scanned from my boxes of tattered comics ...

because I laughed

I went to this site and I put in
centuri0n.blogspot.com
and I also put in
stevenjcamp.blogspot.com

Try it and see what you get.

Pomotivators -- the Video

This'll go up on the TeamPyro site later this week, but here's the music video for the Pomotovator posters.

Apologies to Elvis Costello, Declan McManus, and all other aliases bound to be frownie-faced over this.

The Next MegaChurch

What a great idea for a pre-mil church site.

On removing posts

It's funny, but when I have Blogger set up to drop the 15th-oldest post, and it falls off, nobody notices -- no matter how incendiary it is. I have blogger set to drop the 3rd-oldest post, and suddenly I'm doing what all disreputable bloggers do: I'm revising history or shame-facedly and without comment removing something I am allegedly ashamed of.

Here's a tip for people who think they know something about their favorite bloggers: use your favorite search engine to discover how often they have offered up the following phrases --

"I apologize"
"I'm Sorry"
"I was wrong"

It will be very instructive to you about how they deal with their own alleged sobriety of thinking and circumspection.

This is reported to be Captain Drama, but it's only a copycat from a non-denominational summer stock troupe:



For the record, here's my favorite candid photo of Captain Drama:



Notice how it's impossible to tell if he's wearing a mask to cover his own horrible disfigurement thereby giving him a smooth porceline exterior, or if the mask he's wearing is scarier than what's actually underneath.

However, never let it be said that he doesn't have a lovely singing voice. He always brings down the house.

Before you get all beta-testy ...

... I want you to look at this chart of stats for this blog, which is the browser mix of people headed in:



In very round and unscientific numbers, 97% of the readers of this blog come here using either MSIE, Firefox (good for you) or Safari (even better). You MSIE users still rankle me, but there you are.

This other chart is also very telling:



It doesn't really matter what platform you're coming in on. MSIE, Firefox, Safari.

Now, this is not to say that you malcontents who are using crazy software like Konqueror or Camino or Opera aren't beloved readers of this blog -- you are. But unless you are getting a giant red skull with flaming eyes screaming vulgarities at you when you load my page, I have really, really toiled to get this new template stable on the major platforms -- and it still needs work for those of you who don't have Flash 8 or better loaded. Please let's not take screen shots of what this looks like using Camino for Mac OS 10.1.X on a hooptied-up G3 iMac bondi.

For the record, I'm interested in readers using MSIE 6 with or without Flash, luddites using Safari 2.X rather than the 3.X beta, Windows users using Safari, MSIE 7 without Flash, anyone who cannot read the text over the right sidebar, and anyone who has design elements rendering in obviously-messed-up ways who is able to detail his or her system configuration.

I'm filing this under "problem of evil" for obvious reasons.

The New Ecumenism

I propose that, along with these measures proposed by a Dutch Roman Catholic Bishop, Catholics also begin to call themselves something less likely to offend Muslims.

You fill in the punch line.

WOW.

I have been working on an upgrade to the blog template, and it is killing me.

Today I just put my work into the test blog blogger blog, and I have lost all my sidebar items. I mean: I deleted the saved copy of my old template, and I lost all my sidebar items.

poof.

ouch.

No, you may not see it yet. You may never see it as I may now go and set myself on fire. (just kidding) (I think)

Meta-blogging

Those of you following the Zens critique got a fix yesterday, and it turns out that it's a timely thing as it sort of runs together with the new/old topic at TeamPyro, which is Dan Kimball's new book, They Like Jesus but Not the Church.

I say that because Pastor Kimball advocates for something which the Zens paper says is OK by the Bible -- which is, female leadership in the church. And by "advocates", I mean, "it doesn't really know why the church has never done that in 2000 years".

I'm sure Pastor Kimball is a smarter guy than his chapter on that topic comes across, but that's next up. I'll post a review of that book sometime after the Founders' conference next week, and then we can break out the hammers and tongs about female church leadership over here.

In the meantime, you might want to review the following post which I would qualify as the "Best of centuri0n":

The last installment of my Tony Campolo review (you might enjoy following the links to read the whole thing)

A somewhat-bloated commentary on the clarity of Scripture (too many big words)

This one about orthodoxy

This one about the letter to Diognetus

This one for the diagram if nothing else

this one to note our humble beginnings

This one which turns out to be about the Gospel rather than about gay rights

And lastly, because I am sure you don't remember it, read this one because your church needs it

And have a nice week. I may post incidentals from Tulsa next week. If you're at Founders, I'll be the guy trying not to look like I'm part of Phil's entourage. In the mean time, be with the Lord's people on the Lord's day in the Lord's house.

booyah.

Obligatory Paris Hilton post

Briefly, before the day gets kicked off here, Paris Hilton was apparently releasd from jail last week to spend some time under "house arrest" or whatever you call it when you have to stay at home (I think it used to be called "grounded") rather than go to jail. The Judge wasn't actually happy about that, and ordered her back to actual jail where she has to serve out something like 45 days minus time served and time off for good behavior.

What I'm really posting about here is the somewhat universal glee being expressed on the internet that Ms. Hilton is going to jail and going to serve out her sentence. It's one thing to find some comfort in the fact that our legal system still works sometimes -- maybe most of the time. It's another to sort of throw a party when this girl has to spend 45 days in jail for doing something most people were dying to hear about in the first place. She was famous because she did this sort of stuff and validated all the people who were doing not-more-than-that in terms of social weirdness.

The same kind of thing has happened to Girls Gone Wild producer Joseph Francis -- he has found out he doesn't really have any friends, and the public is rather glad he's in the clink in spite of having bought all his mail-order videos and making him ridiculously rich.

Anyone what to provide the moral to the story?

Oh brother: you can't write punchline like this one.