When attorneys attack June 25, 2009
Posted by markgeil in Things that amuse me.add a comment
Here are a couple of inane product warnings I’ve read recently.
These were on my new guitar:
The instrument can catch fire, and earthquakes can cause it to fall if stored in a high location.
Earthquakes? The word is even plural. They expect multiple earthquakes during times I’m not playing my guitar. And if that’s not scary enough, there was this:
Read the owner’s manual that came with power amplifiers that you connect your guitar to. Accidents such as fire or electric shock can occur due to lightning strikes.
So, while the guitar is not being played, the earthquakes (plural) come, but while I’m playing I can expect lightning raining down from the heavens.
Either Yamaha knows something I don’t about the coming apocalypse, or they need to relax a little more.
And finally, there was this allergy warning, on one of those tiny bags of peanuts that a select few airlines still give you:
This product manufactured in a facility that processes peanuts.
Did I mention this was a bag of peanuts? If the person with the peanut allergy is dumb enough to eat a bag of peanuts because it didn’t have a warning label stating that those peanuts might have been around traces of other peanuts, then I say he deserves his fate.
Update from the Land of Make-Believe June 23, 2009
Posted by markgeil in Family.Tags: CBS, Reality TV
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It was a steamy summer night in Suburbia, USA. The hot sun was finally giving us a rest, painting the sky pink on its way below the horizon. A gentle breeze stirred the air – oh ,wait, that’s not a gentle breeze. That’s the helicopter hovering over our house.
We’ve grown somewhat accustomed to living in the land of make-believe where CBS is filming a new reality TV show. They’ve apparently changed the name. It was “Block Party” but we recently got a note saying it will be called “There Goes the Neighborhood”. The massive faux-concrete walls have held up through a couple of thunderstorms, which is good. There is a flag perched atop one of the houses, but we haven’t seen anyone near it yet. We caught a glimpse of one of our walled-in neighbors, but on a news feed, not through any crack in the wall. There are no gaps in these walls! And yes, we do have helicopters hovering over our house from time to time, recording those news feeds. Last night Rebekah shot out to the deck to show the helicopter her teddy bear. Not sure if that’s newsworthy, but she was mighty cute. Here’s a link to some of the helicopter shots:
http://www.wsbtv.com/slideshow/news/19803486/detail.html
Our street is closed every now and then by a faux-concrete curtain, but it’s usually very brief. Rental vans and shuttles and ambulances turning around in our driveway have become commonplace. Most days there is an ambulance on set, which makes me wonder what all is going on inside those walls. We see very few signs of life, even. Not much sound, not even many lights on in the windows at night.
The new title of the show is ironic, because there are lots of neighbors who have taken to bitterly complaining to the various news media who show up every day. For my part, I quite enjoy the whole scene. It’s quite exciting, decidedly unusual, and a surprisingly minor inconvenience given the scale of the operation. It gives us plenty to talk about, and we’re gratified in knowing it’s temporary.
Camp Images from my Foggy Head June 20, 2009
Posted by markgeil in Church.Tags: Summer Camp
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We’re home from camp. Exhausted, exhilarated, enjoying home, and ignoring chigger bites. If you know me, you know camp is one of the highlights of my year. Amy and I help run our church summer camp each year; we’ve done it since 1998, we think. This year we took 105 kids who had all finished 3rd through 5th grade. We pack about as much camp as you can into a single week, and it’s a grand gamut of action, emotion, battle, victory, and growth, both for the kids and for me.
Even though I can predict how I will feel on this Saturday after camp, it practically knocks me over each year. I have images in the fog of my head that are individually disparate but collectively powerful. Here are a few, written in the hope that they’re somehow coherent.
Catwalk
The “high ropes” experience for our kids at Woodland Christian Camp is called the Catwalk. It’s a long telephone pole that spans two trees a good 30 feet off the ground. Secured in a climbing harness, each kid climbs a ladder, then climbs a tree, then steps on the pole and realizes that it looks a lot higher looking down than it did from the ground, and that it’s actually round and not flat. Then they try to cross. The image in my foggy head is of one of our 3rd graders. He had been sobbing just two nights before, terribly homesick, having never even spent a night away from home without his parents, but we talked him into staying. He woke the next morning with a whisper, “I did it.” Now he faced a new challenge on the high ropes. He climbed the ladder, then climbed the tree, then put one foot and then another on the catwalk. The hardest part is letting go of the tree and stepping onto the catwalk, away from safety and into uncertainty. This is the image in my foggy head: bright sunlight filtered through high tree leaves, illuminating a trembling hand, fingers slowly extending, feet moving in tiny shuffles, drawn breath, letting go.
Campfire Declarations
We played the same song every morning before the kids went out for their quiet times. It’s an endearing sight for even the hardest of hearts. A hundred kids, together but alone, sitting on a step, or a dock by the lake, or on the grass in an open field, reading their Bibles and jotting down notes and bowing their heads and praying. Our morning send-off song was “Here I Am” by Shaun Groves. The chorus is a bit of a spiritual progression: “Here I am, save me / Here I am, change me / Here I am, mend me / Here I am, send me.” Thursday night, I was selecting songs for our campfire singalong. I picked some of our usual get-up-and-boogie sillier songs, and then was moved to revisit “Here I Am.” We sang the verse together, the kids in the sweetest of voices. Then we prayed the chorus. This is the image in my foggy head: the last few chords on the guitar, followed by silence, then the spoken words, “here I am, save me,” then a handful of children standing from their seats, making the words their own, declaring their salvation. Then the next line asking for life-change, and another group of children standing, boldly declaring their need for something different. Then the words, “Here I am, mend me,” and then the children who needed mending, standing at their seats, declaring their dependency. They represented broken hearts, or broken families, or broken lives, and for them to stand was no small feat. Finally, the largest group of all standing as I spoke, “Here I am, send me.” Ready. Ready to go, ready for a mission. These are the ones who will change the world.
