Wonderful Wednesday: The public art of Joshua Callaghan

Check out this amazing work by Joshua Callaghan.  He likes to paint public objects to appear like the items which are standing behind them.  Which translates to urban camouflage.  I'm a fan.

I'm planning to paint our house to look like our back yard (don't tell Krista).

Three things I've learned while watching late night television with my infant daughter

1) Montel Williams is a really big fan of blankets with sleeves.   Every time I flipped around to him, there he was, talking about how great a blanket with sleeves could be for me.  I shifted underneath my precarious blanket wrap, baby in one arm and remote in the opposing hand and decided that I would not buy one of those around the time that the husband and wife said that they bought two to wear in bed so that they would never steal each other's covers.

2) Oscar Wilde spent two years in prison for "gross indecency." I had no idea.  But some movie from the 1960s knew all about it.

3) Apparently young singles in my area like to call "chat lines" while wearing skimpy clothing, lying around in their living room with candles, or while lounging in a hot tub.  Kids these days... go figure. 

Winners of the Holy BIble: Mosaic drawing

Congratulations to Ruthie Johnson and Erica Cheslock, the winners of the Holy Bible: Mosaic lot casting for free Bibles.  I've contacted Ruthie and Erica and their Bibles are flying through the air... right... now.

What's that?  You want to know how I chose from the more than 50 entries to come up with Ruthie and Erica?  Fine then.  I assigned each person a number (those who tweeted, commented and entered other ways got extra numbers) and then used a random number generator to choose between them.

While at the random number generator I got distracted by the coin toss feature, in which you can choose coins from throughout history to toss.  The way I figure it if you're going to toss a coin you might as well toss a Aurelian  Bronze Antoninianus from the Roman Empire.

Anyway, if you didn't win a copy, you can still purchase a copy.  It's a really fun, helpful Bible.

Eavesdropping with Matt (Episode Thirty-Eight: I Keel You)

Dedicated to the old man with the flat blue tooth and the two middle-aged sisters all drinking coffee together at Peet's coffee in Beaverton, Oregon.  And yes, I can identify you old man.  I'M WATCHING YOU!!!!

Old Man: -- think that the best solution is to kill him.

Sister 1: What does that solve in the long run?  The police would eventually trace it back to you and then you would go to jail for the rest of your life.  I just don't think that's a good solution.

Old Man: I don't think the police will do anything about him, so the best solution is to kill him.

Sister 2: I would get his address from google maps and then watch him for something that would get the police's attention.


How the police will find him out in the end if he ever did something drastic (sounded like the sisters eventually talked him out of this): turns out you shouldn't discuss murdering someone in crowded coffee shops and so on.  Who knew?

Your true colors are beautiful,,, like the wind

Little known fact about me: I have little names that I use for different outfits I wear.  For instance, I have these brown shorts that I sometimes wear with a striped brown polo shirt.  I call this my "prison outfit" because Krista once said that the striped shirt reminded her of something a prisoner would wear. I also have a pair of blue shorts that I wear with a grey shirt, and I call that my Civil War outfit because it is like the Union vs. the Confederacy, except that the Confederacy is in the North and the Union in the South.  I also have these khaki shorts that I wear with a green shirt.  This is called the green shirt outfit.

But my entire system was thrown into disarray when someone mentioned on Monday that the blue shorts of my Civil War outfit were grey.  In fact, they walked up to me and called me "Grey Man."  I asked Krista later in the day what color my shorts were and she confirmed that we could, at best, call them "formerly blue."  I was stunned.  No longer could I call this outfit my Civil War outfit.  Unless I was happy with the a-historical representation that  the Confederacy was winning out over the Union!  I don't think so.

So now I need a new name for the outfit.  Here are some of the choices.  Feel free to leave your suggestions or preferences in the comments to this post:

1) Grey Man. 
2) The outfit formerly known as the Civil War outfit.
3) The Antebellum South.
4) Portland Skies (Winter)

That is all.

Wonderful Wednesday: Jung's Red Book

Carl Jung kept a secret diary where he tried to break down the barrier between his conscious and unconscious mind.  His family has been keeping it private for decades, and it's being published next month.  Jung feared that people would think he was insane if they read the book.  Check out some of his drawings.

