Actress Denise Richards recently canceled reality show was subtitled "It’s complicated." I don’t know much about Richards other than she has just come of a messy divorce from Charlie Sheen. I was struck by the subtitle of the show however because in this era of reality television letting us peak into people’s personal lives, the reality in which we all live without a camera in our face is indeed complicated.

Our political candidates for president are now officially nominated by their respective parties. Former presidents take credit for the good things that happened while they slept in the White House. Opposition candidates point out how badly things went while another man of a different party occupied the Pennsylvania Avenue address.

Campaign ads blame war, famine, tough economic times, and your mother-in-law’s gout on the other side. Each party promises economic prosperity will come as quick as inauguration day in January. Cut taxes. Drill for oil everywhere. Simple as that.

But, like life, politics and economics are more complicated than sound bites and quick fixes. The positive results of one administration’s tenure may well have begun with the work of another’s time in the oval office. And one President’s disaster may have been the result of a previous president’s policy decision. It’s complicated.

As we travel through these next weeks leading to election day, I will keep reminding myself that the world is much more complicated than I’m being told. And when the election is over and the wingtips on the left and right continue to spin everything into simple and even trite drivel to appease my laziness (they believe I prefer to think like a 12 year old), I will keep telling myself it’s complicated.

Pastor B.

This week I’d like to do a short follow up on a couple of earlier blogs.

In the blog "Push Butt" I wrote about blow dryers for your hands in various public restrooms. Since then I’ve discovered the newest upgrade to these conveniences is to increase the power of the fan. Now, hand driers shoot the air out only a few mph less than the jet engine on an F-16. Your skin actually ripples like waves in the sea. However, it still turns itself off before your hands are fully dry.

The second follow up is regarding the blog "Superior Personalities." The musing outlined the various moods of Lake Superior. As you may have surmised, I wrote it while vacationing along the big lake’s shore. About two hours after I finished it there was a stirring within the campground. A man on the other side of the campground had been knocked over by a large breaker and been swept out by a rip current. The incident was as near to a drowning as I’ve ever seen. Thanks to some athletic young men and someone who knew CPR, the man who was blue from lack of oxygen and cold water lived. He spent a couple of nights in a hospital. He and his family eventually came back to the campground to retrieve their things.

Pastor B.

I suppose I first came in contact with text messaging (usually shortened to "texting") long before computers became a household appliance and cell phones became more numerous than ears. I kid you not, the place was a city bus in Minneapolis, and I was probably riding to a cornet lesson downtown when one of the advertisements that decorate the inside of mass transportation began something like this:

if u cn rd ths thn u mgt b ....

I don’t remember the rest, but I could read the sign and discovered myself to be a prime candidate for a speed writing course. Wow!

That type of speed writing now dominates the texting world, the world our kids travel with ease. In my few fumbling attempts at texting, some ironies have hit me between the eyes. Those ironies are in the Morse Code and on the typewriter.

The telegraph opened the world to instant communication. But the simple system of clicks needed a common code, so Samuel Morse invented a code. He began his code around vowels since they were the most commonly used letters, A = . - , E = . , I = . . , o = - - -, u = . . - The vowels became some of the easiest and fastest letters to key.

Not long after the telegraph came along, Christopher Sholes invented the typewriter. Although typewriters generally sit in dusty attics and basements these days, the QWERTY keyboard has crossed over to the 21^st century. And the keyboard, as you all know, doesn’t have the letters in alphabetical order. Letters were placed in such a way that the most common letters used in the English language (E is the most common) were far apart so the keys on those original mechanical typewriters would not jam. As you may have guessed, all the vowels found prominent places.

Which brings me to the irony of texting, the most modern way of written communication. Texting is all about omitting vowels. All these years of making vowels easy to find and use have gone by the wayside in a system that eschews the vowels like moldy leftovers. To add to the irony, the least used vowel (u) is now the text messaging stand alone for "you". It gets used the most. Ironic, isn’t it?

May th Lrd b w u.

Pstr B.

While Susan and I vacationed on the south shore of Lake Superior we spent a leisurely afternoon on the beach. The gentle water placidly lapping the sand was warm by Gitchagumi standards. Not long before sunset Susan waded back into the water for another swim. When she emerged back onto the shore she explained that she felt she needed to take one more swim because "you never know when the lake will be like this again." Her words proved prophetic. The next morning brought us a lake with a very different personality - loud and dangerous.

With a bit of poetic licence regarding the exact days, here’s a journal of the personalities Lake Superior might bring.

