Urban Onramps

Indiana Jones’ bid for tenure was officially denied.

I’ve had this green phlegm, sore throat thing since Thursday, when I lost my voice. I’ve never lost my voice, ever. So this has been a new experience. My son Samuel prayed that I would get my voice back. My voice feels about 50% back, but he declared me healed: “Daddy got his voice back!” I’ve been wiped out to boot. I did nothing all weekend but rest, and not even that (I woke myself up with my own snoring a few times). Today I was whacked out for different reasons. But my stock is on an up-tick, I can feel it.

• Why YOU should church plant por este Bob Hyatt
• Micro-finance: A way out of poverty by Jennifer Roback Morse
• This Time, It’s Not the Economy
• Local man gives USC $35 million: He said he’s become wealthier than he ever imagined possible and wants to help others at his alma mater.
• Fallout of Hamas’s rule spurs Palestianian desire to flee:

Like Hushiyeh, a growing number of Palestinians are openly saying they’d like to leave the West Bank and Gaza if given the chance, raising concern about the possibility of a Palestinian brain drain. The sentiment, which flouts the long-held Palestinian belief that Israeli occupation can only be resisted by staying put, is yet another indication of the deepening despair since Hamas was elected to run the government.

• Nicaragua poised to outlaw all abortions
• College degree worth an extra $23,000 a year: Take heed: I like this number a lot better than the other number you get when discussing education-based income disparities. That number is “$1 million” - people like to say that over a lifetime you can expect to earn a million bucks more if you have a college degree. That’s not a good figure, though, because most people have a hard time understanding what a million bucks over the course of a very long period of time can do. But $23,000 every 12 months - now THAT’S a number you can get worked up about. Excuse me while I go grab some urban youth standing on the corner, admiring the rims on passing cars, and convince him to take a bazillion dollars in schools loans and go finish that degree…
• This is so amazing to me that I’m going to repost it in full. I’m actually reposting what JordonCooper had originally posted: Dilbert’s creator, Scott Adams, hacks his own brain:

My theory was that the part of my brain responsible for normal speech was still intact, but for some reason had become disconnected from the neural pathways to my vocal cords. (That’s consistent with any expert’s best guess of what’s happening with Spasmodic Dysphonia. It’s somewhat mysterious.) And so I reasoned that there was some way to remap that connection. All I needed to do was find the type of speaking or context most similar – but still different enough – from normal speech that still worked. Once I could speak in that slightly different context, I would continue to close the gap between the different-context speech and normal speech until my neural pathways remapped. Well, that was my theory. But I’m no brain surgeon.

The day before yesterday, while helping on a homework assignment, I noticed I could speak perfectly in rhyme. Rhyme was a context I hadn’t considered. A poem isn’t singing and it isn’t regular talking. But for some reason the context is just different enough from normal speech that my brain handled it fine.

Jack be nimble, Jack be quick.
Jack jumped over the candlestick.

I repeated it dozens of times, partly because I could. It was effortless, even though it was similar to regular speech. I enjoyed repeating it, hearing the sound of my own voice working almost flawlessly. I longed for that sound, and the memory of normal speech. Perhaps the rhyme took me back to my own childhood too. Or maybe it’s just plain catchy. I enjoyed repeating it more than I should have. Then something happened.

My brain remapped.

My speech returned.

Not 100%, but close, like a car starting up on a cold winter night. And so I talked that night. A lot. And all the next day. A few times I felt my voice slipping away, so I repeated the nursery rhyme and tuned it back in. By the following night my voice was almost completely normal.

When I say my brain remapped, that’s the best description I have. During the worst of my voice problems, I would know in advance that I couldn’t get a word out. It was if I could feel the lack of connection between my brain and my vocal cords. But suddenly, yesterday, I felt the connection again. It wasn’t just being able to speak, it was KNOWING how. The knowing returned.

I’ve been thinking about this for a few days. I wonder if such a thing can occur at an emotional level as well….

