I'm on vacation right now. Here's a photo from last night. Also, yesterday, Julia got sunburned. And yes, it was I who applied her sunscreen. Oops.

Wow, I just downloaded Firefox 3 and it is blazingly fast.  I don't know anything about programming or whatever, but all I know is that pages just pop up for me now instead of rolling in content as the page loaded. 

In other news, I've been watching the Euro2008 soccer tournament and man, talk about fakers.  Anytime those guys fall to the ground they act like they broke their leg in twelve places.  It seriously happens every three minutes.  Maybe if they spent more time playing rather than rolling on the ground acting, the scores wouldn't be 1-0.

Calvin and Hobbes was the greated comic strip ever.  I thought this was pretty funny, cause Calvin's dad, does a lot of the same stuff I do when answering my kids' questions. 

Calvin's dad answering questions, quoted from various Calvin and Hobbes books by Bill Watterson.

Q. Why does the sun set?
A. It's because hot air rises. The sun's hot in the middle of the day, so it rises high in the sky. In the evening then, it cools down and sets.
Q. Why does it go from east to west?
A. Solar wind.

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So The Incredible Hulk movie was the exact, perfect movie made for that character.  Now, Bruce Banner is no Tony Stark.  He's not carefree, he's haunted by a killer inside him.  So the tone of the story isn't going to like Iron Man.  How do you make an interesting movie about a Hulk, when your main character doesn't want to become the Hulk?  But they pulled it off.

Here's all the major points of why the movie worked:

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Apple released info on the new iPhone.  It's very cool.  The number of people guilty of covetousness just multiplied in direct proportion to our population's internet capabilities.  I have Verizon not AT&T.  So I will go unfulfilled in life.  I wonder if it's a sin to unlock the iPhone for use with other carriers.  Ah the ethical conundrums we here at Decapolis ponder.

So here's my take on summer movies so far.

Iron Man.  Yeah, you know what I'm gonna say - it was tons of fun.  It got most everything right.  It avoided a lot of missteps from other movies such as boring research scenes (like Ang Lee's Hulk) by having a robot to talk to and make jokes with, weak female leads (Batman Begins, Spiderman) by having an Oscar winning actress and villans where you can't have big ending slug fest showdown (Ang Lee's Hulk, Superman Returns).  Only the music sucked, everything else was very cool.

Speed Racer.  Whoa, this was totally fun too.  I wasn't expecting anything.  It basically was a live action cartoon, where all the physics, dialogue, fighting scenes were right out of a cartoon.  And surprisingly, the movie had a decent amount of emotion.  I know you didn't see this, so I recommend you do (if you can find it - it was a total financial bomb).

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Julia, the love of my life, has her birthday today. You can wish her a Happy Birthday here. Or you can yell "Happy Birthday" at the photo above. I set it up so she'll be able to hear you.  She's the one with the sunglasses about to give lollipops to strangers.  Happy Birthday!  I love you!

The ministry that we support in the Philippines took a five day trip to visit and minister to a remote village. Click 'read more' for the full story. You can also support the ministry here.read more

I can't believe David Lee Cook won AI.  (I don't know how many times I heard people put in "Lee" into his name like Kristy Lee Cook.)  I thought David Archuletta had it totally won a long time ago. 

But I really didn't care who won it.  I didn't watch the past three weeks.  It's funny, I'd much rather watch Dancing With The Stars.  That was way more interesting.  What's crazy about DWTS is they have two competitions in one season.  If you had two American Idol competitions in one season, people would loathe it.  Well, more than they do already.

We've all been in situations where a fellow Christian attacks us or is a big fat jerk to us in some way.  It happens all the time.  At school, work, church, with our family members, in ministry, on the internets, on a rocketship or in an underwater lair.  I'm sure we've all let our emotions get the better of us.  And I doubt that God wants us to respond by calling them 'poopie-pants' and then punching them in the face, then sending out a mass email written in all-caps to your all your friends saying exactly how much of a poopie-pants that person is.

So how do we deal with it without sinning?

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I'm so done with this season.  David Archuletta won this season about 4 weeks ago.  But I guess I need to finish out my critiquing.  Seriously, I'm more into Dancing With the Stars than AI.  I at least want to watch Kristy Yamaguchi, where as with AI, I don't want to listen to anyone.  Even Deadliest Catch is boring so far this season.  Well, at least I have Lost. 

David Cook singing Hungry Like the Wolf.  Whoops, they forgot to mix in any of the music, so it's all his voice.  And it's not all that good.  Man, this mix is killing me.  It's someone singing rock a cappella.  Well, he didn't really do anything with it.  And it wasn't all that great.  Grade C+

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Neil Diamond night?  Boring.  It's going to be the easy listening radio station tonight.  I'm ready for one of the worst lineup of song choices ever on the show.

I'm also not all that into the top five.  There's some likable people, but are they great singers?  And yeah, I'm late on this again.  I just can't watch it while it's actually on TV.  I gots stuff to do.  Yeah, it makes my commentary less relevant, but it's not like it's important anyways.

Jason Castro singing Forever in Blue Jeans.  I guess this is okay.  But what did I say about the easy listening station?  Yeah, it's that.  Grade C

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I know I kinda exaggerate a lot, but this is no exaggeration.  Carly's choice to sing Judas' song from Jesus Christ Superstar is by far the worst song choice anyone ever had.

What makes it even worse - is she was going to sing one of the best songs from Phantom.

I have video evidence! Compare the quality of these two songs.

Here's the song she wanted to sing from Phantom sung by Sarah Brightman and the Josh Groban, who was gracious enough to come down from his kingdom in the clouds to sing this song...

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Wow, there's not a whole lot of people left.  Hey, look they brought the band down to the stage.  I always thought having the band thirty feet above the singer was totally goofy - it made it look more karaoke (expect for all the off key harmonies).

Andrew Llyod Webber night.  Weird.  I like it, but it's weird.  I always thought his music was a little too like, "Hey, I'm singing an entire sentence."  But whatever, he has some good stuff.  The Phantom of the Opera is really good.  I'm more partial to Les Miserables, but Andrew Lloyd Webber is good at what he does. 

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I've seen it so many times where Christians are not only hesitant to label themselves as a Baptist, Methodist, Reformed, Calvinist, Arminianist, Conradist, etc., but also think it's a bad thing.  We've seen so many divisions in the Church and a lot of people attribute that to labels. 

The common thinking goes, "What can't I just call myself a Christian?  Why do I have to label myself? Why can't I just say I believe the Bible because labels are bad."

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