"I've heard people reference Jack Kennedy before, Mr. Vice President..."

If you didn't watch the Vice Presidential debate, well, then - and it sounds weird to say this - you missed out. Let me put my vote in now that we permanently do away with the standard distant podiums, and have the candidates sit in close proximity for every vote. Ideally, they would both share a single porch swing next time. Or maybe a seesaw.

My thoughts during the debate went from, "boy, Biden is really tearing into him at this debate" to "boy, if Biden doesn't stop interrupting him, he's gonna undercut everything." Biden had Ryan beat at every turn, but he couldn't help himself, and his confidence started to play as arrogance, and became a bit bullying. I posted during the debate that I thought Biden had won the debate but would pay for it in the polls among independents. Since most of my Twitter followers are either dyed-in-the-wool conservatives, or liberals who believe they are the only free-thinkers in Texas, nobody agreed.

I am not much of a political wonk, but my prediction proved true, if not very dramatically so. While the overall country picked Biden as the winner, undecided voters leaned Ryan - and the very next day, Romney had another surge in the polls.

What stuck with me most, though, was the most famous soundbyte from Thursday's debate - Biden snidely calling out Ryan after he mentions Jack Kennedy. "Oh, now you're Jack Kennedy?"

This is about an hour into the debate, and tempers were clearly wearing thin. Neither of these guys sound that pleasant:

Here's a quick transcript if you didn't hit play:

RYAN: You can cut tax rates by 20 percent and still preserve these important preferences for middle-class taxpayers.

BIDEN: Not mathematically possible.

RYAN: It is mathematically possible. It’s been done before. It’s precisely what we’re proposing.

BIDEN: (laughing) It has never been done before.

RYAN: It’s been done a couple of times, actually.

BIDEN: It has never been done before.

RYAN: Jack Kennedy lowered tax rates, increased growth.

BIDEN: Oh, NOW YOU'RE JACK KENNEDY?

The more I think about this, the more it annoys me. Because, for the quote of the night, this is an inane response.

Biden kept saying that something didn't exist, and when Ryan gave an example, he taunts him for comparing himself to the example, then sits back with a look that clearly says, can you believe this guy? But the logic on Biden's side is not sound. There's a point to be made about Democrats and finances that Biden could've probably jumped into. After all, when Republicans reference Democrats in regard to taxation, that's a softball pitch. But instead, when Biden heard "Jack Kennedy", he saw a chance to make his own Lloyd Bentsen comment, regardless of context.

But the problem is, Ryan didn't compare himself to Kennedy, even implicitly. He just responded to Biden's taunts about the historical accuracy of his statement. And, while I have no idea if Jack Kennedy actually lowered taxes and increased growth or not, the debate from that point has to hinge on whether or not Jack Kennedy cut taxes in that fashion, and if so, does that mean you should vote for Romney and not Obama?

But Biden's retort is founded not on the conversation that they're having, but a mythical conversation that is clearly not taking place at the time of the comment.

Take it out of a political context. Let's say that the conversation was about something else where someone was refuting a point you made.

GUY 1: You can go to the library and pick up a book about a famous person from India.

GUY 2: There have never been any famous people from India.

GUY 1: There have been people from India who were famous. It’s definitely happened.

GUY 2: (laughing) There have never been any famous people from India!

GUY 1: There've been a couple, actually.

GUY 2: There have never been any.

GUY 1: Mahatma Gandhi was a famous India figure, known worldwide.

GUY 2: Oh, NOW YOU'RE MAHATMA GANDHI?

The whole thing unravels the further you push it:

GUY 1: ...and that's why we have a surplus of purple vegetables.

GUY 2: There have never been any purple vegetables.

GUY 1: There are purple vegetables.

GUY 2: (laughing) There have never been any purple vegetables!

GUY 1: There are a number of them, actually.

GUY 2: There have never been any.

GUY 1: Eggplants are available in every supermarket.

GUY 2: Oh, NOW YOU'RE AN EGGPLANT?

I don't suppose it really matters. By Monday, people will have forgotten the debate entirely, which is a shame, because there was a moment there I really thought the two were going to come to blows right there at the desk.

By the way, weight routine or no, I'd still give Biden two-to-one odds in that fight.

Review: The Perks of Being A Wallflower

The Perks of Being A Wallflower is an adaptation of the 1999 teen novel of the same name, the sort of earnest tome that inspires kids to proudly brand themselves “wallflowers” in a way that has nothing to do with Jakob Dylan, and that forced hundreds of high schoolers to learn what “epistolary” meant. Many high schools now assign the book as required reading, which is likely partly a statement on its quality and partly a way of subtly reminding students of the existence of the school’s counseling department.

