Well, there's one way to get out of church when you're 7

Drive.

Caught on tape: 7-year-old boy leads police on car chase to avoid church

PLAIN CITY, Utah -- Police in Utah say a 7-year-old boy led officers on a car chase in an effort to avoid going to church.

Dispatchers received reports of a child driving recklessly on Sunday morning. Weber County Sheriff's Capt. Klint Anderson says one witness said the boy drove through a stop sign.

Anderson says two deputies caught up with the boy and tried unsuccessfully to stop the Dodge Intrepid in an area about 45 miles north of Salt Lake City. The car reached 40 mph before the boy stopped in a driveway and ran inside a home.

Anderson says when the boy's father later confronted him, the boy said he didn't want to go to church. The boy is too young to prosecute and no citations were issued, although police did urge the father to make his car keys more inaccessible to children.

A great (and slightly nerdy) email signature

No trees were harmed in the production of this message. However, a large number of electrons were slightly inconvenienced.

The big announcement!

I'm very excited to announce that we're expecting a baby and are due late February/early March! We just had our first appointment today and were so excited to hear a heartbeat! So far everything looks good and while Jamie has had some of the normal pregnancy "blah," she has been doing really well. We're so thankful for the health that she's had so far.

Thanks to those of you who are and will be praying for us. We praise God for His mercy to us so far and pray for wisdom as we learn how to take on our new role as parents!

Speaking of that role...you know how every parent thinks they'll be perfect? They've watched their friends, parents, and relatives and they've got it all down to an exact science. They know exactly what they will and especially what they WON'T do! Well, that's us. So please be patient with us as we (mostly I) rant about the right and wrong way to parent...we'll learn - very quickly, I'm sure, but we'll learn! :)

Oh, and the most common question we're asked is if we're going to find out whether it's a boy or a girl. To save ourselves from having to answer that question more times than we have already, the answer is no, we do not plan on finding out the gender. We will all get to be surprised!

My bank was robbed

This is just a mile and a half down the street from my house.

FBI agents foiled a bank robbery July 16 at the Associated Bank of Burnsville, 2999 County Road 42, the FBI’s Minneapolis field office announced.

Agents had uncovered a plot to rob the bank, the FBI said. They arrested 36-year-old Carnovsky Deshawn Franklin, who was charged in federal court July 17 with one count of bank robbery.

Franklin arrived at the bank at around 2 p.m. and was arrested as he walked form the Chevrolet Suburban he was driving toward the bank, the FBI said.

He was found to be carrying a note demanding cash and a pair of latex gloves, the FBI said.

Agents, including an FBI SWAT team, were waiting when he arrived.

Franklin made his first appearance in U.S. District Court on July 17. He was scheduled for a detention hearing at 10:30 a.m. Monday, July 20.

This investigation was conducted by the Minneapolis field office with help from the Burnsville Police Department.

Interestingly, this guy was arrested in Richfield just 5 days before the robbery with a charge of fleeing police. The story doesn't say how the FBI knew he was about to rob the bank, but I would think the fact that he'd just been arrested has something to do with why they knew he was about to rob a bank.

Deadline

Apparently you can get college credit for putting stuff like this together. Who knew?



Too bad there's no work credit for watching it...

And for those interested in how it was done:



H/T: Jed.

The President Bush I'd like to remember

This isn't the same guy who left office but this is the guy I had liked. This is the America that I like.

I don't think it's a stretch to say that for me, this was the greatest moment our nation has experienced in my lifetime. I remember feeling that nothing could stop us and that after the divisiveness of the 2000 election, we really were one nation that couldn't be torn apart. That probably sounds stupid, immature, and naive considering it was "just a baseball game," but as a 16-year-old kid on the heels of history's largest attack on our nation's turf, that was how I felt.

Say goodbye to the Sears Tower

This is sad.

Farewell Sears Tower: Tallest Building in U.S. Renamed

CHICAGO — Sports fans have dealt with it for years: a favorite team sells the naming rights to its stadium in a lucrative, if unsentimental, money grab.

But when Chicago residents go to bed Thursday night their beloved Sears Tower, one of the world's iconic skyscrapers and the tallest building in the U.S., will no longer be the Sears Tower. It will be Willis Tower.

Or will it?

"It's always going to be the Sears Tower. It's part of Chicago and I won't call it Willis Tower. In Chicago we hold fast," Chicago teacher Marianne Turk, 46, said as she stood in line to go up to the building's Skydeck on Monday.

Mayor Richard M. Daley and others will join the building's owners at a ceremony Thursday to officially rename the tower after Willis Group Holdings, a London-based financial servicescompany that secured the naming rights as part an agreement to lease 140,000 square feet of space in the tower.

The building has been known as Sears Tower since it opened in 1973. It's original tenant, Sears Roebuck and Co., moved out in 1992, and a real estate investment group formed in 2004 now owns the 1,450-foot, 110-story skyscraper.

Am I the only one who noticed the typo in that last sentence?

Analysis of President Obama's first pitch

Obama delivered the All-Star game's first pitch tonight. Here are my observations.

1. It was low, thus meeting our expectations.

2. He's left-handed, naturally.

3. Fox didn't show Albert Pujols catching the pitch, obviously wanting to hide just how awful the pitch really was from the general public. This shows obvious pro-Obama bias from Fox.

4. He wore a White Sox jacket, reflecting his support for the big labor that's dominant on Chicago's gritty south side.

5. He threw the pitch from the mound (most ceremonial first pitches are from 10 feet in front of the mound, on flat ground), which furthers his view of himself as being above everyone else.

6. He left the field quickly without taking questions, once again shying away from the media...he's obviously hiding something from the American public...what is he so afraid of? It's not like Jim Gray was on the field waiting for an interview...

If you found any other fun conspiracy theories in President Obama's first pitch, please leave them in the comments.

Stop honking!!

You've all seen the demonstrators' signs.

"Honk if you love peace!"

Or,

"Honk if you support our troops!"

And of course, people honk...and honk...and honk.

Here in Burnsville, police are doing something about it and the ACLU isn't too happy about it.

Burnsville Man Ticketed While 'Honking for Peace'

A nuisance or freedom of speech? A Burnsville man says he got a ticket for honking too much during the weekly ‘Honk for Peace’ event.

Burnsville Police says they started getting complaints about the Thursday event and began taking photographs of the scene at Burnsville Parkway and Nicolette Avenue.
...
One of the group members snapped pictures of police taking pictures of them and passed them along to the American Civil Liberties Union.

"Having two officers standing out taking photographs you is incredibly chilling," said Teresa Nelson with the group.

Police say their cameras caught one driver honking more than 50 times.

"We certainly don't mean to be chilling. I can see that's one interpretation of us. We're just trying to document accurately what's going down," explained Police Cpt. Eric Gieseke.

No, that's not chilling, it's responding to public complaints because guess who the police serve? That's right, the public!

A guy blaring his horn for a solid 20 seconds as he passes through the intersection is dangerous and a pretty significant nuisance. The police action has nothing to do with politics, but don't tell that to the ACLU...they'll find a way to make it political.

A case against universal health care

This guy is kind of a twerp, but assuming his investigation is an accurate portrait of Canadian reality, it's a pretty compelling argument.

Bleeding movies

I like this quote from my pastor:

"Prick Bunyan anywhere and he will bleed Bible." Let it not be said of the king's heralds: Prick him and he bleeds movies.