My cabinet is here! My cabinet is here! My cabinet is here!
(That's the monstrous box with the 4 speakers in it, as depicted in my previous post)!! I'm going to pick it up after work! Unfortunately, the header has yet to arrive, so the cabinet will, for the moment, be, well, useless :( But hey at least it's here! I suppose there is an off chance the header will arrive today at some point as well.. it's pretty well due, I think..
UPDATE --
I spoke to Canada Post and apparently the amp has been in customs for the last week and just today was accepted and shipped to Richmond. Apparently I can expect it sometime next week. Too bad I won't be able to take it to the "All Nighter" tonight, but them's the breaks when you order stuff off of eBay :/
Friday, December 29, 2006
Wednesday, December 27, 2006
Can You Feel the Mountains Tremble?
Aha! I tricked you into thinking that this was some sort of esoteric post about something religious! Or maybe I didn't.. I just meant because the title is that of a popular praise song, which I have now shamelessly taken in for my own alterior agenda of destruction!! MUAHAHA!
No, actually it's not that either.. this is, in fact, a BASS-related post.. which is why the reference to mountains trembling is appropriate.. because THE MOUNTAINS ARE GOING TO BE TREMBLING REAL, REAL SOON, BABY, YEAH!
*Ahem*. Pardon moi, allow me to explain. I'm in a band, see, and I play bass. I think most of you knew all of that. Anyway, my big focus lately has been to buy a new bass amp, for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that I want something that really sounds GOOD, not just adequate, and something built for what I like. There are a few names that are synonymous with REALLY REALLY good bass amplification, my favourite of these being Gallien-Krueger, with Ampeg a close second. Not long ago I happened to become quite enamoured with the idea of buying a GK amp header on EBay, as the prices on there are quite a bit better than what you get here. I ended up buying a Gallien-Krueger Backline (their entry level, but from what I hear, this amp is really good) 600, which is a 300 Watt Amp, said to be VERY nice. Someday I'm sure I will upgrade to a 1001RB or something, but for smaller venues (clubs, etc) this is going to be GREAT! And, even after shipping and the exchange rate I still saved $100 over the local price.
Of course, a nice header is nothing without the cabinet (aka speakers) to go with it. You can amplify somethng till the cows come home, but without any speakers, no one is going to hear a dang thing. Thus, I made it clear to my family that what I really wanted to Christmas was purchasing power in form of monies or gift cards that would enable me to get a nice cabinet. And come through they did! I was looking for a particular Ampeg cabinet, but I couldn't find it anywhere, however I was able to get (well it is on order and I hope it will be in within a couple of days) this Gallien-Krueger 410SBX cabinet, which should match the head very nicely and by all reports sounds absolutely incredible. Needless to say, I am looking forward to pounding some air with this sucka!
All this to say one thing: if you feel the mountains trembling sometime in the next week or so, you now know why! Cheers!
Thursday, December 21, 2006
It's Just a Matter of Time Now...
Well, I've just now finished my second (hour long) interview for the Quality Assurance Supervisor job here at work -- I think it went quite well, and I am confident that if it is a job I am meant to have, God will put favour on me in the mind of my boss, and also potential future-boss (yeah, make sense of that, will you?).
I still have to go back to a dream that Lisa had way back when we were talking about whether or not I should take a job at West or another position that, at the time, looked better. She dreamed of me in an empty white room, waiting. There was one door, and it was closed, but I went and opened it and behind it there was another door, and another, and another.. the doors just kept opening for me. She felt this was West, for some reason. Then she saw me in the same white room, with the same door. This time the door was opened for me, by some hideous looking man, and behind the door it was all just black -- I walked through the door and never came out again.
Certainly, my experience at West has been one of opening doors, and hopefully this is the next one in the series!
Anyway, if everyone could just be praying about the outcome, that would be great!
I still have to go back to a dream that Lisa had way back when we were talking about whether or not I should take a job at West or another position that, at the time, looked better. She dreamed of me in an empty white room, waiting. There was one door, and it was closed, but I went and opened it and behind it there was another door, and another, and another.. the doors just kept opening for me. She felt this was West, for some reason. Then she saw me in the same white room, with the same door. This time the door was opened for me, by some hideous looking man, and behind the door it was all just black -- I walked through the door and never came out again.
Certainly, my experience at West has been one of opening doors, and hopefully this is the next one in the series!
Anyway, if everyone could just be praying about the outcome, that would be great!
Friday, December 08, 2006
Two or Three... Hundred?
So what is it about Christian(ist)s exactly that always makes them want to simplify the complicated parts of the Gospel while complicating the simple parts? It is a strange phenomenon that seems to me, to have led to endless faulty doctrines, teachings, and belief systems within the church, resulting in sermon after sermon of cherry-picked scriptures from this book and that book and this book over here, that we fit together assuming they are all talking about the exact same things despite the disparate cultures, eras, and authors that they came out of.