Day 1

Today the lake is playful like a toddler. The waves remind me of a ripe wheatfield waving in a gentle wind. Lake Superior invites visitors to come and swim. Float on your back, and bob up and down like a baby being rocked to sleep. The lake is sneaky in pushing you down the shoreline. When you finally look up you might find yourself one or two hundred yards from where you started but still near the shore.

Day 2

It doesn’t take long up here before the constant sound of the lake rushing into the shore becomes the norm. So when you awake to an absolutely still, soundless giant, it’s a little eerie. The millions of rocks on the shore offer up many that are flat and smooth. Skipping them across the mirrored finish of the water seems more enticing than swimming. I know this water will not stay this way for long, but I’ll enjoy it while I can.

Day 3

The wind direction has changed. The speed, too. The lake wants to play, but it wants to play rough. Out toward the horizon, whitecaps dot the surface as though like blinking lights. On the beach, waves of two or three feet crash down noisily in a white froth. If you take it on, the lake will most certainly wrestle you down in the early going. And if you’re not deep enough, you’ll have a hard time getting up as one slam after another keeps you from getting a firm footing. I’ve learned that this game can only be played when I’m chest deep into the lake. Then, when the breakers rush in I dive into them to let their power go over my head. Don’t turn your back on the lake. That one you don’t see coming could tumble you into the churning sand and deposit you like flotsam upon the shore.

Day 4

This morning the lake turned mean. Five foot swells and maybe even larger crash with a thunderous roar. Sometimes you can even feel the earth shake. Along with sand churning in each wave, the colder water of Lake Superior’s deeper regions had awakened to the challenge. A few foolhardy souls may try to swim, but they will not last long against the relentless power of the world’s largest fresh water lake. This personality is only a few steps away from being deadly as a host of shipwrecks along this shoreline will attest.

Yes, the greatest of the Great Lakes suffers from multiple personalities. Some are friendly. Some are not. But all are worth experiencing.

Pastor B.

Over the summer I spent a few afternoons at the Prairie Athletic Club’s water slide, the one where you fly down on a blue tube * inside a blue tunnel. As I sat on the sidelines and watched folks of every size and gender shoot out the tunnel, I took the opportunity to watch them get off the tube. Conclusion: there is no graceful way to get off a tube.

Method #1. In this scene a rider, usually an adult, tries to look oh so graceful sitting up on the edge of the tube. Remember that this begins with your body in the ‘V’ position with the bottom of the ‘V’ (a.k.a. your butt) stuck inside the middle of the tube. So the rider struggles to push himself up with his hands on either side of the tube. This usually results in one or two slips that send him back to square one or over the edge into a face first plunge. Once the sitting up position is finally attained, he scootches forward and slips gracefully into the water feet first. Then the tube flips up and hits him in the back of the head. It’s very funny.

Method #2. This is usually reserved for 48 pound skin-and-bone kids. I call it the fold and fall method. In this scene a girl might simply fold herself more tightly so that the ‘V’ becomes an ‘I’. She drops through the hole in a not altogether elegant dunk, but almost all the action takes place under water, so it looks good even though it guarantees total wetness.

The real oddities begin when she has grown over the winter and discovers her butt has hit the bottom of the pool before her head and feet have cleared the tube. Thus trapped like a finger in Chinese finger cuffs, she can’t move. The fun escalates when the stuckness happens with her nose underwater. The ‘I’ suddenly explodes into every other letter in the alphabet.

Now, I could describe this method when used by a 200 pound man who is wedged into the tube to begin with, but I won’t. Draw your own picture.

Method #3. This method begins when the rider quite literally turns herself into a stick so that her body is basically a plank lying atop a tube. While this step generally is performed without much ado, the next step is where the fun begins.

In one option, the rider attempts to straddle the tube and step up and off. Unfortunately, unless you play for the NBA, you are not built with the length to achieve this little feat. The result can be an extreme amount of personal pain, and most assuredly will result in a very undignified forward flop into the water.

The second option is to slide one leg off the tube in an attempt to stand up quickly, throw the other leg over the tube and into the water, and to stand up head dry, smiling and tube in hand. Although I have actually seen this maneuver work two or three times, all the other times have usually ended with a side flop and the tube zipping away in the other direction to hit some unsuspecting 48 pound kid perfectly executing the fold and fall.

So folks, if maintaining poise and grace at all times is a requirement for your existence, don’t get on a tube.

Pastor B.

(*I refrained from calling these inflated donuts inner tubes. Many of you know that an inner tube has an inflation stem inside the hole, and this has lead to several more ungraceful moments in swimming history. But I’ll save that for another time.)