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As we prepare for the Lord's table, it is suitable and fitting for us to return to 1 John. We have come now really to the final section of this great epistle. First John chapter 5 verses 13 through 21 constitutes the conclusion of the epistle. And this section can be titled, "Christian Certainties...Christian Certainties."
If you just glance at verses 13 to 21, you will recognize the word "know" is there. Verse 13, "That you may know..." Verse 15, "If we know that He hears us, we know we have the request we've asked." If you drop down to verse 18, "We know that no one who is born of God sins." Verse 19, "We know that we are of God." Verse 20, "And we know that the Son of God has come that we might...verse 20...know Him who is true." This is all about what we know.
You will also recognize that the word "confidence appears in verse 14, "And this is the confidence." What is in verse 13, we know. What is in verses 14 through 17 is one subject about which we can be confident. What is in verse 18 we know, what is in verse 19 we know, what is in verse 20 we know and a final warning appears in verse 21. This is about what we know. That's why I've called it Christian certainties.
Now obviously we live in a very, very uncertain world. We hear this all the time that these are very unstable times, uncertain times. We struggle against all of the uncertainties that we face. And, of course, since the terrible tragedy of 9-11 a couple of years ago, there is a new kind of uncertainty injected into our daily lives, the fear of terrorism. We are uncertain when we fly, we are uncertain when we are in public places. This introduces to us a new uncertainty. There are increasing uncertainties about walking down the street and just being in a visible place because there are bombings and there are drive-by shootings and you all know the uncertainties with which we live.
And there are some more common uncertainties. When we buy a car we are uncertain that it's going to function well and so we want a guarantee. And the manufacturer provides a guarantee, and if he didn't provide a guarantee, we wouldn't buy the car. And then fearing that we might have an accident for which we could not pay and then get sued, we hedge against that uncertainty by buying an insurance policy and spend our lives pouring a small fortune into the insurance company for something that hasn't happened. But it might. And when you go to the store to buy an appliance, you are immediately told by the sales person that you need to buy a 36-month warranty, or you need to buy a service guarantee, which is another way of saying this is a lousy product. Something could go wrong. And many people do that. There's uncertainty about our health and so we spend thousands of dollars a year buying either insurance or buying into some kind of a medical plan to protect us from illness and accident and catastrophic issues that might come into our lives physically. There's even uncertainty of life in a family and so insurance policies are basically purchased so that should the bread winner, the husband, die there's money immediately given to the wife. Most of you women sitting out there would be far wealthier if your husband was dead than you are now...certainly many of you.
There's uncertainty with employment so we have unemployment insurance. And so it goes. I talked to a professional athlete who told me that when he negotiated his massive contract, it included the provision in the contract that in case of injury or accident that made him impossible for him to play that his complete salary would be paid for the full length of the contract, which happened to be five years, and he would receive an addition 200 percent of that contract for his injury. And they signed him, of course. There is uncertainty about fire and theft so you have a homeowner's policy. There's even uncertainty now about marrying people so we now have prenuptial agreements where partners want to hedge against somehow being extorted by the person they're marrying. And so it goes.
People are so uncertain that they will literally spend huge percentages of their money to cover all of the potential contingencies. And there are other people who will pay large amount of money to mediums, astrologers, fortune tellers to have some insight into the future, to remove some of the fearful uncertainty.
And I suppose a good question to ask an unbeliever when you talk to one is, "What are you absolutely certain of?" And, you know, the standard answer is "death and taxes." But beyond that, and death might be a good place to stop, but beyond that, sort of trite answer, what are you really certain of? You can't be certain that this planet is going to be here. The second law of thermodynamics tells us that all material universe is tending toward disorder and disruption. You can't depend upon anything material, anything physical. Can't really depend on people. There are no guarantees about how people are going to treat you in the future, even your own spouse and your own family, your parents, your children. It's very hard for an unbeliever to answer the question...what are you absolutely certain of? And if you can get that person to say, "Well, I am certain of death," you've put them in a very, very good position. Well after you've died, what then are you certain of?...poses the inevitable question about eternal life.
Well against the background of living in an uncertain world, and living basically with people who are uncertain about almost everything, the Bible is a divine revelation that is filled with absolute certainties...absolute certainties. Let me just suggest a few of them that I jotted down.
Numbers 32:23, "Be sure your sin will find you out." That's a certainty. Or Psalm 19:7, "The testimony of the Lord, Scripture, is sure." The Bible is certain. The consequence of sin is certain. Proverbs 11:18, "To him that sows righteousness, assure reward." Job 34:12, "God will not do wickedly." That is certain. Isaiah 53:4, "Surely He hath borne our griefs and carried our sorrows." It is a surety that Jesus has done that. In fact, in Isaiah 55:3 it speaks of the sure mercies of the Lord. His mercies are certain. John 6:69, Peter said, "We are certain that You are the Christ, the Son of the living God." John 16:30, "We are sure that You know all things." John 17:8, "They have known surely...says Jesus...that I came from You." Romans 2:2, "We are certain that the judgment of God is according to truth." Romans 4:16, "The promise of salvation is sure." Second Timothy 2:19, "The foundation of God is sure." Hebrews 6:19, "Christ is a sure anchor in the presence of God." Second Peter 1:19, "Scripture is a sure word of prophecy." Revelation 22:20 Jesus said, "Surely I come quickly." There's a few and many, many, many more.
We deal in certainties in an uncertain world. That is a problem for our uncertain world, isn't it? It is an offense to people to say that you are certain about everything. It is really an intolerable posture and position to take. But it is the truth. The Bible is a book of absolutes, it's a book of certainties. We are certain how the universe began. We are certain how it will end. We are certain why God created and how His purpose in the beginning will consummate in the end. We are certain about why people behave the way they behave. We are certain about what is right and what is wrong. We are certain about the elements that make for good human relationships. We are certain about what is necessary to go to heaven. We are certain there is a hell and certain about how people get there. We are certain about all those things. We are certain about God's promises, certain about His Son the Savior, certain about His substitutionary death, His literal resurrection, certain about His Second Coming. We are certain about all these things, absolutely certain.
Now you understand again, that is not something that is easily accepted in our society, but we are unique in a world of doubters. God has even given us a guarantee for the truth of His redemptive promise. In Ephesians 1:14 it says He's given as a pledge, that's a guarantee, of our inheritance, the Holy Spirit of promise. When you became a believer, you put your trust in Jesus Christ. Why? Because you came to the conviction and the belief that all God's promises were true. Is that right? You came to the conviction that what He said about you was true, what He said about your sin was true, what He said about the judgment you would receive was true, what He said about forgiveness, mercy and grace was true. What He said about Christ was true in the Scripture. You came to the conclusion that all of that was true and when you believed in the truth of the gospel, embracing all that God had said, you put your trust in Christ because of that belief and God promised you eternal life. And to secure that eternal life, He gave you a guarantee and the guarantee that He gave you was the Holy Spirit who immediately took up residence in your heart. And that's exactly what Paul says in Ephesians 1:14, "He is the pledge, the arrabon." Arrabonmeans guarantee, down payment, deposit, pledge, promise, it's even the word for engagement ring...a symbol of a pledge and a promise. God deals in certainties. He has bound Himself by His Word to those certainties and He has guaranteed His Word in the gift of the Holy Spirit whose temple we as believers are.