When one comes across a verse in the Bible recording a conversation that Jesus had with a Jewish person regarding the sacrifices he was making in the Jewish temple, why is it our impulse to grab onto those words and throw them at each other, saying "See! SEE!! Jesus said you need to do it like THIS!", while conveniently overlooking the fact that neither party in the discussion is A)Living in the first century Roman Empire, B) Jewish, C) Attending a Jewish Temple, D) Making a sacrifice, or E) the individual the Jesus was addressing in the passage. These are all important questions that really do need to be contexutalized before any applicable meaning can be derived from the passage. To blithely look at such a verse and take it literally, or worse, start bashing people over the head with it, is completely disgraceful, deluded, and sinful, in my humble opinion. And yet, this is the way it has been in pretty well 100% of every church service or Bible study I have ever been a part of -- why?
It is equally eggregious, to me, when someone takes a passage out of the old testament, reads it verbatim and then says "Look - God said this, and this is what we are supposed to be doing!". By that twisted logic, we should be going out onto the streets and slaughtering every man, woman, and child we meet who doesn't worship Jehovah. And basically this would also mean nuking the bejeezus out of the middle-east until all the ungodly muslims have been extinctified.
However, we don't do this (at least some of us don't.. although certain American politicians seem to be leaning dangerously in this direction lately). For some reason it is okay to reject the old testament's admonitions to genocide, while embracing the condemnation of people with tattoos, or loud music, or alternative lifestyles. Again I ask -- why? Not that there is no applicable teaching to be had out of the old testament, but it HAS to be interpreted with a cultural, linguistic, stylistic, chronistic context that leads to discovering the underlying truth behind it.
Now to get back to the subject of the post title --- on the other hand, we also have this bizarre and opposite tendency to over-analyze and insert fictional meaning to entirely straight-forward issues, and things that Jesus said which really give us very little reason to delve further into. Jesus was many things, but I do not believe he was ambiguous -- evasive perhaps, when people were looking for easy answers, but not ambiguous. He said what he meant, basically.
Here is an example of what I mean:
"For where two or three gather together because they are mine, I am there among them.” (Matt 18:20)
It is a verse that pretty well every Christian knows, and it is a very important verse, but it is also very simple. And when I say that Jesus wasn't ambigious, what I mean is that in this passage, he specifically uses the number 'two or three'. Not 'twenty or thirty' or 'two or three hundred', and neither did he say 'two or three is alright, but you're better off with seventy'. I believe that something very specific is being established by Jesus here.
You know the really funny thing about this verse is that the times I hear it repeated most often is when it is being used as an excuse. Someone calls a prayer meeting or a Bible study and when only a small handful of people show up, the organizer looks around and flippantly says "Well he did say 'when two or three are gathered'", almost like they are apologizing for something. We've read far more into this than Jesus intended, and instead of placing the emphasis on the 'two or three' as being a desirable result, we've taken this to be a minimum threshold.
My theory is this: What if Jesus actually meant what he said? What if he was trying to get something specific across with his words? While this verse is usually taken to mean that two or three is the minimum number of people required for Christ to make an appearance, I think that Jesus was actually trying to tell us something else.
I think he was trying to tell us that it is in the intimate moments with people that we love and care about, that we will find him. I know it's always been true for me. More and more I am realizing that our sunday church services and fancy programs serve only to distract us from experiencing Christ in a personal way.
Often times we look at these huge venues where people are dancing and singing and "praising" as one body and say "Wow, the spirit is really moving here".
No it isn't. At least not usually. The fact is there is no big mystery to these occurances - these massive corporate moves of the spirit. It all comes down to a very well-documented effect known as mob mentality. It is a condition in which people cease to be individuals, lose their ability to think and act for themselves, and get swept along with whatever the rest of the group is doing. When the mob is doing something unseemly, we call out the police to go dismantle it with body armour, batons, and tear gas. When the mob is falling over, weeping, jumping up and down, etc, at an overly-emotional worship service, we call it 'revival' or being 'slain in the spirit'. Not that these things can't be valid, but not with the frequency we see it.
The reason I say this is because I have stood at the front of the church, with my bass strapped on, playing the best that I can, more times than I can count, and what I have observed, time and time again, is this: when the congregation is enthused about what is happening, everybody sings and everybody dances, yet when the congregation is indifferent, everyone stands around with their arms crossed. And at the end of the day, they go home and forget whatever it was they felt earlier, because the vast majority of the time there was nothing there for them to personally connect to, anyway. They got to sit down and listen to someone talk about things that more than likely had little or no relevence to their day-to-day life. Woo.
The times that I can really remember feeling like God was there, talking to me, are the times when I am with my wife, maybe at a friend's house, talking about why we fight, or why we're angry, or why we're sad. Talking about what God's words really means to the rat's nest inside my mind, quietly praying for things that are on our hearts and minds, and accepting those things, regardless of the right and wrong of it. Letting God, not people, sort us out.
When one comes across a verse in the Bible recording a conversation that Jesus had with a Jewish person regarding the sacrifices he was making in the Jewish temple, why is it our impulse to grab onto those words and throw them at each other, saying "See! SEE!! Jesus said you need to do it like THIS!", while conveniently overlooking the fact that neither party in the discussion is A)Living in the first century Roman Empire, B) Jewish, C) Attending a Jewish Temple, D) Making a sacrifice, or E) the individual the Jesus was addressing in the passage. These are all important questions that really do need to be contexutalized before any applicable meaning can be derived from the passage. To blithely look at such a verse and take it literally, or worse, start bashing people over the head with it, is completely disgraceful, deluded, and sinful, in my humble opinion. And yet, this is the way it has been in pretty well 100% of every church service or Bible study I have ever been a part of -- why?
