You’ve got (hate) mail

0
by on April 3, 2006 at 7:50 pm

It’s official. The MonT-SteR REPORT has finally received it’s first hate message. I knew this day could not be staved off forever. Frankly, I have to admit to a certain amount of surprise that it hasn’t happened before now.

Simply refer to the comments in my last post, and you will note that a kind soul has taken pains to point out that I am on the road to perdition because of my conservative leanings.

Did he debate the actual content of my post? Did he say anything that was genuinely thoughful or constructive? Did he attempt to persuade rather than attack?

No, no, and no. I’m just wrong (and thereby “unchristlike” [sic]), and I’m going to “burn in hell” for it.

Well, Shaun, in the very Christlike tradition of blessing those who curse me (Luke 6:28, Romans 12:14) I respond to you by praying (in all sincerity) the following: May the Lord bless you and keep you. May He cause His face to shine upon you, and grant you peace — both now and forever more.

Blessings,

Rob
aka The MonT-SteR

in Politics

Read More

MonT-SteR in Dallas II

0
by on February 20, 2006 at 4:51 am
this is an audio post - click to play
in Life, The Universe, and EVERYTHING

Read More

MonT-SteR in Dallas I

0
by on February 17, 2006 at 10:30 pm

Well, friends, The MonT-SteR is en route to Dallas, TX to attend the National Religious Broadcasters 2006 Convention. I’d love to say I’m attending as a Christian broadcaster, but I’m actually going because the company I work for is exhibiting at the show.

I thought it would be fun to keep a journal of my experiences and impressions while on this trip. This is only the second time I’ve attended a tradeshow, and I’ve never been to a Christ-centered tradeshow (which the NRB convention is ostensibly designed to be).

In any case, I’ve already had an interesting trip:

  • My flight out of Norfolk International (ORF) was nearly 3 HOURS LATE taking off. This caused me to miss my connecting flight here in Charlotte. Thankfully, the folks at ORF knew us poor souls bound for Dallas would be hopelessly late, and so they bumped us over to an American Airlines flight that leaves here at about 7 p.m.
     
    After learning this at US Airways Special Services, I mosied on over to the American Airlines gate to confirm my seat. It was there that I caught a bunch of undeserved guff and attitude from a ticket agent:
    &nbsp
    Agent: Did you ask about your bags?
     
    The MonT-SteR: What do you mean?
     
    A: Do you know if we got your bags?
     
    TM: No, I have no idea.
     
    A: (Now visibly agitated and impatient) Next time this happens, you need to ask about your bags. Once you’re on our flight, it’s a hit against us if we have to deliver your bags to you.
     
    TM: (Now wondering how in the world this is his fault) Oh, um… okay.
     
  • After my pleasant and stimulating chat with the ticket agent, I got some lunch and sat down with my loaner laptop to take advantage of some WiFi goodness, courtesy the Charlotte International Airport. On a whim, I typed in the URL for The MonT-SteR REPORT, only to find that the Charlotte airport’s content filter has BLOCKED MY SITE!! That’s right, ladies and gentlemen, tMR is a forbidden blog at Charlotte Douglas International. The reason? Apparently, there must be something cultish or occultish about my site — it was filed under a “forbidden category” of “cult/occult.” I can’t quite figure out why this happened, but maybe it was all those references to Christianity. No, it must be all those rants about biblical morality. Oh, wait — I know! It was the Terri Schiavo podcast where I railed against her murder. Mmm, no, that couldn’t have been it. Honestly, folks, I’m at a loss. But I’m probably going to write to the IT folks at the airport about it. For goodness sake, anybody can see that there’s nothing remotely occultic about my blog.
     
    Sheesh.

Blessings,

Rob
aka The MonT-SteR

in Life, The Universe, and EVERYTHING

Read More

Shouted from the housetops

0
by on September 18, 2005 at 3:52 am

Quoted with clenched jaw and raised fist:

Because you have said, “We have made a covenant with death,
And with the grave we have made a pact.
The overwhelming scourge will not reach us when it passes by,
For we have made falsehood our refuge and we have concealed ourselves with deception.”
Therefore thus says the Lord God,
“Behold, I am laying in Zion a stone, a tested stone,
A costly cornerstone for the foundation, firmly placed.
He who believes in it will not be disturbed.
And I will make justice the measuring line,
And righteousness the level;
Then hail shall sweep away the refuge of lies,
And the waters shall overflow the secret place.
And your covenant with death shall be canceled,
And your pact with the grave shall not stand;
When the overwhelming scourge passes through,
Then you become its trampling place.
As often as it passes through, it will seize you.
For morning after morning it will pass through, anytime during the day or night.
And it will be sheer terror to understand what it means.”
(Isaiah 28:2-19)

Blessings,

Rob
aka The MonT-SteR

in Life, The Universe, and EVERYTHING, Theology

Read More

…and keeps on ticking.