And so, as we come to the end of John's epistle, John wants to reiterate for his readers and for us the certainties that are ours in Christ. With verse 12 John ended the formal argument of the book. Verse 12 summed it all up, "He who has the Son has the life, the eternal life. He who does not have the Son of God does not have the life." Remember this is a book that is intended to distinguish true Christians from false Christians. And John sums it up by saying eternal life belongs to those who have the Son, if you have the Son you have the life, if you don't have the Son you don't have the life. And then John summarizes his purpose in verse 13, "These things I've written to you who believe in the name of the Son of God in order that you may know that you have eternal life." This book was written to give you assurance.
Chapter 1 verse 4 says, "These things we write that your joy may be made complete." The only way you'll have complete joy is to have complete assurance of your salvation. Chapter 2 verse 1, "My little children, I'm writing these things to you that you may not sin. If anyone sins we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous." He says I'm writing so that you may have full joy, full joy related to the fact that you always have an advocate who intercedes even when you sin so that you can know that you are saved. I want you to have joy, I want you to have holiness and confidence in His intercession and I want you consummately to have the assurance that you may know that you have eternal life. That is the most important certainty, to know you have eternal life, to be certain you have eternal life.
All through the epistle he's been giving tests, tests that identify the true and the false believers. There were false teachers among these believers. There were antichrists among these believers. There were spiritual fakes and frauds and phonies and deceivers among these believers. They were insecure, as believers tend to be when they're not well taught. And so John gives tests, doctrinal tests, the test of understanding a true view of man as sinful, the test of understanding a true view of Jesus Christ, who He is and why He came. Those are the doctrinal tests. The moral tests have to do with obedience to the Law of God and to Christ and love for God and not the world and love for others. We've gone through all of those various tests. And believers who read the epistle or like us, study the epistle, come to the conclusion that they pass the test. They believe the right things about themselves as sinners. They believe the right things about Jesus Christ as Savior. They manifestly obey the Word of God, that's the direction of their life and demonstrate love for Him and love for others. John says here, "This is why I've written this, I want you to know, I want you to be certain, I want you to be confident." Of course the Roman Catholic Church says nobody can ever know if they're saved, nobody can ever know if they're going to go to heaven until after they die, which would be to completely discard this entire epistle.
By the way, the word "know" appears 39 times in this epistle. I counted them just to be sure. I think that's accurate, it might be off one or two. Thirty nine times in this epistle and seven of those times in this last section. Our faith is not a hope so, it's a know so. It's not wishful thinking, it's not pie in the sky. God has spoken and what God has spoken is true. And if we know what He has said, then we know what is true. We don't speculate. We don't hope. We are certain.
I remember years ago when I was writing a book on the Charismatic Movement, I was talking about the danger of thinking that God gives new revelation, that God speaks. And I read a book written by a charismatic leader and in it he said this, "When someone in our congregation stands up and says, 'Thus says the Lord,' we know that either he is representing what the Lord has said or he's not.'" Now that is not helpful. That's why we don't turn to that because there is no criteria by which to know. We know what God has put in His holy Word.
Listen to Job. Job in the patriarchal era way back before Moses, therefore before the writing of the Pentateuch, before there was any Scripture in anybody's hand, Job the righteous man says this, Job 19:25, "And as for me, I know that my Redeemer...what?...lives and that at the last He will take His stand on the earth, and even after my skin is destroyed, yet from my flesh I shall see God whom I myself shall behold and whom my eyes shall see and not another." I know my Redeemer lives, I know that He will stand on the earth in the last days and set up His eternal Kingdom, I know that after this body is dissolved I will awaken to see God with my own eyes. That's a lot to know before there was written any Scripture. I know, said Job... maybe the oldest book in the Old Testament. In chapter 42 Job answered the Lord and said, "I know that You can do all things and that no purpose of Yours can be thwarted." He had a sound doctrine of eternal life, resurrection, "In my flesh shall I see God," bodily resurrection, an eternal Kingdom and he also had a sound understanding of the absolute sovereignty of God. One might say that he was a pre-Abrahamic Calvinist. He knew.
The Old Testament is filled with such statements of absolute knowledge. I wish I could take the time. Here's what the psalmist says, David in Psalm 20 verse 6, "Now I know that the Lord saves His anointed. He will answer him from His holy heaven with the saving strength of His right hand." David says I know my God hears the prayers of those that are His and He answers...He answers. In Psalm 56 verse 9, similarly, "Then my enemies will turn back in the day when I call. This I know, that God is for me." Isn't that great? I may have enemies, they may attack me, but God is on my side. "In God therefore whose Word I praise, in the Lord whose Word I praise, in God I have put my trust, I shall not be afraid. What can man do to me?" And there is a confidence in God's absolute power, omnipotence.
These are just highlights. Psalm 119:75, "I know, O Lord, that Your judgments are righteous and that in faithfulness You have afflicted me." I know what You do is right and sometimes You bring suffering because You're faithful to me. Faithful? Yes faithful to bring the necessary suffering to perfect me. So the psalmist says, "That I know. You do what's right even when You allow suffering, Your purpose is to be faithful to make me what I need to be." Psalm 135:5, "For I know that the Lord is great and that our Lord is above all gods. Whatever the Lord pleases He does in heaven and in earth, in the seas and in all depths. Anywhere in the universe I know...says the psalmist...God does whatever He wants." In Psalm 140 verse 12, "I know that the Lord will maintain the cause of the inflicted and justice for the poor." I know, he's saying, that God is compassionate.
Now let me just give you a little exercise. As you read through your Bible from place to place and time to time and day to day, just see how many times you find somebody say, "I know, I know." Here's something else. Paul said, "For I know that nothing good dwells in me." That's a certainty, right? Romans 7:18, I know that. Or 2 Timothy 1:12, "I know whom I have believed and I am confident that He's able to guard what I've entrusted to Him until that day." That is I know my Lord to whom I've committed my life will keep me. I know.
So here John closes his epistle...all that's just sort of footnote.
As he closes his epistle, he uses the word "know" seven times, six of the seven it's oida, a form ofoidawhich is a reference to absolute knowledge, not something learned by experience, positive absolute knowledge known not by our experience but by divine revelation. So here we are as Christians living in a world of absolute certainties. This is the great crescendo of this magnificent epistle. You pass the test, you pass the doctrinal test, you pass the moral tests, you are the real Christians and you know.
Now he's going to close with five things we know. I'll give you one tonight. It's a good one. Be content. That leaves four for next time. Number one, we know we have eternal life. We know we have eternal life.
