New York, New York...

Beautiful city...

~Stumbled: blogs.wsj.com/photojournal/2010/08/30/awake-in-the-sleeping-city/ ~

Ashes Snow Love

~Stumbled~

Exhilarating

Stumbled across this while listening to 'BRAIDS'. It absolutely blew me away. The song was 'Native Speaker'. I strongly recommend you listen to that song while watching this video.. Actually I'm forcing you to listen to that song while you watch this. Gave me the chilly willies!

~Stumbled~

Song of the Day (#26)

I think I might of found my new favourite band. They're Canadian too, which is so awesome. To be honest with you, I don't know many bands from Calgary, but going to school in the Okanagan, I now can say that I know A LOT of people from Cowtown. This band represents Calgary well though. I was speaking before of music that can move you to the core and after listening to four songs by these guys, I can seriously say they're my favourite band. The band is called BRAIDS and they're relatively new, but something tells me they're going to be pretty big. Enjoy!

Plath Heart - BRAIDS

Song of the Day (#25)

As a aspiring accordion player, I have to give it up to this guy. I guess I have to give it up to Michael as well...

Billie Jean - Scott Dunbar

Forced Perspective...

A cool idea...

~Stumbled: http://www.instantshift.com/2010/08/24/88-brilliant-examples-of-forced-perspective-photography/ ~

Happiness

Whoa buddy! It's been forever since I written here... It really seems like a Skype chat with a friend who lives abroad, who you haven't talked to in a long time. Just really awkward, but good, and needed nonetheless. Where do I begin though?! You're probably wondering why the title is 'Happiness' and that would be because I really wanted to use this clip from 'The Pursuit of Happyness'.

No, it's actually because I might be the happiest I have ever been in my entire life, or maybe in a long time. It's something I should be nervous about though.. well, I am nervous, but super stoked as well. For the better part of half a year, I've been pursuing (like Will Smith) a job. As of a couple days ago, I got the job! Some of my friends have gotten jobs too, so it's all around a great time. Have to say though, there were times in the stretch leading up to the decision where I didn't know if I would get the job. What's the job, you ask? Well, right after my first year of schooling comes to an end, I will be embarking on a three month adventure, living in the bush, and treeplanting! I know, I know, it is no cake walk by any stretch. Trust me, I've been researching for a long time now, and this WILL be the hardest thing I ever do. It just feels so good to know that I will get some source of income this summer, a good source of income at that. Maybe, just maybe, I will get my ass on traveling finally! Slow and steady, Tim!

My friend Thom has started a gathering of sorts with a few guys. It's not really a study, just a hang out with prayer, and encouragement and all that jazz. We had our first meeting today actually and it was so so so good. I really felt God putting the value of family/friendship on my heart, and It just was one of those surreal moments. Just walking out of Simi, and feeling the warm (Yes, I said warm. The weather has turned to gold here in the Okanagan, and that my friend is why I love British Columbia) wind on my face as I looked out onto the wide spectrum of colours in the sky, and on the valley mountains overlooking Kelowna. I might be up to my neck with work and studying but life is good man. I love my friends, new and old, Canadian and non-Canadian and I would be nothing with out them, and of course, God. I love love was a DTS sayings of sorts and it could not be truer for me. I absolutely love loving on people and I love love love taking pictures. Sooooo, I decided to make some gifts for some of my friends here at uni. and they're below :). Ah, life is amazing!

Song of the Day (#24)

This band hails from Brooklyn, New York and they're crazy good. I know I say that about every band, but that is why they're on here, isn't it? Anyways I don't have much else to say about this song. Anywho, enjoy!

Two - The Antlers

Proverbs 6 (NLT)

⁴ Don’t put it off; do it now!

⁶ Take a lesson from the ants, you lazybones.
Learn from their ways and become wise!
⁷ Though they have no prince
or governor or ruler to make them work,
⁸ they labor hard all summer,
gathering food for the winter.

Storm

When I stumbled across this picture, it had 666K views! I kid you not! Strange...

~Stumbled~

Song of the Day (#23)

I find my taste being steered towards olden day songs or songs that seem like they were from way back when. Whether it's the nineties, eighties or whenever, it's just old school. I think a lot of people like this genre now though because I found this song on We Are Hunted's top emerging songs... I really really really dig this guy, and I hope you do as well. He's from New York, and it kind of looks like he's Sri Lankan! In fact, he kind of looks like me! Got the 'stache and everything... A modern day Rexy Silva in the flesh! Anyways, enjoy...

