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A little bit of Star Wars Episode 8 to tease you.

Want another glimpse of old Luke Skywalker that wasn't in Episode 7?  Here ya go!  Episode 8 starts filming today and here is a taste of your favorite one armed Jedi.

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Perfect video to watch on 9/11

A friend of mine sent this to me today. Great video to watch in remembrance of that tragic day. This is uplifting and inspiring. I hope it moves you and causes you to think and reflect on the fragility of all we hold dear, but also the power of tradition and recreation in our spiritual journey.

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Ping Pong Balls make amazing fires

Lighting 2,538 ping pong balls on fire is way more exciting than you might think.  

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If this doesn't get you excited for Opening Day nothing will

Classic monologue from Field of Dreams recited by current MLB players.   

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The one thing the iPad can't do

This situation is all too real.

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This dog has no depth perception and it's hilarious

This is hard to stop watching. Weird idea, but I assume the dog isn't humiliated and enjoyed all the "people food".  

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The Gold/White versus Black/Blue dress controversy explained finally.

This is the best explanation we've seen so far of why this is destroying lives all over the internet. It's not magic, it's your brain.  Interesting and short.

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Shocker: Your iPad and Kindle are not killing the old fashioned book market

Apropos of nothing, here's a thought about the book industry. I was watching BookTV on the weekend (yes, there are 12 of us in the country that actually watch stuff on C-Span's third channel). They featured a tour of the offices of Simon and Schuster, a publishing firm slightly bigger than, but very similar to, my own company, Whitecaps Media (www.whitecapsmedia.com). Okay, not really that similar and a WHOLE LOT bigger! One of the top people there made an interesting observation: He said that ebooks and online commerce were not killing the publishing industry and bookstores. The real problem and competition, he observed, was the increased demands on our free time. The more I ponder it, the more true I think that is. People still enjoy reading. Almost everyone I know, regardless of education level, enjoys reading. But they also enjoy surfing the internet, watching Netflix, binge watching TV shows via download or DVD, participating in fantasy sports leagues, playing video games, spending time on social media, etc. None of those things were a factor in our lives until relatively recently. I heard today that twenty years ago there were over 10,000 bookstores in America. There are now only 3,000, including all of Barnes and Noble's outlets. In Houston, there are only four independent bookstores. Yes, you heard that correctly. Four. That's one per million inhabitants. So, there's definitely a problem. But I don't think it's ebooks or Amazon that are killing the bookstores. I think Netflix, the internet, etc., are more culpable than ebooks.

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So Cows Really Dig Lorde on Trombone - must be seen to be believed

I suppose it's merely a matter of time before Chic-Fil-A gets their hands on this, because it's a gold mine for them!  Also, this is really bizarre and cool. How did this dude figure out this would work?

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Still tired from Daylight Saving, this will help.

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Volcano erupts live, the sound is awesome.

This is a great illustration of how sound travels so much more slowly than light.  Wait for the sound to arrive and turn your speakers up (but only a little).

If you're into another kind of eruption, enjoy this.

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Did your football team lose? No problem, blame the coach

    Football is one of my favorite things about America.  It has been a really big part of my life, and I’m super thankful for the memories and friendships that the sport of football gave me.  In my opinion, it is the greatest game ever invented and for the past decade or so the American people go crazy for it.  This entire football craze has led to a lot of things; one of the more prominent ones is Madden, the NFL video game.  People go crazy for this game, it flies off the shelf the minute it goes on sale.  I like Madden a lot, but I think it has given us a little bit of a twisted sense on what the game of football is all about.  Madden has given rise to the phrase “football is like a chess match.”  I HATE that phrase.  If football was like chess, the coaches making the “moves” would be getting paid a hundred times what they make now and the “pawns” (players) would be totally dispensable.  Obviously, that’s not the case and that is because football is a game of human confrontation.  The team with the better players almost always wins.  Whatever the play-call is, if your team physically beats the other guys it will probably be successful.