Look at verse 13, "These things I've written to you..." What do you mean, John? What things? The whole letter...the whole letter. How do I know that? Well, there are a number of indications. One, he shifts from the third person in verse 12, "He who has the Son has the life. He who does not have the Son of God does not have the life," to the first person, "These things I have written," which indicates that this isn't in the flow of thought, he's not simply saying, "What I've just said in the prior verse," but rather there's a shift all together out of the third person of speaking to them to a self-proclamation of his purpose. Plus, "These things I've written to you that you may know" introduces all that is about to follow, all of which is the conclusion, all of which is about what we know. So clearly this literally refers to the whole epistle which then launches him into all the things that we who do have the Son know for certain. This is also good parallel to the gospel of John. When John wrote his gospel, 21 chapters, he came down into chapter 20, the end of the chapter, the last verse of chapter 20 and he said this, "These things have been written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ the Son of God and that believing you may have life in His name." That sweeps back over the whole of the gospel of John. Everything from chapter 1, "In the beginning was the Word, the Word was with God, the Word was God. All things were made by Him, without Him was not anything made that was made," all the way down, "The Word became flesh," and then all through those 20 chapters everything so far has been written that you may believe. All the "I am" sections, all the miracles of Jesus that are recorded in the gospel of John, all intended that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God and that believing you may have life, eternal life in His name. The gospel of John was written, follow me, the gospel of John was written so that people might believe and be saved. The epistle of John was written so that the saved might know they're saved. The gospel of John has a message of salvation. The epistle of John has a message of assurance.
And so, the parallels as he gets close to the end of the gospel, he says this has all been written that you might believe. And here as he gets near the end, this has all been written that you who believe might know that you have eternal life. The first one was to bring you to belief. And this one is to eliminate any lingering doubt. How wonderful it is to know this. As I said earlier, it must be sad to be a Roman Catholic, must be sad to live your whole life caught up in a system and the more devout you are, the more you give to that system and be told incessantly and constantly that one thing you can never ever know is where you're going to go when you die. Talk about frustration. Talk about disappointment. Talk about beleaguered people. I can't imagine anything worse than going all the way through your life with some kind of loyalty to that system, never ever knowing or even being able to know whether you've qualified to go to heaven. We can know.
People who have no interest in religion, or very minimal interest in religion, generally say, "Well I hope I'm going to heaven, I think I might be good enough." You know, that's a question you really ought to have some certainty on because eternity lasts a long time. I mean, just kind of going around and taking a cavalier approach in life, "Well, I think I'm going to heaven, I think, you know, when things all sort of wind down I'll probably be good enough to get there." You know, you need to do a little better than that because of what is at stake. Can you know? Of course. John says that's why I wrote this epistle. Measure yourself against the tests. Do you believe in Jesus Christ? Do you understand your own sinful condition? Are you manifesting day in and day out the evidence of a transformed life by virtue of your love for God, your love for others, your hatred toward the world? And by manifestation of your obedience? If that's the case, if you pass the test verse 13 says, "You may know that you have eternal life." You may now know that you have eternal life. When I die I'm going to heaven. And people say to me, when you die are you sure you're going to heaven? Absolutely! Absolutely!
I always think about what Larry King said to me off the air. He said, "Do you have any fear of death?"
I said, 'I have no fear of death."
He said, "You don't have any fear of death?"
I said, "Well, you know, I have a normal antipathy toward pain and so I would like to minimize my pain in dying. That's just kind of a normal thing. But death itself? No, I don't have any fear of death."
And he said, "Well how is it that you have no fear of death?"
I said, "Because I know exactly where I'm going to go. I know exactly where I'm going to go. I'm going to go to heaven."
"And you're sure you're going to go to heaven?
"Absolutely sure."
And, of course, he said to me, "I wish I had that faith."
Well that faith comes by hearing the message of Jesus Christ. These Christians to whom John wrote had been shaken by false teachers. They had been shaken by antichrists. They were insecure. They had therefore lost their confidence in ongoing forgiveness. They had lost their joy. And so John has gone back and said, "Look, examine yourself. If you're walking in the light, as He is in the light, then you're in the fellowship. If you're confessing your sin, then you're the one to whom He's forgiving."
Look at your life, if you're obeying the commands of Christ, if you're loving God, loving others and not loving the world, if you're confessing Jesus as God, if you're practicing righteousness, if you're experiencing the internal confident witness of the Holy Spirit, then you can be sure. You can be sure. And so the first certainty is that we have eternal life.
Now I don't need to spend a great amount of time defining for you what eternal life is. In the simplest sense, eternal life means living forever with God...it means forever with God in His glorious wonderful heaven. I mean, that's what it means. But there's a lot more to it. For example, go down to verse 20, the last statement. It speaks of Jesus Christ, "This is the true God and eternal life." So eternal life is living forever with God, listen to this, possessing the very life of God that was possessed by Christ Himself. We enter into the very life of God. In some ways we inherit His perfect sinless, holy, righteous life without becoming God. I guess you could say, I don't know it's a good illustration, it's like we're a light bulb, we contain His life like a lightbulb contains light. The bulb isn't light, the light comes into the bulb and illuminates it. So His life will be transmitted to us. It's already been transmitted to us, although the light doesn't shine very brightly because the bulb is still dark. It's not pure crystal transparency because it's darkened by our fallen flesh in which we still live.
I guess you could put it this way. The light is on but what the world sees is dim. Some day when we leave this mortal flesh and enter into the glorious manifestation of the children of God, we will become absolutely transparent, crystal clear bulbs through which the power of eternal life will flow to radiate throughout all eternity. In John 17, that great High Priestly prayer that Jesus prayed and the third verse, He says, "And this is eternal life that they may know You, the only true God and Jesus Christ whom You sent." That's exactly what we read in chapter 5 verse 20. God and Christ are the eternal life. They are the power of eternal life. And to say that we will have eternal life is simply to say that we will literally have the life of God in us, it's already true, it's just not fully manifest because that life is incarcerated in the darkness of our still fallen flesh. We already possess that life, that's why we love God, that's why we love others. That's why we don't love the world, that's why we have a longing and a heart to obey. That's why we desire righteousness and hate sin because that life is already in us. It is the very life of God. Another way to see it is that the Spirit of God dwells in us and therefore that presence of God is in us as the Spirit of God is in us, as the Spirit of Christ is in us, as God is in us, as Christ is in us, the whole essential nature of the Trinity has taken up residence in our lives. It is a massive miracle, the world doesn't yet see it, as Romans 8 says, they can't see us yet because we haven't had that unveiling, that glorious manifestation awaits the resurrection. And in the meantime we struggle with the dark covering that makes the light that is in us so hard to see.
This is not about a duration of life. It is about a quality of life, a kind of life we have now and will forever have the life of God in us, holy and pure and righteous and good and content and satisfied and fulfilled. Eternal life is a life that lacks nothing, wants nothing, seeks nothing, misses nothing, desires nothing other than what it has. God's life in us, we already have it, that's what he says, that you may know that you have eternal life. It's just an incredible thing to think about, isn't it? But it's what we have. And that we can be certain about. If you believe in the name of the Son of God, if you believe savingly so that it is manifest in not only your doctrine but your conduct, you can know that you have eternal life. And eternal life does last forever because God lasts forever.
