I was reading about layered mafic intrusions today because I am bored. I am reading it out of a petrology textbook over 20 years old. I bought it because my more modern petrology textbook sucks. Blatt et al can go suck a rotten egg as far as I'm concerned. Best's first edition is better than Blatt et al's current offering.

James Lee Wilson's Carbonate Facies in Geologic History is a must for anyone who deals with carbonates on a regular basis, like I do. Carbonate Sediments and their Diagenesis by Robin Bathurst is also a must have.

You know, I am going nuts. I mean it. There is a lot of stuff that has happened to me over the past few months that I haven't discussed on this blog and probably won't discuss for a while, if ever. Some of this is just so screwed up that I really don't want to discuss it publicly, and the few who do know about all that is happening to me are not talking either. Well, in certain aspects, sort of.

The Scheister is coming soon, and there will even be a commentary by an old Jewish man to go along with it. Basically, you're getting the whole package. It needs a little more editing and maybe a little more background, but it should make you all laugh.

Lutheran Carnival: Laetare is now up at the Lutheran Carnival site.

Did the Russians give away our war plan?

The Return of Patriarchy

DeathStar and the new BoC.

Unless your head was buried in the sand (if it was, you better tell me if it was well or poorly sorted, rounded or angular, etc...), you have seen much of the Confessional Lutheran Blogsphere go absolutely crazy about the Doctrinal Review Board pulling its certification of the new Book of Concord (just called BoC from now on). Various hypotheses have appeared to explain this. I have now given a man you can have confidence in, a man whose integrity as a reporter is beyond reproach, a man who always gets to the bottom of a story no matter how much (expletive deleted) he has to wade through. Yes, I am talking about Samuel Simon Schmucker and The Scheister. No stone will remain unturned (or carefully looked over for ore), no lead remain unscrutinized, no bad geology joke will remain untold with Samuel Simon Schmucker on the job. Leave it to him to tell the whole story.

I wish to let it be known that I have only received four entries for the carnival. If you haven't taken the time to do so, grab your favorite beverage (be it hot or cold), sit down for a bit, and see what gems you can find in these older blogs. If you are having trouble figuring out where to look, here are a few suggestions.

The First British Lutheran Blog Ever
All the Fullness
Bunnie Diehl
Journalistic Jargon
Love and Blunder
Watersblogged
Full Throttle and an Empty Gas Tank
Theology Geek
Terrible Swede
Necessary Roughness
IntolerantElle
Yeah...
Katie's Beer
Nonpareil
The Moose Report
Beggars All

I do not know if this even begins to cover the possibilities.

I was playing with the Wayback Machine, preparing for the next Lutheran Carnival (hint hint) and I ran into an old post that truly demonstrates what kind of a blogger I was once upon a time.

WE ARE DEATHSTAR. YOU WILL BE ASSIMILATED. RESISTANCE IS FUTILE.

Why do I still find this funny? You know, I thought I was beyond all the pettiness and stupidity. I guess I can be serious and discuss theology with the best of them, or I can be, well, the guy who says things like that.

Anyway, the Carnival is due this Friday. As a reminder, you can't submit your own stuff, but only the stuff of others that is dated no later than March 2005.

What you do, do quickly is back and as feisty as ever. I have never been sure what to think about this blog. It reminded me of me a lot in my early days. That might be why I was one of the few people it seems in the Lutheran Blogshpere who is hesitant of accepting this blog. I have raised hell. I have called people out. I've been crude, rude, unsightly, and an ass, normally all at once. During this whole time, however, everybody has known who I am. I haven't been the most charitable to either Kieshnick or Benke. It's hard to be charitable when one admits he isn't much of a theologian (and we expect him to keep other theologians in line?) and the other constantly squats over altar and pulpit fellowship and takes a nice dump upon it. Maybe it will turn into a coprolite and then it will become interesting to me. Anyway, the point is you all know I said these things about them. If someone wants to bring the hammer down on me, there is plenty of opportunities to do it. As someone who does put his neck out there and waits for the chopping block to fall, I find the whole being anonymous thing to be annoying. Honestly, if your going to say inflammatory things and piss people off, at least put your name on the thing.