 To illustrate this point, I will use Detroit Lions’ wide receiver Calvin Johnson.  Typically in the NFL if a receiver is double or triple covered, you don’t call a play in which you expect to get him the ball.  However, Calvin Johnson is a freak of nature, and routinely comes down with the ball when it’s thrown to him, no matter who’s covering him or how good they are.  There are a number of plays where the opponents (unfortunately these opponents are sometimes the Green Bay Packers) (Go Pack Go!) have called an excellent play, and Calvin Johnson takes the great defensive play call 80 yards to the end zone for a touchdown; rendering a fantastic play-call useless.  I know there are bad play calls, and scheme certainly does come into play in a game, but the most determinant factor in the outcome of a football game is the players.

    There are few things that drive me crazier than when fans of an NFL team blame a loss on the coach.  I hate listening to people tell me that the play-calling was awful and had it been better (or had they been in charge of it) their team would have won.  There are a couple reasons that this kind of thinking drives me crazy, other than it being blatantly false.  First, the men who coach professional football know more about it than you.  Sometimes it’s hard for me to admit as well, but it’s the truth.  These men know football better than anybody else on the planet.  Secondly, they know their team better than you do.  They know who excels in which situation, and they put players there hoping that they may capitalize on it.   Beyond the reasons I don’t like this kind of thinking, there is another huge issue hiding in this statement; I think we have a huge problem admitting defeat.  It is way easier to duck behind play-calling and being put in bad situations than to admit that another team is just better than ours.  We hate saying that we lost because they were better, and therefore we blame the situations, i.e. the play-calling or coaches or a number of other factors.

    This issue spreads far beyond the football field.  Unfortunately, this is an attitude a lot of us carry around every day.  Why is it that our first reaction to confrontation is usually to say, “It wasn’t my fault.”?  This happens to me a lot with the high school kids I work with.  We will have something going on and they will tell me they’ll be there.  Then I’ll get a phone call saying they can’t make it because they have too much homework.  The homework isn’t keeping them from attending, it’s the other things they chose to do instead of the homework that forced them to still have the homework on the day of the event.  I would much prefer a call saying, “I screwed up and was lazy this weekend and now I have homework I have to do and won’t be able to make it.”  This example may be subtle, but it spreads into way more important things.

    This issue doesn’t stop in adolescence either.  When you ask someone why they didn’t fulfill a commitment that they said they would, there is almost always an answer that does not include them taking responsibility.  I understand that there are extenuating circumstances that are out of our control sometimes, and that we are not always at fault, but I don’t think it’s healthy when we automatically react by shifting blame.  Especially when we indirectly shift blame.  We know it sounds bad for us to directly blame somebody else, so we say something that insinuates another person is at fault without us ever having to say it.  When we don’t admit to ourselves that we are wrong and at least slightly at fault, we let ourselves off the hook and don’t learn whatever lesson is there for us to learn.

    Our nation is full of people who don’t want to take responsibility, and those people are all over the map, in both major political parties, from all races and religions.  We blame each other for things because we don’t want to deal with the fact that maybe we’ve been wrong.  When I played Quarterback in high school, I threw a lot of interceptions.  Most of them were my fault, but a couple weren’t, sometimes the receiver ran the wrong way.  If I had shown a receiver up in front of the fans, i.e. made a huge deal about him screwing up for people to see so they would know it wasn’t my fault, I would have been benched.  It was a huge learning experience for me because it taught me that it was okay to take responsibility for things that may not even be your fault.  

    Most of the time, I’m not very good at this.  It’s easier to blame other people and in the short run it feels better too.  We can live differently though.  Instead of blaming our shortcomings on others, we can take responsibility for them and eventually work toward improving as people.  When we blame our stuff on other people, nobody wins.  We don’t have to deal with our own issues, and we alienate others.  When we admit that sometimes, we just didn’t have what it took, we learn and it brings other people in closer.  Taking blame is inclusive; shifting it is exclusive.  In my experience, whenever we can be inclusive, it usually works better for everyone.          

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Clowns everywhere in Cali = a real life Joker.

