It’s November 30. Even here in balmy Georgia, the grass quit growing a month ago.

My next-door neighbor’s ride-on mower was built during the Van Buren administration. Imagine the volume of standing right in front of a 747 jet engine, only it’s running very rough.

Now consider the fact that, in the height of summer, he’s got — maybe — 42 blades of grass on his whole lawn.

Right now, I — and my until-a-few-minutes-ago napping wife — are listening to that mower for the third time this week.

Lord, I need help resisting temptation. That bag of sugar over there and the mower’s gas tank are begging for a meeting.

What kind of communist plot would encourage us to share dark chocolate peanut M & M’s ?!?!

This post is dedicated to Keith, who gave me grief today for not posting anything about Georgia Tech football coach Chan Gailey’s firing after three days had already passed. He logged off IM before I could respond that I’d been too busy running naked down Main Street in near-orgasmic ecstasy. There’s an image seared into your brain for eternity. No extra charge.

Where to begin? Sadly, I seem to be one of the few asking that question, as every article I read talked about Gailey being fired after a disappointing season. No, Sparky, “after a disappointing career” would be much more accurate.

Let’s go back to the summer of 2005. Gailey had been at Georgia Tech for three seasons, compiling records of 7-6, 7-6, and 7-5, for a winning percentage just over 55%. Then-athletic director Dave Braine stated that if things did not improve in the football program quickly, Chailey’s job was in jeopardy. All of Tech’s football fans breathd a sigh of relief, as they had already grown tired of kissing-your-sister records and trips to the Tid-y Bowl.

The Georgia Tech sports information office likes to trumpet the fact that the football program has been to 10 consecutive bowl games. What they don’t mention is that half of those are:

Carquest Bowl (doesn’t exist anymore)
Seattle Bowl
Silicon Valley Classic (doesn’t exist anymore)
Humanitarian Bowl (played on blue turf — can’t really consider that to be football)
Champs Sports Bowl

(Be honest — if you aren’t a Tech fan, I bet there’s at least one of those that you never even heard of.)

Those last three, by the way, were the ones that Gailey had taken Tech to when Braine made his statement. Apparently, that statement lit a fire under Gailey. That year, Tech made the huge and exciting leap to going to the Emerald Bowl (in which we got spanked by Utah).

By mid-November of that year, Gailey had accumulated a 6-3 record (4-3 in the ACC), on his way to yet another 7-5 season. So naturally, Dave “if I only had a” Braine gave Gailey a 5-year contract extension. I guess Braine’s reasoning was that 7-5 was an improvement over 7-5.

Actually, we know Braine’s real reasoning, as when someone asked what the heck he was thinking, he responded that

. . . Georgia Tech can win nine or 10 games. They will never do that consistently. That’s my feeling . . .

So apparently, mediocrity was fine with Braine, and Gailey was giving him plenty of it. What company wouldn’t reward an employee that was giving it exactly what it wanted? (Well, ya know, other than mine.)

In actuality, I think there’s another explanation. It’s pretty obvious that Tech QB Reggie Ball (who passed for 57 TD’s and 55 picks, with a career completion rate of 44%) had naked pictures of Gailey, that he used to blackmail him into starting Ball every game. Had Braine not extended Gailey, Ball would’ve had no leverage. One can only assume then, that Ball had naked pictures of Braine, too.

Shortly after rewarding Gailey, having sufficiently pacified Ball, Braine retired. The search for a new AD came down to former Tech football coach and all-around class act Bill Curry and Dan Radakovich, who apparently is a very good businessman, but wouldn’t know a football if it bit him in the glutes. So naturally, Radakovich was the one chosen by Tech president Wayne Clough (rhymes with “puff”, as in, “what were you puffin’ when you made that decision?”)

Either out of respect to the outgoing Braine, or because Tech had a (fluke) good season in 2006, Radakovich did and said nothing about Gailey’s (lack of) performance until just recently. Things were somewhat tenuous by the last game of this season, though (against rival UGA). I hate to admit this, but I was actually hoping that Tech would lose that game (thereby making Gailey 0 for 6 against UGA). Had Tech won, I fear that all would have been forgiven, and Gailey would’ve been given a 50-year extension.

