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| It seems the sometimes thoughtful and well connected world of Xanga has been left behind by other less thoughtful and better connected worlds such as MySpace and Facebook.
This is all well and good...I have no great love or allegiance to Xanga. I have joined Facebook and find it more distracting and less benficial than Xanga (which is funny because Xanga was almost on the negative side of beneficial anyway), but as an online social scene Facebook is fairly incredible.
So, do I try to post a thoughtful Xanga post every couple of weeks (something I have not done in a year) only to have it read by no one? Do I jump headlong into facebook? Maybe I should give myspace a run...?
Nah...I think I will spend my time with actual people, having real conversations, talking in complete sentences about things that actually matter. Call me a anti-social, but I don't need a bunch of new "friends." I can harldy keep up with my real ones.
I will still lurk a bit in these bizarre online worlds, but please have the lowest expectations from me when it comes to the blogosphere.
Word. | | |
| Every year I have a sort of unofficial Christmas theme.
This year's: It's Not Your Birthday. | | |
|  | Currently Watching
Dora the Explorer - Dora's Ultimate Adventure Collection
By Kathleen Herles, Harrison Chad, Marc Weiner, Sasha Toro, Muhammed Cunningham, Jake Burbage, Ashley Fleming (III), Jose Zelaya (II), Elaine del Valle, Adam Sietz, Ashley Rose Orr, Eileen Galindo
see related |
A ongoing discussion on faith hosted by the Washington Post:
Find it here: http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/onfaith/2006/11/can_there_be_common_ground/all.html | | |
| Administrators at Willett Elementary School in Attleboro, Massachusetts recently banned tag. That's right folks, no more of that dangerous and frightening game in which one kid runs after another. None of that in Attleboro. They have discovered trouble with a capital "T" and its name is "Tag."
As TIME magazine reports,
"Game over for students in Attleboro, Mass., who yelled "You're it!" one final time at Willett Elementary School last week. The school has forbidden tag--as well as touch football and all other "chase" games--during recess, a move that made national headlines. As in schools from South Carolina to Wyoming that have implemented similar bans recently, Attleboro administrators cite fears that children could get hurt and their parents might sue. According to some parents, another factor was concern that such games could hurt self-esteem if, say, one kid were always "it.""
No more "chase" games? Yeah, like that will ever happen. What are these people thinking?
We have transformed childhood into the arean of self-esteem and lawsuits. Dodge ball -- my favorite game in middle school -- has been banned in many school districts because it celebrates violent behavior. Of course it does. Let a kid throw a ball at a classmate and just maybe a little frustration will dissipate. That energy is going to come out one way or another. And if physical violence is to be absolutely avoided, what about football? Of course, the difference is that dodgeball needs no great apparatus or athletic supervision -- no coach. Just give the kids a ball and let them loose. Isolate the bullies and let the other kids play, and play hard.
The Los Angeles Times reports:
"The topic is so no-win that school officials, admittedly busy with loftier issues, are reluctant to discuss it. But the reality is that schools across the United States have been quietly discouraging tag for years. Any discussion of it elicits a flinch response because this simple schoolyard game is at the nexus of three competing interests: giving kids freedom to play (what many teachers and kids want), keeping them safe from harm on large, unruly playgrounds (what concerned parents want) and avoiding band-aid-related depositions (what all administrators want)."
This world is getting crazier by the minute. The kids, meanwhile, will find a way to play anyway.
More from The Los Angeles Times:
"Tag is a uniquely elemental game that develops naturally -- and kids seem to be hard-wired to play it. At age 4 or 5, children are running around chasing each other, and by the first grade, they've created the rules and organized themselves into a game. "It's one of the few games left where the adults have absolutely nothing to do with it," says psychologist Fred Frankel, director of the UCLA Parent Training and Children's Friendship Programs. "Kids transmit it from generation to generation and spontaneously organize it.""
So the kids will find a way to play tag anyway. So there, meddling school board. You're it. | | |
| TIME magazine, not to be mistaken for a journal on youth ministry, suggests in the current issue that evangelical youth ministry is trending toward substance and away from what it calls a "sugarcoated" approach.
From the article by Sonja Steptoe:
"Youth ministers have been on a long and frustrating quest of their own over the past two decades or so. Believing that a message wrapped in pop-culture packaging was the way to attract teens to their flocks, pastors watered down the religious content and boosted the entertainment. But in recent years churches have begun offering their young people a style of religious instruction grounded in Bible study and teachings about the doctrines of their denomination. Their conversion has been sparked by the recognition that sugarcoated Christianity, popular in the 1980s and early '90s, has caused growing numbers of kids to turn away not just from attending youth-fellowship activities but also from practicing their faith at all."
Now, that is an astounding approach -- maybe kids are hungry for biblical substance and something more than entertainment and pizza. Well, they probably still want the pizza, but they don't want to waste their time in useless and superficial youth programs. This is good news...and from TIME of all places. | | |
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