Where did we get this eternal life? Well I just read you verse 20, from Jesus Christ, this is the true God and eternal life. God sent His Son into the world that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life. That's exactly what verse 13 says. "If you believe in the name of the Son of God, you may know that you have eternal life." All God's life is in Christ and all of Christ's life is in us. It is frankly an astonishing reality. We do not await our eternal life, we have it now, although it is not yet fully manifest.
Turn, in closing, to Ephesians 3 then we'll come to the Lord's table, but this is a good passage to wrap up my thoughts. In Ephesians 3 verse 14, Paul says, "I bow my knees before the Father." He's praying here for us, "Bowing before the Father from whom every family in heaven and earth derives its name." And he's praying to Him that He would grant you according to the riches of His glory to be strengthened with power through the Spirit in the inner man. I pray, he says, for believers who already have the Holy Spirit, who already have the life, the eternal life, I pray that they may be strengthened by the indwelling Spirit. Then in verse 17, "I pray that Christ may settle in their hearts." In other words, their lives will be pure enough for Christ to settle down and be at home. "That they would be rooted and grounded in love." I want the Spirit to work on their hearts. I want Christ to clean up things and then find a place to rest in them. I want them to be grounded in love. Why? In other words, I want them to understand they're the temple of the Holy Spirit who strengthens them, I want them to know that they are the house in which Christ dwells who cleanses them. I want then to understand the reality that God lives in them.
So verse 18, "They may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth and to know the love of Christ which surpasses knowledge that you may be filled up to all the fullness of God." Paul says this would take a long time to sort of unpack here. Paul says I want you to understand the Spirit is in you and the Spirit is strengthening you. I want you to understand the Son is in you and the Son is cleansing you to make you a home in which He can settle down and be at rest. And I want you to comprehend the length and breadth and height and depth and to understand this immense love of Christ which is beyond comprehension so that you may also recognize the fullness of God. He's trying to take us from glory to glory to glory from level to level to level to expand our comprehension. And in the end what he is saying is the whole Trinity is in you, the whole Trinity dwells in you. All that the Spirit is there to strengthen you, all that Christ is is there to cleanse you and to purify you, all that God is is there to feel you with His fullness. I just pray that you can understand that. Don't go around wondering needlessly who you are and how you stand before God, get a grip on this unimaginable, incomprehensible privilege of possessing eternal life.
Then in verses 20 and 21 he launches into a doxology of praise. "Now to Him who is able to do exceeding, abundantly beyond all that we ask or think." Well that's God, isn't it? God the Father, God the Son, God the Spirit, "Now to the one who can not only do what we can think, He can do what we can ask, not only what we ask or think but all we ask or think not just all we ask or think but beyond all we ask or think, not just beyond it all but abundantly beyond it all. And not just abundantly beyond it all, but exceeding abundantly beyond it all. I mean, the terms are just grandiose. You say, "That's some kind of power. Wow!" To Him who is able to do exceeding, abundantly beyond all that we ask, or think, according to the power, you would expect him to say that is in Him, but he says, "The power that works...what?...within us." It's just absolutely staggering. "To Him be the glory in the church," that's us, "and in Christ Jesus to all generations forever and ever. Amen."
Get a grip on the reality of eternal life. It is that the Trinity lives in you, you possess the very life of God. It is clouded and covered by the sin in your unredeemed flesh so that the world cannot fully see what we are. There will come a day in the next world, in the next life when we are liberated from this flesh, the great redemption of the body and then the power and the glory of eternal life will come through us unhindered, unrestricted, unrestrained, unclouded but it's already there. It is that power of the Trinity that works within us. It works to our salvation. It works to our sanctification. It works to our endurance, our ministry, our usefulness, our service, our evangelism. It works to the benefit of our prayer life. Everything we do is a reflection of that power.
And why did God do this? Why did He gives us this power now? Verse 21, "In order that He might receive glory in the church and that Christ might be glorified to all generations." So that the world could see the power of Christ even if cloudy in the amazing power expressed in the church. We are then possessors already of this eternal life. If you believe in the name of the Son of God, that is you believe Him to be who He said He was and believe Him to have done what He said He did, if you believe the gospel you may know that you now possess eternal life.
Father, we come now to the time around Your table realizing that that eternal life was only made possible because of the sacrifice that Jesus rendered on the cross. You gave Your only begotten Son as a sacrifice for sin, to die our death so that we might receive Your life. This is the great gift of which we have sung so magnificently tonight to which we give testimony here in this table. We recognize the bread as the symbol of our Lord's body given for us, the cup as a symbol of our Lord's blood shed for us. He became sin for us who knew no sin that we might be the righteousness of God in Him. He died the just for the unjust. He was wounded for our transgressions and bruised for our iniquities and the chastening for our peace was laid on Him and by His stripes we are healed. This eternal life which we now possess which will last forever is a gift that You've given us because of what Christ did. He died that we might live. He died on this earth that we might live in heaven. He died as a man that we might live as glorified saints. And so we come again to celebrate His death. And You've told us, don't take lightly of these elements, examine your heart, make sure there's no sin between you and God, there's nothing that shouldn't be there. Confess it lest you treat this in a trivial fashion and bring about chastening and judgment. Nothing is more serious than coming to this table where we thank You for sending Your Son to die, bearing the full weight of Your judgment on our sins. Deliver us, Lord, from any love of any sin, holding on to anything that would cause us to be hypocritical in coming to this table. Cleanse us now, we pray in Your Son's name. Amen.
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The April 23-24 student dance concerts at Hope College will feature an example of cross-disciplinary connection in action.
The program will include "ishta," the Women's Studies Keystone project of senior Jillian Conner of Finleyville, Pa., who is a dance and women's studies dual major. "ishta" is directed by Conner, who has co-choreographed the work with sophomore Jessica St. Clair of Sparta, N.J.
The concerts, featuring a variety of student works, will take place on Monday and Tuesday, April 23 and 24, at 8 p.m. at the Knickerbocker Theatre, located at 86 E. Eighth St. in downtown Holland. The public is invited, and admission is free.
"ishta" is Conner's independent project for the spring 2012 Women's Studies Keystone class, which is instructed by Dr. Julie Kipp, professor of English. The piece was co-mentored by Matthew Farmer, assistant professor of dance.
The objective of the project is to create a feminist dance piece through feminist means; to make a safe space for a group of young women to explore through dance what it means to be a woman. Through those explorations, which focused on physical womanhood, the body and erotic power, the piece was developed. It is an abstract work that focuses not as much on aesthetic as on authenticity, on movements that are truthful and healing. The title "ishta" comes from the Native American Lakota word for she/female/girl.
In addition to Conner and St. Clair, the performers in "ishta" will include junior Amber Banks of Zeeland; junior Elizabeth Bisinger of Wheaton, Ill.; sophomore Jillian Black of Plymouth; sophomore Claire Call of Royal Oak; sophomore Alexandria Clark of Grand Rapids; senior Kaily Gumpper of Salt Lake City, Utah; senior Erin Kolba of Arlington Heights, Ill.; senior Liisa Mosher of Galesburg; junior Hannah Stewart of Stockholm, Sweden; and senior Kirsten VanReenen of Livonia.
