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Celtics beat Heat again 112-107
Ray Allen was amazing tonight, going 7-9 from beyond the arc. This guy doesn't seem to age and I feel like he could hit corner threes till he's 70. Rondo was outstanding as always with 16 dimes and 8 points. What more can you really say other than he is awesome at life. Garnett and Pierce were solid as well with 25 and 16 points respectively.
Lebron put up some good numbers with 35 points 10 rebounds, and 9 assists but I feel like he never really dominated the game. Chris Bosh is scared. He reminds me of Rashard Lewis last year in the Eastern Conference Finals. This isn't Toronto anymore Bosh. One guy that did impress me on the Heat was Udonis Haslem. I told my friend tonight that I haven't seen Haslem miss an open 15 foot jumper in his career and he didn't fail me tonight going 9-10 from the field. Give me a team of Haslem's over Chris Bosh's any day.
There was a Nate Robinson sighting tonight. He played a huge part in staving off a Heat come back. Ever since I saw this guy win us Game 6 of last year's Magic series I've given him the benefit of the doubt and I'm confident he will continue to get better as the year goes on. The guy is talented and it is just a matter of time before he starts hitting his shots.
The Celtics are a better team than the Heat. Basketball is a 5 on 5 game not 1 on 1. I'm not scared of the Heat. At the same time, the Celtics made some mental errors tonight that they can't afford. Don't go for the dunk Ray! The plays of the game were the Rondo dunk and Glen Davis put back. Great win for the Celtics. This team is without a doubt better than last years squad.

subset: commoncrawl


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Wednesday, November 30, 2022
"And they [the shepherds] came with haste, and found Mary, and Joseph, and the babe lying in a manger. And when they had seen it, they made known abroad the saying which was told them concerning this child. And all they that heard it wondered at those things which were told them by the shepherds" (Luke 2:16-18 KJV).
The second verse of the classic Christmas carol highlights today's Scripture.
"Why lies He in such mean estate,
Where ox and ass are feeding?
Good Christians, fear, for sinners here
The silent Word is pleading.
Nails, spears shall pierce Him through,
The cross He bore for me, for you.
Hail, hail the Word made flesh,
The Babe, the Son of Mary."
It was just as the angel of the Lord had told them. The Saviour, Christ the Lord, the King of Israel, was indeed born in Bethlehem, but not in a palace. The shepherds found Him lying in a trough, a structure out of which farm animals ate! How odd!
There were just so many things about Jesus' nativity that did not make sense in the human mind. Firstly, a virgin had conceived and borne a child. Secondly, the God of creation had confined Himself to a tiny body that could be held in human hands. Thirdly, that the King of Israel had been born in a stinky, dirty barn and His crib was literally a trough. Lastly, that Someone so important did not have thousands of people flocking to His crib. Strange!
As the shepherds left Joseph, Mary, and Baby Jesus, they spread the news about what they had heard and seen. The Bible says that this audience "wondered at those things which were told them by the shepherds." They could not fathom how it was possible, either. Even today, the natural (lost) mind of man not only struggles with, but outright refuses, to believe the simple truths of the Bible. They rather rail against and reject that which they do not understand, than acknowledge that they do not know everything and the God of the Bible is wiser than they are. To accept those truths would mean validating how Jesus Christ came to live that He would die for us sinners.
Yet, some hearers believed!


