the tindog coffeehouse

I was all set to write some sappy blog post about looking back over the year and looking ahead to 2009, but, eh, whatever. We all know this year has sucked in a lot of ways, and it’s been a tough one for our family, so who really wants to rehash all that?

So, as I enjoy the last couple of days of my vacation, I’ll just wish everyone out there on the Interwebs a happy New Year.

(And I promise I’ll try to be more interesting next week.)

Now there were in the same country shepherds living out in the fields, keeping watch over their flock by night. And behold, an angel of the Lord stood before them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were greatly afraid. Then the angel said to them, “Do not be afraid, for behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy which will be to all people. For there is born to you this day in the city of David a Savior, who is Christ the Lord. And this will be the sign to you: You will find a Babe wrapped in swaddling cloths, lying in a manger.”

And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God and saying:
“Glory to God in the highest,
And on earth peace, goodwill toward men!”

Luke 2:8-14, NKJV

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Merry Christmas!

I began seeing friends on Facebook join a group called I Am Second, and it didn’t really mean anything. Then I saw it mentioned in an article in the Dallas Morning News. Hmm. OK, so what is this about?

That’s the question Plano-based e3 Partners Ministry hopes North Texans will ask as part of “I Am Second,” a multimillion-dollar media campaign intended to promote God as the source of a shared, purposeful life. The initiative – which began this month and is planned to last three years – has attracted professional athletes and Hollywood celebrities and drawn more than 160,000 Web site hits from people in at least 150 countries. …

The mysterious ads list a Web site – iamsecond.com – with provocative testimonial videos by celebrities like movie star Stephen Baldwin, Dallas Cowboys linebacker Greg Ellis and former NASCAR champion Darrell Waltrip.

Dallas-area residents also share stories of eating disorders, loneliness, drug abuse and pornography addiction. The intimate clips appear more like the makings of a professional documentary than a homegrown church movement.

Continue reading…

Although the college football bowl season officially kicked off a few days ago with the EagleBank Bowl (?!), tonight it really begins when TCU faces off against Boise State in the Poinsettia Bowl.

This should be a great game between two strong teams. The Horned Frogs are 10-2 and ranked No. 11, while Boise State is undefeated and ranked No. 9. Both teams, of course, got shafted by the BCS and have lots to prove, which should make for an exciting game. (Thankfully, the game is in San Diego instead of on the Smurf-turf at Boise State!  Seriously, what in the heck is up with that blue Astroturf?!)

I have my share of complaints about the BCS system, which I’ve shared before, but one great by-product of it is that you often end up with some really entertaining games between teams that wouldn’t otherwise ever play each other, even in a playoff system.

I won’t make any predictions, but I’m certainly rooting for TCU to win big against the Broncos.

Go, Frogs!

The government has burned through almost all of the first half of the $700,000,000,000 bailout rescue money approved by Congress in October. And only now are people beginning to wonder where the money has gone.

Salon.com has the easy answer: the banks are holding on to it.

With the benefit of hindsight, lawmakers now express regret about the way the bailout was handled — with few provisions for oversight of the banks or the Bush administration — and the public hates it more than ever. The feeling that money and political capital were squandered even helped endanger the far cheaper and more popular bailout of the auto industry. So what went wrong — and where did all that money go?

A lot of it is, apparently, just sitting in the bank. A Government Accounting Office audit released earlier this month showed the Treasury Department doling out buckets of cash: $15 billion for Bank of America, $45 billion for Citigroup, $3.5 billion to Capital One, nearly $6.6 billion to U.S. Bancorp. …

“There is a black box where that checkbook is, and we can’t see into it,” Ellis said. “Once the money leaves Treasury’s hands, we have very little knowledge as to what the heck we’re getting for the billions of dollars.”

Now, even the people who designed the bailout say they’re not happy about it. In the rush to action they didn’t place enough controls on how the administration doled out the money, or what the institutions did with it once they got it.

Continue reading…

The Big 3 automakers don’t need a bailout, they just need to build amphibious cars!