Driving down a busy street in Louisville, Kentucky, I noticed a bread truck in an adjacent lane. I did a bit of a double-take at the brand name advertised.

This is, in fact, a legitimate brand, and not a Photoshop’d picture. You can find proof here.

Punch lines for this picture are left as an exercise for the reader, but points will be taken off for anything utilizing the words “hot” and “toast.”

For several years now, my Starbucks addiction has manifested itself in the form of a Quad Con Panna with a shot of white chocolate. It has a strong espresso taste (from the four shots), but the presence of whipped cream and the white chocolate takes a bit of the edge off the espresso early in the morning. Making it even harder to avoid getting this instead of “regular coffee” is the price: $2.81.

However, as the weather gets warmer, I’ve found myself able to steer away from the many Starbucks locations, largely because something about a hot beverage in hot weather just seems contradictory to my soul. On rare occasions, I would spring for a “Venti Iced Black & White” (four shots, white chocolate, mocha syrup, milk, and ice in a 22 oz cup), but this is cost prohibitive at $4.65.

Now, Starbucks has thrown a monkey wrench into my plan for reduced spending in their store. They did this by introducing the “Iced Double Shot.”

Do not be fooled by the name. The only version that contains just two shots (which you would expect from the “Double Shot” name) of espresso is the strangely-named Tall size. The Venti (my personal favorite) contains five shots, and though the standard version contains the “classic” syrup (liquid sugar), they will substitute white chocolate at no cost. Adding insult to injury (and calories to the drink), one of my many barista buddies alerted me to the option of topping it with Half & Half instead of milk.

So why am I cursing Starbucks for this glorious, caffeine-laden beverage? I can answer that very simply:

$3.13

My older son and I made the following video on the Saturday of Father’s Day weekend. The local Kino group put this on, and at the last minute, we decided to give it a shot. Enjoy!

One of the interesting things I’ve noticed over the past couple of years is the number of people who come across my blog after searching for something like “words to son for graduation.” A few years ago, I published something I wrote for my son, “To My Son (at Graduation),” and this seems to be a common introduction to my blog for many readers.

My oldest just finished his sophomore year of college, so it’s a bit early to be writing to him in anticipation of his collegiate graduation. My younger son is about to finish his junior year of high school, so it might seem a bit early for that too. Instead, I want to share something that I have already shared with both of my sons, and it’s something I wish someone had shared with me, long before graduation day. It’s called “What You’ll Wish You’d Known,” by Paul Graham. Enjoy.

Here’s a sign that you’re not awake enough to get behind the wheel of a car and drive (in spite of the fact that I had already brushed my teeth, let the dog out, and put my laptop in the trunk):

Fortunately, I noticed that this shirt normally has a pocket on the other side.

So today, I get an update from Classmates.com, telling me about new profile pictures that various people from my high school have posted. However, when I log on, I’m greeted with this:

Just to clear things up, I am not presently a Mom, nor do I plan on ever becoming one. It does make me wonder… how difficult is it to use the gender variable in a social networking site. For some time, I’ve wondered how a site like Classmates.com can continue to exist, and the answer seems to be, “until the people who use it figure out that you can do everything that you can do there, and more, on Facebook.”

At least Facebook seems to have figured out that I’m not a potential Mom.

Last night, I decided to bring a PC online that had been an offline gaming system for a year or so. Naturally, I was quite excited to see XP SP3 available from Windows Update.

Much to my dismay, upon restarting, my machine went into continuous reboots. So I rolled back using System Restore.

Much to my surprise and pleasure, I noted that Microsoft had, apparently in response to several issues, like continuous rebooting, revised SP3.

Ah-HA! Victory is mine! I excitedly went back, redownloaded and reinstalled SP3.

And now?

Continuous rebooting. Again.

As part of some work I’m doing with my church, I’ve been recording audio of the relevant passages in the Bible for a given Sunday. Here are the three chapters that we’re using in April/May:

Matthew 5

Matthew 6

Matthew 7

Feedback is always welcome.

[Ed Note] In one of the auto-generated links below, “The BIBLE has a VOICE,” you’ll find links to “The Bible Experience,” which is a full dramatization of the Old and New Testaments. Clearly, as one guy sitting in a recording room, operating the recorder myself, I’m not trying to reproduce this. I wouldn’t begin to try. If you’re looking for an intensely dramatic reading, where the reader tries to take on the “voice” of the Biblical characters, then I recommend The Bible Experience. It sounds awesome. Here, I’m doing my best to “disappear,” and let the words themselves take on the drama. - Tim

From ABC news coverage:

Outside the courthouse, where satellite trucks lined the street, a man who said he was an FLDS father waved a photo of himself surrounded by his four children, ranging in age from an infant to about 9.

“Look, look, look,” the father said. “These children are all smiling, we’re happy.”

As I read this, my reaction was “I bet slave owners in the South said the same thing to people in the North.”

The events at the polygamist FLDS compound in West Texas have haunted me, and for several reasons. First, it haunts me that parents would allow their children to have their minds and hearts twisted the way that they have. However, I’ve also been haunted with questions about what Christians do that parallels some of the FLDS parents’ behavior in disturbing ways.

Forfeiting Your Right to Parent

As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, a very close friend of mine has said, “Any man can be a father, but it takes something special to be a Dad.” The same, of course, is true for mothers and Moms. However, we also tend to view the maternal bond as being somehow superior to the natural paternal one. Perhaps its events like those at the FLDS compound; or the news of the Austrian who imprisoned his own daughter in a cellar, and forced her to bear his children; or any number of other instances of paternal cruelty; but the last people we expect to harm their children are their mothers, and some of the first we expect are their fathers.