With that said, I am completely dumbfounded how LutherChik could confuse TK and me. She is a nice ELS lady from Minnesota, and I am an ass who attends a LCMS congregation in Kansas. She was the one who was polite, and I was the one who was being an ass. Do you see a pattern here? Her blogs are nice, and mine show what an ass I am. The fact you couldn't see what a gradeschooler could figure out probably should tell you and your copatriots to give up the "holier than thou" routine because you couldn't even figure out who "thou" is.

My dear Great Aunt had a wonderful church to belong to. It was what I always thought a Catholic Church should look like. There was a lot of artwork scattered throughout the church. Statues of Jesus and Mary predominated of course. This church also had some of the most beautiful stained glass I have ever seen. The apostles are all presented in this stained glass. In the evening, the sun shines in and lights up the glass, giving it a otherworldly appearance. This is an old Catholic Church built after a tornado ripped through this small town in 1911 and destroyed the original church. It is part of the old German Catholic farming community that sprung up in the area. The priest is an older gentleman, but a man who showed both love and mercy to my Great Aunt. She was baptized, given her first communion, confirmed, married, and buried in that church. That blows my mind.

As with her brother (my great uncle) before, she died well. She died clinging to her baptism and clinging to the crucifix. Along with my uncle, they all set an example for me as to how to die. As long as I die clinging to my baptism and to the hope set in front of me through the crucifix, I have nothing to fear from death. They all look forward to the life to come, as do I even now. I thank God for the faith he gave all of them.

I walked into the Church, and besides the stunning beauty of the Church as a whole (they don't build them like that anymore), there were honest to goodness hymnals. Yes, I saw big red books sitting in the pew racks. I was stunned. I opened it up and actually found the hours listed and I also found the mass in the hymnal. There were missalettes also in the pews, but I didn't see the letters OCP anywhere in this church.

The choir was a liturgical choir and the priest gave something resembling a law and gospel homily. I think it is quite difficult for anyone who preaches at a funeral to not preach the gospel at some point. One of the most shocking things at the graveside service was when we prayed for the next person in the group who will die. It brought it all home: God can call us home at anytime.

I came away from this funeral mass thinking much more highly of Rome than the prior funeral mass I had attended. Maybe it was the whole country church vs city church dichotomy that made things more comfortable for me. Maybe it was just the environment that made things wonderful. I think I can say this: God willing, I pray I won't have to attend another funeral mass for a while.

Lutheran Carnival XIX is up at Be Strong in the Grace.

What are people saying about the LC?

Oh me..I may have spoken too soon. I checked out some of the past carnivals done by this group..some of them are a bit to the right of Atilla the Hun.--LoveisTruth

Those guys are mainly seminarians and Pastors from the LCMS. Not only that , they are part of the confessional movement. They are some hardcore people. From what I read in their blogs, The elca is not lutheran and 90% of the LCMS are not either. One is to liberal and the others are to Protestant. Honestly I think they want to crown themselves bishops. IMO.

There is useful information though, just to be fair.--thinkstoomuch

I've read through this "carnival" before. Waaaaay too scary for me.:-O (In the immortal words of Jerry Seinfeld in one classic Seinfeld episode, "That's one angry clown.")--tawonda

We're being compared to Atilla the Hun? I just thought we were people putting our ideas out there and trying to preserve 2000 years of catholic history. I also find it amusing they think all of us are disgruntled LCMS types. Maybe my girlfriend (who is WELS) might dispute that, along with the current LC host. She belongs to the ELS. Of course, some of our contributers come from Canada (LCC) and England (ELCE). What do I know? I'm only one of three snobby, stiff-necked, backwards laymen that run this thing. Oh yes, you heard me. I am a layman. There's no pastoral conspiracy, no clergy pulling the strings behind the scenes, nobody actually telling us how to run this thing. Rather, we have a group of laymen concerned about what people think about Lutheranism and willing shout to say there is a different way to be Lutheran besides the ELCA way.

How come death seems to be hovering around me and my family as of late? I had a great aunt die on Friday. Her rosary was today. I'll have a report about the funeral tomorrow.

