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Me, Fancy Fast Food, and the AP
I was interviewed for a story on Fancy Fast Food a while back,
This used to be a Subway footlong.
“I would never make any of the things they put on there,” said Ted Carnahan, a seminarian from Sterling, Ill., who follows Fancy Fast Food on Facebook. Carnahan keeps up with the site for amusement, not for recipes.
“It kind of points out the extreme low quality of a lot of fast food meals and how, with a little effort, you could do better.”
Service Project: Back Seat Bags
You’re driving along, and you stop at a stop sign or traffic signal near a major highway. You see a man, dressed shabbily, standing by the side of the road with a cardboard sign. Maybe it says he’s a veteran, maybe he needs food, transportation, or a job. What do you do?
Most Christians do what most everyone else does in that situation – they avert their eyes. They don’t make eye contact. They roll up their car windows. Especially if their precious children are in the car. Guess what?
Your kids are watching how you treat the poor.
Here’s a simple service project you can do with kids of school age. Assemble “Back Seat Bags” that you keep in the back seat of the car. Get a paper bag, and include some essentials in it, depending what’s appropriate for your particular context:
- Food: high energy, individually wrapped, storable foods like granola bars or beef jerky
- Food: gift certificates to someplace ubiquitous, like McDonalds
- Information: a map or directions to nearest homeless shelters & food pantries
- Information: a small, lightweight tract written in English and/or Spanish
- Transportation: bus tokens
- What else could we put in back seat bags? Leave suggestions in the comments, below.
The key is to pick things that can sit in a hot car for a long time, don’t expire, and have little cash value on exchange. Bus tokens, gift certificates, and the like may be sold on the grey market, so consider that when making a list of items for your bags. Never include cash.
When you are in the car, stopped on a road near where someone is begging, instead of turning our eyes away and not doing anything, we now have something responsible we can give them. It’s a way to serve people and live out our faith.
Two natures in Christ, two arms of mission
Food for thought: Just as there are two natures in Christ, the human and the divine, so there are two forms of mission for the Church in the world. We would do well to learn from Jesus, who often used physical, human work (healing, miracles) as a means to share a broader divine reality (salvation in his name).
The Body of Christ, Given for You
Occasion: Pentecost 11, Year B
Text: John 6.51-58
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This sermon was prepared for services at St. John’s Lutheran Church, Sterling, IL on August 12 and 16 and for services at three local nursing homes.
Over the last few weeks, we’ve been hearing in our Gospel readings about Jesus being the “bread of life.” Last week, Jesus’ hearers were shocked because he said “I am the living bread that came down from heaven.” They said, “No, Jesus, you don’t really mean that. You don’t mean that you are bread. We know you. You’re Joe and Mary Nazereth’s boy. We watched you grow up. My kids were on the same softball team as you – you’re nothing special. You delivered our kitchen table out of your Pop’s workshop a couple of years ago. So just who do you think you are?”
This week, we get an even more shocking statement: “…the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.”
Morning Light Released!
I’m pleased to announce that my setting of Morning Prayer for the season of Easter, Morning Light, has been released! You can download a ZIP file of all of the necessary PDFs or of the source files to customize Morning Light for your particular setting. This post is a good place to comment if you find mistakes (bugs?) in the music, have questions about the project, or want to let me know you are using the 14 August 2009 release.
More on Cloth Diapering
Jennifer was recently asked to give some more details to a friend of a friend who is considering cloth diapers. I thought her response was really comprehensive and would serve as a good update to my initial post on this from March.
We use cloth diapers on our 6 month old and have since she was 1 week old. We do like them a lot. There are a lot of options – everything from traditional cotton prefold diapers with covers to fancy/expensive all-in-one systems. I’ll tell you what we do and what I know about a few other options, but I know some people who use other systems as well, so just let me know what you’re thinking or curious about.
We went fairly simple/old-school mostly due to budget constraints:
Having Enough
This little blurb sprung out of my preparation to preach on John 6.51-58 this week. I didn’t use it in the sermon, but it serves as a short summary of my day last Wednesday and food for thought when considering the trade-offs of “fair and just” agricultural policy.
Last week I had a wonderful opportunity to attend the Foods Resource Bank national gathering at Augustana College in the Quad Cities. The keynote speaker was Wall Street Journal reporter Roger Thurow, who just published a book called “Enough: why the world’s poorest starve in an age of plenty.” The book argues passionately that, unlike thirty years ago, starvation in the world today is no longer due primarily to natural disasters like floods and droughts. Instead, the world produces enough, but human corruption and greed prevents food and emergency food aid from being distributed to the people who need it most. In Christian terms, the cause of most starvation in the world today is not “acts of God,” but instead human sin.
Emacs goodness
A couple of nifty things I learned about the new Emacs 23 in the last few days:
Because the new Emacs has XFT rendering for fonts, it really does look beautiful. One thing I didn’t like was changing my font size by starting Emacs, hating the current font size, closing Emacs, changing ~/.Xdefaults, starting Emacs again, lather, rinse, repeat. Turns out I was doing it the hard way. According to hexmode, the Right Way is:
C-x C-+ — scale the current buffer’s face/font up
C-x C-+ — scale the current buffer’s face/font down
This is, of course, completely awesome. Speaking of font rendering, most of the hacks for pre-loading Emacs with the new --daemon option circumvent loading the user’s environment, so other customizations in ~/.Xdefaults aren’t applied. Fix that by doing it the Right Way using pure Elisp.
Finally, there are a few cool customizations I didn’t know about posted on Musings of a Software Engineering Student. There are lots of other good Emacs tips on that website too.
And, if you’re wondering: Why does Ted care? He’s not programming full time anymore! Au contraire, I’m still working on a number of programming-related things, with cool results to be published soon. Stay tuned!
Fancy Fast Food
Tuesday I was interviewed by Michael Hill from the Associated Press. Apparently I’m quite the celebrity! Okay, okay, that’s not true – it’s actually something of a fluke that I was contacted about this interview. I am on Facebook (and, by the way, if you’re on Facebook please feel free to look me up and add me as a friend) and am listed as a fan of a website called “Fancy Fast Food.”
Basically, they take a complete fast food meal and manipulate it into something resembling gourmet food. Here’s an example recipe for Fondue du Sept-Onze:
Go to a gas station and buy some cheesy nachos, a couple of hot dogs, and some Sprite. Take it home, save the nacho cheese, soften the tortilla chips in a steamer basket, and cut up the hot dogs and buns into little pieces. Wrap the softened chips around the little pieces of hot dog, and lay the little “sausages” and pieces of bread on a fancy plate. Then scrape the nacho cheese into a fondue pot and heat it up – voila, fondue and “champagne!”
So we chatted about why I liked the site – short answer: It’s funny – and he said that he’ll probably quote me in the article. It should run sometime later this month.
Losses Not Insured
From the section on “Losses Not Insured” in our new renter’s insurance policy:
War, including any undeclared war, civil war, insurrection, rebellion, revolution, warlike act by a military force or military personnel, destruction or seizure or use for a military purpose, and including any consequence of any of these. Discharge of a nuclear weapon shall be deemed a warlike act even if accidental. [Emph. added]
Ponder that last sentence for a minute. Someone thought that through long enough to think it worthwhile to add that. Someone was breathtakingly thorough. I think I’d like to have a beer with that person!
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