We were born to be loved...

Two minutes ago the CBS Orchestra lit into Kings X again. Just this very moment in between commercials they showed this artist who is painting a picture of Dave and Oprah during tonight's show and the band was going to town on the ending. Whoa! There it is again!

3D Dreaming

I found some software written by a guy on the Gold Coast of Australia that is actually marketed as a toy which lets one put together 3D models on a computer. There are various kinds of vehicles one of which happens to be the Rans S6 Coyote II which has caught my interest lately. The program is actually a very good tool to introduce the concepts of 3D modeling and animation in that it gives the user a great feel for 3D space and how models are built and it's a fun and easy format. For a somewhat more difficult
challenge, you can create texture map files in Photoshop and map them to various parts to create custom paint jobs. My first attempt at that is shown on these frame grabs. This little program is great fun. Kids will love it. There are also race cars, helicopters, a crotch rocket motorcycle and a cabin cruiser boat available. And if you happen to be dreaming of building a Rans S6, you can knock yourself out trying out paint schemes and then view them in 3D from every possible angle. Check it out at 3dkitbuilder.com

Guitar Love

I played one of these today. I sure did like it a lot. And so pretty. Maybe a replacement for the lost RGX-TT? We'll see.

How can this be?

Just this past minute, Paul and the band on the Letterman show played a Kings X tune as they went to a commercial. They were still playing it when the break was over. How can it be that a band with this kind of influence regularly plays to audiences of a hundred and fifty people or so in bars such as Amos' South End in Charlotte?

It happens that the tune the CBS Orchestra played tonight was the same one the originators were playing in this photo. If you've been to one of their show's, you'll know which one it was. BTW, I took this shot with a point and shoot camera - no telephoto lens. I was standing one body away from the front of the stage. Admission was maybe $10 at most. This is amazing if you're a fan, but has to be frustrating for these wildly talented guys who were named by VH1 as one of the top 100 rock bands of all time.

Branching Out

-o-o-

For more art from someone who can't draw, jump back a few months.

Or a few days.

Dream II

This is a Rans S-6S Coyote II. It's similar in many ways to the Kitfox, but there is a major difference: you can still buy a kit for this one. Yes, I think one of these would do very nicely. Dream ON!

More Faculty Meeting Doodles

Starters

Our Faculty

I’ll preface this by saying that its probably common knowledge among trained educators; no doubt the stuff of Pedagogy 101. Not having had the benefit of learning how to teach before actually stepping into the job, this kind of thing comes to me through observation. So, here is one:

Teaching is like starting a car. The teacher is the starter. Information is the gas. Wisdom is the air that mixed with information yields a mixture of knowledge that is worth something neither is alone. No information leads to continued ignorance. Too much floods the cylinders and you are further away from the goal of motivating down the road than you were before you began.

Back in the days when manual transmissions were common and before safety interlocks to protect us from ourselves, it was possible to put a car in gear, turn the key, and cause the car to limp forward a bit powered only by the starter using battery power. If one tried to head down the road this way, either the battery would give out or the starter would burn up in short order. But stir a cold motor to movement using a starter, make the parts begin to move in their internal dance without requiring any actual work from them just yet, then feed in just the right amount of fuel mixed with the right proportion of oxygen to make it volatile, and provide a spark at just the right moment – then, VROOM! You have power. Keep feeding some fuel and warm the engine to its new found status of moving and sucking fuel and producing power and soon it will be ready to motivate the vehicle down the road. As long as there is a supply of fuel to be had, it will continue. This power will not only far outstrip the starter’s original ability to get the car to move forward a little bit, it will also recharge the battery to provide juice for the starter to do it’s job again in due time.

A single semester in a class or even four years of college can come nowhere close to providing enough education to send a person through life on any path any more than a little starter motor can propel a car down the interstate. The best one can expect from any formal education is a start in the ability to ingest and use knowledge and feed one’s self through a lifetime of learning. Maybe I can motivate, inspire, model, demonstrate, or otherwise coerce my students from a static state to some kind of momentum, but they must take off and fly by themselves. Education is a lifelong process. We should probably award diplomas at funerals instead of at “commencements.”

Ginko

There is a large ginko tree next to one of the women's dorms on our campus. At this time of the year the leaves turn a blaze of yellow and it just begs to be photographed. Today the sun was bright, the temperature cool, and the sky deep cobalt. I really had very little to deliver to my photography class and when I mentoned this to a colleague in passing he suggested I take everybody out to photograph the ginko. Perfect idea. I made it an optional activity for the second half of the class. Most of them opted out and went off to use the windfall of time some other way. But a handful came out with me, enjoyed the beauty of the tree, and actually learned some things about photography they hadn't picked up before. The weather pattern this year has the tree not quite as blazing in color as it's been in past years. Some of the leaves are still a bit green and already many are falling off. But the remarkable beauty is there in a more subtle way. This is sort of a natural version of the idea of what I talked about a while back re: an artist backing off from the extreme corners of the envelope to deal more with subtlety of tone. Here are a few tastey images:

End of the Spear

I’m hoping this will become a household phrase in a couple of months. Yesterday I got to attend a sneak preview of a movie by this name. It's a feature film treatment of the Auca/Waodani story involving the martyrdom of five missionaries in Ecuador in 1956. It is arguably the most well known missionary story of the twentieth century, perhaps ever. In ’56 when the missionaries went missing, it hit the mainstream press in the USA big time. The aftermath of the slayings was presented in Life Magazine in many pages of images by the famous photographer Cornell Capa. The story struck deep into the hearts of many Christians and fomented a swell in recruits for missionary service. Countless people stepped up to take the places of the slain men. Nate Saint and his legendary inventiveness and skill in bush flying has been an inspiration to every missionary pilot since. But it has been so long since the widespread telling of the tale that there are several generations of people alive now who have heard little or nothing of it. The film will be released in theatres January 20 and will mark 50 years since the five were killed.

Steve Saint, son of the slain pilot who transported the group to the remote jungle location, has basically been the keeper of the story all these years. He told me that he has constantly had folks come to him wanting to make a video or movie about the story. He said he always had reservations about these opportunities until this group came along. Something just seemed very right to him this time and he got the families of the other four men to give their blessing. I think his intuition and sensitivity to God’s timing was spot on. The results are very special. The film is really magnificent, as are the promotional materials. I think it sets a whole new standard for a Christian film. It's a new genre, really - a film that doesn't pull any punches spiritually but at the same time isn't preachy. It really does respect the viewer's intelligence by using cinematic literacy and not hammering on the obvious. It also doesn't try to be everything in one package - a strategy who's day is past, I think, at least here in the US. There is no invitation at the end.

The same production company also made a documentary called “Beyond the Gates of Splendor” that tells more of the story in interviews with actual people involved and covers much more of what has happened with the Waodani up to the present day. The documentary idea came out of expert recommendations that the story was really too big for a feature and would require two films to tell. The people charged with raising the money for production found this to be just too daunting a task, so the idea to tell the extended story through a documentary was originally meant to save money. But the strategy of the way they are using the two films together is a really innovative and great one. The documentary was intended to be an extra bonus item on the DVD of the feature. When it was finished (they did it before the feature) what they had was really a worthy product on it’s own and a candidate for it’s own theatrical release. It did have a very limited theatrical run and is on DVD now at Best Buy, Borders, Blockbuster, and probably some stores that don’t begin with “B.” The intent now is for Christians to have extra background and insight about the story with which to engage our culture at large when the feature comes out. I am hoping and praying it works splendidly. This whole thing is really a prototype project of this new company. Let’s hope it does well and they are able to go on to make many more such films. It could be a whole new day for Christian influence in our culture.

for info: www.endofthespear.com

for resources: www.daretomakecontact.com

25

When you're talking about years, 25 is a pretty big number. 25 years ago today, the most beautiful and wonderful woman in the world, after a string of far-fetched circumstances, perhaps under the influence of some magical spell, or maybe just suffering a complete lapse of judgement, walked down the aisle of a church, kissed me, and became my wife. To this day I am dumbfounded as to why she would do a thing like that. But, wonder of wonders, she not only did it that day, but she has hung around for all these years. "Hung around" is probably not the right phrase. "Hung on" is more like it as I've dragged her from south to north and back, and from one end of the country to the other and back again. At the start I couldn't promise much. I did promise her that life would not be boring. That is one of the few promises I've been able to keep. Good grief! Can one keep a promise too well? I think yes! We could all use a little bit of boredom, thank you. At this moment I'm looking across the room at my precious one's sleeping face. Maybe tomorrow she will read this. So I think I'll communicate across the room via the big wide internet:

Thank you for the 25 years my love. You have given me so much more than I deserve. I so dearly hope we will have 25 more together. I'll try to make them a little more boring. Sweet dreams. Tomorrow we'll get started on the next quarter century.

Undream

Earlier this week my friend blogged about having a dream that involved having a dream. Sort of like the "film within a film" script element. This morning I woke up and asked my wife about a conversation we had had during the night. I had been asleep and she woke me to tell me something. It was a bit unexpected so I asked her if I was really awake or was I dreaming this? She had assured me I was awake and emphasized what she was trying to get me to wake up and hear. She said, "no, you're not dreaming!" But I really was. Or she's really messing with my head!

Unhappy Landing

I just found out something very sad. A couple of weeks ago on Oct. 19th, after delivering over 4,000 kits, thousands of which are now flying, Skystar Aircraft, makers of the Kitfox line of kit-built airplanes, filed for chapter 7 bankruptcy. I've been wanting to build one of these airplanes for about 20 years. Looks like the kit with my name on it will probably never be delivered. The one good thing is that it never got ordered. There are probably a good number of people just like me who have waited and worked and saved and schemed much of their lives to get to the place to be able to build one of these wonderful machines and finally sent their money off to claim their long-cherished prize. But they will not get their airplane and likely will never see their money again. I can't imagine the pain being felt right now. I just hope the jigs and other tooling makes it's way to someone who will offer these magic airplanes to the market again one day. A dream that will probably never be able to be fulfilled is still a dream. You can hang onto it and cherish it no matter how unlikely it's fruition. A dream that suddenly becomes impossible is a death.