0
by on August 24, 2005 at 9:36 pm

The MonT-SteR REPORT is resilient, if nothing else. Last April, it survived when the hosting service I use had a Chernobyl-sized meltdown.

This week, tMR weathered the storm I am calling The Harrowing Domain Name Expiration SagaTM of 2005. I attempted to renew mont-sterreport.com this weekend with the folks over at WazooWeb. They had been warning me for weeks that it was about to expire, so naturally I waited until the last minute and tried to renew it on its expiration date — in this case, this past Sunday.

I’ll spare you all the details, but suffice it to say that my efforts on Sunday were not successful. The WazooWeb sales folks had the audacity to actually go home for the weekend. What nerve! So I passed Sunday afternoon and evening nervously biting my nails, worried that some squatter was going to gobble up my precious domain name and force me to plie said squatter with fistfuls of money to get it back.

Thankfully, that didn’t happen. tMR is back in business after a relatively brief 2.5 day outage, and I don’t have to hand my hard-earned cash over to a would-be squatter. This is a good thing, since I wouldn’t have been able to plie him or her with much more than fistfuls of coins totalling $2.83.

All’s well that ends well.

Blessings,

Rob
aka The MonT-SteR

in Life, The Universe, and EVERYTHING

Read More

The face of ABC News

0
by on August 8, 2005 at 4:02 am

There have been many attempts to accurately define Generation X. I confess that I’m not all that qualified to add anything significant or substantive to the debate, but I don’t think many will argue with the notion that we are a TV generation. From an entertainment perspective, we had our own golden age of Saturday morning cartoons, we were the first generation to grow up watching Sesame Street, and we witnessed the (unfortunate) birth of MTV.

We also lived in a time of profound scientific advance and geopolitical drama, and TV was there to bring it to us. From the comfort of our homes, we watched the assassination attempt on Reagan, the first launch of the space shuttle, the massacre at Tianenmen Square, the tearing down of the Berlin Wall, and the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Regarding the latter, I can remember watching footage of Russian citizens lying down in front of Soviet tanks in protest of the government — so brave and desperate in their cries for freedom. As I matriculated through high school, I always had the angst-ridden feeling that the strained relationship between the US and the USSR could crumble at any moment and thrust us headlong into nuclear holocaust. So I watched the coverage of the Soviet collapse eagerly, knowing that I was witnessing something both hopeful and historic. In response to such incredible news, the anchorman gave simple voice to what I was feeling, and I have never forgotten it.

“Truly,” he said, “we live in extraordinary times.”

It was Peter Jennings who made that tidy commentary; to me, his words are emblematic of the time in which Gen-Xers were born and raised. He was the face of ABCNews since we were old enough to pay attention to it, and it was his name that we associated with the familiar theme that heralded the nightly news or a special report. We grew up having this handsome, well-spoken man report on the events of our time, day in and day out. And so, for me, his untimely passing represents something of the passing of an era — one which he rightly described as extraordinary.

My prayers and heartfelt condolences go out to his family and colleagues.

Blessings,

Rob
aka The MonT-SteR

in Current Events, Life, The Universe, and EVERYTHING

Read More

Ouch.

0
by on July 30, 2005 at 1:48 am

The MonT-SteR had to go to the doctor today to get a nasty ol’ ingrown toenail taken care of. Thanks to the HUGE novacaine injections the doctor gave me (my toe felt like it was going to burst!), I didn’t feel a thing. This was decidedly positive, especially given the doctor’s ensuing actions:

  • First, he took a scalpel and SHOVED it underneath the right half of my toenail, all the way down to the cuticle. This was to “separate it from the nail bed,” and it was by far the most unsettling part of the whole procedure to witness. The further the scalpel descended, the wider my eyes got — and the more I thanked God for the wonders of local anesthesia. Anybody want to sit and contemplate how painful it would be to forcefully thrust a scalpel, point first, underneath your big toenail? Brrrr….
  • Next, with a large scissor-like implement, he snipped away the part of the toenail he had just EVISCERATED.
  • Finally, he clamped down on the cut nail with a pair of forceps and YANKED it out. The nail made a disgusting, moist crunch noise when it came loose. Yuck!

The offending bit of nail that was biting into the side of my toe was quite large, and it had a little hook on the end that was pointing upwards. No wonder my toe was sore! As I said, I didn’t feel a thing during the whole procedure. But I am feeling it now. Although I’m not in as much pain as I thought I would be, my left big toe is throbbing away. The doctor dressed it with some gauze, so now it looks like someone pushed a large marshmallow down over my big toe. Lovely.