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As an English professor, I have spent the last two decades guiding college students through the great books of the western intellectual tradition. And yet, though I have taught (and loved) the works of Homer, Sophocles, Virgil, Dante, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, and Dickens, I do not hesitate to assert that Aslan is one of the supreme characters in all of literature. Though many readers assume that Aslan, the lion king of Narnia who dies and rises again, is an allegory for Christ, Lewis himself disagreed.
According to his creator, Aslan is not an allegory for Christ but the Christ of Narnia. The distinction is vital. Were Aslan only an allegory, a mere stand-in for the hero of the gospels, he would not engage the reader as he does. In fact, as Lewis explained, Aslan is what the Second Person of the Trinity (God the Son) might have been like had he been incarnated in a magical world of talking animals and living trees. As such, Aslan takes on a force and a reality that speaks to us through the pages of the Chronicles of Narnia.
In Aslan, we experience all the mighty paradoxes of the Incarnate Son: he is powerful yet gentle, filled with righteous anger yet rich with compassion; he inspires awe and even terror (for he is not a tame lion), yet he is as beautiful as he is good; The modern world has ripped apart the Old and New Testament, leaving us with two seemingly irreconcilable deities:
an angry, wrathful Yahweh who cannot be approached, and a meek and mild Jesus who is too timid to defend his followers from evil. Aslan allows us to reintegrate—not just intellectually and theologically, but emotionally and viscerally as well—the two sides of the Triune God who calls out to us on every page of the Bible, from Genesis to Revelation.
Every time a character comes into the presence of Aslan, he learns, to his great surprise, that something can be both terrible and beautiful, that it can provoke, simultaneously, feelings of fear and joy. Borrowing a word from Rudolph Otto, Lewis referred to this dual feeling as the numinous. The numinous is what Isaiah and John felt when they were carried, trembling and awe-struck, into the throne room of God, and heard the four-faced cherubim cry out "holy, holy, holy!" It is what Moses felt as he stood before the Burning Bush, or Jacob when he wrestled all night with God, or Job when Jehovah spoke to him from the whirlwind, or David when he was convicted of his sin with Bathsheba and experienced (all at once) the wrathful judgment and infinite mercy of the Holy One of Israel.
Our age has lost its sense of the numinous, for it has lost its sense of the sacred. Through the character of Aslan, Lewis not only instructs us in the nature of the numinous, but trains us how to react when we are in its presence. When we finish the Chronicles, we may not be able to define the numinous, but we know we have felt it: each and every time Aslan appears on the page.
No person has ever had a greater impact on the history of the world, and yet no person has been the focal point of more controversy and strife. No person has ever been worshipped with such devotion or manipulated with such selfish ingenuity. For well over a century, an ever-changing band of biblical "scholars" (some of them genuine, but most of them self-appointed) have organized themselves under the rubric of the Jesus Seminar and have taken as their goal the grail-like search for the "historical Jesus." Sadly, though the majority of their findings are based on their readings of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John (with an occasional gnostic gospel thrown in),
most members of the Jesus Seminar refuse to treat the canonical gospels with the respect they deserve. And that despite the growing number of historians and textual critics who have judged the gospels to be reliable historical documents based on eyewitness accounts that corroborate, rather than duplicate, one another.
Though C. S. Lewis was not a trained biblical scholar, he was an expert reader of literature with a fine eye for the distinctions between genres. Long before modern scholarship confirmed the historical accuracy of the gospels, Lewis had already explained to his readers that the Jesus of the gospels and the "historical Jesus" of revisionist scholarship were one and the same.
Anyone who reads the gospels alongside other ancient texts will immediately see the difference. There is nothing legendary about the gospels. They are, Lewis asserts, sober biographies grounded in real, down-to-earth details— the kind of details that do not appear in literature until the 19th century. As for Jesus himself, he emerges from the gospels with a concrete
As for Jesus himself, he emerges from the gospels with a concrete reality that surpasses all other figures in the ancient world (only Socrates comes close). When we read the gospels, we know Jesus in a way we do not know anyone else before the modern period.
As for the claims Jesus makes in the gospels, Lewis, in what is perhaps his best known apologetical argument, defuses all those critics who would treat Jesus as a good teacher or prophet and nothing more. In Mere Christianity (II. 3), Lewis gives the lie to this attempt to domesticate and defang the historical Jesus of the gospels.
Again and again, Lewis reminds us, Jesus makes incredible claims about himself: he is the Way, the Truth and the Life; he is the Resurrection and the Life; he is one with the Father; he has the authority to forgive sins; he calls on people to follow him (and not just his teachings); he takes upon himself the power to reinterpret the Law.
A person who made these claims and was not the Son of God would not be a prophet or even a good man. He would either be a deceiver on a grand scale or a certifiable maniac. Yet the overwhelming consensus of the gospels and of those who knew Jesus rule out the possibility that he was either a liar or a lunatic. Once these two options are eliminated, however, we are left with only one possibility: that he was who he claimed to be.
And that is why Lewis concludes that we can shut Jesus up as a lunatic, kill him as a devil, or fall at his feet in worship—but "let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to."
Articles adapted from Markos, Louis A. (2012-10-01). A To Z With C. S. Lewis (Kindle Locations 74-79 & 377-379). . Kindle Edition.


