Pi on the raft and the Tiger in the Lifeboat

So, this book came out a few years ago.  I had heard about it and have had it on my bookshelf for four or five years now.  Recently, I picked it up, and subsequently devoured it.  I loved every page.  The slow, thoughtful Part One that meanders through Pi’s childhood, his search for God, and his experiences growing up in an Indian zoo.

This is not a review…this is me processing my hate for the last 8 pages of the book.  If you have not read it and would like to, stop reading this post.

For those that want to continue, let me sum up the story.

Pi Patel, an Indian boy in Pondicherry is son of a zookeeper. He is Hindu. He finds Jesus, becomes a Christian…then finds Allah and also becomes Muslim. He practices all three, much to the chagrin of the dudes who run the three institutions that he attends. It’s my favorite scene in the book. Favorite quote…(when seeking out the Christian Church) “Christianity’s reputation was strange: very few Gods, terrible violence, but good schools.” haha…anyway. First part of the book is him growing up. Second part of the book is what happens after his family tries to move to Canada by taking a cargo ship across the Pacific. The ship has a menagerie onboard because they are selling some animals to American zoos. Shipwreck leaves him a lone human survivor on board a lifeboat with an orangutan, a hyena, a zebra, and a Bengal tiger. The book is about his survival…scratch that. The book is actually one big sham to get you to see how everyone believes in something. Why believe in “dry yeastless factuality” when this is the “better story.” If you want it to be true…it indeed becomes true to you. Postmodern spirituality at it’s most nausea inducing. Ack…can you tell I’m still hot about this? haha. Curse you Pi!

So…my main beef with the book. My problem is that the end negates the entire book. Some may say that this is the beauty of the book. Some may say that it is the very thing that points us toward God. The fact that Pi changed the horrific story and truth of what happens to him out at sea to an amazing story of courage, survival and a tiger makes me ticked for taking the time to read Martel’s story. For 130 pages, the book became an amazing and pain-stakingly detailed, page-turning story that I fully became engrossed in. As the story became increasingly wondrous…especially the beautifully horrific island of algae I fully bought it all, because a) Martel is a brilliant writer and shapes his world around you and b) I had no reason not to. Pi was an honest, highly religious boy who loved God…I had no idea that the story I was reading was going to end up simply being coping mechanism for the horror and dehumanization he suffered at the hands of the human survivors.

I wish I could go back to yesterday at sunset. I had just taken a break from reading it…just as I learned the truth (ha-truth) about the algae island and went to dinner with my family. We left the restaurant.

The sky was lit up with amazing orange colors. I thought of Pi and the skys he was seeing. The various hues, the symphony of color that moved from yellow to orange to magenta and finally a dull blue. I pictured the world from his perspective. I wondered how he would be rescued and whether he and the tiger would remain together.

I couldn’t wait to get home and finish the book.

I wish I had never picked it up again.

YouTube – ABC “V” TV SERIES PILOT PROMO TRAILER.

Ahh…the 80’s.  Loved this series the first time.  Hope this one is good too.

YouTube – The Onion Reports – Star Trek fans bash new film as “Too good & too much fun”.

After four airings, NBC has decided no one really cares about “Kings.”  Trouble is, it was/is a terribly interesting show and Ian McShane as King Silas was/is the baddest, scariest, smoothest and most “hate ‘em and root for ‘em at the same time” character on television since Benjamin Linus first weaseled his way into our hearts on “Lost.”  He plays the King on a show that was most likely going to show in a contemporary setting, the story behind the transfer of power from King Saul to King David in the Old Testament.  It was an intriguing idea. In fact, a buddy of mine and I have been prepping a western about this very story.  It’s a gripping story about loyalty to God, to country, about peace and the purpose of war.  It’s about power and how the people who most desire it are the ones who should not have it. It’s about God…and it wears it right on it’s sleeve.

So I got to thinking the other day, when I heard that “Kings” was moving to the graveyard of Saturday night television, that Christians love to say things on their facebook status like, “Hollywood, we want more movies like ‘Fireproof’” or “If Hollywood would just tell some decent stories about things that matter, we would watch it.”  Well…only 3,999,998 of you watched this along with my wife and I.  Apparently, not enough for NBC to continue this risky venture.  It’s not cancelled yet, but most likely it will be.

I read the following article about this very quandry by John Ridley on NPR:

The thing about working in Hollywood is that at some point you really get tired of hearing how godless you are, and how if you and the rest of the heathens in Tinseltown would put more God-centric shows on TV, people wouldn’t be abandoning prime time in favor of their Bible study classes.

If that’s true, then why isn’t NBC’s Kings the biggest show in the history of humanity?

If you haven’t been watching Kings — and you haven’t ’cause it’s been averaging less than 4 million viewers a week — it’s this alt-world royalty/palace intrigue allegory set in the mythical near-future Kingdom of Gilboa. Kings stars the great Ian McShane who would be worth the price of admission even if you actually had to pay to see him.

