My friend Ben Pries is getting married tomorrow. I finished my best man speech today. I give it tomorrow. I was sweating bullets for a bit, but then I found the answer. If you are ever in a pickle to find a speech for a wedding, do what I did and google “wedding speech”. You will read the same speech over and over (because they are all the same) until you realize that it’s really not as hard as you are making it. I did not follow the format though. I came to the realization that I can write something just as good, if not better than the crap on these sites. Mission Accomplished.

Congratulations Ben and Shannon. May God Bless You with health, happiness, and a baby someday that Loa can play with.

Say what you will about his shady past, about how you would never leave your kids with him or whatever. I don’t care about him paying money to a kid to settle out of court. I don’t care what he did. Michael was never charged. The man was an icon. The man started a movement in music that has yet to be touched. When I was a kid, my mom asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, and I kid you not, I looked her dead in the eye and said, “Michael Jackson”. Michael Jackson raised the bar, and everytime he came back, the bar got higher. Michael Jackson set the standard. Michael Jackson is the standard. Michael Jackson will always be the King of Pop. RIP MJ. You continually inspire the brown kid and for that I thank you.

At staff meeting we had an interesting discussion about search engines and the statistic of the #1 searched item in Porn of some kind. Wayne Park and I began to discuss how people find our sites, because due to the beauty of wordpress blogs you can see searches that led people to your site ( it don’t think blogspot has this feature, at least it didn’t when I was on blogspot before I switched). Anyways, wayne said because of a blog entry he did about Song of Songs and marriage, he gets a lot of people looking involving “sex with my wife”.  Eugene Cho had discussed this same issue. He gets a lot of people seaching for “Asian women”.

So, me? What are people looking for when the stumble across the brown kid? The most popular one is “Douchebag”.

People warned me about it, but i didn’t believe them. But it happened. It came like a thief in my ice cream. I gained weight. I gained weight in a big way. Some call it daddy fat and others call it baby fat, but i call it fat. I haven’t weighed myself, but my before Loa was born I got down to around 210. Now I am guesstimating i’m hanging at around 230. And so, I introduce the Summer of Change.

Summer of Change is a way for me to reflect on different areas of my life: Physically, Spiritually, Mentally, and Artistically. So with that I introduce you to (and invite you to join) the Summer of Change.

Welcome.

One of my blog friends asked me about the newer hate speech bill passed and how it will affect the church, as the democrats were the ones who passed it (I flew my democrat flag pretty high during the elections). I’ve been thinking about this for some time. In fact, check the date on his blog here and you’ll see how long (and what I am talking about).

I guess the gist of the Hate Speech Bill is that any speech against Gays will be a federal hate crime. If this is true then pastors speaking out against homosexuality are fearful that they could be arrested for their sermons on the abominations of homosexual behaviors.

In a nutshell here are my two cents that took me forever to come up with:

What about all the sermons that are blatantly against other religions? The sermons that speak out against Islam post 9/11?  What are we to do with these sermons? Are these not as bad as sermons against homosexuality? These types of sermons are still going on as well. Therefore, I don’t believe that we will see any pastors being arrested in the near future. Unless there is some kind of dramatic reaction from the church (i.e. violence), this bill is being blown out of proportion and will probably just be something that we will recieve as spam from our friends in our emails.

I love sunday on memorial day weekend because we get to see who didn’t wear sunscreen on saturday. Every year this happens. Every year it’s funny. I love the smell of sunscreen too. It reminds me of late spring-summer.

I wear sunscreen almost everyday. I read somewhere that pacific islanders are more prone to melanoma. I don’t know if this is truth or theory but I’m not taking chances.

Seriously made me laugh.

I read this today and laughed. If you are not familiar with Danger Mouse, he is a wonderful producer who worked with people like the Black Keys, Beck, and is one half of Gnarls Barkley. Perhaps one of his more infamous things is when he produced the Grey Album, a mash up of Jay-Z’s “The Black Album” and the Beatles “The White Album”. Genius work, I must say.

So anyway, Danger Mouse is back in the news after his latest release “Dark Night of the Soul”. He sold it with a blank CD-R inside instead of a CD. Why? Apparantly in fear of what EMI would do. From what I gather, they can sue him after his whole Grey Album ordeal.

So what are fans to do with a blank CD-R? I guess download the album from a site somewhere else and burn a copy. It is times like these that I get excited for where music is headed. I read that Green Day did the same thing a few years back, but the king of this is Trent Reznor. If you have 15 minutes, watch this YouTube Vid below from the guys from techdirt.com . It will blow your mind if you are a music geek like me…

Thank you Eugene Cho for putting into words what I’ve been thinking for a while.

I appreciate it.

It’s interesting how relationships change when we find out the dirtiest part of someone. I have a customer who comes in everyday at Starbucks. They get the same drink and pastry, we have extensive conversations on the day or our week, and we talk about things we have in common (i.e. music). The other day, somebody told me that this customer was a sex offender. I didn’t write them off, but I did wonder. Am I supposed to treat them differently? As a Christian, I’ve come up with the answer of no.

I look to the thief on the cross and I remember that we don’t know his crime or what he did, and Jesus treated him no differently than the other guy mocking him on the other side. I think that this is a challenge that faces us as Christ followers, is accepting the person (that clich’e of loving the sinner and hating the sin fits well here). Though the crime is utterly repulsive, and they may deserve death in the eyes of society, what are we to do in the eyes of the Kingdom?