the entry deadline for the 2nd annual tell me a topic contest is now past. we had 5 lucky winners, each of whose suggestions will be magically transformed into sermons in the coming weeks. this week shall the first! lucky for me, too, because there's a simpsons rerun on fox & i think i lost my w2 forms, so i'd otherwise be distracted from thinking of a topic.

but i don't have to because doorhinge did it for me! in fact he sent in a whopping 50 possible topics, a list so long that reproducing it in its entirety here would fill up the sermon. i'll only hit a few of them this time around, although i might come back to some of them in the future. the whole list should be at the winnaz section.

these always struck me as silly. most of the ones i've seen have looked obviously fake, like the woman's body is one hue & her head is another, at a different angle even. & the pics that aren't fake are at best a peek of areola from under an oscar dress. i can appreciate their use as satire, but aside from that it's a losing situatuion all around. but then i've never really understood the sexual fixation on celebrities. sure, some of them are pretty hot, & i'll admire them when i'm watching them on tv or film, but i don't think about them much otherwise. there are usually enough pretty ladies to look at in my everyday life without thinking about women i'll never meet.

i had tried to block that series from my mind, so i only vaguely remember the episode in question. but you could substitute almost any show on tv for who's the boss, & replace the character names as needed. everyone is always walking in on everyone else in the shower in tvland. makes me jealous. i never get to walk in on anyone in the shower. i walked in on a foreign exchange student accidentally while she was undressing once, but she had on a bra & panties.

well i guess i have a variation on the lincoln beard (currently with no sideburns) so i'd have to say love 'em & grow 'em. but i started growing mine years back out of laziness. i found that shaving under my chin took the longest, & would skip it some days if in a hurry.

ah yes. early 20th century composer john cage was the first to implement chance into his music. he would roll dice to make decisions when composing & even pioneered an artform called "prepared piano" which is basically misusing a piano, plucking the strings & dropping things into it & whatnot. great fun. i wish i had more cage cds so i could recommend some, but i only have one & doubt it's among his best.

i barely even remember apa style. at work we use a modified chicago manual. expect a sermon about style issues & grammatical "errors" sometime in the coming months.

well, to show how far i've strayed from my punk roots, i had no idea jello was running. & how can you take the green party nomination from ralph nader? nader is the green party. anyway, any great slogan for jello would have to be very dk, like "storm the heartland" or "we eat children".

i haven't seen it in a long time, but i did name a song after something from that movie a few years back. the song was called "thermonuclear global war" which of course was the name of the computer game that kid thought he was playing when he accidentally hijacked the nation's nuclear missiles. nowadays our nuclear weapons facilities are on internal networks totally isolated from the internet. the only way to hack into them is to sneak into the facility.

i actually did sermons about tits & asses back in year one. they were actually about leg men instead of ass men, but there's only a subtle difference there (unless you start getting into fetishes).

wow. as you can see, i'm only halfway through the list & already i'm running longer than usual. needless to say there were a lot of good ideas there. you'll just have to go to the winnaz section to see what i was forced to skip over. another flock topic next week!