But forget for a sec the great acting, the wonderfully rendered CGIed New York capital of Shiloh, the intrigue… Here’s the disconnect I can’t connect with: Kings is “a contemporary re-telling of the timeless tale of David and Goliath,” according to the official NBC press release and the $10 million pilot episode that revolves around a character named David who single-handedly takes out an enemy tank called a Goliath. Yes, a Goliath.

(read more)

I suggest you give it a chance…catch up on hulu or NBC.com and if nothing else, witness the miraculous work of Ian McShane. The dude’s amazing. Then start watching the remainder of the season.  It’s one way to vote that at least a few folks in Hollywood will take risks on stories like these.

In glorious black & white.  Thanks Ian.

Technorati Tags: life behind the lens, texture, disneyland, kids

What? You can’t do it.

Jess and I got out of town this weekend.  Rodrigo was a great guy for stepping up to lead the services for me on Valentine’s Day and his wife was even greater. 

For Christmas, Jess got me a membership to the Huntington Library and Gardens in Pasadena, CA.  The place is beautiful and it was a perfect day for getting away just the two of us.  It’s amazing how much you appreciate a few stolen moments with your girlfriend after a few years of parenthood.  I won’t get all mushy, but it was grand…

You can see all of the Huntington Pics here.

That evening, we journeyed down to Santa Monica to spend the night in the most affordable motel on Ocean Avenue…Needless to say…you get what you pay for.  No chocolate on the pillow if you know what I mean.

But alas, it was still wonderful.  Spent the evening strolling down Third Street Promenade and scored points buying Jess a red velvet cupcake from a store that makes nothing but cupcakes.  We then made our way down the pier and back to the hotel motel.

We laughed alot, we talked alot.

We walked silently sometimes…just holding hands. 

It was one of the most relaxing and rejuvenating moments of our marriage.

I’m glad we did it.

The next day we awoke and I got owned by a three mile run through Palisade Park, the streetside park along Ocean where all the beautiful LA people go to run. (Jess’ actual words to me at one point, “You’re not going to have a heart attack are you?”  Why is treadmill running so much different than street running?

After the run, we spent the day on the pier and at the great little aquarium beneath it.  If you’re ever down in Santa Monica with your fam, you need to check this place out.  It’s cheap and it’s not huge.  If you are on a date, then it’ll only cost you 4 bucks for the pair of you.

We ran around on the beach taking pics of each other.

We also came across an amazing memorial to those who have died in the Iraq War.  Apparently they set this up every weekend.

If you want to see all the Pics from Santa Monica that day, see the set here.

It was just one night…as Jess put it, we only had 32 hours together.  It was nice to know that above kids, homeschooling, jobs, ministry, bills, stress, and twitter, that we were still connected and hopelessly in love with each other.

A pretty great article on being “green” and being a follower of Christ that Ian (yes this is two posts in a row that originated from an @mynameisian find) found on Relevant Magazine

Here’s an excerpt:

“Thinking Jesus is coming to rescue us will shape your faith differently
than believing Jesus is coming to join us and that we need to welcome Him to the planet He loves.

If you were coming to pick me up at my house tonight, I wouldn’t care
much about the dishes in the sink, my messy papers on the kitchen
counters, the dog toys strewn all over the living room, or the spotty
sinks in the bathroom. You would be coming to get me out of here…who
cares what things look like inside my house. But if you are planning on
coming over to hang around at my house, my whole agenda changes…I would
want this place to be clean and to look good. I’d get to work cleaning
the house before your arrival.

Because so many of us think Jesus is coming to get us out of here, we
are way too casual about the condition of this planet. I think we need
to wake up and enter the long-standing Christian tradition of
responsible environmental conservation. Jesus is coming. We need to
embrace practices like only cutting down as many trees as we can
replace with seedlings. Jesus is coming. We need to stop dumping more
waste into our air and water than the environment can recover from.
Jesus is coming. We need to be stewards instead of users of this
planet. The saints that have gone before us have claimed that God loves
this place. What if that is true? What if conservation glorifies God?
Then that would mean the followers of Jesus should become the champions
of environmental issues. We shouldn’t tolerate global warming,
overflowing landfills, species extinction, and the like. We have to
find simple, sustainable ways for we earth-dwellers to live here
without destroying “here.” So, though we are not supposed to be tree
worshippers, I think we should at least be hugging them.”

Do you view the earth this way? Do you disagree with this guy?

While I am not intending to spark an Intelligent Design debate, I did read an article today that made me praise God for the amazing design He stuffed into our eyes.

Read this article that Ian twittered a couple days ago.

THE PHOTOGRAPHIC EYE: How Our Eyes See vs. How Our Cameras See, by Allan Weitz

It’s a little geeky, but addresses things like:

What is the Focal Length of the Human Eye?
How Many Megapixels of Detail do Our Eyes Resolve?
What is The ISO, F-Stop, and Shutter Speed of The Human Eye?

We struggle to make cameras that can produce 21 megapixel images while God thought that 576mp would be good enough for us.  I thought that was cool.  Eyes are something we use everyday to process information, color and observe life.  God gave us some pretty kicking imaging systems.