I myself was fortunate enough to not be forced to read the book, which tends to negatively color one’s memories of a work (I’m looking at you, “Great Expectations”), but instead stumbled across it in college – a little too late to really fall in love with that kind of novel, certainly, but not too late to develop a real fondness. My memories of the book are vague, but warm. But I was a little uncertain when I heard that it was being adapted to film.

First of all, adapting books is tough. Adapting young adult novels is tougher. Adapting novels written in the first person in a series of letters to an unknown friend is tougher still. Adapting novels written in the first person in a series of letters to an unknown friend concerning love, pain, death, suicide, mental illness, sexual trauma, and the perils of high school into a bright, accessible teen movie seems nigh-impossible.

But then word came out that the book’s author, Stephen Chbosky (the pronunciation of whose name I’m quite uncertain of), would be adapting the novel into a screenplay himself.

Good news. My heart is warm.

Then word came out that Chbosky would be directing the film himself.

Not good news. I feel a chill across my back.

I’ve seen movies by first-time directors. Some of them – a few of them – are great. But that’s usually because they’re by people who’ve spent a lifetime preparing for that moment. They’ve been making short films in their backyard, done their dues as a commercial director, or spent decades on movie sets as an actor or technician. Chbosky doesn’t have any of that experience. He’s the guy who wrote the film adaptation of “Rent.”

So… why is this movie so good?

I’m serious, guys. It’s good. Real good. Amazingly good.

It’s not just that the performances are strong – though they are, and we’re absolutely going to get to that in a moment. It’s that the film is so well paced, so well knit together. There’s none of the haphazard, I’ll-know-better-next-time clunkiness that’s the trademark of new directors. It’s visually strong in a way dozens of major Hollywood directors never achieve. It’s tense. It’s magnetic. It’s… moving. How the hell is a director this inexperienced so sure-handed?

I don’t have any idea. I’d love to know. Certainly some of the credit has to go to the cast, though by the same token, you have to give Chbosky credit for getting such good performances out of his actors.

I know everyone always says it, but most of a movie like this really is casting, and Logan Lerman, the lead, and Ezra Miller (whom I’m just realizing now is perhaps the saddest possible version of the “gay best friend” ever) are both exceptional here. Lerman is frail and honest and small all at once, and he plays broken with real, accessible feeling, keeping the audience from that sense of distance that so spotted Joaquin Phoenix’s performance in The Master (I’ll review The Master when I’m good and ready. Which may be never).

The specter of his almost certain breakdown haunts the movie – Lerman is wound so tight that you know his newfound happiness can’t possibly last, and yet you root for it to anyway. His quiet is nicely counteracted by Miller’s ebullience, who sells the hidden melancholy with tiny breaks and almost imperceptible voice cracks. He’s ever bit the rising star We Need To Talk About Kevin hinted he would be, and the two are an unconventional, yet terrific pairing. If anyone wants to sell a studio a movie featuring Lerman and Miller as a pair of emotionally fragile rookie cops with something to hide, I can promise you that you’ve already got my nine dollars for an opening night ticket.

I would say that what you think about Emma Watson depends on what you already think of her, but I don’t think that’s true. Watson is forever Hermoine, and while she’s very good in this movie, she’s probably not the caliber of actress to ever really break away from that role. But there’s a reason why it’s so easy to buy her as the dream girl – she has a quality to her, a magnetism that jumps off the screen. It’s the reason why she’s one of the most searched Google terms of the past few years, and it’s easy to see why Lerman’s character is so instantly smitten.

The cast is rounded out by a collection of name actors seemingly far too famous to be in a movie this tiny: Dylan McDermott, Kate Walsh, Nina Dobrev, Melanie Lynskey, Mae Whitman, Joan Cusack - and most notably, Paul Rudd, who eschews comedy and drops his trademark cheek, and yet somehow seems more comfortable and compelling than I’ve ever seen him before.

Young Neil is also in this movie. He's not too big to be in it. But I just wanted to mention it.

Often times, already knowing the source material can dull a movie’s edge, but the imbalance at the center of Wallflower’s plot – the mental instability Lerman’s character struggles with – only makes the movie more tense for those in the know. There is a bomb at the heart of this movie, and fans of the book are no more privy to its timer than newcomers, only to the stakes of its explosion.