Here's an article about the process of getting the book and publishing it, and more details about the strange journey this book has taken to print, the slavish devotion of some Jungians and the Descendants of Jung.

You can purchase the The Red Book here.  Only a hundred bucks (!).  I'm pretty interested to take a look at this bad boy, but think I might have to make a date at the library.

Free Mosaic Bible here at BHR!

Great news! You may recall me gushing over the artsy beauty and theological richness of the new NLT Mosaic Bible-- a Bible that has devotionals built around the church calendar with art, creeds, quotes and hymns from across the centuries and around the world. Well, thanks to the generosity of one of its editors, David Sanford, I have TWO COPIES TO GIVE AWAY THIS WEEK!

I thought we would do it "random drawing style" to increase the appearance of casting lots. What could be more Biblical than that? I'll be doing the drawing this Friday night sometime, so get your entries in before Friday at 5pm Pacific.

You can get your name entered into the drawing up to four times. Here's how to do it:

1) Send me your email address using the form below. This DOES NOT sign you up for a newsletter. Don't believe the hype that will tell you otherwise. This just allows me to get your email in a way that keeps internet robots from learning your email address and telling you that you won the British lottery. 

Mosaic Bible drawing

Enter your email address:

Enter the 5-digit code displayed:

2) Leave a comment on this post. I will read all the comments, so feel free to try to sway me by saying things like, "A wild dog tore my own Bible to pieces and I really need this because it also got my wallet and my internet connection." But since this is a drawing it won't really matter. Make sure I have a way to contact you if you leave a comment.

3) Tweet about the giveaway this week. Be sure to include a link to this post, and if you want to make sure I see it you should probably put @mattmikalatos in your tweet, too.

4) Put a link to the giveaway on your blog. Again, you'll need to let me know about this (though I should see the incoming links).

So, there you have it. Four ways to win. I'll do the drawing on Friday, so the winners should be hearing from me this weekend. Good luck and may whoever is causing this terrible storm that is causing our ship to sink be the one to draw the shortest lot.

Dr. Horrible at the Emmys

In case you missed his appearance at the Emmys, here's Dr. Horrible's evil genius on display:



And if you have a higher standard of evil and don't think this video cuts it, I would suggest you check out this link.  Mooohwahhahahahahaaaaaa!

I knew it

Win a Free Mosaic Bible

Those of you who follow me on twitter know that I got a free copy of theHoly Bible, Mosaic a few weeks back. 

It's a really cool Bible that has quotes, creeds and artwork from throughout church history in a series of devotionals that follow the church calendar.  You can see more about it here:
Holy Bible: Mosaic NLT 

Anyway, I saw today that another (more generous) blog is having a contest where YOU can get a free copy of the book yourself if you enter.  Here's a link to that contest.  I think you have to enter by Monday, though, so you better get to it.

Also -- I know I've directed a few of you to blogger review programs for Thomas Nelson and NavPress, and I recently discovered Tyndale's, also.  Here's a link to that.

Alright kids, have fun and go win yourself a Bible (ah, what a special moment of church history we live in that we can raffle off Bibles).

The Traditional Airport Post

Yesterday, Krista and I flew Horizon.  Two events of note:

Wanda Gets Grounded.  A woman we later learned was called 'Wanda' came onto the plane and took a seat in the row ahead of us.  Then she got up and moved to the back.  Then a cop came on the plane and said, "Wanda, we need you to step off the plane." 

"Why would you do this to me?" Wanda asked.  "I'm just trying to get home."

"Step off the plane and we'll talk about it," the officer said.  Then they went back and forth for a while.  Why would you do this to me?  Step off the plane.  But why would you do this to me?  Step off the plane.  And then Wanda stepped off the plane, leaving all of us to make us stories about why she was removed.

My theory: Drrrunk!

Krista's theory: Wanda did something bad.  Then possibly snuck onto the plane.  This is one of the rare moments where Krista's invented history for another person is more dramatic than mine.


Missionary Aviation Fellowship.  We overheard the young lady behind us talking and realized she's a missionary that will be joining our friends Matt and Sharon in Slovenia.  Of course Krista and I are missionaries.  And the lady across the aisle from the missionary behind us seemed awfully familiar with a variety of missions organizations.  This is very strange when you consider the small percentage of Christians in Portland, that so many of us on the plane were missionaries.  Maybe that's why they took Wanda off the plane... she was a missionary and she was skewing the percentages on the plane.

In any case, when we got off the plane I saw this bumper sticker: IN CASE OF RAPTURE THIS PLANE WILL HAVE PLENTY OF LEG ROOM.

Wonderful Wednesday: DRAGON BOAT!

I'm not sure why so many of the Wonderful Wednesdays have to do with Japan, other than the fact that Japan is more wonderful than other countries. Check out this dragon boat:

Imaginary Jesus at the US Open

Keen eyed BHR correspondent Ken Cheung sent in this note and the picture on the left:

"I found Jesus at the us open ... he is married to kim clijsters."








P.S. I am a big fan of puns, but if one more sports writer says something about Clijsters staging "The Mother of All Comebacks" I am going to stick my fist into the internet to send them some electronic justice.

Imaginary Jesus Cover Art

Here it is at last -- the official cover to Imaginary Jesus!  The fine folks at Tyndale sent several rough drafts of possible covers to me back in July, and the early version of this cover was by far my favorite.  It made me laugh, and I love the haphazard look to it, like someone just took a sharpie to a guy and made him look like Jesus.  So, I'm pleased that this is the cover that was eventually agreed upon all around.

The cover was designed by Beth Sparkman, who sent me this behind-the-scenes note about the cover design:  "This image just jumped out at me as being so far out, and then when I scribbled the beard and hair on it with a half-dried up marker it got even more bizarre! But I thought it fit the wildness of the book so showed it to Nancy [marketing director at Tyndale] and Sarah [Tyndale acquisitions editor]. The rest is history. . ."

The picture should show up in places like Amazon starting next week.  You can preorder Imaginary Jesus
on Amazon and they will give you the lowest price between now and the release date in April!

Notice also the official tag line... brought to us by the ridiculously clever Sarah Atkinson.

Hope you enjoyed this little sneak preview. Now go out there, get a sharpie, and deface some posters.

Wonderful Wednesday: Zombie Bunnies!

Today's Wonderful Wednesday takes us to the land of handmade zombie bunnies. AAAAH! They live! They are so cute! And deadly!

This Song Is Stuck In My Head

And  I don't care because it's a great song.

Leave me alone, strange old man

I was sitting in my car minding my own business, with the AC on, reading a newspaper.  A rap on the window startled me and I looked up to see an old man making the "roll down your window" sign.  Since I was in a public parking lot I didn't think much of it, so I rolled my window down.

He said, "You need to keep your window rolled down."  I just stared back at him, trying to figure out what made him in charge of windows in this particular parking lot and, yes, why he could possibly care.  "Carbon monoxide," he said.  "It's odorless, tasteless and invisible and when your car is running it can come up through your floorboards and kill you.  So you need to open your windows if you're going to sit out here with your car running."

I couldn't think of what to say so I said, "Okay, thanks."  When he walked away I rolled up my window.  Then I thought, Really?  Am I at risk when I am at a stop light, then?  I should have asked him.

I wondered if I should be worried about dying every time I sat in the car with the windows up and AC on.  But then I started thinking about his description of carbon monoxide: odorless, tasteless, invisible, deadly. I suddenly realized he wasn't talking about carbon monoxidea at all... he was talking about iocane powder!  Fortunately, I've spent the last several years building up an immunity to iocane poisoning.

Take that, old man!

An Open Letter to the Twitter Skeptic

Dear Twitter Skeptic,

You know, I'm sick and tired of hearing you say that twitter is no good, that it's rotting our minds, that it can't hold anything of value.  I think, honestly, that you are repeating (RTing?) criticisms you've heard from other people.  There are plenty of great, worthwhile twitter accounts that make people's lives better.

I know you are a skeptic.  But I think that if you will look at this one twitter account you will see its potential.  So I beg of you, take five seconds and take a quick look at this twitter account.

Thank you, Twitter Skeptic.  Now that you life has been changed forever by the beautiful Twitter sentiments on that page, I think we can both agree now that Twitter is full of wonderful things and must be embraced fully.

Sincerely,

Matt Mikalatos

Wonderful Wednesday: Plaid

This guy made a plaid book when he was given the assignment to come up with the moment that he first "chose creativity."

How about you? When did you first choose to be creative?