If you could choose five artists that you would want to be blogging, who would they be?  And when I say blogging, I mean regularly, actively, participating in a blogging community.  Who would you want to hear from the most?  More specifically, who do you think I should talk to next about blogging?

Ready?  Go.

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Remember my friend John from The Myriad?  Well, check this out.  John wrote a book.  How cool is that?  I haven’t had a chance to check it out yet because Amazon won’t let me read parts of it, and I haven’t left the house to get to Borders yet, but I’m excited to check it out.

John is an amazing guy.  We had such a great time on the tour that we were on together, and continue to stay in touch.  I swear the guy needs his own TV show where he just sits and talks to the camera for an hour or so.  He has so many stories, some of which I hope, for your sake, are not in the book, and has an amazing way of telling them.  He also has a great story about how he once almost met Ving Rhames before he was doing Quizno’s commercials.

So, if you get a chance, check out John’s book and then purchase it.  I’ve got some running around to do today so hopefully I will have time to check it out.  If anyone is able to get it or check it out let us all know what you think.  

Have a great Thursday.  

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White Gold - “One Gallon Axe”

You’re Welcome

*This has been a part of  CARLOS WHITTAKER’S CREATIVE CHAOS thing. And it was foolish of me to leave the link off. I apologize to CARLOS WITTAKER and his CREATIVE CHAOS thing and anyone else that I may have offended.  Make sure to go visit CARLOS WHITTAKER’S CREATIVE CHAOS thing that he has over at RAGAMUFFINSOUL.COM.

**This has also been a sarcastic response to something in the comments

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Pathetic - Moon Janitor - I need to poop - Gene Pensiero cult leader - is like blaming spoons - stealing pine cones - baby sitter poaching - barbie jesus - stanky and the coal miners polka band - tick tock tick tock - Brody Harper nude.

“I need to poop”, said Gene Pensiero, cult leader as he grabbed his Barbie Jesus and headed out of the room.  

Roughly ten minutes later, Floyd, the pathetic moon janitor, stumbled in after a late night of rocking out with Stanky and The Coal Miners Polka Band.  Floyd was not normally one to be late, but Gene had recently noticed strange things happening when Floyd was around.  ”Tick Tock Tick Tock“, said Gene, “How can we run an efficient cult here, if you can’t even show up on time?”  

“Sorry, Gene, it won’t happen again”.  Floyd had been accused of things in the past like baby sitter poaching, but nothing was ever proven, but now it seemed like every time Floyd was around it was as if someone was stealing pine cones and putting them places they didn’t belong.

Gene went to his eleventh wife Sara, concerned about Floyd and the missing pine cones.  ”I don’t think I can trust him”, Gene said.  ”Every time I ask Floyd about the pine cones, he is like… blaming spoons or something, and saying other weird things.  And the other day when I was out on a walk, I saw Brody Harper nude, and that shook me up a little.  There is just too many weird things happening in this place.”  ”Well, it’s your cult, Gene.”, said Sara.

So I had this idea the other day to use all the search words that you guys came up with in a story.  I picked most of them and put them at the top of this post.  There’s my story.  Keep in mind it’s way too early to come up with a creative way to use “baby sitter poaching” but I gave it a shot.  

Here’s the challenge.  The list of words is up there.  Use those words and write your own story in the comments.  Let’s see who can come up with the funniest story.  

Ready? Go.

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Google just got a little creepier.  Has anyone seen Google Street View yet?  I’m a little weirded out by it, but at the same time completely fascinated.  This is a view from Downtown Nashville.  

Can you find your house?

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It’s Tuesday again.  Time to write something positive.  I have noticed more and more people getting involved in this thing and I think it’s awesome.  I think that it has and can continue to grow into something really cool.  With more folks coming every week I wanted to re-post the idea behind this though most people already know.  The “guidelines” are pretty loose and it’s a pretty simple thing.  Write something nice, then share it.  This is from the original post:

I want to try something. (and it’s pretty early in the morning so I don’t know how good of an idea this is) I want today to be “Positive Post Tuesday”. Let’s today, all write something on our blogs that builds another person up. Someone who is doing an amazing job at something, or someone that is changing the world around them by living the way they are supposed to, or someone that you feel needs building up and deserves it. Write about them and comment here and post the address of your blog below.* Then at the end of the day we can all go through the links and check them out. Sound good?

