[Those of you who are just now beginning to track with me: If you are wondering about the name "Bulldog Tooth", go back and read the introduction to the first ever Bulldog Tooth post, written in summer 2004 and published retroactively when I started this blog. That will explain everything.]
So you think that the 2009 Georgia Bulldogs are thoroughly and utterly incapable of losing at least four games?
Uh…yeah. And Michael Jackson faked his death and his upcoming comeback tour will be the biggest in music history. And Mark Sanford was just going down to Argentina to do some sightseeing. (Yes, that is another cheap dig to try to draw pageviews to this site. And you know me, I’m all about the pageviews. Gotta problem with that? Deal with it.)
The biggest difference between the 2008 edition and this year’s team is that this year’s team is down a quarterback and a running back. Matthew Stafford and Knowshon Moreno both defected to the NFL as underclassmen. Matthew Stafford went to the Detroit Lions as the #1 pick. Knowshon Moreno fared only slightly worse, winding up with the Denver Broncos.
The last time that Georgia lost its top two offensive playmakers to the NFL draft as underclassmen was in 1993, when running back Garrison Hearst and wide receiver Andre Hastings both abandoned ship. These defections represented a catastrophic breach to the hull of Georgia’s program; they foundered from a 10-2 finish with a win over Ohio State in the Citrus Bowl to a 5-6 campaign which featured a most infamous 0-4 start in conference play.
So do I think Georgia is headed for a similar catastrophe in 2009, foundering from a 10-3 finish with a win over Michigan State in the Citrus Bowl to a disastrous 5-7 campaign? I don’t think so. The amount and quality of talent in the Georgia program–and the quality of coaching also–have improved significantly from those halcyon days of Ray Goof. Continue Reading »
In our last few posts we met Father Madeleine, saw him rise to the position of mayor of Montreuil-sur-mer, and saw that there was in fact more to him than met the eye.
Now we return to Fantine. She came back to MSM and found it drastically changed from anything she had remembered. She found Father Madeleine’s factory and they were more than willing to take her on. She didn’t make a whole lot of money, but it was enough to live on and to send money to the Thenardiers to provide for Cosette.
Unfortunately it does not take long for Fantine to run into problems. You see, Fantine wrote letters almost constantly to the Thenardiers to inquire about her dear Cosette. Actually, she did not write the letters; she was illiterate. And this goes back to Victor Hugo’s big thing about universal free education; if she had been educated, at least enough to know how to read and write, then she would have been able to write her own letters and that would have prevented an awful lot of the troubles which are to come for her. Continue Reading »
Today I would like to direct your attention to a post by Noel Cordle about God’s will and the desires of our heart.
What is God’s will, anyway? Is it something that is all written out for us already in invisible ink, where all we have to do is find the right thing that will reveal the hidden message? Or is it something that we are free to choose, as long as you live according to the Bible’s teachings and live in a way that honors God?
As many of you probably know, I am originally from the great state of Louisiana. And today I would like to show you something which makes me really proud of this.
As a native Louisianian, I can assure you that this is not atypical of what goes on in the Louisiana legislature. So if you are wondering why Louisiana is at or near the bottom in almost everything, here it is–it is because the Louisiana legislators spend all day doing what you see here.
Last time we met Javert and we saw that he was one man who was not taken in by Father Madeleine. There was one other, and that would be the man whom we will meet today: Father Fauchelevent.
Father Fauchelevent was a well-educated notary, but by the time Father Madeleine came along, his business had begun to decline. He felt a serious twinge of jealousy: This mere artisan was growing rich, while he, an educated professional, was only going downhill. So he took every opportunity he could come across to injure Father Madeleine. Eventually he went bankrupt and lost everything but his horse and cart; this left him with no choice but to try to make his living as a carter.
One day he had an accident. He fell under his cart; his horse was injured in the fall and could not get up. The streets were wet that day from recent rains; the cart was sinking fast and soon he would be crushed.
A crowd had gathered around to watch. Father Madeleine was walking down the street and he saw this. Someone had sent for a jack to lift the cart off of Fauchelevent, but it would be fifteen minutes before the jack arrived and the cart was sinking so fast that by that time he would long since have been crushed.