It is equally eggregious, to me, when someone takes a passage out of the old testament, reads it verbatim and then says "Look - God said this, and this is what we are supposed to be doing!". By that twisted logic, we should be going out onto the streets and slaughtering every man, woman, and child we meet who doesn't worship Jehovah. And basically this would also mean nuking the bejeezus out of the middle-east until all the ungodly muslims have been extinctified.
However, we don't do this (at least some of us don't.. although certain American politicians seem to be leaning dangerously in this direction lately). For some reason it is okay to reject the old testament's admonitions to genocide, while embracing the condemnation of people with tattoos, or loud music, or alternative lifestyles. Again I ask -- why? Not that there is no applicable teaching to be had out of the old testament, but it HAS to be interpreted with a cultural, linguistic, stylistic, chronistic context that leads to discovering the underlying truth behind it.
Now to get back to the subject of the post title --- on the other hand, we also have this bizarre and opposite tendency to over-analyze and insert fictional meaning to entirely straight-forward issues, and things that Jesus said which really give us very little reason to delve further into. Jesus was many things, but I do not believe he was ambiguous -- evasive perhaps, when people were looking for easy answers, but not ambiguous. He said what he meant, basically.
Here is an example of what I mean:
"For where two or three gather together because they are mine, I am there among them.” (Matt 18:20)
It is a verse that pretty well every Christian knows, and it is a very important verse, but it is also very simple. And when I say that Jesus wasn't ambigious, what I mean is that in this passage, he specifically uses the number 'two or three'. Not 'twenty or thirty' or 'two or three hundred', and neither did he say 'two or three is alright, but you're better off with seventy'. I believe that something very specific is being established by Jesus here.
You know the really funny thing about this verse is that the times I hear it repeated most often is when it is being used as an excuse. Someone calls a prayer meeting or a Bible study and when only a small handful of people show up, the organizer looks around and flippantly says "Well he did say 'when two or three are gathered'", almost like they are apologizing for something. We've read far more into this than Jesus intended, and instead of placing the emphasis on the 'two or three' as being a desirable result, we've taken this to be a minimum threshold.
My theory is this: What if Jesus actually meant what he said? What if he was trying to get something specific across with his words? While this verse is usually taken to mean that two or three is the minimum number of people required for Christ to make an appearance, I think that Jesus was actually trying to tell us something else.
I think he was trying to tell us that it is in the intimate moments with people that we love and care about, that we will find him. I know it's always been true for me. More and more I am realizing that our sunday church services and fancy programs serve only to distract us from experiencing Christ in a personal way.
Often times we look at these huge venues where people are dancing and singing and "praising" as one body and say "Wow, the spirit is really moving here".
No it isn't. At least not usually. The fact is there is no big mystery to these occurances - these massive corporate moves of the spirit. It all comes down to a very well-documented effect known as mob mentality. It is a condition in which people cease to be individuals, lose their ability to think and act for themselves, and get swept along with whatever the rest of the group is doing. When the mob is doing something unseemly, we call out the police to go dismantle it with body armour, batons, and tear gas. When the mob is falling over, weeping, jumping up and down, etc, at an overly-emotional worship service, we call it 'revival' or being 'slain in the spirit'. Not that these things can't be valid, but not with the frequency we see it.
The reason I say this is because I have stood at the front of the church, with my bass strapped on, playing the best that I can, more times than I can count, and what I have observed, time and time again, is this: when the congregation is enthused about what is happening, everybody sings and everybody dances, yet when the congregation is indifferent, everyone stands around with their arms crossed. And at the end of the day, they go home and forget whatever it was they felt earlier, because the vast majority of the time there was nothing there for them to personally connect to, anyway. They got to sit down and listen to someone talk about things that more than likely had little or no relevence to their day-to-day life. Woo.
The times that I can really remember feeling like God was there, talking to me, are the times when I am with my wife, maybe at a friend's house, talking about why we fight, or why we're angry, or why we're sad. Talking about what God's words really means to the rat's nest inside my mind, quietly praying for things that are on our hearts and minds, and accepting those things, regardless of the right and wrong of it. Letting God, not people, sort us out.
Monday, December 04, 2006
And The Winner Is...
...Me!
Yes, National Novel Writing Month is officially at a close for 2006, and I can officially count myself among the winners, thanks to my astonishing feat of writing 52,000 words in 30 days! That's an average of 1733.33 per day! Woo!
The truly amazing part about it is that I actually ended up with a pretty decent story after all was said and done - I actually like it, despite all that I was worried about it ending up as a lot of crap. It has been partially posted at http://coldbloodnovel.blogspot.com and I will be working up putting the whole thing up there with a slightly easier-to-read format maybe today sometime.
Well that's all the news for now...
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
