Wild Game Supper – I wish I could identify everything in this picture. The truth is, by the time I sat down I had already forgotten some of the details. I know that I didn’t pick up the deer sliders because I had them last year, and I had deer in my freezer (that I actually made into chili on Thursday). In the cup is duck gumbo. On the plate, in addition to coleslaw and baked beans, is deer meatloaf, roast turkey and deer poppers; that’s roasted deer meat inside of a jalapeno pepper wrapped in bacon. There are a couple of things I don’t remember the specifics of; there is some kind of wild game in that quesadilla but I don’t remember what.

On the left is Chris McDaniel; formerly of Confederate Railroad, he has been playing Christian music for several years and has been at every one of these I have attended four years running. On the right is Joshua Sergent, atheist turned evangelist who is celebrating 22 years clean and sober.

The Chosen has always been somewhat controversial usually for who is writing and producing but sometimes for who stars in the series. One of the Facebook groups I’m in that discusses Christian things brought up the latest controversy which actually involves an event that takes place in the story. To be on topic, comments need to address why the details presented should or should not be included. Even if you are not a fan of the show or have seen the particular episode in question, I think you can weigh in with a valid point about what is appropriate to include in a dramatic presentation of the life of Jesus and his interactions with his disciples, the Pharisees, the Roman government and the multitudes of people listening to his message. Enter Exhibit A, the commenter above that wants to question why any of us what watch the show in the first place. I don’t think that comment has a place in the discussion but that’s just my opinion. But since she asked, I provided an answer.

Some people have been invested in the program since the beginning. The production is crowd sourced so it took a little while for new episodes to come out on a regular basis. When they were advertising season 2, my wife watched the pilot and suggested we jump in and watch all of season 1. I will be honest; I tried a couple of times and found it boring. I was surprised by the number of adults that became infatuated with The Chosen as it felt to me like a dramatic children’s Sunday School lesson. The dialogue in the Wedding at Cana episode felt “dumbed down” and we all knew what was going to happen by the time it did. I never disparaged my wife from watching it, I just didn’t continue. All the stuff about Mormons either writing or producing and the guy playing Jesus being Catholic didn’t concern me because the story material didn’t seem to be present a Mormon version of the Gospel nor try to persuade the audience to become Roman Catholic. I don’t quit watching a show if I find out the actor is liberal, conservative, gay or thinks we didn’t land on the moon. I watch a program based on what is happening on screen. On an unrelated note, my wife and I attended an event about a year ago that featured Willie Robertson and Jonathan Roumie as speakers. But I neither started nor stopped watching the show because he is Catholic.

The recent controversy, if you are unaware, has to do with a character having a “nocturnal emission” which according to the Old Testament makes one ritually unclean but is not sinful. That seems like a relevant story element to me considering the characters and setting of the story. But let’s talk practicality for a moment. Season 5 kicked off with the first three episodes getting a short run theatrical release. The crowd sourced program, gearing up for a big finish right at Easter, needs to generate buzz; water cooler talk, chatter. It needs to be trending on social media. Sometimes a program is going to do something a little edgy to get people talking about it and there is no such thing as bad publicity. Why are we watching to Chosen? Some have been all along. Others have tuned in over the past few seasons to see what all the fuss is about, similar to the crowds of people that came out to hear Jesus in the first century. And some people will now watch for the first time because everybody is talking about season 5. When a post on social media starts getting reactions, good or bad, that post is shown to more people. That’s how anything online goes viral; traffic is traffic. So the comment scorning us for watching will have the unintended effect of causing more people to watch. I don’t have anything against The Chosen, it just wasn’t for me. If it causes people to read the Bible, join a small group, or do anything that moves them closer to the actual Jesus presented in the Gospels, as I believe is its intended purpose, then I am in favor of that. Which is why I have written three long paragraphs and will tag it in this post : -)

I am not seeking any of those things but I did respond to wisdom love spell caster that if she wishes to break free from occult practices and seek spiritual healing from the true and the living God that I am an ordained minister of the Gospel and can help with that. Haven’t heard back.

If you are familiar with the Wally Show, a syndicated radio program on WAY FM, they recently turned their online personas into Muppets. I like it.

It’s been a long time since I really cared about stats but with the new big project (Read the Bible) I’ve been paying attention to see if those posts are getting any traction. As time goes by, WordPress has gotten more detailed in the way it presents data. There used to be a stat on search engine traffic, i.e. how many hits came from search engines. Those stats are now broken down. Looking at them makes me want to say something about DuckDuckGo.

Out of 943 search engine redirects over the past 30 days, 906 came from Google. Those could be further broken down by Google.com, Google.ca, Google.uk etc. The Bing stats work about how would expect an MSN prodcut to work; 9 are from bing.com while the other 8 are from bing.com. Lovely. And then there have been 12 people in the last 30 days that found my blog using the DuckDuckGo search engine. That is less than 1.5% of all search engine traffic… but not to disparage, because it is traffic.

Let’s think about the demographics. I am politically and morally conservative, and we are talking about a religious, specifically Christian, blog site. Politically conservative Americans seems to be the target demographic for DuckDuckGo customers; internet users concerned with big government and corporations prying into their business. Their ads are designed to scare people. If I were writing a far left, DEI focused blog I imagine even fewer stats would come from DuckDuckGo.

You’ve probably heard about the dire wolf pups by now, three pups named Romulus, Remus and Khaleesi that are the first dire wolves to exist in thousands of years. Are they really dire wolves? Yes; mostly, well sort of. They were produced by manipulating the genome to create the traits that we believe dire wolves possessed. So they are the closest thing scientists can create to what (we think) real dire wolves actually were. Saying dire wolves have been “resurrected” may be overreach because what they have really done is create something new which is meant to be the same as the original. Before I posted the image above of George Martin holding one, I wanted to confirm that was indeed a real picture. And it is. Martin was one of the first people to hold a dire wolf pup, that is either Romulus or Remus, because it was his books that introduced modern audiences to the dire wolf and sparked interest in the first place.

After reaching maturity, many turtles stop aging completely. The same kind of scientists that created dire wolf pups believe turtles may hold the secret to ending the aging process in humans. Yes, we could be on the cusp of living forever because 8 billion people is not enough to exhaust our limited resources fast enough. Sometimes I don’t know if they are trying to cure us or kill us. Maybe both.

And finally…

Congrats if you made it this far, I know there are a couple of long stories in there. Tell us in the comments what’s wrong with this clock and then get on to enjoying your weekend.