If you were grossed out by this post, you can blame my friend Adam. He’s the one who suggested I share more MonT-SteR MinUTiAe on my blog.

Substantial posts on the way tomorrow.

Blessings,

Rob
aka The MonT-SteR

in Life, The Universe, and EVERYTHING

Read More

I’ll take Potpourri for $1000

0
by on July 26, 2005 at 3:03 am

First, I want to note an odd phenomenon that occurred today. tMR usually gets a trickle of traffic each day — the occasional return visit from a regular reader, referrals from my Blogger profile or various and sundry search engines, and so on. Well, at the tail end of my lunch hour (which was around 2:40 p.m.), I made some corrections to my last two blog posts and republished them. Later in the day, I checked my site statistics and found that I had a spike of over 25 hits right around 3 p.m. I’m assuming that this was because I republished my blog and people were clicking the Next Blog button on Blogger sites. But isn’t that an odd time for the masses to be roving through the blogosphere? Or is there just a steady stream of people clicking through Blogger sites throughout the day and I replubished at just the right time? In all the life of tMR, nothing quite like this has happened. Thoughts to ponder (though not too hard)…

In other news, I’m reposting several installments of From the MonT-SteR’s Mouth (FTMM) that were inexplicably deleted from my Audlink account. You can access them here, but for your convenience I am listing them below with short descriptions.

Some of these I’m more proud of than others — their purpose is to 1) provide me with a forum for shooting my mouth off, and 2) give me practice at speaking extemporaneously while sounding reasonably intelligent and avoiding the overuse of “um” and “uh.” I actually think of them as practice for hosting a talk radio show (I hear that chortling and snickering out there!). Based on these little gems, you may or may not think of me as talk radio material, but we all have to start somewhere.

At any rate, here you go:

  • FTMM #1. A test of Audlink, plus a fun announcement the day Mrs. MonT-SteR and I found out we’d be having a boy.
  • FTMM #2. Here I skewer those ridiculous Bush=Hitler ads that MoveOn.org had the unmitigated gall to dignify by posting them (temporarily) on their Web site. I also find myself coming to the defense of Margaret Cho. I think a few pigs flew that day…
  • FTTM #3. My nightmare about President Bush losing his cool over the 2004 election.
  • FTTM #4 Part 1, Part 2, & Part 3. To date, this is the magnum opus of my anti-PeTA rants. Unfortunately, in Part 3, I forget to state that the group of doctors that illegally obtained Dr. Atkins’s post-mortem medical report has close financial, ideological, and relational ties to PeTA. Corroborating articles are here and here, and here’s a fellow blogger who agrees with me about PeTA’s despicable strain of extremism.
  • FTTM #5 Part 1 & Part 2. An expose of the snobbery and hypocrisy that marked the auspicious launch of AirAmerica (see my original post for more information).

Enjoy!

Blessings,

Rob
aka The MonT-SteR

in Life, The Universe, and EVERYTHING, Politics

Read More

Stop the Insanity!

0
by on April 13, 2005 at 11:05 pm
this is an audio post - click to play
in Uncategorized

Read More

Return from Christmas

0
by on January 16, 2005 at 12:20 am

As you all can see, The MonT-SteR has taken a significant hiatus from blogging. Blame it on the holiday season. It’s funny how the busyness of home and work seem to converge between Thanksgiving and Christmas and make the pace of life unusually frenetic. Leading up to Christmas, I had three weeks of absolute insanity at work. Paired with the standard levels of heightened activity that go with preparing for the Most Wonderful Time of the Year, there just wasn’t time for blogging.

I had all sorts of grandiose holiday blogging plans, too. I was going to write some deep and contemplative things about the advent of our Savior. I also planned to do some “investigative” reporting on what is known as EVP, or “Electronic Voice Phenomenon” — the basis for the recent movie entitled White Noise. Of course, my goal was to bring a Christian perspective to bear on the topic. And I also had some snide remarks to make about Calvinism and the whole “God part of the brain” movement that was recently in the news. Those might be better left unsaid, however. :)

At any rate, with the 2004 election over (thank God), I fully intend to work on these projects for The MonT-SteR REPORT. Before I do that, however, I am compelled to write about an unpleasant topic I don’t relish discussing at all. But it’s real, and I’m in good company. After all, Jesus Himself talked about it in a fair amount of detail.

Next post: Thoughts on Hell.

Blessings,

Rob
aka The MonT-SteR

in Life, The Universe, and EVERYTHING

Read More
1 2 3

Latest Tweets

Javascript needs to be installed to view the twitterfeed. Get Javacript