When Father Madeleine became fully aware of the situation, he asked for someone–anyone–to go under the cart and help to lift it off him. But there were no takers. Javert, who was there as well, told him that there was no one there who was strong enough to lift that cart. The only person Javert knew who would be strong enough to do that was a certain convict from the prison at Toulon. Continue Reading »
Today I would like to direct your attention to another post over at Michael Spencer’s blog. (What? Another Michael Spencer post? Yeah. Gotta problem with that? Tough. Deal with it.)
The post which I have in mind for you is on worship. It is about the commercial and professional enterprise of worship music which has developed within evangelical Protestant-dom over the last couple of decades, and how this is an extremely unfortunate development. This meshes quite well with what I have said about worship in previous posts.
Notice that he is not saying anything about traditional versus contemporary worship. Rather, what he is speaking to is the idea that when anyone says “worship”, our very first thought is “Crank up the band and let’s all get crunk for Jesus!!!!!” We don’t have anything to say about the idea of worship as participation in an ordered liturgy, acts of service to the least among us whom Jesus clearly identified himself with, or any other facet of a life lived to the glory of God in its totality.
Last time we saw how the town of Montreuil-sur-mer had changed drastically in Fantine’s absence, and we met the man responsible for this drastic change, Father Madeleine.
Father Madeleine was respected and admired throughout MSM. He had his share of cynics and detractors as well, but in time even the staunchest of these were won over. All except for one man. This one man was a high-ranking police inspector, and his name was Javert.
Victor Hugo introduces Javert by setting up, in his usual eloquent prose, the idea that every person represents at least one animal, so that all species of the animal kingdom are represented among the human race. Now, certain peasants believe that in every litter of wolves there is one cub which is killed by the mother for fear that when it grows up it will devour all the others. This wolf’s cub would be Javert.
Javert was born in prison, the son of a gypsy mother. It seems that he was ashamed of this for some reason or other, because he grew up with an irascible hatred of gypsies. Here is what Victor Hugo has to say about him: Continue Reading »
Today I would like to direct your attention to a short post over at NextReformation about the whole “vision” thing which seems to have swept through evangelical Protestant-dom during the last couple of decades. Basically it says that this whole “vision” thing is nothing more than a fancy way of saying “I am the alpha wolf around here; you need to just submit to me.” A far cry from the kind of leadership which Jesus modeled and expected His disciples to implement.
As always, your comments, suggestions, dirty jokes (Well…I don’t know about that. We’ll have to see), etc. are welcome.
Last time we saw that the whole village of Montfermeil thought Cosette had been abandoned and forgotten by her mother Fantine. But what was the truth of the matter? We get some advance indication that things will not turn out well for Fantine, when we see that she began to fall behind in her payments to the Thenardiers. Now we get to see the whole thing from Fantine’s perspective.
Having left Cosette safely (so she thought) in the care of the Thenardiers, Fantine continued on to MSM and found that the town had changed drastically in her absence.
Montreuil-sur-mer was a small coastal town in northern France. If you look on Mapquest, you can find a town called Montreuil located about seven miles in from the coast and about eighty miles north of downtown Paris. I have no idea if this is the same Montreuil-sur-mer which appears in the story, but it seems to be in the right part of the country because it is thirty miles from a town called Arras which will figure into some of the later action.
At any rate, MSM had staked its living and livelihood on making imitation jet beads and black glass trinkets. But in order to make the black, they had to use a certain kind of resin which was very expensive and hard to come by. This made the beads and trinkets which they produced very expensive, and as a result business was extremely slow for them. Continue Reading »
I joined Facebook a couple of months back. Since then I have been amazed at how I have had the opportunity to reconnect with people from college, high school, and even elementary school whom I have not seen or heard from in ages.
I have also been amazed at the amount of change that has taken place in the lives of my friends since the time that I last knew them. Many are now married, some have kids, and some have moved to faraway places. Some have undergone even more major changes than this, such as changes in religious belief and even changes in sexual orientation.
I have undergone some major changes as well. One of the most serious changes is that in recent years I have come to terms with certain developmental issues which have been part of my life all along. Those of you who have already been tracking with me here for some time, feel free to take a pass today; this is not for you. But for those of you who are just now finding me, whether through Facebook or otherwise, this is for you. Some of you have already found this without any help from me; thank you for your responses. As for the rest of you, go ahead and read on.
Those of you who knew me back in high school and elementary school, you probably knew all along that something was weird about me. At last you will have the opportunity to put a label on it.
