Did I not instruct...

We ran out of heat. Two months ago we paid almost 500 dollars for gas and it's gone. Eph that! My wife and I have decided to stick it to the man and heat the house the good old fashion way. Space heaters, and manufactured Duraflame logs that burn longer and cleaner than real wood. Naturally the office/soon to be baby room is the last room we heat. This alone has deeply affected my blogging production.

At church this weekend, my wife, Gorss, Gorss's wife, their driven son, and myself all sat through what I took to be a weak sermon. I can not speak for the driven Gorss family. The gentleman speaking had gone off to seminary school and come home for a weekend to deliver a lecture on, well I can't tell you. He went on for a while about Paul and the Thessalonians. His segue to each new topic was a maneuver I personally think is ineffective. He would go on for a while and then ask, "So what does all of this have to do with the image of God." When he turned that one on me, all I could say in my head was, "I haven't the foggiest." I suppose I'm being very critical of a job that I'm sure is very difficult and it's really not my place to do so. In all honesty I was trying really hard to get the most out of Mr. Ruddy's speech. I would have loved to ask him for a copy of the script that he read word for word from because I would have loved to read it as a paper to test its efficacy. His cadence, took all of these, pauses that needed no, pausing. And it was very consistent. I suppose someone’s cadence is really getting down to the nitty gritty but I thought it was so distracting. Have you ever heard Cornell West speak? It seems impossible to write that well let alone perform it spontaneously. Mr. Ruddy did give forth a good effort to break up his speech with a joke about how Paul didn't have e-mail, but he actually broke cadence for the joke and I think he caught the crowd off guard. Gorss was the only one who laughed. (I don't know this for sure) I still didn't give up I kept trying to really bear down on the message. But when he referred to Imago Deo or the image of God, all that repeated in my head for the rest of the sermon was,
"imago DEOOOO000ooo...,
imago Day-ay-ay OOOO000ooo...,
Daylight come and me wan go home."
If my eyes happened to meet the guest speakers after the sermon I had planned on suggesting it. This has happened to me before, where I've met the preacher face to face at the coffee table. You should be prepared to say something about the sermon from the end of the sermon until the car.

So what does all of this have to do with the Oscar's? Well I'll tell ya. Ever notice, (this is always a segue to someone’s attempt at comedy) how you watch the Oscar's but you only end up voting for the one movie you've seen. It's funny when the category for Best Male Performance in a Comedy is announced and my wife and I both agree that Phantom of the Opera should take this one home, hands down.

I saw Phantom of the Opera. Here is the usual sequence that takes place when you tell this to someone.
"Hey, I saw Phantom of the Opera last night."
"I heard it was terrible."
"Funny, I thought it was really good."
"Well, I'm not really a fan of Andrew Lloyd Webber's music."
"Yes he is often criticized."
"Have you seen the musical?"
"I have see..."
(abruptly) "I SAW IT, at the Pantages theatre in Toronto. I would never see the movie though."
"That's too bad. It's really the Best Male Performance in a Comedy"...etc.
I don't think you have a deep or profound understanding of classical or operatic music if you think that Phantom sucks. I think that this is the intended goal. I saw it a bunch of times and I loved it every time. It's a great story and the music is great and it isn't cool to say that it sucks. I've yet to hear a good reason that Andrew Lloyd Webber is awful.

I'm all out of gas, and speaking of things I'm all out of...

(put segue here)

I saw I heart Huckabees this weekend too. What a funny movie. There was some sort of seguing between Mark Wahlberg and Minnie Driver but I lost it somewhere. Mark Wahlberg's character in this movie is so good. You just want the movie to be more about him. He kind of steals the show, as does Minnie Driver in Phantom of the Opera. She plays Carlotta. When the little chorus girl says, "Christine Dia can sing it sir," I was all like, "No let Carlotta keep singing it. She's funny."

And so, in closing, I'd like to leave, you with these useful boxes. Box one; I'm all out of heat. Box two; I was critical of the church sermon. Box three; something about the Oscar's because it's trendy. Box four; Phantom and The Huckabees, and Box five, well, Box five I have, chosen to, remain, empty.