This creepy set of events sounds like the set up for a Batman film in real life. Check this out, then compare it to the video below from Batman Returns.

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What's it like to camp out for the new iPhone?

Tucker Morrow experiences the iPhone 6 release camp out line

 I use my cell phone for just about everything.  I know that this isn’t weird, as most people do, but I integrate as many of my daily functions on to my phone as I can, so that wherever I am, I can be doing something. Unfortunately, a couple of weeks ago, my iPhone broke, and I was downgraded… to a cracked, slow iPhone 4 (I know you probably feel terrible for me).  Even worse than the iPhone 4 was the fact that I couldn’t get any of my apps to work; I was reduced to talking and texting (so basically, I was reduced to what it is cell phones were made for).  I went to the AT&T store to see when I was eligible for an upgrade, and to my surprise they told me I was eligible immediately.  This was Sunday, September 14th; the iPhone 6 came out on Friday, September 19th.  I attempted to preorder the phone, but was informed that it would take weeks for me to receive it, and I couldn’t wait that long.  I decided instead, to camp out overnight and buy the iPhone 6 in the store the day it came out.  

Why camp out?

    The main reason I camped out is that I was extremely curious about the type of people that camp out for an iPhone.  It was also an excuse for me and a couple of my buddies to hang out.  We got in line at around midnight behind three other guys.  The first guy in line had obviously done this before; he was well prepared.  He had a generator powered up in his car which ran power to his laptop that he had set up on a collapsible table.  He was on the internet playing World of Warcraft, and drinking energy drinks from a cooler next to him.  The second guy looked like he’d never done this before.  He was sitting on the concrete with his back against the wall, and staring at the bank across the street.  The third guy was in a sleeping bag and didn’t seem very social at all, so I made sure and put a little extra space between where he was and where I was.  

Strangest Group of People Ever

    As more people began to show up, conversations began to happen.  I can honestly say (and I say this with all due respect) this was the strangest group of people I had ever been around.  Inevitably, we started sharing stories.  This quickly turned into a one-upping contest and the stories got more and more ridiculous.  The highlight of these stories was most likely the claim by one of guys that he had taken forty-two shots of patron on his twenty-first birthday and hadn’t really felt much of the effect of the alcohol… I’m not kidding.  Somehow, this guy thought that we would all believe it.  As I continued to pay attention to the stories that were being shared, I realized that all of these guys were lying.  Every one of them wasn’t questioning anyone else’s stories because they didn’t want their stories questioned.  It was a really strange phenomenon.  

    I realized after a little while that a lot of these guys were living for the next thing, whatever it was.  They needed excitement in their life, they had to live for the moment.  The problem with living for the moment is that the moment ends, and it ends quickly.  The moment also disappoints you, it’s not everything that it promised it would be.  There was a heavy sadness on the air as I realized that these guys were here, because they desperately needed something to get excited for.  They needed something to pull them out of the routine of their day to day.  Even worse, these guys thought that the iPhone 6 was going to do it.  They believed that by buying this phone they would finally have everything they wanted.  It was difficult to watch, these guys were convinced that this phone was all they needed.  

    The iPhone 6 is a great phone, I like it a lot, but it isn’t capable of fulfilling any part of us.  We chase fulfillment day after day and we don’t often stop to realize that we’ve been chasing it for years and nothing has come of it yet.  I believe that only a relationship with Jesus is capable of permanently fulfilling us.  The guys in line with me are probably finding out about now that their life is pretty much the same, with the addition of a cool new phone.  They’re likely setting their sights on something else they can hold out for to break their routine, and whatever that thing is won’t be able to bring any kind of lasting fulfillment either.  