The piece was adjudicated by dance faculty Steven Iannacone, associate professor of dance, and guest adjudicator Luise Wykell. Lighting and technical design was made possible by Erik Alberg, technical director for events and conferences, and the Knickerbocker technical crew.

subset: commoncrawl


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On the third anniversary of the Mopar Muscle True Street Challenge in Las Vegas, Nevada, we here at Mopar Muscle were inundated with applicants wanting to tough it out with their streetcars. Sifting through piles of applications, letters, photos, and bribes (we wish!), we ended up with what we felt was the best cross-section of representatives of the Mopar fan base-two small-blocks, a 340 and a stroked 408, one 383, one 400 that sported a masterfully polished fuel-injection system, two 440s, one Indy-headed Six-Pack, and four Hemis fitted into four B-Bodies, three A-Bodies, and three E-Bodies.
For those who are new to Mopar Muscle or have never heard of the True Street Challenge (TSC), let us fill you in. Other magazines present the enthusiast market with streetcar challenges every year. Unfortunately, their definition of streetcar usually is the headlights and turn signals work, the doors open and close, and, occasionally, the windshield wipers work (if there are any). The MM TSC demands these cars be driven, and not just anywhere, but on a grueling 22-mile loop around the scorching-hot Nevada desert on run-of-the-mill pump gas. We tag along for the ride and evaluate each car on its road manners.
Many quarter-mile gladiators require the necessary additional rigidity to survive the hard pulls that gobs of horsepower make. Thereby, their road behavior is usually insufferable to the layman. to score a perfect 10 in this category, you have to find the fine line between daily driver or cruiser and drag machine. After the road trip, the cars are corralled back at the judging grounds where the MM staff scours the car for signs of excellence in craftsmanship, overall detail, paint and body, fit and finish, and interior. Then comes the moment of truth-the 1320.
Obviously, we'd like to see these monsters obliterate the quarter-mile in record time, but because many of these cars have spent most of their years as daily drivers, that would be hoping for a little too much. What we do consider is consistency of times and speeds, which helps to indicate not only the potency of the vehicle, but also the driver's capacity and familiarity with the machine at hand. Sometimes, like an old violin in a master's hand, it can make beautiful music.
Rumbling BeeMike Bellis of San Ramon, California, is a little bit of a celebrity. This yellow '69 Super Bee was the featured B-Body on Dodge's Rumble Bee advertisements. Unfortunately, the ad execs wanted the Bee to be a Hemi car, so their art department simply glued a flashy Hemi tag onto the driver-side front fender. That's right, only on the right. Mike laughed when asked if he's going to take it off or at least put a matching tag on the other side. "It's a little piece of history. I'm not going to mess with it," he replied.
When Mike purchased the car on eBay, it arrived in less than stellar condition. Rust had begun to eat away at the quarters, the running gear spat and sputtered, and the electrical was a jumbled mess of Christmas lights. Mike untangled the electrical problems and installed trustworthy four-wheel disc brakes. Determined to make the Bee a daily driver, the Dana 60 was pulled and emptied of the 4.10 gears, and replaced with 3.54s. After the TSC, Mike intends on taking the Super Bee completely apart to do a full restomodification to it. Mike pointed out the visual rust damage to the car and said, "That's first to go." This Bee might have been a little more Beast than Beauty, but knowing this was his daily driver, we had to tip our hats to him. How often do you see '69 Super Bees sitting in the Starbucks parking lot? With a fresh engine and professionally rebuilt transmission, Mike's '69 ran a 14.90 at 96 mph, only to come back with an improved 14.70.
Northern Exposure
John Melnyk's '68 Valiant initially wasn't supposed to be in the lineup. one of two available alternates, John waited on the sidelines the first day of the competition until two of the contestants failed to show up. John exclaimed to us, "How many small-block Valiants do you have that run in the 10s?" Good point. He quickly jumped into the open space, but then the lagging two arrived. We didn't have the heart to take him out, so we bumped the participating total to ten rather than the original eight.
John built this car by himself. Everything. Hailing from Leduc, Canada, he found the car in decent condition after it had sat in a garage for ten years. The car was quickly disassembled, put on a rotisserie, and mini-tubbed. The phenomenal six-month resto-modding left him with a reliable driver that gets 18.5 mpg (better than this author's new Hemi truck), and made the trip on its own wheels. The stroked and bored 408 small-block wields a 4-inch stroker crank, Ross pistons, Eagle rods, and an Edelbrock Victor Jr. intake with ram-air snorkeling the cool air down the venturies of the Holley double pumper.
Unfortunately, after a formidable transmission-breaking run of 11.96, the transmission locked up, stationing the little A-Body in place. John had to be trailered off the strip. But even with only one pass under his belt, he showed us what a Valiant and a whole lot of guts could do.
Golden Third Gen
Larry Globbell's '73 Rally Charger is a sight to behold. Many take on a project and slave away at it for years, spending long weekends and nights alone in the garage. Larry brought in his whole family to help him in the restoration process. Found in a field by Larry's brother-in-law near their hometown of Snelling, California, the Charger became a daily driver until Larry was clipped in an accident. Larry pursued his would-be hit-and-runner, only to overshoot a turn and end up nose first in a turkey ranch.
Rather than putting the battered B-Body out to pasture, Larry and the whole Globbell family stripped the car down to bare bones, where it received a beautiful coat of the original gold-and-black paint scheme. Larry had his eyes set on one goal-the 2005 True Street Challenge-after seeing it in the pages of Mopar Muscle the previous year. Racing against the clock, Larry pieced the Charger back together as best as he could before rolling up to the judging booth. he showed up without a headliner since the original interior was still in the process of a restoration. But in perfect dad fashion, Larry stepped aside to let his son Chad take the hefty Charger down the strip.
Prom Queen
Bill Bridges' '70 Hemi 'Cuda was one of the most photogenic cars we have ever seen. No matter what we did, we couldn't take a bad picture of his yellow E-Body. Bill bought this car from the original owner in 1975.
This 'Cuda has served as more than just a fun weekend ride. Bill has recorded an all-time best time of 11.80 at 118 in stock form. Getting the inevitable itch that we all get for faster times, Bill has since added several goodies to amp-up the 426 Hemi. A new camshaft, headers, and full exhaust have added to the boost in performance, but the car still retains its pleasurable streetability and road manners. The car has been repainted back to its original color because years and mileage can do their damage so easily. Aside from some other cosmetic and performance mods, such as rebuilding the 727 TorqueFlite, the car has retained its complete originality down to the functioning eight-track cassette tape player.
If Josh Campbell excels in anything, it's showmanship. One of the aforementioned alternates who later joined into the mix, Josh's faux-dual-plugged, tunnel-rammed, A/C-blowing, Hemi-powered, Pro-Street, hoodscoop-sporting '70 Barracuda Grand Coupe nearly stole the show. Josh's father, Bill, approached us the first day of judging wondering, "what's it take to get into the True Street Challenge?" Since we thought we were short a car, we told him to get his son and come join us. Little did we know that Josh's one-out-of-none Grand Coupe would be so personalized.