Movies about books like this never get made, and if they do, they always get their guts ripped out and replaced with dick jokes and radio-friendly pop songs. Go see a movie that centers its characters around their love of Smiths’ b-sides and then tries to sell that film to teenagers. The world’s a better place for it.

Forbes named Houston "The Coolest City In America." No, I'm not kidding.

It probably didn’t raise many eyebrows wherever you are, but Forbes had a headline recently that caused a bit of a ruckus in my neck of the woods. The magazine had a feature rating the “20 Coolest Cities,” and Houston was ranked first.

Now, Forbes’ ranking was a shock, but it's an understandable choice. When a magazine is trying to make some noise and move some issues, they don’t put the obvious choice atop the list, they try to find an unusual pick that’ll garner some buzz. So New York City gets dropped to the bottom of the top ten, and a city occasionally deemed “the armpit of Texas” moves into the top spot.

But the problem with the piece is that whenever you put a financial magazine in charge of figuring out what’s “cool,” you’re going to get an awfully dusty answer. The piece’s creators are fairly thorough: they give a laundry list of statistics for each city, including “diversity index,” “unemployment percentage,” and “net migration.” Because, after all, when you’re trying to track something’s coolness, the first thing you ask is “how do I quantify this?”

Here’s the Forbes quote:

“Houston is known for many things: Oil, NASA, urban sprawl and business-friendly policies.”

When I moved down here, it was all I could do to get people to stop talking about how much I was going to enjoy Houston’s business-friendly policies.

“But the Texas city deserves to be known for something else: coolness.”

Nope.

“Houston has something many other major cities don’t: jobs. With the local economy humming through the recession, Houston enjoyed 2.6% job growth last year and nearly 50,000 Americans flocked there in response… combine that with a strong theater scene, world-class museums and a multicultural, zoning-free mashup of a streetscape and you have the recipe for the No. 1 spot on Forbes’ list of America’s Coolest Cities To Live.”

Only Forbes could possibly write an article on coolness and get to a city’s zoning policies by the third paragraph. They see Houston, which, since it’s mostly shielded from the recession by the oil industry’s financial halo, got fifty thousand people to uproot and move here. Houston must be the place to be! By this thinking, people must have packed up their belongings into oxcarts and rode the Oregon Trail with the sole purpose creating some sort of hipster mecca. “Sure, we’ve all got dysentery, and Ezekiel lost his foot to that rattlesnake bite*, but at least out here I can find people who really share my interests in farming, and not dying of exposure. We can stay up late and just vibe.”

*my knowledge of this section of history may be a bit over-influenced by the Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium.

“Cool” is defined by Merriam-Webster’s dictionary as “very good; fashionable.”

This article reads like every freshmen term paper ever written.

“We sought to quantify it in terms of cities, ranking the 65 largest Metropolitan Statistical Areas and Metropolitan Divisions (areas that include cities and their surrounding suburbs that are defined by the U.S. Office of Management and Budget) based on seven data points weighted evenly.”

Because if you weighed those data points unevenly, people would just lose their minds.

Wait, let’s actually think about this for a second. If all those points are weighted evenly, then things like “Arts & Culture Index” and “Recreation Index” are weighted right alongside “Diversity Index?” Milwaukee just got way less cool than it already is.

So, let's let conventional wisdom return for a moment and take a look at this. Let’s really break down this list for a second and see if any of the cities we ranked in front of deserve to beat us (spoiler alert: YES).

20. Denver, Colorado

Oh my god, yes. Obviously Denver is cooler than us. Denver has mountains. Denver still has hippies. People go to Denver to go snowboarding for a weekend and don’t come back for three years. If you say to someone,  “I ended up living in Denver for a year after college,” they will nod knowingly and try to size you up to see if you have any weed on you. If you say to someone, “I ended up living in Houston for a year after college,” they’ll tell you, “you know, you’ve really got to stick with an engineering job for two years at least for it to look good on a resume.”

19. Austin, Texas

Everyone in Texas knows that Austin is the coolest part of Texas. It has the University of Texas. Sixth street. SXSW. Drafthouses. Film companies. Art companies. Art film companies. “Friday Night Lights” was shot there. We get it. Austin’s the place you move to when you don’t know what to do with your life but you think you might be a creative person, despite a wealth of evidence pointing to the contrary.

18. Minneapolis, Minnesota

We might have Minneapolis beat. Texas, as a state, is undeniably cooler than Minnesota. Minneapolis is just cool by Minnesotan standards. It’s a lovely town and I’m sure I could find lots to do. The people there are probably polite on an otherworldly level. But it’s whiter than most polar bears and they probably also refer to soda as “pop.” It’s not cooler than Houston.

17. Bethesda, Maryland

Oh, hell yes we’re cooler than Bethesda. It’s Bethesda. Or, “the greater Bethesda-Frederick-Gaithersberg region.” It snuck onto the list by virtue of its infinitesimal unemployment percentage, which is not the best way to land on a “coolness” list.

I don’t know anything about Bethesda. It sounds like a place that rich politicians retire to. I already resent it with a Holden Caulfield-like intensity.

16. Oakland, California

If we have a chance against any Californian city, it would be Oakland (okay, Sacramento. We could beat Sacramento). Oakland has no buzz. It’s a bay town. It has the Raiders and the A’s. It has a good music scene. Does that put it ahead of Houston?

Yes, it does. Think of it this way: if someone told you “check out this new band, they’re fresh out of Oakland!” or “check out this new band, they’re fresh out of Houston!”, which one would you want to listen to?* I thought so.

*possible exceptions for the following genres: country music or gansta rap performed by white people.

15. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

The fact that Philly is in Pennsylvania drags its score down, but no, we’re not cooler than Philadelphia. Philadelphia has heaps of history, a rival city not far to the north, and a definable cuisine. I’ll take the Liberty Bell, Eagles and Phillies games, and cheesesteaks over the San Jacinto monument, Texans and Astros games, and Tex-Mex. And I dig Tex-Mex and don’t even like cheesesteaks.

I mean, if Nicholas Cage was here hunting for more national treasure, I don’t even know where we’d send him.

14. Baltimore, Maryland

Oh, we’re cooler than Baltimore. I’ve seen “The Wire.” No one wants to go there. There’s dead people on the wharves like, every day.

13. Fort Worth, Texas

Interesting. Dallas is separated from Fort Worth for this issue, leaving Fort Worth to stand on its own two feet. Dallas is going to make this list, right? Because Dallas is also cooler than Houston.

Not Fort Worth, though. Not by itself. Just picture someone saying to you, “hey, let’s go down and hang out at the Fort Worth stock yards!” See? You’re already bored with Fort Worth.

12. Chicago, Illinois

Last year, 22,000 people migrated out of Chicago, surely fleeing its legendary uncoolness.

This ranking is so ridiculous it's obscene. Chicago is obviously cooler than us. Chicago has a cool nickname. It has deep-dish pizza so good no one else even tries to make it the same way. It has tons of good sports teams. And the Cubs. It has politicians so shady there’s one murdering someone in broad daylight right now, probably with a tommy gun. Everyone knows what Chicago is. Yet somehow it’s down here with the Bethesdas of the world.

11. San Antonio, Texas

Texas’ second-coolest city also fails to make the top ten and ranks incredibly low on the Arts & Culture index, despite the fact that thousands of people flock there to gape at the Alamo daily. It has history so cool people fly in to see it. Not to mention the Riverwalk, and whatever that thing is that’s exactly like the Space Needle. San Antonio has culture. You can sense it when you walk around the place. The only thing you can sense when you walk around Houston is a vague aroma of urination, which is likely why there’s no one else out walking besides you.

10. New York, New York

Let’s take a minute and look at the picture Forbes used to indicate what New York looks like:

Could you find a worse picture to indicate New York? I bet you couldn’t. I bet the web guy at Forbes was so worried that readers would see the New York skyline and their heads would snap back as they suddenly realized, “wait, is Houston supposed to be cooler than New York?” Jay-Z and Frank Sinatra sang about New York. If Houston was going to choose someone to write a song about it, we’d have to pick Kenny Rodgers.

I’m not even convinced that’s New York there. That honestly could be Bratislava.

9. San Francisco, California

By their own metrics, Forbes listed San Francisco with an Arts & Culture score of 98 out of 100. Recreation? 99 out of a 100. Dragging it down? A median age of 41. The average citizen must be so depressed! “So, there’s tons to do and see, but you might run into, like, A PROPORTIONALLY LARGE AMOUNT of old people. Do not want, you guys. DO. NOT WANT.”

I have a buddy who moved to San Francisco a couple months back, and he’s spending essentially all his money on rent, because the markup on property is so insane. You can move to Houston for a bag of nickels. There’s a reason for that.

8. Orange County, California

I’ll answer this one right after I watch a new episode of the CW’s new hit drama, “The Houston.” Texas… Tex-AAAAAS…. Here we CAAAAAAAAAAHHHHMMMME!