    When I was a sophomore in college, I finally came to the point where I was sick of living for the next big thing, I wanted my every day to be the next big thing.  I was tired after chasing things that could not permanently satisfy me.  That’s the point where I decided to really follow Jesus, He said that He was capable of that kind of fulfillment, so I decided to give Him a try.  Living in the fulfillment of Jesus allows me to experience other things for fun, and not as a means of sustaining me.  We have a chance to make our day to day routine exciting and fulfilling.  We can stop chasing material things that don’t ever give us even half of what they promise.  I fully believe that I am able to enjoy things like the iPhone 6 more because I am not depending on it to fulfill me.  Rather than living for the next big thing, let’s allow Jesus to make everything we do the next big thing.  The journey I’m on with Jesus is the most exciting, crazy, and scary thing I’ve ever done, but it is also the only thing that has ever truly fulfilled me.  I don’t know where you stand on all of this, but I can tell you from my experience, and the experience of a lot of my closest friends, Jesus is who He says He is.  

    You may not have expected to read all of this stuff about Jesus when you opened this article, and if you don’t agree with any of it that is more than okay with me.  I believe that everyone has the right to hear about Jesus Christ and what He’s capable of doing, but I also believe that people have the right to come to their own conclusions about Him.

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1924 World Series Highlights

The 1924 World Series ended 90 years ago! Here are the long lost highlights! Amazingly clear although not the best camera angles. This World Series ended in an extra inning game 7 with Hall of Famer Walter Johnson pitching 4 innings of relief to get the win. The best part is seeing the crowd storm the field at the end. I think people in our day tend to think of "the old days" as much more reserved, but it's obvious by this footage that while the folks in the stands were dressed much more formally back then, they were still going nuts when their team won the title in dramatic fashion.

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I don't hate Derek Jeter I'm just tired of the celebrations, here is why

If you are even aware of the existence of sports then you know that Derek Jeter is retiring. Today is his last game......EVAR!!!!!! (That is misspelled on purpose for those of you who aren't familiar with nerdy internet speak). I'm glad!  I don't dislike Derek Jeter. In fact, there isn't much to dislike about the guy. Very good player, classy dude, says all the right things, doesn't act like Kanye West. The only thing he has going against him is the plays for the Yankees, which isn't even a bad thing if you're a Yankees fan or if you are indifferent towards the Yankees. Nevermind, everyone who isn't a Yankees fan hates the Yankees, indifference isn't really an option.

However, this year long celebration and endless tribute to Derek Jeter is WAY over the top. Keith Olbermann summed it up nearly perfectly in this rant. Check out the video, he nails it.  

If you think Keith Olbermann is an obnoxious gas bag, skip over the video, I've collected the pertinent stats below. 

 Here are some of the points he makes that point out that Derek Jeter isn't all that legendary of a player.

1. Jeter only lead the American League in any offensive categories (doubles, home runs, runs batted in, stolen bases, batting average, on base percentage, and on base plus slugging) 3 times. Not many. He only lead his team in an offensive category 17 times... in 20 years. So basically he wasn't even close to being the dominant offensive player on his team.

2. But what about defense? Jeter has been a negative on the Yankees defense for a long time. He probably cost the Yankees several wins per year because of his limited range and below average defense. He should have moved to third and let Arod play shortstop.

3. MVP awards - zero!  Got 2nd once. Rarely finished in the top 5 of MVP voting.

4. WAR - Wins Above Replacement - this is the stat that is currently used to determine a player's value, it has flaws, but most stat guys agree it's pretty darn accurate. His career WAR is about the same as Scott Rolen. Don't know who Scott Rolen is? Point proven.

5. Jeter ranks behind Graig Nettles and Red Ruffing for average WAR as a Yankee. Don't know who they are? Weird, they were more valuable as Yankees than Jeter has been. He is also behind Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Mickey Mantle, Joe Dimaggio, Alex Rodriguez, Thurman Munson, Mike Mussina and Willie Randolph. Way more Yankees were on average more valuable to their team than Jeter, at least on the field.

6. Longevity - Where does he rank among the guys who have played the longest? Not well.  Of the 19 players in baseball history with over 12,000 plate appearances, he leads that group in only once category - strike outs.

7. If he had convinced his coach to move him down in the batting order this year, the Yankees might still be playing for something this weekend. He has been that bad.