The Hemi itself is a work of art, starting out as a standard 426, bored .060 over with 10.25:1 pistons, MP aluminum heads, Norris roller rockers, a Milodon internal oiling system, a Weiand tunnel-ram with two 4150 Holleys, and a 150-horse shot of nitrous. The valve covers fool the unwary eye as the dual-plug system is only for show; the second set of wires lead off to nowhere. A high-flow Be Cool radiator and aluminum MP water pump helped Josh's E-Body survive the 22-mile loop out in the Nevada desert as a slight breeze of chilled air blew from the A/C vents. The A/C compressor really couldn't freeze the interior like we hoped, but he still gets accolades for having the only Hemi with air conditioning that we had ever been in.
Josh's Barracuda is layered in coats of Dodge's Amber Fire paint, the same color available on Dakota trucks a few years back. It's a gorgeous color and pleasantly unexpected on a classic clone Hemi car.
Mark Yates of Gilroy, California, sold this '70 Challenger for parts in 1984 to a friend who let the car sit as a shell for twelve years before Mark bought it back for a measly $2,500. Deciding that stock simply wasn't enough, Mark completely modernized this E-Body to the fullest extent. There is nearly nothing stock or untouched on this car. From the customized road handling suspension and sway bars, impressive Boyd Coddington 17-inch rims, super quiet tti and Magnaflow exhaust to the heavy-duty Richmond six-speed transmission, this car was bred to be as classic as its body lines and as modern as a Viper. The Indy top end matched to a full computer-controlled electronic ACCEL fuel-injection system and keeps the 400 Magnum engine fed and happy while either traveling 75 mph on the freeway or passing the traps in the 12s.
The unique paint job might look stock, but upon closer inspection one will notice that the hood decal is not exactly a decal. The blackout was painted on, masking off the "Dodge" lettering on the nose. Mark remarked that his wife oversaw the entire project, demanding that no detail be forgotten. The paint scheme, graphics, interior, and highlights were all double-checked by his wife, and his son pulled out the computer and tuned the EFI system.
Fortune Favors The Brave
Dr. Ralph Carnugi likes to race classic European speedsters and coupes, such as his Aston Martin DB4, Corvette, Porsche, and two Jaguars around his home in Phoenix, Arizona, so when a friend and car builder came to him with an idea for a Super Stock Mopar, Ralph needed some convincing. Ralph's friend, Greg Fernald, had an interest in the legendary Hemi cars that hit the scene in the mid-to-late '60s, building period-correct AF/X and S/S cars for customers. Ralph was quickly schooled on the short history of Mopar's venture into the A-Body S/S racing and ultimately introduced to Greg's potent '68 S/S Dart, and knew he had to have one.
Greg built him this factory identical S/S 426, cross-rammed Hemi Barracuda, a near flawless replica of the original Super Stockers to come out of the Hurst modification shops in the late '67 season. New to the unbridled power of the legendary elephant motor, Ralph jokes that the first time he took this beast down the 1320, he wasn't sure if he was having a heart attack or an adrenaline rush. Ralph's introduction to drag racing has been one monstrous learning curve, improving with each pass. Unfortunately, all of the go-fast DNA of the S/S chipped away at the actual streetability of the Barracuda. But regardless of it's appropriateness for pulling into the grocery store, it's sure a hell of a lot of fun to ride in.
Clean Machine
There's only one adjective to use when describing Craig Hill's '73 Duster-clean. The stock 318 suited teenaged Craig fine until he discovered a built 340 with a spun bearing in the junkyard. Getting the appropriate repairs made, the stout 11:1 compression small-block propelled his A-Body into a whole new world. Other additions would follow, such as a 727 TorqueFlite automatic and an 831/44 rear. Unfortunately, the life of a teenager's car doesn't usually last too long. The car suffered too many accidents to be worth the labor of a restoration. So Craig found another '73 Duster and transferred the heart and soul of the battered original to the new donor body. Though not the exact same car, Craig still claims that this is his first car. It's sentimentality, we suppose. Regardless of the VIN number, the car is outstanding. Immaculately clean, precision craftsmanship, and near-luxury-car-style road manners, the car was an all-around pleaser. Regardless of its 14-second passes, this Duster's overall road worthiness brought its scores up high enough to be one of our top three contenders.
In the Running
Coming from Lawrence, Kansas, Mark Bastemeyer's earth-moving '69 Road Runner had everything to be the winner of the '05 True Street Challenge. Having mini-tubbed the back of the B-Body, Mark had customized 12-inch-deep Magnums made to maintain the original look, but with an edge. Those thick meats out back were burned to inky blue clouds several times during the competition. Stout 4.30 gears packed into the Dana 60 could launch the 3,900 Plymouth at a consistent 1.690 60-foot time, or cruise through the Gear Vendor's overdrive at a leisurely 75 mph on the highway. Sure the cage and subframe connectors made the car a little more rigid than a streetcar would like to feel, but Mark's arsenal of go-fast goodies makes it all worth it (e.g., with a simple flip of a switch, an electric motor cuts off the exhaust to two quick dump-offs).
The Road Runner came into Mark's life as a lazy 440 four-speed with acres of hidden Bondo and filler. Opting to build the engine first and worry about the paneling second, the Plymouth received its first manifestation of gnarly horsepower with a set of stock Indy 440 heads and a Six-Pack setup. the car's power source would be reborn several times over with a new MP Mega Block, a 4.15 stroker crank, professional porting and polishing for the top end, and a new reciprocating assembly that warranted the outstanding production of nearly 750 horses on pump gas-naturally aspirated!
The car retains the stock appearance and paint scheme of the infamous mid-production year A-code Road Runner, but hides a very hungry wolf beneath its sheep's clothing.
Old School
Sixty-one-year-old Steve Hagberg of Berthoud, Colorado, can stomp you where you stand. Nothing about Steve or this plain-Jane-looking '66 Plymouth Belvedere is what it seems. This nice, kind-faced, silver-haired retired airline pilot was once an United States navy pilot in Vietnam, and this neighborly '66 two-door post coupe used to be raced exclusively before Steve garaged her when he was away making runs over the Viet Cong.
Steve is the only owner this car has ever had. Purchased new in June 1966 in Denver, Colorado, the Belvedere was driven on the street for only one week before he decided the 426 inches of semi-hemispherical terror belonged on the drag strip rather than the main drag in town. Returning back to civilian life, Steve swapped the Hemi for a 318 since the Plymouth served as a driver, while the Hemi continued on in another race car. By 1981, Steve had enough and put the elephant back in its rightful place. Since then, the car has been meticulously restored to its original condition. Steve claims that more than ninety percent of the car is original, and what isn't, is period correct like the original Doug's headers and Sun Tach mounted to the dashpad.
With a pedigree of racing history under its belt, such as rounds at Bristol at the Spingnationals, the U.S. Nationals at Indy, and the Winternationals, the Belvedere clocked an all time best of 11.29 at 120 mph at last year's Las Vegas Mopar show.