Slow - Twin Shadow

Hockey

~Stumbled~

While it is true that no professional sport is as ill-suited for television as ice hockey — even in HD the puck can be difficult to follow, the speed and flow of line changes and late-rushing attackers are impossible to track, and the great, sweeping canvas of the ice must be rudely squeezed into a frame far too small to hold it — it is also true that no professional sport is better suited to live viewing.

Baseball spreads half its players across a pasture, hides the rest in dugouts, and then, proudly aware that it is the only sport without a time clock, proceeds apace as though its fans do not have one either. Football, played on one hundred twenty yards of distant field in increasingly canyon-esque stadia, packs twelve minutes of balletic violence into sixty minutes of game time and two hundred minutes of real time. Basketball provides near constant action and often intimate attention, but when scoring occurs every twenty seconds, only the last hundred or so seem to matter, and they often unfold over such an excruciation of stops and starts and fouls and timeouts and team meetings that even the most dramatic finishes unfold like athletic arrhythmia. Soccer drops one lost ball amidst twenty joggers, offers almost as many riots in the stands as goals on the field, and is beloved only by a loose affiliation of drunkards, Europhiles, and overprogrammed eight-year-olds who have yet to convince me I’m missing anything of interest.

But there’s something about hockey.

It’s a Canadian game, and many of the players have French or Russian names, so it’s not exactly an easy sell in the United States of Xenophobia. It’s the red-headed immigrant step-child of the American sporting world, dismissed, frowned upon, and condescended to by a great many people who do not understand it, have never seen it played in person, and are therefore in little position to judge. It barely registers on the radar of millions of so-called sports fans, with precious little print coverage and tv ratings somewhere between the abject boredom of bowling and the Kafkaesque torture of poker. It’s a bunch of guys in sweaters and shorts and ice skates, chasing a little rubber biscuit around a big, frozen parking lot.

But still. There’s something about hockey.

You feel it as soon as you walk out of the concourse and into the seating bowl; the chill rises off the ice and ripens the air, filling your lungs and radiating a cool, rousing energy throughout your body. You take a deep breath, then another, and step forward into the light, to behold a gleaming, glistening rink below. Freshly mown fields and polished hardwoods have their charms, but to my eye, neither can compare to the pure, pristine perfection of Zambonied ice. And it only gets better once the game begins.

The ice becomes the background, the playground, the blank canvas on which a dozen artists take their shifts and make their marks and paint their works of flowing, darting, crashing beauty. They skate with equal parts power and poetry, propelling themselves up the ice and back down again, starting and stopping and flashing, gliding and cutting and flowing, reaching speeds of twenty-five miles an hour suspended on just a few millimeters of metal. Imagine strikers, linebackers, catchers, and point guards all doing what they do; now imagine them doing it on ice skates, with bullseyes on their backs, in pursuit of a ball the size of your fist, as it hurtles toward and away from them and back at them again, at almost one hundred miles an hour.

Everyone plays offense and defense simultaneously; there are no quarterbacks and safeties, no pitchers and hitters, no formal turns and changes of possession, just two teams of guys (or gals) doing it all at once, moving from attack to retreat and back to attack in the blink of an eye or the flick of a wrist, when every inch and every second and every possible point, whether it’s scored in the first period or the last minute, could win the game. The action continues, fevered and frenzied, unbent and unbowed, until someone scores or someone breaks a rule, not even stopping for breaks or rests or substitutions; teams and players change on the fly, jumping over the boards and hustling back to the bench, always in service to the rhythm and flow, sometimes going two or three or four (or more) minutes between breaks in the action. It’s the fastest game on earth, and also the most frenetic.

Of course, hockey sounds almost as great as it looks. The swish and swooshof the skates cutting through the ice. The bang and boom of bodies crashing against the boards. The rattle of the glass shaking after a heavy forecheck. The tap-tap-tap of sticks on the ice, facing off or mucking in the corners or calling out for a cross-ice pass. The smack and whoosh of the puck rocketing off a stick blade. The thwack of the puck hitting the glass when it sails over the net, followed by the hard tap of it falling to the ice and back into play. Thegrunts, the whoops, the chips and shouts of players skating, checking, grinding, and shooting, barking orders to their teammates and yapping at their opponents. The blare of the horn and the wail of the siren when the puck crosses the goal line or pops the back of the net. The exultant roars andchants of the crowd that, 17,132 voices strong, quickly obscure both the horn and the siren. The great, giddy ringing in your ears that follows you out the door and onto the street and all the way home, sometimes even to the next morning, one more sensual reminder of this most sensual of games.

There is, the occasional Alexander Ovechkin outburst aside, no showboating, no trash talking, no choreographed celebrations; when a hockey player scores, he raises his arms and pumps his fists and gets a few hugs and helmet-taps from his teammates. When a player breaks the rules, he's sent to the penalty box, where he must sit alone for two or four or five minutes and watch his teammates pay for his sin by playing without him or any replacement for him — one man down, contemplating his punishment until his sentence ends, or the opposing team scores and ends it for him, teaching him another hard lesson in obedience along the way.

There are only two referees. There are no cheerleaders. There are no visits to the mound, no endless succession of pick-off attempts, no cascading pitching changes; the game has neither the time nor the patience for such piffle. There are no huddles, no audibles, no waiting for plays to be radioed into their empty helmets; plays and formations are called on the fly, run from memory, and most often improvised in brilliant bursts of athletic creativity. Each team gets only one timeout. There are fewer television timeouts in a whole game than there are in any quarter of an NFL game. The time between prime scoring chances is usually measured in seconds, not in innings or minutes or hours.

Hockey is home to grace and grit, to brains and brawn, to prolonged periods of brute force followed by sudden explosions of astonishing elegance. It elevates teamwork and celebrates self-sacrifice. It bestows an annual award for sportsmanship and gentlemanly conduct. It inspires awe and honors tradition and does both at once, at the end of each season, when its two best teams meet to win and hold and see their names engraved upon the most hallowed, the most regal, the most revered trophy in all of professional sports.

There is, indeed, a whole lot of something about hockey.

Something that, if you don't know, you should know. Something that, most especially, you should see and hear and feel at least once live and in person, at any arena in the country, where the boys of winter (and fall, and spring, and now even summer) ply their trades and prowl their ices with the energy and exuberance and maybe even the innocence of an overgrown bunch of kids who, with nothing more than a piece of rubber, a few friend,s and a frozen pond, believe they can take sixty simple, scintillating minutes and give you the elemental rush of the coolest, greatest, something-est game on earth.

-Chad

Come Fly With Me

Kyrgyzstan

- Yann Arthus-Betrand

~ Stumbled: http://justpaste.it/3ky ~

Proverbs 5 (NLT)

¹⁸ Let your wife be a fountain of blessing for you.

Proverbs 4 (NLT)

⁷ Getting wisdom is the wisest thing you can do!

¹⁸ The way of the righteous is like the first gleam of dawn,
which shines ever brighter until the full light of day.

²³ Guard your heart above all else,
for it determines the course of your life.

Proverbs 3 (NLT)

³ Never let loyalty and kindness leave you!
Tie them around your neck as a reminder.
Write them deep within your heart.

⁶ Seek his will in all you do,
and he will show you which path to take.

¹² For the Lord corrects those he loves,
just as a father corrects a child in whom he delights.

¹⁸ Wisdom is a tree of life to those who embrace her;
happy are those who hold her tightly.

³⁵ The wise inherit honor,
but fools are put to shame!

Song of the Day (#22)

There's something about female singers. I just find female voices more appealing then male voices. It makes sense, no? It's a rarity though... Most bands, or specifically lead singers, are men; well in my music scene anyways. I ain't talking about the Taylor Swift, Miley Cyrus, Justin Bieber music scene, but real music! I've come across an ALL girl band that kicks some serious ass. They hail from Los Angeles and I'd say they fall into that Californian surf rock genre like the bands, 'Best Coast' and 'Girls'. A genre I really really really like. I also love the use of bass in this song in particular. It really reminds me of Dubstep, that genre of music that is very popular right now. I mean EVERYBODY here likes Dub! Pretty rediculous if you ask me... The only similarity is that the bass is emphasized in this song, and bass is ALL that Dub is. Well, here is Warpaint!

