Watched nothing....

....other than having a Stone IPA and watching most of 42ND STREET FOREVER VOL. 4: COOLED BY REFRIGERATION, but didn't watch all of it. I skipped the bad 70s comedy parts. I should investigate to see if there's some kind of trailer of sorts out there, although it would seem odd to have a trailer for a compilation of other trailers.

What I did do was finish another book: THE UNLIKELY DISCIPLE by Kevin Roose. The writer transferred to Liberty University [the one founded by Jerry Falwell] for a semester and wrote about his experience there as an undercover non-believer. It was different than I thought it would be, he actually got quite involved with the people he met there, especially his dorm mates. However, he could not get past some of the crap they have in their curriculum especially regarding science, and one of the problems with the institution is that they view the academics of the school as secondary to the religious aspect.

I was amused that although he went to an Ivy League school he had a lot of difficulty with some of the coursework, especially the religious stuff because he had zero background knowledge of the Bible. It was also interesting that guys at Liberty spend a great deal of time talking about girls' boobs, maybe more than guys at secular colleges. I found it funny that although he felt more "spiritual" during his time there, he never really felt a desire to convert or get "saved." He learned to fake a lot of the talk and more or less passed, although some people suspected something was a little different about him.

So here's my story....I am a Christian, although very open minded and not sure about a lot of the evangelical tenets. When I was a junior in high school I transferred to a small conservative Christian private high school mainly just to get away from my small town public school. Pretty much every course had some kind of conservative religious talking point, even the sentences in the grammar exercises [we had to diagram things like "When will people realize the world does not owe them a living?"]
The education I got there was pretty poor, but at the same time I liked a lot of the people there and did admire some of the staff who were "missionary volunteers" and drew no salary. I ended up graduating from there. The school closed about eight years ago...they had a sex scandal in the late 90s and a lot of parents withdrew their kids. Enrollment never recovered and they shut down a few years later.

It was an interesting environment. There were a lot of missionary kids and kids from other countries, mainly Latin American and Japan. You also had a lot of kids who were sent there as some kind of punishment or because their parents couldn't control them.


I later spent a year at a Christian college [that was way less conservative than Liberty, although drinking, smoking, and dancing were still verboten] but wasn't happy there and transferred to a larger state university.

Anyway, THE UNLIKELY DISCIPLE was a good read...it took me back to those times in my life.