We were more than happy to announce that Steve stole the winner's trophy this year with his experienced hand at racing his Plymouth. The staff here at Mopar Muscle all agree that Steve Hagberg's Belvedere captures the complete spirit of the musclecar era for Mopar-minimum optioned, zero frills, hard pulling American muscle at its very best in the most unassuming vehicle imaginable.
We couldn't cover everything that happened on these pages, so for complete event coverage, go to our Web site, www.moparmusclemagazine.com.
The Facts
Car: '69 Dodge Super Bee
Engine: 383, Edelbrock aluminum heads, Mopar
Performance hydraulic 484-lift cam, Weiand
Stealth intake, Holley 750 carb
Trans: 727 TorqueFlite automatic, B&M shifter, 10-inch 2,200-stall converter, Cheetah valvebodyRearend: Dana 60, 3.54 gearsExhaust: 131/44-inch Hedman Headers, Flowmaster mufflers, 211/42-inch pipesWheels/Tires: Front: American Racing Torq-Thrust 15×7, BFG 235; Rear: American Racing Torq-Thrust 15×8.5, BFG 255Quarter-Mile: 14.90 at 96 mph and 14.70 at 91 mph (best)
The Facts
Car: '68 Plymouth Valiant
Engine: 408, Chrysler 4-inch stroker crank,
Eagle 6.123 rods, Ross 11.8:1 pistons, Comp Cams roller camshaft, Edelbrock Victor Jr. intake
Transmission: Chrysler A500 overdrive automatic, TCS 10-inch 3,500 stall converter
Rearend: Chrysler 831/44, Strange axles
Exhaust: Hooker headers 151/48-inch, Dynomax mufflers, 3-inch pipesWheels/Tires: Front: Weld 15×6, Hoosier front-runners; Rear: Weld 15×10, Hoosier 30×11.5Quarter-Mile: 11.96 at 110 mph
The Facts
Car: '70 Plymouth 'Cuda
Engine: 426 Hemi, Clay Smith .530-lift flat-tappet cam, stock heads, stock iron intake, MP distributor, dual Carter AFB carbsTransmission: 727 TorqueFlite automatic transmission, SlapStick shifter, Art Carr 9-inch 3,500-stall torque converter, Turbo Action manual valvebody
Rearend: Dana 60, 4.10 gears Sure Grip
Exhaust: Hooker Headers, Dynomax mufflers, 3-inch pipes
Wheels/Tires: Front: Ralley 15×7, BFG 235/60R/15Rear: Ralley 15×7, BFG 275/60R/15Quarter-Mile: 12.93 at 106 mph and 12.85 at 106 mph (best)
The Facts
Car: '73 Dodge Rally Charger 400
Engine: 440, MP hydraulic 484-lift camshaft, Six-Pack rods, 10:1 pistons, MP M-1 intake, Holley 850 carb
Transmission: Keisler five-speed manual, Pistol-Grip shifter
Rearend: 831/44, 323 gears
Exhaust: Dodge Magnum manifolds, Flowmaster mufflers, 211/42-inch pipesWheels/Tires: Front: Super Coupe 15×8, T/A 275-50-15; Rear: Super Coupe 15×8, T/A 295-50-15Quarter-Mile: 13.40 at 98 mph and 13.38 at 99 mph (best)
The Facts
Car: '70 Plymouth Barracuda Grand Coupe
Engine: 426 Hemi, MP Aluminum heads, Weiand tunnel-ram, dual 450 Holleys, MP 495-lift cam, Ross 10.25:1 pistons
Transmission: 727 TorqueFlite, Turbo Action manual valvebody, TCI pan, and 2,400-stall B&M converter
Rearend: 831/44 with 4.10 Sure Grip
Exhaust: Hooker Headers, Super 40 mufflers, 3-inch pipes
Wheels/Tires: Front: Convo Pro 15×4, BFG 267-50-15; Rear: Convo Pro 15×10, BFG 325-50-15Quarter-Mile: 11.39 at 114 mph and 11.36 at 114 mph (best)
The Facts
Car: '70 Dodge Challenger
Engine: Magnum 400, MP 474-lift camshaft, Indy SR aluminum cylinder heads, ACCEL fuel injection
Transmission: six-speed Richmond manual, Pistol-Grip shifter
Rearend: 831/44 with 3.23 Sure Grip
Exhaust: tti headers, Magnaflow mufflers, 3-inch pipes
Wheels/Tires: Front: Boyd Coddington 17×8, Bridgestone Potenza 245-45-17; Rear: Boyd Coddington 17×911/42, Bridgestone Potenza 285-40-17Quarter-Mile: 13.40 at 107 mph and 12.93 at 106 mph (best)
The Facts
Car: '68 S/S Hemi Plymouth Barracuda
Engine: 472 Hemi, cross-ram intake, Ray Barton rods, JE pistons, solid Comp Cams camshaft, MP aluminum heads, dual Holleys
Transmission: 727 TorqueFlite automatic, Hurst shifter, 3,500-stall 10-inch converter.
Rearend: Dana 60, 4.10 gears Sure Grip
Exhaust: Hedman headers, Flowmaster mufflers, 3-inch pipes
Wheels/Tires: Front: Cragar 15×4, BFG 15×6; Rear: Cragar 15×10, BFG 15×13.5
Quarter-Mile: 11.58 at 118 mph and 11.37 at 118 mph (best)
The Facts
Car: '73 Plymouth Duster
Engine: 340, Crane hydraulic 467-lift cam,
Direct Connection Bracket Race heads,
Edelbrock Air-Gap intake, Edelbrock 750 carb
Transmission: 727 TorqueFlite auto, Mopar Performance valvebody
Rearend: 831/44 Sure Grip
Exhaust: Stock manifolds, Dynomax mufflers, 211/42-inch pipes
Wheels/Tires: Front: American Racing 15×7, Cooper Cobra 215/60/15; Rear: American Racing 15×8, Cooper Cobra 265/50/15
Quarter-Mile: 14.54 at 94 mph and 14.45 at 95 mph (best)
The Facts
Car: '69 Plymouth Road Runner
Engine: 513ci Six-Barrel, Indy cylinder heads, cross-drilled main-capped MP Mega Block, stroker 4.15 MP crank, Comp Cams hydraulic roller cam
Transmission: AMP-built 727 TorqueFlite automatic transmission, Hughes 3,000-stall torque converter, Gear Vendors overdrive
Rearend: Dana 60, 4.30 Sure Grip
Exhaust: Hedman headers, Dynomax mufflers, 3-inch pipes
Wheels/Tires: Magnum 500 15-inch, Hoosier front runners; Rear: Magnum 500 15-inch custom width, Hoosier 15-inch 31×12.50
Quarter-Mile: 11.83 at 113 mph and 11.72 at 114 mph (best)
The Facts
Car: '66 Plymouth Belvedere
Engine: 439 Hemi, Manley 6.86-inch rods, JE 10.8:1 pistons, Racer Brown .527-lift camshaft, iron heads, stock intake, stock AFB carbs
Transmission: self-built 727 TorqueFlite auto, 3,000-stall 10-inch Turbo Action Torque Converter
Rearend: 831/44 with stock 4.10 gears
Exhaust: Doug's Headers, Dynomax mufflers, 3-inch pipes
Wheels/Tires: Front: Bogart 15×3.5, Firestone M/T 205/75/15; Rear: Bogart 15×8, Firestone M/T 28/11.50/15 ET Street
Quarter-Mile: 11.36 at 118 mph and 11.32 at 119 mph (best)


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Many travelers who pass through the nation's overcrowded airports as the holiday season begins are going to be subjected to a new kind of security procedure. They'll be asked to walk into a machine that will allow a Transportation Security Administration employee to see what they look like naked.