Bees - Warpaint

Song of the Day (#21)

It all started awhile back while I was watching some television. I usually cannot stand commercials, but on the rare occasion, they supply me with some decent music. I happened to see a Honda commercial a ways back with a very very very nice cover of an oldie. Do you know the song, 'Getting to Know You' from the classic, 'The King and I'? Well it was that song sung by a Canadian unknown. The commercial just had that Japanese scarily talented robot, Asimo, prancing about, helping people; I thought the whole thing was quite creepy, but it was the song that was important, and yes, not the car! I looked it up on Youtube, and I was informed that it was recorded just for the commercial and it would not be released! Gutted! Fast forward awhile, to now, and the new Honda commercial comes out with a original song by the same guy. The song stirs something in me that not very many have ever done. I look it up, and same story! Ah! Trust me, I wasn't the only one looking! Good news though, they're actually releasing the song, and it will be sometime this month. What a change of fortune! Anyways, this Canadian unknown might make it big.. Definitely has the talent to!

Oh yeah! Like I said, the song hasn't been released yet but I have the commercial for you! Don't mind the sap, but enjoy the song!

Pinhole Sky - Nate Kreiswirth

Proverbs 2 (NLT)

² Tune your ears to wisdom,
and concentrate on understanding.
³ Cry out for insight,
and ask for understanding.
⁴ Search for them as you would for silver;
seek them like hidden treasures.
⁵ Then you will understand what it means to fear the Lord,
and you will gain knowledge of God.
⁶ For the Lord grants wisdom!

¹⁰ For wisdom will enter your heart,
and knowledge will fill you with joy.

²¹ For only the godly will live in the land,
and those with integrity will remain in it.

Proverbs 1 (NLT)

¹ These are the proverbs...

² Their purpose is to teach people wisdom and discipline,
to help them understand the insights of the wise.
³ Their purpose is to teach people to live disciplined and successful lives,
to help them do what is right, just, and fair.
⁴ These proverbs will give insight to the simple,
knowledge and discernment to the young.

⁷ Fear of the Lord is the foundation of true knowledge,
but fools despise wisdom and discipline.

⁸ My child, listen when your father corrects you.
Don’t neglect your mother’s instruction.
⁹ What you learn from them will crown you with grace
and be a chain of honor around your neck.

²⁰ Wisdom shouts in the streets...

²³ Come and listen to my counsel.
I’ll share my heart with you
and make you wise.

³³ ...all who listen to me will live in peace,
untroubled by fear of harm.”

What if Jesus Meant All That Stuff?

To all my nonbelieving, sort-of-believing, and used-to-be-believing friends: I feel like I should begin with a confession. I am sorry that so often the biggest obstacle to God has been Christians. Christians who have had so much to say with our mouths and so little to show with our lives. I am sorry that so often we have forgotten the Christ of our Christianity.

Forgive us. Forgive us for the embarrassing things we have done in the name of God.

The other night I headed into downtown Philly for a stroll with some friends from out of town. We walked down to Penn's Landing along the river, where there are street performers, artists, musicians. We passed a great magician who did some pretty sweet tricks like pour change out of his iPhone, and then there was a preacher. He wasn't quite as captivating as the magician. He stood on a box, yelling into a microphone, and beside him was a coffin with a fake dead body inside. He talked about how we are all going to die and go to hell if we don't know Jesus.

Some folks snickered. Some told him to shut the hell up. A couple of teenagers tried to steal the dead body in the coffin. All I could do was think to myself, I want to jump up on a box beside him and yell at the top of my lungs, "God is not a monster." Maybe next time I will.

The more I have read the Bible and studied the life of Jesus, the more I have become convinced that Christianity spreads best not through force but through fascination. But over the past few decades our Christianity, at least here in the United States, has become less and less fascinating. We have given the atheists less and less to disbelieve. And the sort of Christianity many of us have seen on TV and heard on the radio looks less and less like Jesus.

At one point Gandhi was asked if he was a Christian, and he said, essentially, "I sure love Jesus, but the Christians seem so unlike their Christ." A recent study showed that the top three perceptions of Christians in the U. S. among young non-Christians are that Christians are 1) antigay, 2) judgmental, and 3) hypocritical. So what we have here is a bit of an image crisis, and much of that reputation is well deserved. That's the ugly stuff. And that's why I begin by saying that I'm sorry.

Now for the good news.