My Burden
Arriving home from camp is bittersweet. Mommies and little sisters run to embrace their haggard, sleepy children, and they always ask, “How was camp?” and the few words that follow are never enough to sum up the week. Luggage is found, or not, and kids say goodbye to new friends, sometimes unsure if they’ll see each other again. But then, there are the ones who don’t have the sweetest of homes to which to return. The ones who linger, waiting to be picked up because someone is late or has forgotten. We have kids with sick parents, or incarcerated parents, or no parents at all. They are my burden. We cram as much love and safety and acceptance into them as we can in one week, but as I drive home I’m aware that for some of them, we’re throwing them back into situations that are lacking in love, that rarely feel safe, and that hold more rejection than acceptance. I pray for them, but I confess that I worry about them. This is the image in my foggy head: playing in the pool, a silly made-up game that basically involved dragging a group of girls around the deep end, but with lots of giggles and smiles, and then the words from one of the little girls who had such a need for a guy to just play a silly game with her, who deserves so much more: “I wish you were my dad.” She is my burden.
When Reality TV Hits Home June 10, 2009
Posted by markgeil in Written while slightly bitter that I don't get to ride on the neighbor's made-for-TV zip line.Tags: Block Party, CBS, Reality TV
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We no longer live in a normal world. Not all of us, though some would disagree. I just mean my neighbors and me. We now live in the land of make-believe, since the arrival of a new CBS reality TV series being filmed right on our very street. It will be difficult to describe how very odd this all is, but I’ll do my best!
Pictures. That would help. Video would be even better. Alas, we were taking pictures last night while driving through the land of make-believe when we were chased down by a police officer calling, “No pictures! No pictures!” and then demanding we delete them all. Turns out the Atlanta Journal-Constitution avoided said officer and shot some good photos, so let’s start with these.
Maggie Roe/AJC
Yes, those are massive walls on our street. They are about 30 feet tall, constructed of scaffolding and covered with vinyl that looks just like poured concrete. Yesterday they poured a little real concrete along the bottoms of each panel to complete the illusion. The walls are what really shocked us when we arrived home from vacation. But let’s back up a little.
It all started when we heard a call for families to audition for a new reality show tentatively called “Block Party”. Sounded like fun, but you had to commit to being available the entire month of June, and so we let the audition pass and forgot about the show. Later, the underground pipe-finder people swept in and painted all sorts of multicolored lines and codes on our streets and yards. We wondered with trepidation what sort of massive sewer-related project was on the way. Then a group of people with notebooks met daily on our sidewalks and street corners. We wondered what sort of massive evangelism-related project was on the way. Finally, while we were at the beach, we heard the news. The reality show construction was in full swing, and we wouldn’t believe our own neighborhood when we got home. The news was entirely correct.
Six houses are completely encircled in walls. We can only see their uppermost windows. The walls sit right where the curb meets the street. The occupants have moved out during construction, and when I peeked in the house two doors down I saw all the furniture wrapped in plastic and the floors covered with cardboard. The back yards are encased as well, with section of fences removed to make way for the massive faux-concrete wall. It’s stunning.
Maggie Roe, AJC
There is 24-hour security provided by our local police department. In the beginning they were very diligent about directing traffic along a narrowed street crowded with construction workers in hard hats and production people with clipboards and phones. Now, they mostly sit in their air-conditioned police cars, emerging only to run down nefarious picture-takers. The construction workers are all very polite, trying to minimize the nuisance, keeping quiet, avoiding eye contact. I’m sure they’re all bound to secrecy as well. The street was only closed once, to construct trusses that actually span the road. I did notice today that a curtain of faux-concrete has been attached to those trusses, so I suspect more neighborhood closures in our future.
The speed of the project is extraordinary. The walls are just about finished, including a few houses on the other side of the street, one of which is walled in all by itself. How lonely. The crew has moved on to electrical, with a labyrinth of heavy-gauge wire stretching from transformers that get their own black walls. I’m as impressed by the crew’s ability to make all these wires disappear as anything; it even looks like some of the cables pass under the street. I think visible power cords are a no-no on TV.
Maggie Roe / AJC
Filming starts in five days, and we still don’t really know what the show is about. I got a clue yesterday when I saw the handle of a zip-line, and then saw that the line itself stretched from the roof (yes, roof, bolted right on top of the house) down somewhere within the walls a few houses over. Some adventure may be afoot. We haven’t bothered asking our currently-dislocated neighbors what’s going to happen, since we know they can’t say anything. Everyone sure is curious, though. In fact, our driveway has become the turn-around spot for the gawking onlookers driving through this land of make-believe.
We’re told shooting will last until the end of the month, then they’ll tear it all down. That part is tough for me to take. I’m both frugal and a pack-rat, and CBS is going through obviously exorbitant expense for a completely temporary two-week filming and then they’ll just strip it all away.
I’m tempted to add something about how it’s a shame that all this effort and expense and really impressive work could have been used for something with lasting benefit, but then I’d be a bit of a hypocrite the next time I enjoy a TV show or a movie. Such irony will always exist. So, I’m putting those thoughts aside and enjoying the spectacle.
Music in Recession June 3, 2009
Posted by markgeil in Music.2 comments
Back from vacations and conferences and general out-of-townness. Lots of interview leftovers and stories coming up, including a Topsail Island sea turtle rescue and our neighborhood turning into a bizarro-land reality TV show while we were gone. In the meantime, at long last, here’s my article on the effects of the economy on the Christian music industry:
http://www.christianitytoday.com/music/commentaries/2009/musicinrecession.html
