Author Archives: Clark Bunch

Satur-deja Vu

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Canadian eh? It’s not uncommon for Canadian coins to be mixed in with ours when giving or receiving change. Most people just ignore it, if they notice at all, and carry on business as usual. I’m sure it happens more in northern states that are near the Canadian border than it does in the Deep South. A couple of days ago I noticed one quarter and two nickels amongst my change. (Technically the Canadians do not have “quarters, dimes or nickels” those are American terms. But many Canadians use those terms, referring to American and Canadian coins, because of the contact they have with our culture.) Several years ago I found a Deutsche Mark coin. That was highly unlikely, and now they have switched to the Euro.

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Satur-deja Vu

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This should have been in Happy Monday. We saved on it for a week or two then did not publish a Happy Monday post this week. We didn’t do anything much on the actual 4th of July; I worked in the yard some that morning while it was cool enough, or at least not oppressively hot, both at home and for a relative. I went through the Cook Out drive through for bacon cheeseburgers and Cajun fries then came home to do some inside work on the house. Do you know about Cook Out? It’s exactly what it sounds like; hamburgers, hot dogs, floats with a red and black table cloth motif inside the dining room. The burgers taste just like they would if you grilled them at home over charcoal. Yesterday I made some homemade pulled pork and almost over did it on the sauce. We’ve got a picnic lunch planned today and a real cookout & fireworks event tonight; this will be our 4th of July, planned and executed by some good friends on their farm.

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Satur-deja Vu

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Artificial Intelligence? In Terminator 2: Judgement Day the T-101 model has a telephone conversation with the T-1000, both of them pretending to be someone else. Arnold does a spot on John Conner impression and outwits the more advanced T-1000 who doesn’t know the name of the family pet. Artificial Intelligence in the Terminator franchise, like The Matrix and I, Robot, has advanced to a level that threatens the existence of humanity. Most of the AI we see today is used to make creepy near-photo realistic pictures that are given away by the fact it doesn’t know how many fingers human beings have on each hand. Have you had AI offer to write for you? AI makes claims that it can boost productivity by creating blog posts and even generate social media buzz by posting to social media on your behalf. The same software that thinks people have between 8 and 12 fingers on one hand wants to write my blog posts. If you read the story above you probably recognize Hulk Hogan in both pictures. Those are real images featuring a fan that met Hogan twice, once as a kid and then recreated the photo years later as an adult. That’s not his son, he is not a computer geek as far as we know, and Hogan’s real first name is Terry. The AI simply made up a fake story but had no idea Hulk Hogan is a celebrity that the vast majority of Americans would recognize whether fans of wrestling or not. It can write words and sentences but just like the images there is always a tell. Maybe AI is not as dangerous as dystopian sci-fi movies led us to believe.

Or maybe that’s what the AI wants us to think.

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The Ten Commandment Law

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The governor of Louisiana recently signed a bill into law that the Ten Commandments shall be posted in every public school K-12 classroom. It’s been in the news this week, I have wanted to say something, but every time I think about it I also feel like “I can’t believe we have to say these things again.” Here is what Jimmy Humphrey of the Jimmy’s Table Podcast had to say on social media and he gladly gave me permission to copy and paste:

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Book Review – Christianity Cracking Up

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I almost decided not to read this book. I have a great sense of humor and often use humor and sarcasm, sometimes bordering on irreverent, both online and in the pulpit. I thought a book about using comedy as a resource for evangelism and fostering unity among Christians would be right in my wheelhouse. While the use of comedy is what Jordan Hathcock is advocating his excessive use of profanity is what almost turned me away completely. On the dedication page, which is only a sentence or two, he refers to himself as “batshit crazy.” On the acknowledgment page he calls himself a “lucky son of a bitch.” One page into the introduction, as he describes the events of human history, he summarizes by saying “we’ve done some f***ed up s***. I’ve added asterisks, he did not. He frequently uses all the words which I found alarming. The back cover explains the premise of the book but doesn’t use any stronger language than “dog doo doo.” The about the author page, found near the back of the book, describes Hathcock as a “father, husband, son, brother, friend, profanity devotee…” Like I said, he makes a case for the use of comedy but says nothing about finding expletives funny yet his bio describes him as being devoted to the use of profanity. He only used the GD phrase once, but it is in there.