The announcement post for LC XX is up. You need to read this post to see the new protocols implemented for this carnival only. Call it an experiment.

I saw Josh's comment on my last post, and it reminded me of something I know intrinsically but just don't think about all that much: blogging is hard. You don't know how many times I agonized about what to write about. There are days where the topics fall into your lap and you just write out your thoughts on the matter. There are other days where you know you have a list of about 20 things you want to write about and can't seem to remember any of them. Unfortunately, that is my situation most of the time. I try to remember all there great ideas I had in my head, but they just disappear into the void that is my brain, never to be seen. I have no idea why this happens now. It could be the fact that I've blogged about a lot of different things and I just have trouble finding creative things to blog about. There's also the fact that most people don't find the emplacement of granitic plutons all that exciting. I don't really find it all that exciting either. Mapping them is quite boring when it comes right down to it.

Anyway, I have this really crazy idea for LC XX. I'll just have to see if we (and I do mean we) can pull it off.

A TRIP DOWN MEMORY LANE

I occasionally like to wax poetic and think about "the good old days." OK, the "good old days" was where the total number of Confessional Lutheran blogs could be counted on two hands. Two years ago, the whole of the Confessional Lutheran blogsphere was contained in 10 blogs. How do I know this? Between Josh and I, we linked to every know Lutheran blog. Two years ago, there were 10 of us. Josh railed against Calvinism, The Swede hasn't changed much, Preacherman was the "pastor" of this group, Thomas was wondering if he was still Lutheran, Chris the Brit was the only guy in the UK blogging, Chris of All the Fullness was doing what he still does, just more regularly, Dave of "The Sick Soul" held out hope for the ELCA, (I wonder what happened to him), Neal of "Yeah" was the only WELS/ELS blog out there (I wonder why he's not blogging much), Keith A raged as only a chemist could, and I made sure Kieshnick and company didn't get too comfortable. There were 10 of us each with our own niches and well-defined roles. Now there are hundreds of Confessional Lutheran blogs. Not too far after February 2004 is when the blogsphere exploded. By the time 2005 rolled around, I couldn't keep up with all the blogs.

One of these days, I'll have to write up a history of this little niche of the internet.

There has been a change of deadline for submitting posts to the Lutheran Carnival. I also put up a couple of suggestions for future carnival hosts.

Why didn't I find this blog sooner? My favorite 24 site has been Dave Barry, but now I have found Blogs4Bauer. Oh yes, not only do they have a blog, but they also host the Carnival of Bauer. They even sell merchandise! Not only that, it's run by a who's who of the insane conservative bloggers, which means it's actually funny. Anyway, this blog is going to the top of my list of very stupid links.

By the way, don't go there unless you are finished watching both episodes.

Also, the guy who writes this blog (if you don't get the joke, quit pretending to be conservative) contributes to Blogs4Bauer.

Am I obsessed or what?

I've posted everywhere but here as of late.

So Here We Stand is going nuts again over the old earth/new earth controversy. I made my peace with this topic long ago.

I went to something I felt at ease at today, a place where I was with people I enjoy, an event I like to walk around at, an event where I feel at home. Yes, I was at a gun show. As I walked around the pavilion, I saw all sorts of people, from white trash to the extremely educated, guys with limbs blown off to guys who have never seen a gym before, guys who wore camo to guys who had multiple piercings. There were the usual people with rebel flags and bumper stickers telling Billary where they can stick it, but also guys showing pride in their alma matter. Yeah, you can look around and see a lot of the stereotypes the gun grabbers want to believe, but the businessman that stood next to me as I was fondling some of Glock's latest creations said, "My friends ask me why guns and why not classic cars? Guns are a heck of a lot cheaper than cars and I enjoy it. They just don't get me." I guess you have to hold a gun and fire it to truly understand the magic these pieces of polymer and steel have over men. Economists often talk about guns and butter. I'll take the guns because I can't eat the butter anymore.

Glock

Edit: My girlfriend pointed out to me Glock's website is in German and English, but not in French. Hmmmm.