Go read it.

It’s a big week.  We have a new president, Lost is starting up again, and my little Gwyn is not really a baby anymore. Gwyn is beginning to emerge as an athletic, quiet, daredevil with a twisted sense of humor (Just wait ’til she sees you cringe at the sound of her gritting her teeth). 

Earlier this week, we went to Running Springs and went sledding with our friends, The Foors.  We started small with Gwyn.  We weren’t sure how interested she would be in flying down the hill on a little tire.  I rode down with her a couple times until she begged for her own sled.  From that point on, she became a differnent kid to me.  She wasn’t the baby anymore.  She was a little girl with interests, jokes, and desires and today her desire was to go speeding down a mountain at higher and higher increments.  All in all we had a great time with no major wipeouts. 

If you’d like to see a slideshow of our day at the park, click here

Or just go directly to the flickr stream.

Soon, there will be a formal funeral or memorial for Mark Lamberth.  You should be checking www.prayforthelamberths.com for all of the necessary updates.

But today, many made the trek to the top of Mt. Rubidoux in downtown Riverside for what was originally scheduled as a prayer vigil for Mark’s healing.  Mark passed away two days ago but it seemed very appropriate for us to still gather.  There were about 100 people there to pray together.  I asked if I should bring a guitar and ended up leading them all in a makeshift worship time.  While blessed to do so, it is very difficult to actually sing the words to “Blessed Be Your Name” when you are standing in front of a bunch of people currently living out the bridge–”You give and take away.” 

What was amazing were the amount of people there who had never met Mark, or any of us, but had heard of Mark’s story through other blogs, friends, Facebook, or the newspaper.  They began reading the blog and were motivated to pray and come to this little gathering.  It was awesome to see the community of God working the way it is supposed to…reaching out to each other and to Angie to pray and worship through this difficult time.

It was a beautiful morning.

My family was blessed to be a part of it.

Tags: MarkLamberth, Mt. Rubidoux, prayer, social networking,

Many already know, but Mark went to be with God yesterday. We will all miss his gentle spirit, his sense of humor, his optimism, and his love for life. We pray for Angie and Nolan and for the memories that we all will keep alive so that Nolan will always remember how cool his dad was.

Read his story, look at his pictures, and keep his memory alive, and pray for Angie as she greives.

I love Google Earth. When I have time to kill (read: on vacation with internet access) I will fly around the world looking for oddities and cool finds. I love that in a span of an hour I can read about the construction of the Beijing Olympic buildings, view a massive soccer complex in Southern Uganda, fly along the mouth of the Amazon, and read about Manhattan’s famous skyscrapers. (I tried to figure out how to link these places, but without hosting something called a .kmz file, I can’t quite get there…but you can easily get there.)

Tonight, while looking for directions to vacation destination, I started flying and zooming like a dork. I scrolled across Salton Sea’s Bombay Beach. I have always been intrigued about The Salton Sea and wondered what made it so mysterious. I saw pics like this one of an abandoned bus and thought…dude, I want to go on a photo safari!

I also began to research this geological oddity and came to learn things that I didn’t know. Did you know that before 1905, the Salton Sea did not really exist? It was a massive flood plain that would fill somewhat in the winter and dry up in the summer. It was not until farmers began irrigating the plain using the Colorado river and a dyke broke that the Sea began to fill up. It took two years for the Colorado dyke to be repaired. When it was finally repaired, California was home to one of the largest salt lakes in North America. Once there, people thought it would make a great tourist destination and they stocked it with Tilapia for fishing, divided an area along the southern shore into parcels and named it Salton City, and routed the tributary called The New River into it. The only problem was that The New River flowed from Mexico and is considered to be one of the most polluted rivers on the continent. It carries biotoxins, human waste, and bacteria and it just adds to the salinity of the Sea. The rising salt content in turn causes the now out of control Tilapia population (150 million or more) to be choked out of oxygen when the temperature rises in the summer, since warm saltwater has less oxygen. In the summer time, the Tilapia die off at a rate of 10 million a week, blanketing the shores with miles of piles of dead fish. Crazy populations of disease carrying flies spring up from the fish carcasses and the birds that eat the carcasses usually die of disease. The carcasses also feed a now out of control algae bloom that causes crazy amounts of odor to fill the whole desert basin for months at a time. And the Salton City? Well, what seemed like a good idea by folks trying to create another Palm Springs, quickly faded and now the shores are peppered with abandoned hotels, yacht clubs, and resort homes.

Did you know that? I didn’t.

The Salton Sea is one enormous oops. And I mean enormous. For you Inland Empire folks…if you drove a big triangle from Riverside, to Corona, to Temecula and back to Riverside, it would be like driving around the Sea. Big. Nearly abandoned. Just sitting out there in the middle of the desert as a testament to man’s disregard for the environment given by God and it is crying out to a photographer who loves decay to come shoot for a while. Now if I can just find a creepy hotel…I guess I could always stay in the bus.

Go check it out on Google Earth.

Then go someplace else and make your world smaller.