I want to invite you to consider that maybe the televangelists and street preachers are wrong — and that God really is love. Maybe the fruits of the Spirit really are beautiful things like peace, patience, kindness, joy, love, goodness, and not the ugly things that have come to characterize religion, or politics, for that matter. (If there is anything I have learned from liberals and conservatives, it's that you can have great answers and still be mean... and that just as important as being right is being nice.)

The Bible that I read says that God did not send Jesus to condemn the world but to save it... it was because "God so loved the world." That is the God I know, and I long for others to know. I did not choose to devote my life to Jesus because I was scared to death of hell or because I wanted crowns in heaven... but because he is good. For those of you who are on a sincere spiritual journey, I hope that you do not reject Christ because of Christians. We have always been a messed-up bunch, and somehow God has survived the embarrassing things we do in His name. At the core of our "Gospel" is the message that Jesus came "not [for] the healthy... but the sick." And if you choose Jesus, may it not be simply because of a fear of hell or hope for mansions in heaven.

Don't get me wrong, I still believe in the afterlife, but too often all the church has done is promise the world that there is life after death and use it as a ticket to ignore the hells around us. I am convinced that the Christian Gospel has as much to do with this life as the next, and that the message of that Gospel is not just about going up when we die but about bringing God's Kingdom down. It was Jesus who taught us to pray that God's will be done "on earth as it is in heaven." On earth.

One of Jesus' most scandalous stories is the story of the Good Samaritan. As sentimental as we may have made it, the original story was about a man who gets beat up and left on the side of the road. A priest passes by. A Levite, the quintessential religious guy, also passes by on the other side (perhaps late for a meeting at church). And then comes the Samaritan... you can almost imagine a snicker in the Jewish crowd. Jews did not talk to Samaritans, or even walk through Samaria. But the Samaritan stops and takes care of the guy in the ditch and is lifted up as the hero of the story. I'm sure some of the listeners were ticked. According to the religious elite, Samaritans did not keep the right rules, and they did not have sound doctrine... but Jesus shows that true faith has to work itself out in a way that is Good News to the most bruised and broken person lying in the ditch.

It is so simple, but the pious forget this lesson constantly. God may indeed be evident in a priest, but God is just as likely to be at work through a Samaritan or a prostitute. In fact the Scripture is brimful of God using folks like a lying prostitute named Rahab, an adulterous king named David... at one point God even speaks to a guy named Balaam through his donkey. Some say God spoke to Balaam through his ass and has been speaking through asses ever since. So if God should choose to use us, then we should be grateful but not think too highly of ourselves. And if upon meeting someone we think God could never use, we should think again.

After all, Jesus says to the religious elite who looked down on everybody else: "The tax collectors and prostitutes are entering the Kingdom ahead of you." And we wonder what got him killed?

I have a friend in the UK who talks about "dirty theology" — that we have a God who is always using dirt to bring life and healing and redemption, a God who shows up in the most unlikely and scandalous ways. After all, the whole story begins with God reaching down from heaven, picking up some dirt, and breathing life into it. At one point, Jesus takes some mud, spits in it, and wipes it on a blind man's eyes to heal him. (The priests and producers of anointing oil were not happy that day.)

In fact, the entire story of Jesus is about a God who did not just want to stay "out there" but who moves into the neighborhood, a neighborhood where folks said, "Nothing good could come." It is this Jesus who was accused of being a glutton and drunkard and rabble-rouser for hanging out with all of society's rejects, and who died on the imperial cross of Rome reserved for bandits and failed messiahs. This is why the triumph over the cross was a triumph over everything ugly we do to ourselves and to others. It is the final promise that love wins.

It is this Jesus who was born in a stank manger in the middle of a genocide. That is the God that we are just as likely to find in the streets as in the sanctuary, who can redeem revolutionaries and tax collectors, the oppressed and the oppressors... a God who is saving some of us from the ghettos of poverty, and some of us from the ghettos of wealth.

In closing, to those who have closed the door on religion — I was recently asked by a non-Christian friend if I thought he was going to hell. I said, "I hope not. It will be hard to enjoy heaven without you." If those of us who believe in God do not believe God's grace is big enough to save the whole world... well, we should at least pray that it is.

Your brother,

Shane Claiborne

-Esquire

Read more: http://www.esquire.com/features/best-and-brightest-2009/shane-claiborne-1209#ixzz19pLMH8mw