Keith's research team nailed. Once again, I repeat, I'm not a Jeter hater, I just grew tired of the seemingly infinite lauding of "The Captain". It's been ridiculous. The dude had a very successful career. He'll be a first ballot Hall of Famer just because of his hit total and his charisma, but let's not pretend he is an all time great player. He's way down the list of baseball greats, but at least he is on the list.

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It's tough to always be "right", confessions of a former know it all

Being Right by Tucker Morrow

As a little kid, I was constantly striving to be right.  I constantly argued over seemingly insignificant things, and corrected people every instance I got in attempt to prove how smart I was.  There was something about always being right that really appealed to me.  In our culture today, I think that a lot of people have adopted this philosophy.  As Donald Miller says “Sooner or later you just figure out there are some guys who don’t believe in God and they can prove He doesn’t exist, and some other guys who do believe in God and they can prove He does exist, and the argument stopped being about God a long time ago and now it’s about who’s smarter, and I don’t really care.”  Our culture argues about all kinds of issues, seemingly for the chance to prove they are intellectually superior, and like Miller, I’m really tired of it.

When I was around 11, my sister, Chandler, was 7 and we argued a lot.  We are both fairly hard-headed and she is incredibly intelligent, so that led to some passionate arguing about really insignificant things.  I have always been pretty good at arguing (not really a good thing), and people always used to tell me “you should be a lawyer someday!” (I’m pretty sure it was never intended as a compliment).  Anyway, Chandler and I were arguing one day about the lyrics to a Nickelback song (like I said, insignificant) and she pointed out to me in the lyric book that she was right.  Not wanting to be defeated, I went online and made a fake MySpace account for the band and issued a fake statement saying “We apologize for the misprint in our lyric book.” I think making up a fake MySpace page for the band Nickelback in order to trick your 7 year old sister into thinking that you know the lyrics to a song better than she does has got to be close to rock bottom.  For whatever reason though, I had to be right.  I could not take the fact that maybe somebody was smarter than I was in a given subject.

I think the consequences of our culture’s need to be right can be devastating.  There are so many daily reminders that people are mean to each other, for the sake of being right.  The underlying theme here, in my opinion, is an enormous amount of insecurity.  So many people in our culture walk around so insecure about who they are and what they’re worth, that they are willing to verbally attack someone else to feel just a tiny bit of fleeting validation.  We turn people into their opinions, and treat them like an idea and not a human in an attempt to try and feel good about ourselves.

This insecurity is rampant in our culture.  When you ask almost any little kid why they lost a game, the answer you’ll most likely get is “we didn’t play well” or “the refs sucked.”  For some reason, people can no longer admit to the fact that someone is better than them at something.  We constantly try and find reasons why someone else is wrong, and never want to admit that maybe part of the problem is with us.  This is the very definition of insecurity.  The bottom line is this, whenever we correct someone publicly, we are basically saying “Hey everybody look at how right I am and how wrong this other person is, can you believe that?”  This reaction is one hundred percent about us, and zero percent about the other person being wrong. There is no possible way to beat insecurity with insecurity.  When we fight people, who are projecting their insecurity on others, by projecting ours on them, everybody loses.  The only way to beat insecurity is with love.  The way we take on insecurity is by calling out the good things in them.  When we treat people as humans, with love, we can disagree with one another in a healthy way.  When we allow insecure people the opportunity to set down their insecurity, and step into characteristic traits that we’ve called out of them, we make progress.  Instead of posting another Facebook comment in a chain of controversial opinions, we can call the person we are arguing with and tell them what we love about them.  When we give people identity, not in being right but in who they are, everybody wins.  

All people are looking for validation, and we can give it to them.  We can tell the extremely opinionated friend that whatever their stance on an issue, we admire their passion.  When we call out good things in people, they live up to them.  Like Miller said, all of this arguing is rarely about the issue, and usually about us.  Let’s be people who admit when they’re wrong, and don’t get sucked into the trap of trying to massage our egos by always being “right".