anna nicole, we knew ye well... a little TOO well...

i had just about decided i didnt want to fool with this, seeing as how there have been more than enough posts on the subject. my favorite so far... "go and sin some more" by timmy brister over at provocations & pantings. but this isnt really about anna nicole smith, but rather the obscenely lurid coverage of her death and all that's gone with it.

i'm not a fan of CNN. i have respected and enjoyed fox news. i'm rather ambivalent about many of the other news outlets... print, broadcast or online. but to all i'd like to say, "ENOUGH ALREADY!!" as much publicity as anna nicole generated while she was alive (and without any hard stats to back this up) i really believe she's generated far more buzz in death. i know she was a pop culture icon, and as such there was bound to be more than a passing interest in the details surrounding her death, but i first had a notion to pursue this when i saw these 2 headlines at yahoo news on february 18: "embalming of anna nicole smith's body begins" and several hours later that day: "anna nicole smith embalming completed." was the world really on the edge of its seat waiting to find out when the formaldehyde was turned on and off? we didnt even get that much information at the passing of the likes of princess diana, ronald reagan or steve irwin for cryin out loud.

for better or worse, i decided to rant about the AFA first, and then i kind of lost interest in this... until that joke of a hearing down in florida, presided over by the extremely wacky larry seidlin, the "cryin' judge." even though he managed to cram one day of testimony into four, the main reason he probably did so much weeping is because his time in the limelight barely amounted to 15 SECONDS of fame compared to judge lance ito's 15 minutes of fame during the oj simpson trial. i have 2 words for judge seidlin: BOOK DEAL. although considering how quickly he'll fade from public view, it'll be more like a pamphlet.

i really dont understand what difference it makes where anna nicole's body decays anyway. i may be missing something here, but i did develop an aversion to gravesite visits back in my childhood when we used to go visit various grandparents' graves every sunday after mass. we'd stop and buy flowers... or flags if veteran's day or 4th of july was coming up... and we'd always have to kneel and pray. i understand that was a catholic thing (having to do with purgatory no doubt), but here's the deal... THERE'S NOBODY IN THERE! that wasnt my grandfather in that hole, and that isnt anna nicole in that refrigerator in the morgue. whether they bury her in texas, the bahamas or the front yard of the playboy mansion, i just didnt get why that was so newsworthy.

and that mother of hers... you never heard 2 words out of her while her daughter was alive and wrecking her life until it was way too late. but now she wants to make a public spectacle over her departed daughter's remains. and as long as the media enables these folks, they'll stay in the limelight, too. i dont claim to know her mother's heart or motives, and she may not be a publicity hound at all, but now is not the time to be fighting for anna nicole... the time for that has come and gone. hopefully, she'll put half the effort into being some kind of positive influence in her granddaughter's life.

a little confession time here... its been a long-standing practice of mine - since i became a Christian - to pray for celebrities, among them johnny carson, madonna and howard stern (not howard k. stern, companion and lawyer to anna nicole, but howard stern of radio shock jock fame). there's no way to catch them all, but i was aware enough of anna nicole smith that she should have been on my prayer list, but she wasnt. btw, i think many Christians have adopted an "us vs. them" mentality when it comes to hollywood, the music industry, politicians, etc. i remember a good friend of mine in northeast mississippi, who is an area director for an athletics-based para-church fellowship, who had a conversation with the head of a national "Christian family values" association who was organizing a march or rally against homosexuals in washington DC a number of years ago. my friend asked this man, who also happens to be an ordained methodist minister, if he ever considered praying for these folks. his reply was: "you pray for them, i'm marching against them!" for what its worth, to me its hard to dislike someone if you're praying for them.

the glimmer of hope in all this... when i read the comments on timmy brister's "go and sin some more" post, i came across a link to a very interesting video clip... anna nicole professing Christ as Lord and Savior back in 1999. she seemed rather ditzy, though more coherent than she was toward the end of her life... of course this touched off another firestorm of controversy in the subsequent comments, but i suppose we'll never really know anna nicole's eternal destiny this side of heaven, will we.

but back to my point ( i did have one, didnt i?). oh yeah... the major media outlets are fast losing any shred of credibility they may have once had, fox news (my personal favorite) included. if they'd quit giving these camera-happy wanna-be's the time of day, i think they'd all just go away, and maybe a little dignity could be restored to the whole death part of living.

in the meantime, i hope you'll join me in putting britney spears and her family on your prayer list (really). she's beginning to look for all the world like the next big post-mortem tabloid headline. what a tragedy it would be if that came to pass.

silent witness week... aka, shameless self-promotion week

i had several things i wanted to post about this week... then i checked my email and saw the latest american family association ACTION ALERT there in my inbox, and i just couldnt delete it and forget it. seems don wildmon has a new thing goin on... silent witness week. basing their idea on the famous quote by st. francis of assisi, "preach the Gospel always... when necessary, use words," AFA has minted thousands of buttons that proclaim: EASTER, HE LIVES!

here's the deal... during Holy Week (april 1-8), you're supposed to wear the button everywhere you go. you dont have to say a single word about Jesus.. the button does the "preaching" for you (thus the "silent" witness). further down in the action alert, bro don hopes your participation will bring opportunities to share the Gospel, but the point here is that they will know us by our buttons!

i have a couple of problems with this whole thing. first of all, what francis of assisi meant was that THE WAY YOU LIVE YOUR LIFE should be the silent witness to the lost. we are supposed to live our lives in such a way that sets us apart from the rest of the world. it's called holiness. but of course we should remember that many church-goers have no clue about what it means to be holy, or that we're even supposed to BE holy... so lacking that, we should wear a button i guess.

the second problem - and this is the thing that really got me - was that the buttons and magnets are not only festooned with 3 crosses and a slogan, but lest we forget who sent us out to be silent witnesses in the first place, the web address of the american family association is emblazoned across the bottom. somehow, to me, this cheapens the whole endeavor even further. if the focus is Christ, and being Christ-like, why are they attaching their web address? my attention was immediately drawn to this part of the button, even though its quite a bit smaller type than "EASTER, HE LIVES!" or the 3 crosses.

dont get me wrong... back when AFA started, i believe they took a difficult stand when it was very unpopular to do so. they were a lone voice crying out against the erosion of morality in the media, and they are to be commended for that. but some of the stuff they get involved with these days, it just doesnt make a lotta sense to me. maybe i'm being as nit-picky as the folks who sat through their church's super bowl parties waiting to be offended by prince, but something about this stunt just wont let me stand by and be a silent witness.

the case for praise bands

well, i'm a contemporary worship kind of guy, although i've always thought choirs are nice for things like Christmas and Easter cantatas. but i stumbled across some startling new information that leads me to believe that choirs are far more sinister than i ever realized! it seems that a prerequisite for choir membership is to be some kind of busybody... or at the very least, you have to care a whole lot for thy fellow choir-teer. however, this sort of behavior can be detrimental not only to choir participation, or even church attendance, but also to one's desire to even continue on as a part of the human race!

at least your typical praise band member apparently isnt all up in your kool-aid... being the disaffected artist types they are. they show up for rehearsal, come to church and play their little hearts out, and then they pack up their gear and they're outta there. however, these choir types are always having some sort of fellowship or another, and doing things like sharing prayer requests and even praying for each other. they seem to even go so far as to check up from time to time to see how their afflicted co-warblers are coming along. this just seems to be waay too much attention for some folks though, and i believe for the sake of the church in general, and the future of the fellowship of the brethren, its time for choirs to go the way of pump organs and broadman hymnals.

if you think i'm full of it, just check out this pitiful tale of caring and sharing gone wrong...

02/12/07 addendum:
lest anyone be offended by the accompanying photo, i boosted it from choir-robes.com... really! but if anybody out there has any idea what THATS all about, please feel free to drop it in the comments. it just seemed to be an appropriately goofy pic to go along with the goofy article.

let's go crazy...

well, it was inevitable. i guess unless the NFL and the networks book the mid-south boys for the super bowl halftime show, some folks are just not going to be happy. and even then, somebody will have something to say if there isnt a piano and organ up there on stage with them.

seems there's quite an uproar over prince's guitar solo during "purple rain" as he closed out his halftime performance. we had a super bowl party at the cottage, but i didnt get to see the show because we ate supper during halftime, and i dont allow the TV to be on during meals. anyway, when i first saw the story on yahoo news this morning, i was really surprised because i hadnt heard anything about a controversy in the days following the game. apparently many are taking offense because, for dramatic effect, a large, back-lit opaque sheet came up from the stage floor while prince was shredding his solo, and in typical guitar slinger style, the neck of his guitar was thrust upward from approximately waist level. the resulting giant silhouette, according to the offended masses, was enough to make even "bob" of enzyte fame, envious.

i skipped on over to you-tube and viewed the video and, well gee, i'm sorry, i dont get what the commotion is all about this time (late-breaking news... i was going to link to the you-tube video here, but it has been removed due to a copyright claim by universal music publishing group). i did happen to be tuned in in '04 for janet jackson's wardrobe malfunction, and i sat there rather dumbfounded, trying to figure out if i really saw what i thought i just saw. and janet and justin's lame attempts of explaining that one away were really insulting, and i thought the outrage was more than justified. i'm not so sure that CBS knew in advance, and i think the financial burden for that should have rested squarely on j&j, but that's water under the bridge now.

this time around, i think at least partly because of what happened in 2004, there are folks who just watch to see what they can nit-pick anymore, and they really had to stretch for this one. in the words of one commenter on you-tube "sometimes a guitar is just a guitar." now dont get me wrong, prince has done and said a lot of things in his career that were more than offensive, and one article i read said something to the effect that many a church group that was hosting a super bowl event got more than they bargained for during "purple rain." i submit that given prince's reputation, they should have turned the TV off long before the very last song in his set if they were so convicted about watching him. i dont propose to tell any church group how to organize their super bowl outreaches (although many of these things arent outreaches at all, they're more like desperate attempts to have some kind of turnout among their own members at their evening worship services on the first sunday in february), but all the ones i know about have some sort of devotional or message during halftime. prince sure wasnt going to be holding a church service on the 50 yard line, but i digress...

i've never been a really big fan of prince, although he had a few songs in the 80's that i liked... "purple rain" being one of them. in fact, the handful of his songs i did care for were all from the "purple rain" album. nobody can deny that he is a vastly talented performer, and much to the surprise of many, a really excellent guitar player. and as far as i could tell from the video clips, thats all he was guilty of sunday... playing the guitar solo to "purple rain" like a musician caught up in the moment.

i am a huge third day fan. i've probably been to 12 or more of their concerts since '95. its really like going to a giant church service with the best worship band you've ever heard. but they also are passionate about their music, and they rock like nobody's business... and they get caught up in the moment just like any artist that's passionate about their music. and i'm not trying to compare what prince does to what third day does (other than it's music they're passionate about), but i got to thinking... if some of these hyper-sensitive whiners who didnt know third day from three dog night ever got a look at these guys in concert, i bet they'd pitch just as big a fit as they did sunday night... the photos below: third day band members tai anderson (in sleeveless shirt) and brad avery (with singer toby mac). a guitar is just a guitar, right??