7. Boston, Massachusetts.

Let me put it this way, if you set “Cheers” in Houston, it’s no longer an old English pub/sports bar. Suddenly it’s either an upscale bar where you have to wear a tie and heavyset men in suits leer at the waitresses, or a grimy faux-club with a weird, rapey vibe. And no, absolutely no one knows your damn name. 

6. San Diego, California

“Man, I can’t wait until I get off this pristine beach, with its stylish downtown community and weather consistently in the mid-eighties, and get back to the land of business-friendly policies!”

5. Seattle, Washington

Intellectual vibe? Famous rock scene? Gorgeous mountain views and a crystal-clear ocean bay? Tons of local coffee shops? There’s a reason Seattle is a top-five destination for hipsters to gather and breed. In fact, Travel & Leisure just listed it as “the number one city for hipsters” (please don’t make me break down that list, too). No one besides Forbes and Oil Baron Quarterly have ever made us number one of anything. This city ranks decidedly higher than us.*

*This city’s high rank may be incumbent on you being a white person.

4. Dallas, Texas

I want to be clear: Dallas is cooler than us. It’s just not much cooler than us. Remember that Travel & Leisure hipster list from earlier? (and I promise, this will be the last point in which a connect coolness and hipsterdom) Dallas finished 35^th  – that is, last. Even Houston finished a vaguely respectable 26^th, behind such luminaries of hipster culture as Kansas City and Honolulu, and one spot ahead of Anchorage. Anchorage? Honolulu? If there’s even one hipster in either place, I’ll eat an entire jacket made of tweed.

That ranking is probably fair, but it doesn’t matter. Dallas feels wealthy. It feels like a destination. People in Houston drive to Dallas to shop or take long weekends. People in Dallas only drive to Houston if the Cowboys are playing there.

3. Los Angeles, California

Just imagine if Us Weekly was centered in Houston. “Haylie and Hillary Duff came back to visit their parents for the weekend!” “Stars! They’re just like us! Mike Jones visits the optometrist!”  “Is Lyle Lovett back together with Julia Roberts? No, he’s not!”

There’s a reason thousands of people packed a minor league stadium to watch a 50-year old Roger Clemens lumber to and from the pitching mound. We’re starved for any sort of celebrity at all.

2. Washington, D.C.

Okay, this ranking is insane, too. D.C. is not cool. It’s full of politicians. Politicians are not cool, with rare exceptions (circa-2008 Barack Obama being the most recent example). It’s full of gun violence. Gun violence is not cool. It’s built on a marsh. Marshes are not cool.

Still, there’s a mystique to D.C. All over the city, every restaurant, every coffee shop, every closed door could be concealing a massive, world-changing meeting. Is money changing hands? Are pork-barrel military supplies being promised? Dignitaries from every possible country are shuttled about behind smoked glass, with well-armed and besuited goons escorting them every step of the way. Things are constantly happening.

People in Houston still have posters up celebrating the fact the Super Bowl was held here. In 2003.

1. Houston, Texas

It looks ridiculous even seeing it here, doesn’t it?

While we’re at it, let’s review a pile of other American cities that are also cooler than Houston: Las Vegas, Atlanta, Miami, Miami of Ohio (which is not a city, I know, but its mascot is “Scoop the Redhawk”), New Orleans, Memphis, Nashville, Orlando (14-years-old and under only), Portland, both Gotham and Metropolis (but not Coast City, and definitely not Sub Diego), Charleston (summertime only), Asheville (ditto), San Jose.

Still, let’s not go overboard. There are a lot of cities Houston is a lot cooler than. They include: Jacksonville, Indianapolis, Milwaukee, Albuquerque, Kansas City, Wichita, Tampa, Tulsa, Omaha, Pittsburg, Fort Wayne, Des Moines, Buffalo, Waco, and any city in Ohio.

And, of course, Newark.

Why I'm Against The Red Sox Fire Sale, Even If I'm The Only One.

I sent this email to my dad, then realized I felt strongly enough about it to copy it over here as a post. Enjoy.

The problem I have with the trade is that people act as if we saved any money here. They think in terms of a salary cap: that now that we've gotten more money saved, we can use that money elsewhere. That's $250 million back in our pockets.

No, that's $250 million back in John Henry's pockets. And he can do whatever he likes with it, but he certainly doesn't have to spend it on this team.

 The acquisition of the Dodgers for $2 billion - and their sudden move to land talented, expensive player - may seem like a gigantic gamble, given that they're the only team making these sorts of financial decisions. But they're also the only team reading the landscape correctly.

