The water works were engaged a couple times recently, both football-related...

First as I read this article "Gainesville State high school football gets the best gift of all, hope" while on the road from NC to PA after Christmas and again while observing Browns and Steelers players gather at mid-field to pray together after the game on Sunday.

I was surprised to hear today that my alma mater Lipscomb University overcame a 21-point deficit to surprise the Indiana Hoosiers with a 74-69 loss on their home court this past Sunday (link).  Lipscomb's coach Scott Sanderson (son of Wimp Sanderson) said "[t]here is no question that this is the biggest win in the school history."  Maybe...but I'm not sure an early-season upset win over a struggling Indiana program not in its prime is without question a bigger win than their NAIA national championship in Kemper Arena in 1986.  I get it, though...you can hardly blame Sanderson if in the heat of the moment he might slightly exaggerate the importance of this victory after coming close to pulling off other upsets in recent years since moving from the NAIA to NCAA (e.g. South Carolina, Vanderbilt, Purdue, Kentucky).  Then today Lipscomb sent out a "Special Announcement" email to alumni with the headline "BISONS STAMPEDE THE HOOSIERS," and I started to think that we might be getting a little too excited about this win.  I'm reminded of the quote attributed to Landry, Paterno, or some other respected football coach regarding touchdown celebrations that are embarrassingly exuberant: "Act like you've been there before."

(h/t: Elrod)

30 Dec 08 Update:
"Special Announcement" Fail: the link in the email was broken so they had to send out a correction.

A few weeks back Elliot played several songs on piano at a crafts show at the Midland Center for the Arts. Here is Rudolph.

Not that I'm a huge fan of Rick Warren (though I admire his reverse tithing and work against poverty and A.I.D.S.), but it seems kind of lame that so many are complaining (link link link link link link) about Obama inviting Warren to give the invocation at his inauguration.  It reminds me of pro-life groups whining about Warren and Obama partnering to fight A.I.D.S.

Waldman explains why he respects Warren here: link

Update (17 Dec 08):

This firedoglake post (link) is exactly what I'm talking about.  To me, calling Warren a "warmongering torture apologist" is from the same playbook as saying that Obama supports infanticide.

Another update (17 Dec 08):

Raushenbush also doesn't have his knickers in a twist (link)

Update (18 Dec 08):

See what I mean: link

Tonight I watched Charlie Wilson's War (2007,R) (ScreenIt! Review).  From ScreenIt!:

A party-going congressman, a bitter and sardonic CIA case officer, and a wealthy Texas socialite set out to help Afghan rebels fight off invading Russian forces, all in the hope of stemming the spread of communism in 1980.

It was enjoyable enough and the subject of Afghanistan definitely had more resonance after reading Khaled Hosseini's books - but not too much else.  I give it 3 out of 5.

Last night I tried the new "name tags" functionality in Google's free photo management software (Picasa).  Here is a link to a description: link.  It goes through your photo collection and finds all the faces.  It groups the faces it thinks belong to the same person and and allows you to relatively easily assign a name to each face.  In the past I manually tagged photos in Picasa but gave up because it was so time consuming.  This is a nice way to do it quickly and semi-automatically.  It only works on photos you've uploaded to your web album, not the photos that are just on your local computer.  It's cool regardless.

For the benefit of all of the ladies, here is a link to a slideshow featuring photos of yours truly: link

I think I'm going to try to start documenting the occasions when I get choked up because those are special moments...

This afternoon I teared up as I listened to Frank Schaeffer do the same during his interview on Fresh Air as he related stories of his father's (Francis Schaeffer) struggle with depression including once when his father gave him a hug and told him that he felt like killing himself but was going to struggle on...in part because he loved Frank so much.

link

We've had about a foot of snow over the last few days.  The boys had a couple days off from school, and here are some photos from one of them.