Prophetic Musings

(Originally published at the Youth Ministry Exchange)

In Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End, Will Turner (Orlando Bloom) and Elizabeth Swann (Keira Knightley) combine forces with their former adversary, Captain Barbossa (Geoffrey Rush) in order to find Captain Jack Sparrow (Johnny Depp) and rescue him from Davy Jones' Locker. In the meantime, Lord Cutler Beckett (Tom Hollander) has conscripted Davy Jones (Bill Nighy) and the crew of the Flying Dutchman into service of the East India Trading Company in order to control the seas. This leads to a final battle between the Pirate Lords from around the world and Lord Cutler's armada.

At World's End is another summer blockbuster from Gore Verbinski and Walt Disney Pictures. With each subsequent Pirates movie, Verbinski has added larger setpieces and more elaborate CGI work, culminating in a beautifully made movie with no shortage of action and breathtaking visuals.

All the characters from the first two movies are back in this installment, even a couple of relatively minor side characters from Curse of the Black Pearl. Each of the actors step easily in to their previous roles, and the new actors introduced into this story work well with the existing cast. There are a great many characters to keep track of in the film, including a guest role by Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones as the keeper of the Pirate Code.

The downside to having the number of characters is that it takes a LONG time to tell the story. The running time of this film is two hours and 48 minutes, which is a great deal of time to sit in a movie theater. Add in the five trailers for new films shown beforehand, and it made for about a three hour viewing time.

The length and breadth of the movie seemed to slow it down. With so many characters to keep tabs on and so many places to see, there was almost too much going on. The film seemed to get dragged down by its own weight. The writing for this film was not a tight as the first Pirates movie, and the action sequences not as exciting as the second film. There were great moments and lines in the film, but they seemed to be much farther apart than in the first two pictures. The cameo by Keith Richards was interesting to see, but for people who know who he is it can take them out of the film for a moment. For those who don't know who he is, the reaction was "Hey, who's that old guy supposed to be?"

From a Christian perspective, the biggest downside to the film is the supernatural overtone throughout the movie. The thought that they could bring Jack back from the dead and seeing the spirits in the underworld go against the Christian worldview. Also, one of the characters is revealed to be a spirit trapped in a human body. If youth are able to see this as the fantasy that it is, it shouldn't affect them. There is no adverse language or sex in the film, the PG-13 rating is earned for violence and intensity in some parts.

Overall, this film rates a solid "meh" from me. It was a decent film, but I feel that it failed to live up to the hype that the ending of the second film generated. For fans of the first two movies, it is a must see to simply complete the storyline. It was a nearly three hour epic that failed to capture some of what made the first two films so enjoyable. Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End will no doubt make a great deal of money, but with so many other blockbuster films to be released during this busy summer it will have a difficult time standing out.

I'm excited to announce that I have discovered I am a descendant (about 400th generation, but still a descendant) of King Ferdinand III of Castile. I'm not so excited to announce that his father was known as Alfonso the Slobberer. I can't tell you how proud I am.

We have a three day trial on ancestry.com. Expect more information you don't want out of it. 

According to Ancestry.com, President George W. Bush and I share the same 9th grandmother. That makes us 10th cousins. I'm expecting an invitation to the White House anytime now. For fun, here's a list of famous people it says I'm related to and what the relation is. All these are through my mother's family. My father's side of the family doesn't seem to claim anyone.

• Andrew Johnson (17th US President), 2nd cousin, 7 times removed
• Zachary Taylor (12th US President), 4th cousin, 7 times removed
• James "Wild Bill" Hickok, 7th cousin, 4 times removed
• George Bush (41st US President), 9th cousin, once removed
• Gerald Ford (38th US President), 9th cousin, once removed
• Amelia Earhart, 10th cousin
  
• T.S. Eliot, 8th cousin, 4 times removed
  
• Judy Garland, 10th cousin, once removed
• F. Scott Fitzgerald, 11th cousin
• Bob Hope, 11th cousin, once removed (also, 13th cousins)
  
• John F. Kennedy (35th US President), 11th cousin, once removed

I've got a couple of articles in the works for this weekend. I'm not going to just post links to YouTube. But this one is such a great one, I couldn't not post it.