I’m on my sidekick, getting a ride to O’Hare airport. It’s 5am central time. I’ve got a 7:30 a.m. Flight back to LAX. If all goes well I will land at LAX at 9:30 a.m. and be back in the hood before noon, which means one thing: Back to work, Carrasco! I was in Chicago to attend Christianity Today’s 50th Anniversary Celebration. They had me doing two workshops related to the Intersect/Culture DVD that just debuted. It was a great time. Saw Chris Like. a former Harambee summer intern who came over from Wheaton College. Sat next to Lauren Winner at one session. Got to hang out with a whole bunch of CTI editors and staff, who are an agreeable bunch. Got some affirming words from a former CT board member, a woman whose name escapes me right now. Billy Graham founded CT, but he couldn’t be there. He was too weak to travel. I ended up fighting off some cold or flu, and I actually lost my voice just before dinner. I think it’s the first time in my life that I lost my voice. My throat still hurts a bit right now, though I have a little voice back.

Entrepreneurship from Below by Luis Enrique Bazan is a justice-oriented article that notes the following:

This is the first time that The Nobel Committee has chosen to award the peace prize to a profit-making business.

Bazan is referring to the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize, won by the Grameen Bank. Bazan’s article appears at David Batstone’s Right Reality web site.

My very personal private viewpoint these days is, “The Way of Jesus Brings Life.” I say it three times and snap my fingers and… ok, just being silly, I’ve been in meetings ever since who knows when, September I think… but I digress - I really have that phrase rattling around in my head. Then I go to the home page of The Jesus Dojo and see this: “Making a Life in the Way of Jesus.” I’m gonna get that Scandrette! Unless, of course, it’s the reverse and I owe some royalty or something to him.

Look at this photo:

I was at The Coffee Gallery and this was one of their flavored coffee offerings: Dark Mexican. I felt affirmed.

He’ll be doing the Soliton Zoo.

Steve Van Diest is with Campus Crusade and is based in D.F. They do this Enfoque Mexico thing.

This post by Slacktivist is stirring the pot, in a good way. His original point is about whether the small Christian ministry to the poor should scale up using government money, or not.

Literally - our man in Virginia has relocated to Djibouti for a year, serving with Naval Criminal Investigative Service. Prayers for you on your deplyment, Tim, and for your family back home.

Here is Jordon Cooper’s account of his trip to Los Angeles last weekend. There’s something for everyone in this text: dog fights, man thongs, Mariachi band following you as a life-soundtrack, a certain travel blogger’s first glass of wine ever, and the Economics of Soularize.

(Inner monologue: When is my next emerging church travel thingy? Does the Christianity Today’s 50th Anniversary Celebration this Thursday count? Would the Emerging Church Travel Bloggers Union assent? Yikes. That’s how rumors get started. I better make it clear that there is no Emerging Church Travel Bloggers Union, nor is there an illuminati-like group that approves/disapproves of things.)

If you google “U2 taxes” you can catch up with a row that started last month. U2 moved a small piece of their business to Holland in order to avoid a new Irish tax. Some are criticizing the move in light of U2’s call for governments worldwide to contribute more tax dollars to fighting poverty. I’m interested in this topic not because it bashes U2, but because it’s ripe for surfacing important observations. For example, U2’s defenders say that the band has been very generous over the years with their own personal money as well as via “just” business practices (no links, stuff I’ve received via email), so this move away from contributing to Ireland’s pot for fighting global poverty should be seen within a larger context, that while U2’s contribution to this particular pot may be less than hoped for, in the larger sense they’ve done great things for the cause. A lot of U2 fans, Rudy included, are willing to accept that explanation. Now, remove “U2″ and insert “America” and you can see where I’m going. America may not contribute to a particular pot by a high enough percentage, but if you consider on the whole America’s contribution to fighting global poverty (recall the large amounts that private Americans contributed to Tsunami relief), then America should get the same benefit of the doubt that U2 gets.

If the BBC is one of your regular sources for news and information, you should be aware of this London Daily Mail article: We are biased, admit the stars of BBC News:

One veteran BBC executive said: ‘There was widespread acknowledgement that we may have gone too far in the direction of political correctness.

‘Unfortunately, much of it is so deeply embedded in the BBC’s culture, that it is very hard to change it.’

And:

Political pundit Andrew Marr said: ‘The BBC is not impartial or neutral…. It has a liberal bias not so much a party-political bias. It is better expressed as a cultural liberal bias.’

…Anthony Bradley wrote this:

Single Black And Latino Guys Moving Into Conservative Evangelical Circles Too Fast Will Should Be Prepared For Celibacy

He’s on a roll.

Aaron Flores:

Last night, a friend from church asked why I selected one of the most segregated hispanic communities in Orange County, if not the United States, to plant a ethnically diverse church. I had two answers…

Read the whole post.