BlogRodent: Pentecostal Rumination & Review

I just realized that my subscription tool for subscribing to BlogRodent by email was dysfunctional. So, I’ve fixed it and wanted to let you know.

If you’re a regular reader of this blog and don’t use a feed reader to monitor the site, you can still catch all the blogalicious stuff right in your inbox by just subscribing to BlogRodent by email.

And, here’s something I have failed to mention before about this: You can get the notification in HTML format--but only if you register first (not my decision--it's a function of the plugin I'm using).

[tags]BlogRodent, subscribe[/tags]

I’ve been running a new tool on my site for a couple days that hasn’t broken (yet) so I figure it’s time to announce it in case you’re interested. Enter: BlogRodent’s Del.icio.us Stuff. You’ll find my list of interesting things on the left (see, there?) and you can click from there, or go to the full page (link above) and see the brief comment I wrote for each item. If you’re silly about it, you can even watch my passing fancies in your favorite newsreader by subscribing. 

One of the things I hate about many weblogs is the insanely recursive and self-referential nature of many (if not most) of the posts out there. Blog A points, to blog B, which points to Blog C, which points back to

I’ve been watching NBC’s Trumpfest, The Apprentice, since it began four seasons ago. At first I watched because it was a Burnett production, and my wife and I were enjoying Survivor. So, we figured since Mark Burnett was the wunderkind of unReality TV, it would be worth a watch. Now in its fifth season, my wife has stopped watching, but I still catch it on Tivo.

I’m not a particular fan of Donald Trump, conspicuous consumption, materialism, the almighty dollar, cut-throat business dealings, white-collar back-stabbing, greed, jealousy, petty rivalries, or getting fired. Its not entirely schadenfreude—the joy of watching others experience pain—it’s more like the fascination of seeing justice served when incompetent workers get axed mixed with cheers for the scrappy underdog I want to win. Whatever the source of my fascination, I’m surprised my date with Donald has lasted into the fifth season. But it’s not about Donald. Not for me. I couldn’t care less how financially successful he is: his opulent lifestyle alternately bores and sickens me. And I just don’t “get” the awe these Trump-ites hold for him. No, it’s not Trump. I watch each episode with horror thinking, How can the head of any corporation possibly think these knuckle-draggers have what it takes to run a food pantry, much less a major enterprise? Each week is another slow, sweaty train-wreck, and I can't look away.

I think, of all the seasons so far, the only one where I really cared about the finale and who won, was last year, when the scary-smart, charming, Southern Baptist, Randal Pinkett, was chosen to be the apprentice. I had been pulling for him the entire season, seeing in him a young man with great emotional intelligence matched with good practical intelligence as well. That he was charming, handsome, affable, and a natural leader with clear integrity were all pluses. I thought he might be a believer, and when it was confirmed I was intrigued. What would motivate a brilliant young Christian to follow after a materialistic, ego-driven, business superstar? I rooted for him, but I also admired his finale competitor Rebecca Jarvis. In the end, Trump hired Randal—and when Randal was given the unique opportunity to bring Rebecca on-board as well, he balked. “This isn’t The Apprenti.” Apparently, there can be only one, in Randal’s book—despite his three predecessors. My respect for him took a temporary nosedive, and I was confused (but see Randal’s blog entry). So were others.

Values are a tricky thing and it’s hard to judge, from a distance, through the lens of selectively edited video, anything that was going on there. But, strangely, it's no easier figuring out what's going on in my own office. Working with normal, everyday people is fraught with misunderstandings, presumptions, biased conclusions, and misperceptions.

Throughout the five seasons I have watched each episode, taking mental notes. Note to self: don’t bad-mouth coworkers; I never know when they’re going to turn out to be an ally, a friend, or a motivated enemy, and it’s just plain mean. Or, Note to self: life doesn’t always come in binary yes-and-no, “hired” or “fired” dichotomies. Sometimes everybody wins. Sometimes everybody loses. Sometimes it’s hard to tell the two apart. In each season I saw a microcosm of the workaday world, with rivalries, jealousies, pettiness, and ego writ large. For me, The Apprentice is a little more than a reality game-show … it’s also a weekly lesson on what makes good leadership.

To that end, I offer ten lessons I’ve learned, in no particular order. These are not the only observations I’ve had, but I gotta draw the line somewhere. So these are the ten you get.

Perhaps you’ve heard of Yahawa Wahab recently? Mr. Wahab lives in Malaysia, and he’s looking forward to his day in court: He owes $218 trillion dollars. If Mr. Wahab paid off his debt by one dollar every second of every 24-hour day, he would need 68,770.28 years to pay down his bill--or 1,058 lifetimes with 65 years of earning potential ("How Big is a Trillion?").

I stumbled across an interesting personality test today (PersonalDNA — link below). As a fan of the old Myers-Briggs Type Inventory (based on Jungian types, but updated from his mythical worldview—I'm an INTP), I enjoy taking useful and interesting personality tests once in a while. However, I never get far from my suspicion that most people would self-identify with almost any random sampling of evaluations from most tests.