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Satur-deja Vu

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Camp Chick-fil-A – I’m gonna chalk this story up to a slow news week. The “news” here is about the social media outrage over a Chick-fil-A in Hammond, LA, offering a 3 hour summer program for kids to learn what it’s like to work at Chick-fil-A. For $35 kids can see what it looks like behind the scenes in Chick-fil-A’s kitchen, meet the cow mascot, meet the owner/operator, and of course get a free meal and a t-shirt. Critics jumped all over the camp announcement post on Facebook talking about child labor, corporate greed and one person even tagged the department of labor. A Chick-fil-A in Houston, TX, started having the camp a few years ago and all 200 spots sell out in a manner of minutes. The Hammond, LA, Chick-fil-A sold out all their spots within 24 hours and added additional dates. Mike Rowe (and many, many others) have come to the defense of Chick-fil-A for offering something fun during the summer that kids enjoy and that offers the “soft skills” young adults need in work environments. Chick-fil-A corporate has responded to the child labor complaints by pointing out that kids in the summer camp program will not be doing the actual work of a team member.

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Satur-deja Vu

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Dr. Pepper has overtaken Pepsi to claim the #2 spot in the cola wars. Pepsi has been in second place to Coca-Cola almost every year since 1985 (except for a brief period from 2010 to 2013 when it was Diet Coke). There was a time that Pepsi was doing so badly they put the company up for sale and Coca-Cola had the opportunity to buy it, and cheaply at that. But their reasoning at the time was if Pepsi was that bad off they would do nothing and see if it would just die. Whoops.

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But Who is Wrong?

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I have written before on the fact that denominations exist and suggested that Luke 9:49-50 may apply. The church exists all over the world and without being worldly minded people are products of their culture. There are many different flavors of Christianity and what one must believe to be saved is that Jesus is the Son of God, died for our sins and God raised him from the dead. Everything else is details; there may be important details but the facts listed in the previous sentence is what all Christians must agree on.

So the question has been raised regarding different positions on theology. There are Calvinists, Arminians, and those that claim neither position but believe all we need is the Bible. There are Christians that believe we should worship on the Sabbath and others that gather on what they call the Lord’s Day. There are three basic positions on when the rapture will take place, other sub-divisions, and those who do not believe there will be a rapture. There is so much disagreement that one must either conclude there Is no God or that he offers us much grace otherwise no one gets credit for doing everything correctly. Who is right, who is wrong, and more importantly how can we know?

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Satur-deja Vu

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Negro League stats – If you are a baseball fan you have probably watched a few games this week, read an online or print article or perhaps followed this story for a long time. For the rest of you I will be brief because if you really cared you would know already; MLB has incorporated the former Negro Leagues stats into its official records. We know for a fact that the statistical record is incomplete. It took years of looking through old newspapers and microfilm for researchers to estimate they have 75% of box scores from Negro League games from the years 1920 to 1948. They only added to the official MLB numbers for players that played 60 or more games. There is a precedent for 60 games seasons but again, stat guys know already and non-stat people are not going to read more stats they don’t care about.

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Meanwhile at the SBC

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Southern Baptists do not call women to pastor churches. That may surprise our Methodist or Presbyterian brothers and sisters but that’s a common facet of Baptist life particularly in the SBC. Except that a June 2023 report that analyzed a random sample of 3,847 SBC churches and found that 99 of them did have female pastors. The vast majority of those, 73 out of 99, serve in an associational role or are designated as the leader of a particular ministry. Seven “co-lead” with their husband but two of the 99 are identified as the “senior pastor” and nine simple as “pastor.” If we extrapolate those numbers from the random sample across then entire SBC, over 49,000 churches, there easily could be over 1,800 female pastors serving in over 1,200 churches.

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