FROGLEGS

Some of you guys know that I’m taking responsibility for the 24-7 prayer website as of next month. I’ve got a lot of vision, plans and passion for making the current site work and work well. I’m also excited about redeveloping the site in the near future to make it more suited to building communities across the world and resourcing the movement in its actual form.

What I need from a few people is a little testing of the website. If you have never visited the site, you are a prime candidate. If you have visited the site, but haven’t looked around much, you are a good candidate too. This will seriously only take you about 20 minutes. And there are prizes involved. Here’s what I’d like you to do:

1. Register as a user of the site
2. Find out what 24-7 prayer is. Give me a summary of what you found out.
3. Try to register a prayer room (don’t actually do it, but just try and find how to do it).
4. Try to find 24-7 prayer activitists/communities/prayer rooms near you.
5. Please rate your experience of each. Was it easy? Why? Was it hard? What made it hard?

Send emails to me: jonah dot bailey at 24-7prayer dot com. In the subject line, write “24-7 website survey- gimme some candy”

Here is where the prizes comes in. The first person to jump through the hoops and send me an email which gives adequate answers to the five questions above will get a free 24-7 t-shirt of your choosing. I’ll even mail it to you for free.

But wait! The prizes don’t stop there. If I actually get more than one response, I’ll have to judge a best entry. I am the one and only arbiter, the buck stops here, no appeals. But if I deem your answer the most worthy from amongst the rest, you will get the huge privilege of receiving a music compilation CD from myself and a few of my friends. It will be a wicked mix and we guarantee very nice cover art. Definitely better than the T-shirt.

I’m going to give this a one month deadline. Show me some love folks!

When you look at yourself from a universal standpoint, something inside always reminds or informs you that there are bigger and better things to worry about.

- Albert Einstein

… and consider this. Get some perspective.

By looking at my “Recently Played Tracks” in the sidebar. If all other artists disappear and the only band I am listening to is Wilco, you know I’m stressin’. I can’t explain it. Wilco just help me focus. I tune everything out and I can think clearly when I pop them on my iTunes party shuffle and turn up the volume. Weird.

I was saddened last Friday to hear that Buck O’Neil had died in Kansas City, Missouri. A lot of you that read this blog won’t have the faintest idea who Buck O’Neil was. You might not care. Fair enough, just click on to the next blog and have a nice day. But I’ll be honest with you: you are a poorer person for not having ever encountered Buck O’Neil.

For me, and for many others, Buck O’Neil was one of the defining personalities of professional baseball. He grew up at a time in American history when being born black segregated you into a separate society. Baseball was no exception to that rule. For decades, blacks were forced to play professional baseball in a league of their own which they called the “Negro Leagues“. Buck was one of the great players in the league and he played with some of the most amazing athletes to have ever graced the game.

So why was an elderly black man from Florida, who I never actually met, important to me? Well, it has to do with a dark little secret that most readers of this blog don’t know.

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The next couple of weeks are unbelievably stressful for me, so forgive the lack of blogging. I’m in the midst of revision for the final exam of the third year OU history course that I’ve taken this year.

This year has been particularly difficult because of the breadth of the course content. I feel like I’ve spent almost 4 months focusing on the worst side of humanity. “Total War and Social Change, Europe 1914-1955. The Great War, The Great Depression, World War II, Hitler and the Nazis, The Holocaust, The Cold War. Mmmmm, gotta love the social upside to all that carnage. Regardless of the outcome of the course and exam, I have learned a ton. Particularly enlightening have been essays by Saul Friedlander on the role of Anti-semitism in the Holocaust (not as vital as you might think) and an essay on the role of Hitler in instigating the Holocaust by Hitler and Third Reich expert Ian Kershaw. These are academic history essays. If you don’t have a bit of background information on the Holocaust, the Third Reich and some of the historiographical arguments surrounding them, these essays might not make much sense. But Wikipedia is always happy to oblige!

Not particularly uplifting reading, but for some strange reason fascinating. I guess when humanity gets that evil and that off track, we have an innate need to understand what went wrong.