I've added some Amazon links to the right side (along with a whole new sidebar) and I've put back most everything that I had before. One issue I'm having is that people can't submit comments using IE. I don't know why. I'm sure I've screwed up code somewhere, but I don't feel like changing it right now. I'll work on it later.

Why the Google ads and Amazon links? Why not make a little (and I mean little) money out of this. I made $1.45 last month. I'm hoping for $1.60 this month. Every little bit helps.

Working on my site theme tonight, so it may look funky for a bit. It will be back to normal before long.

 From the looks of this image, Greensburg was toast no matter what that night. If the storms had formed about 10 miles south and a couple miles west, we would have been talking about two towns wiped out. Click the image to enlarge.

Source: NWS Wichita 

While sitting at my desk, sometimes my daughter will start talking to me. No, not on the phone, like this:

She likes making the pictures show up. They also make sounds as well, and she likes to hear the laughing. This is the first time she's used the pictures to tell a little story and given names to the people. We started the numbers game yesterday. She types out 10 numbers, then I type out 10 numbers. It takes her a couple minutes to do, it takes me about 10 seconds. However, this is the first time she's told me to stop. It's usually the other way around.

Some good information on this page from the Wichita Eagle. I thought this by Phyllis Jacobs Greikspoor was especially moving.

I almost made it through the first 24 hours after a storm without sobbing.

Almost.

Greensburg is one of my favorite small Kansas towns. And now a tornado has practically smashed it out of existence. Joining a media tour through the devastation, I walked past the decimated Dillons store, the gas stations, the Kansan Inn and the bludgeoned courthouse. I gasped at the remains of the high school, city hall and the churches. There were a few hastily stifled tears at the site of the elderly people in shelters, holding tight to a beloved dog or cat.

But when I saw what happened to the Big Well, I cried.

OK, I know the “World’s Largest Hand-Dug Well” is one of those cheesy, hokey Kansas things that everybody always laughs about.

But I love that well.

I discovered it on one of my first “getting acquainted” weekend jaunts the first year I moved to Kansas. Half fascinated, half terrified, my daughters and I climbed to the bottom and back to the top. When their friends came to visit from Minnesota and North Carolina, I could count on a visit to the well to create a great memory of Kansas.

On annual Wheat Quality Tours, somebody always stopped at Greensburg and everybody piled out of the cars and into the gift shop, past the meteorite collection. They bought a ticket and climbed down the stairs to the chilly depths of the well. On my last such trip in 2006, I did too. I thought I’d never make it back to the top. But I did.

I’ve always thought of the well as kind of a monument to the persistence, maybe even the downright stubborn streak, that runs down the backbone of Kansas. The railroad needed water and by golly, Greensburg built them a well they had to respect. With shovels and pickaxes and ropes and buckets, they built it.

Without electricity or gasoline engines or powered anything they dug a circular hole 109 feet deep and 32 feet in diameter and cased it in native stone hewn from the banks of the Medicine River 12 miles away.

With the same stubborn persistence that allowed them to move back to the old dugout when a prairie fire took the house or survive on root vegetables and beans when the drought took most everything else, they built it. You couldn’t stand at the bottom of that well and not be impressed by the accomplishment.

I‘ve always felt proud to be a descendant of that kind of folks, even if I am a transplant from the land east of the state line.

On Saturday, the gift shop that covered the well was rubble. The meteorites are missing. The BIG WELL sign you could see from the highway lay crumpled on its side. The guard rail around the top of the well was bent and twisted. Since the storm, nobody has tried to take a look down the well yet. There’s too much really important, life-saving stuff to be done.