A perfect example of this is found in a related article from ABC News:

“What Texas has done is barbaric,” said Richard Wexler, executive director of the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform. “The worst thing you can do to these children is separate them from their mothers.”

Without going to much into the doubts that I have about Wexler’s NCfCPR, I have to ask, is separating children from mothers who have, at the very least, tolerated and allowed abuse, the “worst thing you can do”? If someone were forcing your daughter to engage in sexual activity at 13 years of age, what would you not do to stop them? I don’t think I’m exaggerating to say that I would give my life before I would sit back and allow someone to do something like this to a child.

What then, of the mothers who did nothing? Are they not just as guilty of complicity in this crime? In the Commonwealth of Kentucky, if I become aware of a child living in an abusive situation and don’t report it, I am criminally liable for not doing so. In effect, Kentucky has said (rightly, I believe) that I am guilty of allowing the abuse to continue, and am therefore a party to the crime. Should we not hold the mothers to this same level of accountability? Should we instead excuse their behavior because they nursed the children as infants, or because they weren’t physically involved in molesting the underage girls?

The response, quite naturally, is that the FLDS church members are simply exercising their beliefs. They fully believe that it’s healthy for an underage child to engage in this kind of sexual activity with an adult. By extension, they clearly feel that the girls are capable of establishing healthy emotional relationships, with the men involved and with the children they bear.

This is where, as someone outside the FLDS Church, I look at such behavior with disgust and a powerful sense of moral outrage. Clearly (to me) these children aren’t capable of dealing with the complexities of such decisions that have been thrust upon them, both by peer pressure and through the powerful influence of the adults in their lives. Children of this age obviously do not understand the powerful emotions, or understand the subtle complexities of relationships. They obviously haven’t reached the age of… the age of…

…accountability?

The Age of Accountability?

For Christians, the phrase “age of accountability” is one that’s widely recognized. When we hear this, we instantly think of the controversy that springs up when a child walks forward in a church service to make a “profession of faith.” Depending on the church, this age will vary, but among Southern Baptists you’ll see children from age seven and up making decisions without an eyebrow in the congregation being raised.

“Seven?”, you may ask. Yes, seven. I was nine when I did so, which in some circles, seems to be rather late. I have been in churches where meetings were held to determine whether or not to accept, for membership, children as young as five or six. Many of my Christian friends have children at this age, and those children are asking questions about salvation and “a relationship with Jesus.” This is not at all surprising, and is in fact quite welcomed by virtually all Christian parents.

In the context of the FLDS story, does this sound strangely familiar to you? It does me, and that’s why it’s haunting.

What is it about a “spiritual relationship” that causes Christians like myself to think that a child of seven is capable of dealing with its emotional complexities? Why would children of that age be more capable of dealing with those complexities than those that spring from a sexual relationship with another person?

As Christians look at the FLDS Church with disdain and disgust, and consider the behavior of the parents to be abusive and manipulative, do we miss the potential for our own actions to be just as manipulative? Are we guilty of “spiritual abuse” by not teaching our children to search for truth, but also to teach them to wait for such a time that they’re ready to appreciate everything that spiritual relationships involve?

Perhaps the members of the FLDS Church are afraid that if the girls were older, that they might choose to not marry 49 year-old men. Perhaps they might not choose to engage in that kind of lifestyle at all. Perhaps they would choose to think for themselves, instead of just falling mindlessly into behaviors that are so easily encouraged when a child is so young.

Perhaps Christians (like myself) are guilty of the same thing with spiritual issues.

[Ed Note]

One of the automatically generated links below, FLDS: Big Hate-Big Brother, contains an interesting rant about the actions of Child Protective Services in Texas, and their intrusion upon the rights of the parents. The blog author has apparently decided that the following comment from me is not worthy of approval (they have approved at least one other comment since mine was posted):

Funnier still that there seems no contempt here for the middle-aged men guilty of statutory rape of teenage and possibly pre-teenage girls. And similarly funny that the mothers who sit by and allow it to happen are vindicated somehow by faith.

This hardly excuses inaction for other ills, but it seems a bit odd that the “epithet polygamists” would somehow suggest that we (a society) should tolerate some middle-aged man having intercourse with, and impregnating, a 13 year-old girl. I guess I’m weird, but that doesn’t sound like “tolerance” to me… that sounds like what happens when nobody in the family wants to speak up about “Uncle Frank” molesting his nieces.

Yes… all very funny. - Tim

It’s 5:30 AM, and nature calls. However, as you enter the bathroom bleary-eyed, you note that the toilet is clogged. This is your first sign.

After a quick trip to another toilet to deal with the most immediate problem, you locate the plunger. Even in the stupor of less than 5 minutes of consciousness, you’re able to inspect the plunger and see the crack in the rubber that will render it completely useless. This is your second sign.

Not to worry, you have a “backup plunger” (a backup to deal with… uhm… backups). You grab the backup device, return to the scent of the crime, and begin plunging. Unfortunately, the backup device is slightly inferior in design to your primary plunger (which is why the other, now defective plunger, was the primary tool). As such, it turns itself inside-out periodically, and requires a bit of “toilet rim gymnastics” to get the rubber edge flipped right-side-out again.

And so you plunge away, and pause to pull and rotate the handle, flipping the business-end of the plunger back into the correct shape. But the final pull seems too easy, and that’s when you have the third and final sign that it will be a crappy day: