A Piper Cub Lands in Philistia

I want one of these and I don’t even hunt.

HT: Ken Davis

Uber-blogger and Canadian Tim Challies gives his perspective on Sarah Palin and the hub-bub surrounding her.  He looks at the issues both from a political standpoint and from a Christian standpoint.

Most of it is serious, however, my favorite part (at the end of a long week) was when he characterized Palin as being “undoubtedly a better shot than Dick Cheney!”

(Don’t bother with the comments — they start out with the clown that trolls Tim’s and JT’s sites, and probably don’t get any better.  Tim often attracts commenters that disagree with him, but on the rare occasions that he goes poltiical, things go really weird.)

“Mom just mentioned us. I think we’re supposed to stand up. C’mon guys, stand up!”

“Well, I’m standing up.  Hi, Mom!!”

There’s this moment, too.

HT to JT for the video part.

Here are 5 very cute reasons that Mark Driscoll can’t take himself too seriously.

Did you like the bumper music in my last podcast? I don’t mean “like” as in “I had to run out and buy the album”, but “like” as in “it didn’t make my ears bleed too much”. I actually created that myself online with JamStudio.

Unless you count clarinet in junior high and high school, I have no instrumental talent whatsoever, but with JamStudio, I don’t have to.  I played with the tool for about 15-20 minutes just getting familiar with it, and then created that little ditty in 5 minutes (most of which was spent finding the instrumentation that I liked best).

Basically, you give chord progressions (some musical knowledge is helpful), pick up to 8 instruments, each with dozens of riffs, and the ability to mix the volume on each.  You can set the tempo, and even change the key on the fly.  They’ve even got some sample artists, where the instrumentation and riffs sound like that artist.  I’m not very familiar with a lot of their samples, but the stuff created when you pick U2’s Joshua Tree sounds just like something that’d be on that album.

Most of the features are free, but for $10/month you get a bunch of extra riffs and skip-free MP3s.  This latter issue would be important if you wanted things to sound really good.  The nature of the web-based tool will cause some skips or slight delays now and then.  I had a few that I cleaned up in an audio editor in a couple minutes, but it’s still not perfect.

There’s a video tutorial on YouTube that describes this better than I can.  Note that the tutorial doesn’t always distinguish between the free stuff and the subscription stuff.  But there’s not much that isn’t free.

This is a fun toy for wasting lots of time online.  But it also can be a good tool for the aspiring songwriter with “no instrumental talent whatsoever”, like someone we know.

And in case you’re curious, here’s everything that went into my “song” (this is how it looked with all 4 instruments going):

A good Christianty Today interview with Andrew Adamson, director of Prince Caspian. No fear of spoilers if you’ve seen the first movie (The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe) and the trailer for Prince Caspian.

HT: Justin Taylor

From the guys that brought you the Micro$oft Surface parody comes a parody of the Nintendo Wii Fit.

HT to Kommander Krusty.

Today’s global warming symposium has been cancelled as the speakers are still shoveling their way out of their driveways.

(alternate title : Be Sure Your Spygate Will Find You Out)

It is reported that the Patriots applied for a trademark of the phrase “19-0 The Perfect Season” almost 3 weeks ago, before the AFC Championship.

Hope that application didn’t cost too much.

Read this story today and thought it was fascinating. Apparently someone misplaced a camera and the folks who found it tracked them down via the photos on it. But it took a while, with a few dead-ends. Interesting little mystery.