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Usher and Nicki Minaj over this disco-era MJ track produced by Pharrell is a sugary dance number. It's half as lewd as their first collab "Lil Freak" and about twice as potent. They achieve more without oversexing it and hint at some better musical chemistry overall. Listen after the jump.
New Music: Usher – "She Came To Give It To You" Feat. Nicki Minaj
9 years ago 613,701


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Searching for road money
CRESTVIEW — The North Okaloosa Transportation Committee believes it has found a way for local governments to raise money needed to jump-start long-neglected road projects.
Committee members want to give the idea of a Tax Increment Financing (TIF) District a test run in Crestview and put the money raised toward a $100 million effort to widen P.J. Adams Parkway south of U.S. Highway 90.
If the plan works, committee members such as Okaloosa County Growth Management Director Elliot Kampert think TIF could be held up to planners as a way to fund larger projects such as improving U.S. Highway 98 or replacing the aging Brooks Bridge in Fort Walton Beach.
"We want to raise local funds to bring to bear for large projects with a regional impact," Kampert said.
To create a TIF District for the P.J. Adams Parkway project, the committee must get the Okaloosa County Commission and the Crestview City Council behind the proposal.
Attorney Mike Chesser, another committee member, said the hope is to present county commissioners with a proposed ordinance in the next 30 days or so. Crestview's City Council will be asked to consider the same document at about the same time.
Under the ordinance, both governments would agree to set aside taxpayer dollars for road work.
Eric Davis, a planning official for Crestview, compared the TIF to a "Christmas Club account."
"You set a little bit of ad valorem tax aside in an account that the County Commission or City Council can only use for the specified project," he said.
Funds are accrued not through raising property taxes, but through diverting a portion of the taxes collected — those generated by some new construction or appreciation of existing properties — to pay for a particular project, according to a news release from the committee.
"Growth paying for growth," the news release called the concept.
"The ad valorem stream that feeds the TIF savings account derives from the value appreciation that occurs as a result of the infrastructure investment for which the TIF was established," the release said.
Kampert, Davis and Chesser recently discussed the importance of widening P.J. Adams and the difficulty north Okaloosa traditionally has had in getting funding for roads.
"Okaloosa County works as a small analog of the state of Florida in general. Money and influence are centered in the south end of the county,south of Eglin Air Force Base," Davis said.
South county interests constitute a majority of members on the Okaloosa-Walton Transportation Planning Organization, Davis said, and tend to "set priorities where their constituents are."
"There's a disconnect between need and where the money is," he said.
Widening P.J. Adams will benefit Crestview by pulling local traffic off State Road 85 and encouraging development in the area encircled by those roads and U.S. 90, Davis said.
It also will benefit areas in the south county by easing the trip from places like Atlanta and Andalusia, Ala.
The less painful the drive, committee members believe, the more likely tourists will make a return trip.
About 60 percent of the traffic going through Crestview on SR 85 is local, Davis said. It is comprised of people trying to get from one end of Okaloosa's largest city to the other or driving into town from points east and west like Dorcas or Baker.
The P.J. Adams route will give drivers coming in, from the west in particular, a way to get south of Crestview without using SR 85. Davis is confident feeder roads and economic development will spring up between P.J. Adams and SR 85.
The 40 percent of drivers who aren't county residents, of course, are tourists likely heading to or from the beaches.
"P.J. Adams is not going to be able to reduce 40 percent of the traffic," Davis said. "Tourists are going to do what their GPS says and take the straight route through town."
The theory is that by removing local traffic from SR 85, the road will be freed up to give tourists an easier shot to the beach, committee members said.
"What happens in the north end of the county impacts what happens on the south end," Kampert said.
The need to improve roads is urgent, but collecting TIF funds needed to dangle in front of state and federal sources as match money will take time, committee members said.
They're suggesting the TIF be created as soon as possible and the funds given at least a couple years to grow before a board formed to maintain it would make any spending plans, Davis said.
A chart compiled by the committee predicts about $40 million in today's dollars accumulating in the fund in 20 years.
But Chesser said once the fund becomes established, the alternatives to obtain matching dollars or bond financing opens up.
"The TIF puts money in the bank, and when you've got money in the bank a lot of people talk to you," he said.
Contact Daily News Staff Writer Tom McLaughlin at 850-315-4435 or email@example.com. Follow him on Twitter @TomMnwfdn.