Radical Womanhood

Leap Year Traditions

I'm going to be away from the blog for the next week. So while I'm offline, I'm going to be pointing you to some of my other cyber-friends.

Today, I have the pleasure of introducing my friend, Erin Sutherland, who wrote a post for the New Attitude blog about the gospel and dating. You should note what is special about today, ladies! Once every four years, the tables are turned and legend has it that women are free to propose on Leap Year. As Erin writes:

Back in the 5th century, Saint Bridget complained to Saint Patrick that women were forced to wait too long for a marriage proposal.  According to legend, St. Patrick set aside one day every four years so forlorn females could ‘pop the question.’  That day is February 29th.  The tradition has found its way around the world; Scotland even made it a law in 1288—and any man who refused a proposal was required to pay a fine!  The idea is: leap year can fix calendar problems, and ‘female proposal days’ can fix lack-of-marriage problems.

Wait for it. When this article pops up on the Na blog, it's going to be good.

Speaking of turning the tables on Leap Year, I'd like to commend my manly friends for discovering the delights of tea. Such a great beverage should not be restricted to the province of females!

Here we have some of my friends visiting London and properly acknowledging the local culture by taking tea at Harrod's. From left: Matt, Nathan, Nathan, and Ken. 

The next photo are four tea newbies and their female friends at the Mayflower in D.C. We gathered in honor of a female friend's milestone birthday (I plead the Fifth regarding any details) and the guys were more than willing to do tea--they even planned it. From left: Angelita, Cleo, Michael, Jane, Jeff, Drew, Melanie, me, Aida, Margaret, and Ian.

Hmmm....a man willing to do tea might be just the kind of man to attract a Leap Year proposal. ;)

Rants and Raves

Personal typo torture: to lie beneath such a grievous punctuation error and be unable to reach out from the grave to edit it!

Earlier this week, a friend of mine sent a link to a blog about misused quotation marks. (The “Blog” of “Unnecessary” Quotation Marks. Misinterpreting bad punctuation since 2005.) Reading the examples there, I laughed so hard I began wheezing. From that blog, I followed a link to another "snark" (as the blogroll was termed) to one about apostrophe abuse, which was even funnier! I've been on a personal crusade against the "satanic sprinkling of redundant apostrophes" across the landscape of America since at least 1995. I'm rapidly losing ground, as this photo from the apostrophe abuse blog illustrates.

Though apostrophe abuse is most heinous, my "inner stickler" is also quite particular about numerous other lapses in etiquette or common sense:

Rants

- People who flick lit cigarettes out of their cars. Pollute your own ashtray. A close second: Men who launch phlegm in public places, especially when accompanied by a loud auditory ramp-up.
- Maintenance staff and retail workers who wear walkie talkies and deafen themselves and everyone else within a two mile radius with the volume of the inane and inaudible chatter.
- Definately. It is definitely a spelling error reinforced by its own ubiquitousness.
- People who drive in the rain without turning on their headlights. A louder rant goes to dark automobiles driving like stealth vehicles.
- The way Facebook blatantly compromised its users' privacy and continues to track their off-site commercial activities without knowledge or consent.

To be fair, there are some things that also deserve major props:

Raves

- Airport chair massages to unkink your shoulders after six hours flying in a middle seat and losing the battle for armrests.
- Alarm clocks with iPod docks in hotel rooms so that you can listen to worship music (or anything else you want) while traveling.
- Internet recipe sites that allow you to search by the one ingredient and come up with a meal. A particular shout-out to allrecipes.com for the ability to scale down recipes for the single gourmet.
- Netflix! Best reason: No more dodging the inappropriate DVD covers lurking in the Blockbuster store. Second-best reason: Reviews from people "64% like you."

The fine print: I cannot vouch for the propriety of every example posted on these punctuation blogs. From what I saw of the most recent posts, they were fine. Please read with discernment.

Hat tip: Goes to Lynne Truss of Eats Shoots and Leaves for the quotes about redundant apostrophes and the inner stickler. A highly recommended book for the dwindling defenders of punctuation.

Humility disclaimer: Pride goeth before the grammatical fall. I expect to make many mistake's in the near future. :) <---- This is for all the emoticon ranters.

Stop It!

Got caught up on some of my blog reading today and cracked up at two posts. The first was the Friday Funnies from the Girl Talk blog. You'll have to read it to understand why the photo is so amusing.

The second is a humorous video I've seen before, but I enjoyed one more time today, thanks to Justin Taylor. Don't miss the sterling piece of dating advice this psychologist (Bob Newhart) gives near the end of the video!

Okay, now that you've had a good laugh, check out the serious insight and counsel that David Powlison provides about this clip. As he writes, "Newhart’s wit...creates a perfect foil for understanding the contrast between what our world offers and the riches of biblical counseling."

'Cause I'm the Mom Song

Just back from Richmond, where the ladies at Kingsway were treated to this funny parody by comedian Anita Renfroe. It's all that a mom says in 24 hours, condensed into 2 minutes and 55 seconds and set to the William Tell Overture. Well done!

Vintage Video

My colleagues have been seeding YouTube with some blasts from the past. These videos brought back some fond memories. I produced two of them back in the day, but I can't take credit for the most creative concept ("CJercize," produced by Jacob Campbell).