 

The value of an MLB team is rising at a precipitous rate. Teams are signing billion-dollar deals with networks. In the last five years, the value of these big-market teams has skyrocketed, and every economic indicator says that they're going to continue to. Here's the Forbes list from last year that shows the rise. The Yankees banked $500 million last year from gate receipts and royalties from the YES network, and that's just a piece of their gigantic empire. Yet they're working to drop under the luxury tax by next year, and they're willing to be less competitive to do so.

 

The Sox are on that level. They're minting money in Fenway, and from NESN, and from the millions of hats and shirts and what-have-you. They have the cash to keep these players without blinking an eye. But they want to pretend that they don't, because it's cheaper to say "we don't have the financial leverage" after you bought a top-flight left fielder you don't really need than it is to pay for the starting pitching you actually do need. Somehow, in our minds, it became Carl Crawford's fault we couldn't afford that starting pitching. On some subconscious level, we blamed him for our lack of talent in other areas.  

 

And our trades that followed just made things worse. We traded away Josh Reddick and Jed Lowrie even

though we were down on outfielders and had no other shortstop. Both have played well for other teams. Neither pitcher we got worked out. 

 

The Dodgers are looking the other way. Most teams are still "moneyballing" - looking for inefficiencies, trying to grab players other teams are overlooking. The Dodgers are spending money to grab top-price talent, even with uninviting contracts. Because that's the real inefficiency here - that teams are willing to shed unwanted contracts, even if the players receiving the cash are still pretty good.

  

By the way, that Forbes list says that the Sox spend $25.4 million on operating income, compared to $1.2 million for the Dodgers. How is that possible?

  

Essentially, what the Sox bought was relief. People were done with this team, especially Beckett, and the trade signalled a reset, and that's what people wanted. The prospects we got are pretty good, but it doesn't really matter. What matters is that these guys are gone.

Somehow, Sox fans became a hive mind, and believed that the team had been backed into a corner and the only way out was to rid ourselves of these players. It didn't matter if it was the truth, it was what everyone believed. 

  

If 2010 was supposedly a transition year, I can't imagine what next year will be. We have holes in our rotation, our bullpen, our outfield, at first base and short. And still an incredibly expensive roster. Are we supposed to believe that Sox fans are really going to wait around until we get our decimated farm system in order? That anyone's going to be that patient?

  

We're acting like a guy who made some bad investments and ended up over their head. We're not. We're billionaires who bought an expensive house but then quailed when we saw how much upkeep would be. 

  

If we're billionaires, let's act like billionaires. Let's not pretend to be something we're not because that's the way we feel the Sox are supposed to be.

Good Friday - Exploring "Torn"

Good Friday at our church is entrenched in tradition, to which I am a latecomer. Because we've had a history of having worship leaders on staff who go on to much bigger things (Chris Tomlin, Brandon Heath, Robbie Seay), from the moment I arrived on campus, I was barraged with conversations constantly harking back to our (fairly recent) days of yore, with sighs of "I miss when.." and "it was way better..." We are not a forward-looking community.

Our biggest signature move was to rent out the massive outdoor concert venue across the street from us each Easter weekend. We centered the event around a big concert on Good Friday led by our worship leader du jour. When we needed to cut costs, we moved the weekend back to our campus, but then we built a hefty stage on the lawn, hauled out every watt of moving lights we had and rented a heap more, and had succession of events that drifted slowly from "energetic worship" to "energetic rock festival," all played before our less-than-energetic members (we're Methodists. We don't jump. At most we... lean).

A couple years ago, I joined a worship committee that sacked all that, moved the service back into our sanctuary, killed the rock-show vibe and tried to revert the service back to a night of worship and teaching as strong and unified as we could manage.

It's been a couple of years of that now, and I'm proud of the work I've gotten to do on those services. I won't wander off into a diatribe of what worship is or why it matters, because you've likely (definitely) read much better thoughts than mine before, but as much as we've maintained a good deal of spectacle in these services (we are who we are), it's been nice to center the evening around community and worship, and to focus on the meaning of that particularly sacred evening.

This is all unnecessary introduction for these three videos I did for this year's service, based around the theme of "Torn" - two stories, totally unrelated, but deeply connected to what happened on that Friday a long time ago. If you'd like to see all the videos in context, the sermon they're interspersed in is up at The Woodlands United Methodist website.

I've never been happier with work I've done, or more excited about the stories I got to tell. These videos are my favorite of all my work.