I actually was a bit excited that Radakovich had the guts to fire Gailey before this year’s Tid-y Bowl trip, until I read about his press conference discussing the search for a new coach. In the quotes given in the article, he only used the f-word once. (No, not that one — I mean “football”.) Apparently, Radakovich is looking for a coach that will be economically profitable for the program. His pontificating was about finding a coach that would “inspire the market . . . to buy tickets” and talked of competition with the various major league teams in Atlanta. Granted, winning would help sell tickets, but it seems that winning is only useful to Radakovich if it does that. If free hot dogs and face-painting would sell tickets, he’d be all for that, instead.

I’m starting to think that Braine knew what an idiot his successor would be, and that his statement about Tech not winning consistently was accurate and prophetic.

or What is it with me, my cousins, and bathrooms?

(Warning for sensitive eyes: I quote a minor crudity at the end of this post.)

My grandparents were thrown a surprise 50th anniversary party just before I started college. I was about 18 and spent a good amount of time hanging out with two of my cousins — Keith (about 1.5 years younger than me) and David (about 2 years older).

My aunt had hired a DJ for the party and he was playing music from every era from the 30s (when my grandparents got married) all the way to the (then-present-day) 80s. Being way too cool for school, my cousins and I weren’t dancing at all.

At one point, Ann, one of Keith’s aunts (from the other side of the family — so no relation to David or me) came over and asked one of us to dance. Not wanting to admit that we were just being too cool, we begged off with the lame excuse that we didn’t know how to dance to the song that was playing (I think it was from the 50s). So Ann said that she’d be back for the next slow dance, as “anyone can do a slow dance”. We knew that this was true, and that we’d be totally without excuse. So, when the next slow song started, we did the only logical thing — we bolted for the men’s room.

Another one of our cousins, Paul, was in there washing his hands after “legitimate purposes”. I think our explosive entrance probably startled him a bit, and I imagine that that same entrance followed by no “activity” was a bit puzzling. He didn’t say anything, though, and walked out after a bit.

Once the song was about 2/3 over, we figured it was safe to emerge. So we came out only to find Ann dancing with her husband, Jack, less than five feet outside the bathroom door. Jack looked at us, scowled, and demanded to know, “What’s this, I hear you won’t dance with my wife? What are you guys, a bunch of f*gg*ts?”

UPDATE: Just for grins, I took screenshots about 30 minutes after this was posted. (see bottom of this post)

UPDATE 2: They’re all gone as of 10:30 AM on Friday, 11/23. I’m shocked, shocked. (And a little unnerved — imagine what would happen if I didn’t agree with them on most content.)

UPDATE 3:  Now (12/9) the pingbacks to TeamPyro are back.  Maybe it was just the flaky Blogger software acting in character.  Or maybe they got added back now that the posts are old enough not be regarded anymore.

A couple days ago, I wrote that I finally understood how discernment works — that methodology is simultaneously irrelevant and very important. That post was chock full of links (mostly to stuff with which I disagreed, or at least noted in a negative manner). The one link to Steve Camp’s site and the three links to TeamPyro all popped up on their “Links to this post” sections.

You’ll note that I said “popped”, as in past tense. Sometime in the last day or so, they all got Schlueter’d.

Draw your own conclusions. I’m already at my “fish in a barrel” limit.

Somebody’s gonna get in a LOT of trouble for this.

The Detroit Lions are actually going to be on television in Atlanta. When they play the Green Bay Packers on Thursday, we’ll finally get to see Calvin Johnson on the field for the first time since he played for Georgia Tech (which, duh, is in Atlanta). And we only had to wait until Week 12 of the NFL season!!

I really thought that the only way we were going to get to see Detroit was if they made the playoffs. Obviously, this was a mistake. I’m sure we were only supposed to see the 3-7 Falcons.