That’s it.  It’s that simple.  Like I said, it’s been a pretty amazing thing to see people getting involved and coming up with nice things to say about people.  We live in a pretty cynical world and it’s cool to see things that will bring smiles to peoples faces every week.

We have some relatively new friends that we had over this week for the first time.  We have been trying to hang out with them for weeks now, but haven’t been able to align schedules.  Michael leads worship at our church and him and his wife Andrea have become good friends of ours.  We switch off driving the kids to school but now with Kristin working, and us with only one car, it seems like they have really taken the brunt of driving the kids to school.  It’s a pretty temporary situation, but it’s still amazing of them to do.

Michael and Andrea are also from California so we have that in common and even weirder, Michael grew up about twenty minutes from where I grew up.  Small world huh?  Anyway we have had a great time getting to know them more and hanging out with people that seem so similar to us.  It’s fun to be able to talk about the same places and even some of the same people, as if we have known each other for years.  They are awesome genuine people that are easy to be around and unbelievably caring.  It will be awesome to get to know them better and become better friends. 

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So every once in a while I will look to see what people are searching when they end up on my blog.  Typically it’s nothing too exciting.  A few different spellings of my name, sometimes a search for a picture that I once used.  More often than not there is a search for Jesse James, the cowboy bandit guy that got off’d in his own living room.  But today.  Today was different.

I was sitting down to send out a quick email and decided that I would take a look to see what people were searching.  Here’s the list I got.  More Jesse James, and then some negative thoughts on Myspace.  Not too out of the ordinary.  Then there’s that one third from the bottom.  Huh?  That’s odd.  I’m not entirely sure anyone should be searching for that.  In fact I’m really sure that no one should be searching for that.  That’s not even something my wife would search for.

I sent the search results to Randy and after a good laugh, asked him to search it and see what happened.  My luck would have there be some adult film star with my name and I didn’t need that showing up on my computer, so Randy got to check it out.  Turns out it’s some female TV star from Australia, who hosts a “magazine and lifestyle” show.  Nothing too racy, but certainly not me.

So, most of these blogs have a way of seeing what people are searching when they end up on your site.  What’s the weirdest thing that you have seen bring people to your blog?

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“When I took away the lens of the negative and forced myself to look at the positive, I found that there were far more things worth celebrating in the everyday than I had ever realized. What I took from all of this was that this is it.
The kids playing in the park.
The crossing guard who smiles at me every morning when I pull into school.
Even the sweaters my neighbor puts on his dog (as unfortunate as animals in clothes are).
This is what our world is made up of. These ordinary things. And if we’re willing to take the time to see it, we’ll realize that this ordinary day is wonderful because it’s simple and complicated, beautiful and mysterious and wholly ours.”

This is a really cool idea for a site.  It’s great to see folks recognizing positive things in the details of a day.

It just launched today, Check it out.

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So the other day my friend Seth blogged about this pretty amazing application for his iPhone.  Naturally, after reading what Seth had to say about all the different things he could now do with his iPhone, including Super Mario Brothers, recording music, Etch-N-Sketch, and GPS, I was intrigued and a hair jealous.  Seth sent me the link and now I too, have the entire King James Bible on my iPhone.  I also have GPS, a cool locating Twitter Application and a game where I can smash marbles into things.  It’s pretty awesome.  I can also record video now with my phone, which is something I never understood why Apple didn’t do, and I can also play guitar on my phone.  

Mostly all of this stuff will be used to entertain either myself or my kids when we are places that we need to be quiet and distracted.  I am still sorting through all the different things that this thing has.  There are tons of games, photo applications, dictionaries, alarms, and a ton of other stuff that I have no idea what it is.

So if you have an iPhone, I would suggest checking out iLiberty.  There are a million different ways to waste your battery faster, and you might find some of it useful.

Check it out. And Thanks Seth.

*This post has been added to Watercooler Wednesday*

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