The Amazing Amazingness of Amazing Stuff

Creation of Man

Amazing.

Did it creep up on you as well?

This overuse of the word “amazing” just sort of … appeared.

Amazing.

Here I was just a moment ago trying to read about the Dodgers, and Don Mattingly wanting more instant replay — they’d lost recently to the Brewers on a questionable call to end the game — and up pops a Weight Watchers advertisement, with Jennifer Hudson allowing as how yeah she enjoyed the first iteration of WW she tried, but their new Points Program is … wait for it … amazing!

The word is effortlessly everywhere, with an emphasis on the word “effortless” because something that easy is surely not going to have any power or weight (no pun on the Points Programs intended) at all.

And lo and behold!

It doesn’t.

I swear to you that within the last week someone at a conference posted some social media saying, essentially, I’m at an amazing place with some amazing people, and I’m having a blast. Amazing. It was not significantly different. Fewer than 140 characters, and 21 of them were that word … times 3.

Amazing.

Here’s where I should be all lathered up about the decline of Western Civilization, but honestly, it’s not a big enough deal. Not amazing, if you will.

Because this too will run its course, and some new depredation will take its place.
Because the suppleness and subtlety of English means it can survive even this.
Because there are dozens of other violations of this sort every single day.

And maybe if we ignore it, the self-promotion tweets that start, “So pumped/jazzed/stoked to have my new blog/book/video out tomorrow. … ” — faux excitement as ways of mentioning something that you’re kinda sorta supposed to mention to “promote” events you’re involved in — will die die die die die.

Though no doubt many super amazing people were involved.

Doesn’t anyone just say thank you anymore?

It’s nothing short of

You know.

Recent

Can We Tawk?

Comedienne Joan Rivers’ catchphrase was, ‘Can we talk?’ with all that that entails — its rhetorical nature, the Jewish thing, an implication that at least one of the parties will be better off for having done so … Like God. T’other day a priest spoke of ontological remembrance, the immediate and ongoing memory of past-present-future

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Hide and See

Something lost, Dallas Willard said once, might yet be very valuable. One’s car keys for instance. He was speaking somewhat in the context of salvation, if I recall … the general point was calling something lost doesn’t mean it’s not wanted — quite the opposite. Yet it remains … until finding its way out or being found

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Greater Love Blah Blah Blah

Do we doubt locals thanked them for their service? I’m not equating the two. They were wrong; glad we crushed them. Only noting it’s likely they thought as much about such things as we do, which is to say not much. German citizens who believed their leaders, loved their country, watched their sons get on

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Dark Eyed Life

According to @CitizenScreen, doing yeoman’s* work daily on Twitter* relative to the Golden Age of film, today is the birth date of Mabel Normand, Hedy Lamarr, and Dorothy Dandridge — Normand: New York, 1892 Lamarr: Vienna, 1914 Dandridge: Cleveland, 1922 — which makes for coupla at least interesting, if not compelling or fascinating at the

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Random

Tolkien’s Errantry

‘Errantry’ JRR Tolkien   Commercially found in Adventures of Tom Bombadil Image: detail, Pauline Baynes’ illustration, for above [Where did JKR hear the buzz of Dumbledore … ]

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Christ on a Postage Stamp

Got to thinking on postage stamps today bec hadda mail a book to a friend and when you go in you hafta say to the guy, no matter what your actual business is that day, and of course you’re already saying it if you went in for this purpose — ‘What first class stamps d’ya have?’ It’s

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Fast Food Nations

Sometimes the blogs write themselves. “There’s a really strong pull … to come to different countries. There is a growing familiarity outside the United States with Mexican food.” (Fast food exec in Bloomberg, Dec. 2015) “They don’t always understand what the food is, or how to order the food, or what the ingredients are. Taco Bell takes the mystery

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Duo

… More then says because he’s in prison and only has a coal with which to write he can’t respond fully to the view that one ought harm an evil man lest he cause even greater harm to such as are innocent and good. But He counsels us that even if it be our formal office to punish an evil

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Related

Christians and Atheists

Christians create atheists when we do evil in God’s name. (props to Dennis Prager, who wrote: “Nothing creates atheism as much as evil done in God’s name.”)

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Lookit! Lookit! Lookit!

Don’t see my sin, Lord. Look at Jesus on the cross, Father … then look at me. Look at Jesus Christ risen, Father … then look at me. Look at Jesus ascended, Father … then look at me. Amen.

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Inglorious Bastards

This is a post borne of a recent article in Leadership Journal, by a guy who’s been meeting with Ted Haggard. I don’t usually write on stuff like that — it is cheeseball to even appear to piggyback for one’s own benefit on somebody else’s popular post, or to try and capitalize on an au

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Lapsed Pray-er

When I pray in the morning I often lapse into The Jesus Prayer. The link notes the Eastern Orthodox connection and its basic form — Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner. — though it seems actually to come in different shapes and colors, some slightly longer and more formal,

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