One reason I like the MBTI or it's non-professional offspring, the Keirsey Temperament Sorter, is that when I read the other 15 types, they don't fit me (except, on a few occasions I've come out of the test as an ENTP or

Some of you may have heard of Tim Sanders. He was the Chief Solutions Officer at Yahoo! from 2001–2003, before that he ran an in-house think-tank for Yahoo! Lately he’s been serving as the Leadership Coach there, while also hitting the leadership conference tour, and authoring a couple books along the way. His two main messages appear to be learning to love (in business), and learning how to be likeable. Conference attendees say his message is life-changing.

His first book, Love Is the Killer App, was a slender 214-page tome—that started out much larger. He cut 140,000 words from the first draft (my kind of guy … write long, cut short!), and the nut of his first book

Okay, just out of curiosity, why is my picture associated with a farcical, offensive, "God is dead, Obituary?"

God, comedian, religious and actor, born December 1 1940; died December 10 2005.

Sometimes the Internet and the weird connections it facilitates boggles the mind.

[tags]BlogRodent, weird[/tags]

There’s a new academic journal on the block, and it’s from one of the A/G’s premier seminaries (I say “one of” because we have other great seminaries not on American soil, such as Asia Pacific Theological Seminary and West Africa Advanced School of Theology). It’s called Encounter: Journal for Pentecostal Ministry.

More later, but first, allow me to get a couple new feeds out of the way.

Short post today. I just wanted to point to a brief and fascinating roundup of arguments for the existence of God from a cosmological/mathematical viewpoint:

God by the Numbers
Coincidence and random mutation are not the most likely explanations for some things.
by Charles Edward White

The article summarizes the evidentiary value of three numbers in mathematics that seem to point to an intelligent designer of the universe:

Looked at my traffic logs a couple days ago...

Who died and left me all their traffic? It’s not like I blogged on Britney Spears or Anna Kournikova or anything lately. Did I?

Oh … wait … It’s gotta be Berry.

Since I blogged about Justin Berry (the former "camwhore," now believer, now States' witness, now media sensation) a while ago (here and here), I already had pretty good search rankings for my post, and it's been a steady, popular page. But yesterday our local Chicagoland media-mogul diva Oprah Winfrey blew the roof off my blog just by inviting two guests on her show, Justin Berry and Kurt Eichenwald—the reporter who outted him, saved him, and now “handles” him.

Look at the graphic at the right. This insane Mt. Everest of traffic spikes is entirely due to increased visitor traffic via Google from searchers looking

Yesterday my blog stats tripled. Nay: quadrupled. With six new random comments on my previous Justin Berry post (“Justin Berry: From ‘camwhore’ to water-baptized witness for the State”), I figured there’d been another major media piece on Berry’s recent lifestyle change and cooperation with the Feds. Little did I know that both Justin Berry and Kurt Eichenwald had appeared on the local media-diva’s talk show: Oprah. And I didn’t even Tivo it.

The links to the Oprah show content follow my comments.

“She can not take it any more, Captain!”
One thing concerns me, even more now that I’ve seen Justin’s hollow-eyed, thousand-yard stare in the Oprah.com screenshots: Justin is ripe for a meltdown-burnout-crisis. There’s a scriptural injunction against “laying hands” on anybody suddenly—it’s not a proscription against Pentecostals praying for strangers, and it’s not advice about

For some reason, my weblog became the target of hundreds of referrer spam hits from pornographic websites over the last week or so. I keep an eye on my referrer logs (a record of URLs that generated traffic to my site), and lately a bunch of URLs showed up which had no business being there. Some URLs are obviously pornographic, but there were one or two that looked innocent enough that when I clicked through to see who had linked to me, I got an eyeful. I really, really, don't need that.

So, I did some research. I didn't want to get into a trap of having to hand-modify my .htaccess file or a whitelist or a blacklist file for obvious reasons: the universe of porn and poker sites is potentially infinite. I waste enough time on this blog anyhow!

Angsuman's Referrer Bouncer looked

I’ve added a page of RSS links and email newsletter links for official Assemblies of God news outlets (and a couple unofficial). This includes links to the AG-News newsletter, Dan Betzer’s “ByLine,” and several new Women’s Ministries newsletters that look good.

If you’re interested, see:

Assemblies of God newsfeeds

It’s also linked it in my sidebar under “God,” in case you need to find it again.

Update, April 15, 2007: As of today, you can now link directly to your own entry in the PneumaBlogs list. Just look for the "link to this item" text to find your custom URL for your entry.

Update, April 10, 2007: You can also use the square-but-fiery button shown at right. Just see the updated section below.

For the 130+ PneumaBloggers currently listed on my PneumaBlogs page, if you want to host a button on your site promoting your pneumatic bloggy-ness, here it is in all its drab elegant simplicity:

Please right-click on the image and host it from your website (it's only 255 bytes) and then link to the PneumaBlogs page (or the PneumaSphere aggregator). Here's sample code you can use: