Author: Michael Brown

Loose Connections of My Own

Alabama.gifI’m starting to get all worked up about the upcoming college football season. Crisp fall air, golden brown leaves crunching underfoot, and college football on TV from Thursday through Saturday make for an intoxicating brew. I graduated from a college with only a moderately successful football team and have never experienced an honest-to-goodness campus “Game Day,” so I don’t have as much ego and money tied up in all this as some people do. But as a Virginia expatriate who has lived 17 years in Alabama, I wish to announce that I have finally chosen a side: I do hereby officially declare that I am always, and ever will be, pulling for the Crimson Tide.… Read the rest

An Eye is a Terrible Thing To Pluck

Sometimes object lessons go just a little too far.

Yesterday, our pulpit minister was preaching on purity and was reading Mark 9:47:

And if your eye causes you to sin, pluck it out. It is better for you to enter the kingdom of God with one eye than to have two eyes and be thrown into hell,

To emphasize the point, he brought his hand to his eye to illustrate what “plucking” looked like and to drive home his point. I immediately sensed danger, and I leaned foward at the ready, my professional instincts suddenly on full, red-eye alert. We all watched in horrified fascination as he sharply thrust his fingers toward his orbit in pincer-like fashion.… Read the rest

More Real Sex on Casual Friday

If you’re like me, your workplace allows “Casual Friday,” a day of reprieve from those constricting ties and starchy dress shirts. However, as I sit here contemplating which polo shirt I’ll wear with my khakis today, these passages from Lauren Winner’s book Real Sex give me pause:

Casual Fridays, I think, capture some of our society’s confusion about clothes. Professional workplaces have dress codes in part because managers know that how we dress shapes our behavior. If we dress up, if we dress professionally, we are more likely to behave professionally, to treat others with respect and be treated likewise. A few years ago, when employers all over corporate America said employess could dress down on the last day of the work week, workers were thrilled.

… Read the rest

A Back to School Nightmare

The “back to school” drill is not only hard on kids, but parents as well. What’s really bad are the dreams that parents seem to start having around this time of year.

I had one last night. Actually, I had several, since I kept waking up, falling back to sleep and then dreaming the same blasted dream again.

It was a variation on an old familiar theme. I was back in high school, only this time I was not a slim, salutatorian, but instead I was trapped in my present-day, balding, middle-age body (usually I at least get the benefit of a younger former self).… Read the rest

Real Sex is a Winner

winner.jpgNow that I have your attention, I wish to put in a good word for a book that I’m currently reading (consuming might be the better verb), Real Sex:The Naked Truth About Chastity by Lauren Winner.

Now I know what you’re thinking: Mike, shouldn’t you know what “real sex” is by now?

Well, yes and no. Yes, I know some things about what sex is, should be, and can be, but no, it doesn’t mean I know everything I should. Nor does it mean that that I’m very effective at teaching my sons about sex and how to faithfully answer God’s call to chastity in a postmodern, sex-saturated society.… Read the rest

Lady in the Water–A Review

lady_in_the_water_ver2.jpgBoy, the things a guy’s got to go through to tell a bedtime story these days.

If you’re director M. Night Shyamalan, it means that first you part ways with long-time partner Disney after they excoriate your latest project, Lady in the Water. Then when the film is produced and released by Warner Brothers, it means you must run a gauntlet of cynical and surly critics, the same ones that mercilessly panned your signature film, The Sixth Sense, when it debuted (plus every movie you’ve released since). While Shyamalan seems somewhat hurt and nonplussed by all the fuss (listen here to his comments from an NPR interview broadcast the day before the movie’s release), he remains confident that his vision will be accepted by both his longtime, core fans and moviegoers at large.… Read the rest

Pre Lives, But Not in This Body

What a relief! In the comments from yesterday’s post, I mentioned that I went on a cleaning frenzy recently and threw away my Nike Air Max ’96s that I wore in the Rocket City Marathon back in 1997. After reminiscing about all my “old school” shoes, I began to have second thoughts and wondered if I was going to have to make a trip to the landfill to dig them out.IMG_0071.JPG

Good news–I found them! After 21 plus years of marriage, Eyegal knows that I often make rash decisions like that and figured that I would regret it and had put them in the garage instead of the trash can.… Read the rest

Name…That…Shooooe!

After coming clean on my shoe addiction, I’m ripping off a page from everybody’s favorite Catfish Queen reject Nancy French and having my first contest at Ocular Fusion.

(Cue the audience to shout) Name…That…Shooooe! (cue wild, audience applause and generic game show music)

That’s right, the first person to correctly ID the following shoe will receive, courtesy of yours truly, a signed copy of Doug Mendenhall’s new book, How Jesus Ended Up in the Food Court: Seventy-Seven Devotional Thoughts You Never Thought About Before.

Here’s the picture. Remember, I’m looking for the exact name of this Nike classic:

nikeoregonwaffle-01 2.jpg

It’s really not that hard; there are sufficient clues scattered here and there that should lead you toward the correct answer.… Read the rest

Revenge of a Shoe Nerd

“Where do I buy the Nike shoes?”
-Tom Hanks as Victor Navorski, The Terminal

Hello. My name is Mike the Eyeguy, and I am a shoe nerd.

There, I said it, it’s out in the open now. I no longer have to hide the fact that ever since I was a bushy-haired boy growing up in the 1970s, I’ve been obsessed with athletic shoes of all brands, colors and sports. I’ve worn just about all of them at one time or another: Keds, PF Flyers (remember how they made you run faster and jump higher?), Converse All Star Chuck Taylor canvas high tops (black, red and sky blue–back before I knew that color was associated with the evil Tar Heels), Puma “Suedes” (often referred to as “Clydes” after Walt Frazier, famous point guard for the N.Y.… Read the rest

Buy, Take Up and Read

According to Augustine, the key point in his conversion came when he heard the sing-song voice of a little girl telling him to “tolle lege” or “take up and read.” The book she was referring to was The Bible, and when Augustine obeyed, his eyes fell upon Romans 13 and the rest is, as they say, history.

Now comes another otherworldly voice offering a good piece of advice– “Buy, take up and read.”
dougs book.jpg

This time the book is entitled How Jesus Ended Up in the Food Court: Seventy-Seven Devotional Thoughts You Never Thought About Before by my good friend Doug Mendenhall.… Read the rest

A Front Porch View

Summer Storms.jpg

I’ve been grabbing some much needed and overdue front porch time in my homestate of Virginia this week. The view above is from a couple of nights ago as a late evening thunderstorm rolled into the valley where I grew up. That particular storm blew the roof off the Virginia Transportation Museum in downtown Roanoke. I know that probably didn’t make the A.P. wire, but it sure got the attention of folks around here.

Besides sitting on the front porch taking in an eyeful of Blue Ridge Mountains, here are a few of my other favorite things to do when I’m in Virginia:… Read the rest

Cubera Nights

USS_Cubera;0834702.jpg.jpgIt was fitting that my Father’s Day gift arrived in a small, Priority Mail shipping container. The Navy ballcap emblazoned with “USS Cubera, SS-347″ barely fit inside its tight, cardboard quarters. The snugness reminded me of the way her crew must have felt, tightly sealed inside the smothering, steel hull of the Balao Class fast-attack submarine as she patrolled the waters of the Caribbean and the Atlantic during the Cold War, her eyes ever open for any sign of danger from Mother Bear.

And of course, the cap reminded me of my father, which, I suppose, was the whole point.… Read the rest

The Head Butt Heard ‘Round the World

Zidane head butt.jpgIt’s been a week since the “head butt heard ’round the world,” and the repercussions of Zinedene Zidane’s shot to the chest of Marco Materazzi continue to ricochet wildly throughout the internet.

Zidane has issued an apology (of sorts) for his outburst which arguably cost France the World Cup. For his part, Materazzi has reassured us that he would never dream of insulting someone’s mother. No, according to the Italian defender the insult that provoked Zidane was merely a garden variety one that is tossed around the pitch on a routine basis, implying, of course, that the French midfielder and captain overreacted.… Read the rest

Near the Foothills of the Ozarks

harding.jpg

I’ll be headed west today to pay a call on my alma mater, Harding University (Hail!).

Number One Son has been there attending Honors Symposium the last two weeks, hopefully staying out of too much trouble while bulking up the ol’ grey matter. When I first heard about Honors Symposium I thought it was some sort of “boot camp for the brain,” but when I talked to the parents of previous attendees, I realized it was much more than that.

It’s actually a two-week session of interesting interdisciplinary classes with catchy titles like, “Designer Genes: Technology and the Creation of the Western Dystopia,” and “The Bain of Cobain,” punctuated with service projects, camping, field trips, rock climbing and generally just hanging out with some very cool kids from around the country.… Read the rest