The oldest of the set is a promo video for C.J. Mahaney's first book, The Cross-Centered Life. This remains one of my favorite videos, but not because the shoestring-budget production values. I love watching this video because of the sermon footage in which C.J. recreates the thrill of riding rollercoasters, but then brings the illustration to bear on our emotions: "I love rollercoasters! But that's not how I want to live my life." This is classic C.J. in both the preaching and the reflections that follow.

The second video is a conversation with Josh Harris and C.J. about the worship CD that accompanied the book, Songs for the Cross-Centered Life. The best part is the ad-libbed ending. Wait for it.

And finally, here is "CJercize." This was produced for the Milestone Weekend, during which C.J. installed Joshua Harris as senior pastor. This mock infomercial pokes fun C.J.'s famous preaching gestures--and nobody laughed harder than C.J. when it debuted for the church. (It will be a lot funnier if you watched the first video for the real-life example!)

'Taking Care of the Ladies'

Wow--if I'd seen this video before I wrote "You Are The Man" this week, I could have saved a lot of time. Daniel, from Everyday News, gets down to the basics!

HT: Retro Evangelical via The Family Room

Celebrity . . . Sighting?

I definitely do not have a career in paparazzi photography. Fifty points if you can identify the celebrities in any of these photos. These were taken at Georgia Brown's in D.C. last night. We were told by the staff and other patrons that we were sitting next to a number of bold-face names.

Wait! Don't turn your head!

Darn digital delay!

Okay, we'll just have to go for it.

Any ideas?

Time's up!

If you guessed Aida and Jane Alam, you are right.

No, seriously, they are my friends standing in the last photo. The table behind them supposedly contained film director George Lucas and Mayor Richard Daley of Chicago. But who can really tell with my great photography? The guys at the table in the foreground also claimed to be famous--a rock star and his guitarist. We were skeptical of that claim, but let me know if you can ID them. The wait staff at Georgia Brown's insisted it was George Lucas, though. A Google search for both Lucas and Daley did turn up photos looking like our fellow diners, so perhaps the rumors are true. But the band? I think not.

I guess I should keep my day job. I stink at stalking celebs...

I Live in an Orange Blob

There are so many trite ways to label the differences between men and women, and now I discover National Geographic has created a new class: blue dots or orange dots. Blue dots indicate areas where single men outnumber single women. Orange dots indicate the reverse. (Curious? Click on the image to see a larger picture.)

I live in the midst of a big orange blob. No wonder...!

Ah, another opportunity to trust God. :)

HT: Justin Taylor via Kevin Cawley via Creative Class

My 15 Minutes on The Successor

So I've literally got five minutes at the airport to check my email before boarding the plane, and suddenly my inbox is flooded with emails titled "check this out!" and the like. They are all pointing to Tim Challies' announcement of a new evangelical reality series, The Successor. So I forfeit a good seat on the plane to find out what mischief Tim Challies is up to--only to find out that I'm a star on a new reality TV show. Whoohoo! My 15 minutes, at last!

But really, "the stern-faced Carolyn McCulley"?! I could never measure up to the sober visage of my namesake on The Apprentice.

Thanks for making us all laugh today, Tim. Well done!

"Regarding the Ruddy, Rugged Young Man Featured in the Video"

Last week, I plugged an amusing video on Capitol Hill Baptist's website. A few days later, I received this response from the video's star. I laughed until tears were coming out of my eyes. The writing was simply too good to limit to my inbox, so I asked Andrew Sherwood--the star of this video--if I may publish his dry wit here. I assured him that contrary to the statements expressed in his letter, women like men who can make them laugh. Bravo, Andrew! (But I still want to see an interpretive dance to a Watermark song.) Here is his mock reply:

I recently heard a story that went a little something like this:

There was born to humanity a being so perfect, so beautiful, so amazingly intelligent that humanity almost did not receive him. He went through most of his young life as an outsider; alone he spent many nights toiling in anguish over the world's misunderstanding. Adolescence brought little respite for the young man but eventually, those around him began to see the young man for what he was: a shining star, a winsome meteor zooming through the universe at a speed unable to comprehend by most. And for this, they began to love him.

He would spend his college years battling the world's pressures with rigor, often finding solace among the solving of advanced algorithms, Patristic-period linguistics, interpretive dances to Watermark songs, and trying to grow his hair long'ish while trying to learn the acoustic guitar well enough to lead worship at any of the various women's college Bible study groups around campus. Success came not in these endeavors and the young man still found himself alone, without the help mate God might have for him.

Fate sent Mark Dever charging into the path of the young man's life one day in 2005 and in a twist of destiny, the boy's dreams of being that 4th member of Destiny's Child suddenly changed. He had found his calling: male secretarial work at Capitol Hill Baptist Church. Hand to the plow, the young man matured into one of Godly character, incredible speed, incredible strength, incredible vocabulary, and a job so intense, so complicated...few outside of the advanced scientific community currently working on String Theory would be able to come to grips with the depth.

And then one day a little video of his appeared on a woman's blog he had never met with the description, "relentlessly self-absorbed". Pretty much every single godly woman in the universe blacklisted him, he took up the daily practice of singing "Wait for Me" by Rebecca St. James in his quiet times with tear-stained brow, and he ended up working at an embroidered t-shirt company amidst the tourist shops of Silver Dollar City in Branson, Missouri.

The end.

You've ruined my life.

Priceless! Thanks, Andrew. Everybody needs a laugh on Mondays!