I believe that some big sheet of something, maybe a wall of the building covered it snugly and everything else fell on top. And when all the debris is cleared away the well will be fine. I refuse to think it’s been bludgeoned and beaten, so damaged it can’t go on.

Maybe I need to believe the well survived because then I can believe that Greensburg will survive, too. After all, the folks who lived there are the progeny of the farmers and cowboys and shopowners who dug and dug and sawed and hauled rock until the job was done. They’re made of pretty sturdy stuff, those kids of the pioneers.

Tornadoes, like wildfires and drought and hordes of grasshoppers, are part of life in Kansas. When you get hit, you begin by picking up the pieces. Your family and friends and neighbors come and help. In these more sophisticated times, your state and federal government comes too. You recover and rebuild.

It’ll take time. And persistence. And stubborness. But I think we’ll see Greensburg rise from the rubble. Just like I think that one of these years, I’ll be able to take my grandkids to climb down the well.

I hope that she is right. I would love to see a town rebuild itself like this. And they can be sure that if they do, I'll bring my kids to see the well, just like my parents took me. I love my native state. Not in the typically Texas way of "my state is better than your state", but an appreciation for what it gave me, and what it stands for. Kansas is a stubborn, hard-working, stiff upper lip state. This isn't the first time this has happened in Kansas. Udall, KS was practically destroyed in 1955. Hesston was hit hard in 1990, and Andover was battered in 1991. They rebuilt, every time. I hope it happens in Greensburg.

Instapundit has a good post up this morning about weather radios. A couple excerpts:

SO IN THE WAKE OF THE KANSAS TORNADO TRAGEDY, I finally got around to unboxing and setting up the all hazards weather alert radio that I ordered a while back.

...

More importantly, it will go off if there's a tornado warning in my area. It lets you set the alerts you want to hear about or ignore (though a few, like "tornado warning" are non-defeatable -- who wouldn't want to know about that?) and it lets you set it to register only for your own county or other limited areas. It was pretty cheap -- about 50 bucks -- setup was easy, and there's a battery backup in case the power goes out. Not a bad little gadget.

The good thing is that the disaster sparred him to finally get it out and set it up. The bad thing is that he didn't have it setup before something bad happened. (Bad Glenn!) If the tornado had been around Knoxville he might not have had the chance.

For me it does bring up the sirens vs. radios debate again. It was a good thing that the sirens in Greensburg were sounded well in advance of the storm, but what if they hadn't? What if power had been knocked out by the storm or by some other freak accident and the sirens could not have been used? Are you willing to put your life and the lives of your family in the hands of the local government? NOAA Weather Radio is an ideal solution in that it is not centralized to one area. You don't have to rely on sirens to know that something is coming. It's all about personal responsibility versus abdicated responsibility.

Of course, all this is coming from a weather nut too.  

This is unbelievable. We drove through this town last July. It's 133 miles from where I grew up. The town is/was roughly the same size as my hometown, in rural Kansas. It's a small farming community. Everything about Greensburg reminds me of Caldwell.

It's gone. I was just watching a news conference with the city administrator who said that 95% of the town is gone. 95%. That's an incredible number. I can't help but be emotional when thinking about this. Their lives have been completely turned over. I heard that both the middle school and high school have been destroyed. These schools are typically the pride of the community and they've been taken away.

It's too hard to write about it. I'm watching live coverage from here. Go watch and see what's happened.

The upgrade is completed. I've changed the theme on the site and will probably be making some more changes this weekend. I've lost all my customizations in the sidebar, so I'll bring those back. Let me know what you think.

I'm writing this from Windows Live Writer, which is a somewhat new blogging tool. If this works well it will be a pretty cool tool to use. I can write and format everything from my desktop and then upload it later.

Also, in the very near future I'm going to be upgrading the site from Community Server 2.1 SP1 to Community Server 2007. It will have a different look and feel to it when it happens, so I just wanted to warn everyone. The site also might be down for a bit when it happens, probably in the next day or so.

Hmm...really? Hate to know what a heavy rain is.