I was going to classify this as “late to the party”, but seeing as how even today there are still references being made to the original TeamPyro Willow Creek post from a few weeks ago, I guess the party’s still in full swing.

I finally figured out how this all works.

Mark Driscoll often gets a lot of grief for his methodology. Even his harshest critics on the conservative end of the spectrum recognize that his content is often spot-on. Heck, even Steve Camp abandoned his God-given call to criticize Mark’s t-shirt collection long enough to say:

. . . for the most part, Mark is orthodox and is certainly not to be placed in the Emergent camp with men like McLaren, Jones, Padgett, etc.

But, in the eyes of these critics, Driscoll’s methodology somehow eliminates, or at least diminishes, the effectiveness of the content.

So clearly, methodology is very important.

Criticism of Driscoll, more classically-defined emergents, seeker-sensitive churches, etc, is often ungracious. When the critics are called on this, and clairvoyance isn’t readily available to dismiss the charges as specious due to theological differences, the overwhelming majority of responses note that the criticism is all true, and whether or not the critic is kind is his delivery is of no import, because the content is true.

So clearly, methodology is of no importance.

Got that?

Yet another reason for my friends and co-workers in Arizona to scoff at the majority of the country.

HT to BHT.

Tim Challies recently reviewed what looks like an excellent DVD, Modern Parables: Living in the Kingdom of God. As I read his review and watched the trailers that he included in it, I was drooling over the disc. (That drool was quickly dried up by sticker shock, but that’s not the point of this post.)

The DVD is a compilation of modern-day re-tellings of several of Jesus‘ parables — very professionally done — and studies to go with them. It looks like a great small-group tool. In the meta, a point was raised by a guy named Aaron. Paraphrasing something he heard John MacArthur say, he noted that:

It’s more crucial to try to take ourselves back into the Bible times/culture to understand the text, than to try to bring the ancient text into our modern-day understanding.

And I can definitely see that. Jesus told these stories in the context of His culture. There were assumptions and understandings that the listeners had in mind, and not everything is going to map from first-century Israel to 21st-century America.

A modernization is something akin to a translation of a work from one language to another. Sometimes stuff is going to be lost. If you truly understand the original language, you’d probably get a better grasp of the material in that language than in a translation. But — for instance — seeing as how not all of us read Greek and Hebrew, we have Bibles in English.

This got me thinking about — what to some is — the dirty r-word. Granted, there are some who wield cultural relevance as a weapon, engaging in activity within the culture that is not amoral, and pawning it off as seeking to be relevant. Sorry, but there’s no logic behind getting doo-doo-faced for Jesus.

(Note: I’m not attributing the following attitude to Aaron. His statements make it clear that this is not his stance. But it is prominent.)

Unfortunately, as is most humans’ tendency, the pendulum can be swung in the opposite direction, holding such a disdain for relevance, that one becomes totally irrelevant. Beyond the fact that the doo-doo-faced guy and the irrelevant guy do about the same amount of furtherance of the Kingdom (i.e. none), there’s that whole pesky thing that Paul wrote:

For though I am free from all men, I have made myself a servant to all, that I might win the more; and to the Jews I became as a Jew, that I might win Jews; to those who are under the law, as under the law, that I might win those who are under the law; to those who are without law, as without law (not being without law toward God, but under law toward Christ), that I might win those who are without law; to the weak I became as weak, that I might win the weak. I have become all things to all men, that I might by all means save some. Now this I do for the gospel’s sake, that I may be partaker of it with you.

Sidebar: I always love it when John Doe doesn’t approve of something and you quote this passage, and John tells you that that’s not what Paul meant. So groovy that John can tell me the inner workings of the heart of a man who’s been dead for 1900 years.

Let’s be honest here — what are the parables, but Jesus being relevant to his culture? If you’re going to stand against all relevance, you can’t read your King Jimmy anymore. You have to chuck all the parables (or tell us that’s not what Jesus meant).

And you sure as heck better not be reading this, unless someone hand-wrote it on papyrus for you.