The idea, say TSA officials, is to look for hidden weapons or explosives. But the promoter of National Opt Out Day says it's just "security theater," and he's urging a rebellion.
At OptOutDay.com, the site operator ( identified as Brian Sodegren) writes about the choice travelers have when confronted with a full-body scan: Either consent to being seen naked by a TSA worker in a nearby room, or having a thorough pat-down in which genital areas are probed.
It's the day ordinary citizens stand up for their rights, stand up for liberty, and protest the federal government's desire to virtually strip us naked or submit to an "enhanced pat down" that touches people's breasts and genitals. You should never have to explain to your children, "Remember that no stranger can touch or see your private area, unless it's a government employee, then it's OK."
Opt Out Day is Nov. 24, the day before Thanksgiving, and it involves choosing the pat-down rather than the body scanner. A physical search takes a lot more time than the scan, and the idea is to cause long delays and send a message to the feds. Given that this is one of the busiest travel days of the year, enough folks opting out are sure to cause problems.
The site features videos that show exactly what TSA officials see when you step inside one of their machines. And yes, the video below includes x-ray nakedness, so click only if such things don't offend you.
If you're traveling on Nov. 24, which kind of search will you choose?


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Has any group in the history of pop ever projected a sense of camaraderie as strong as the Beastie Boys?
Yes, the trio's 1986 album "Licensed to Ill" helped hip-hop colonize suburbia. Yes, their sample-happy 1989 disc "Paul's Boutique" was dizzyingly innovative. Yes, 1992's "Check Your Head" and 1994's "Ill Communication" brought some levity to the grouchy alterna-years.
But through all of those musical twists and turns, the Beastie Boys' defining trait was the giddy, goofy sense of friendship between Yauch, Michael "Mike D" Diamond, and Adam "Ad-Rock" Horovitz. And they invited us all to be a part of it. They turned inside jokes into out-sized rhymes — and it resulted in era-defining music.
Over the years, Adam Yauch — the B-Boy known as MCA who died of cancer Friday at age 47 — quietly began introducing Tibetan Buddhist ideas to the trio's lyrical volleyball matches. That fact that he pulled it off without sounding ponderous or self-important was testament to his affable charm and his skill as an MC. It also dissolved the beer-swilling image the Beasties earned with "(You Gotta) Fight For Your Right (To Party!)" and helped made them one of most widely-respected groups of their day.
A dig into the Washington Post archives illustrates that transition. Below, read three feature stories from the Beastie Boys' breakout years, as well as a profile from 1992 where the group reflects on its changing ways.
Beauty & the Beasties
By Richard Harrington
Sunday, May 26, 1985
Definition of a good break for an unknown band: becoming the opening act in 35 cities on Madonna's "Virgin Tour."
Which is the case with New York's Beastie Boys, the first successful white rap group and purveyors of such underground hits as "Beastie Revolution." They'll do the honors at Merriweather Post Pavilion on Saturday.
The four Beasties have been enjoying their 20 minutes in the spotlight and, according to Adam Yauch, some of Madonna's fans have, too. "The reaction has been mostly good," Yauch says. "Usually they love it or they hate it. There's always been a reaction, I'll say that."
"It's not like bland Muzak," adds Adam "Ad-Rock" Horovitz, son of playwright Israel Horovitz. "It's real obnoxious, and it rubs you, either the right way or the wrong way."
The same could be said of a 1981 hard-core punk incarnation of the Beastie Boys. Inspired by a Black Flag performance and convinced they could be just as bad, they pursued a brief career on the CBGB circuit. Two years later, they ended a recording session with a rap parody titled "Cookie Puss," and within another year they had abandoned their instruments for the standard rap lineup of turntable-deejay-triple rappers. The other rapper is Michael Diamond (Mike D), while Rick Rubin (Double R) handles the deejaying.
There's still a strong element of parody at work in the Beastie Boys, though Yauch insists that "we've been playing so long that it's hard to just keep making jokes. Some of our songs are serious, but I don't think we could ever be too serious about it."
Next, they may incorporate Madonna's boyfriend into a band. There's been some backstage talk that actor Sean Penn may front a group in New York in the fall with several Beastie Boys picking up their instruments again.
The Beasties' rap bonanza selling & setting records
By Robert Lloyd - Special to The Washington Post
Sunday, February 22, 1987
LOS ANGELES -- Young master Adam Horovitz, age 20, alias King Ad-Rock, rolls over on his bed and groans. Faint obscenities sneak softly through his teeth.
Stretched out on the sofa, Adam Yauch, 22, known to his fans as MCA, asks, "Who was that on the telephone?"
Ad-Rock and MCA, along with Mike (Mike D) Diamond, 21, constitute the Beastie Boys, the phenomenally successful all-white rap-cum-metal-cum-punk trio out of New York City whose recently released "Licensed to Ill" is the fastest selling debut album in the history of Columbia Records -- over 2 million sold, and more moving at the rate of 200,000 every week. It may currently be found resting comfortably at No. 2, with a bullet, on the Billboard charts.
"Rrrrrrgggggh," says Ad-Rock.
It's almost noon, but the surrounding disarray -- the unmade bed, scattered newspapers, balls of laundry plopped like errant tumbleweeds of T-shirts and sweat shirts and jeans -- the gray light of a cloud-slung sky filtering in from the balcony and the strange, unshakeable sensation that a massive hangover lurks close by conspire to make the hour seem earlier. A sluggish calm suffuses the hotel room. This might be the Sargasso Sea, if it weren't West Hollywood.
MCA sits up slowly. "You were drinking champagne with Molly?" There's an empty bottle on the coffee table.
"Yeah," says Ad-Rock. "It was the worst champagne I ever had in my life."
"It's really expensive."
Ad-Rock punches a button on his blaster. The Beatles' "Norwegian Wood" pours suddenly out, loud and gruesomely distorted.
"Could you turn that up a little?" asks MCA.
The doorbell rings and in walks Mike D, the b-boy fashion plate. Hung from a hefty chain around his neck is an insignia off the hood of a Volkswagen. The duck-billed cap on his head is lettered "GUCCI." His sneakers have no laces.
"I think I figured it out," he says. "The girl in the next room wants to sleep with me, so she took my L.A. Times this morning so I couldn't get my own review, and now I've got to go knock on her door to get it back."
"Mike, nobody wants to sleep with you except me and Ad-Rock. The Elephant Girl wouldn't sleep with you."
"Elephant," murmurs Mike D. "Elephant, elephant."
Two nights earlier, before an audience composed of willingly collusive teens white, black, Latino and otherwise, in an atmosphere several trillion times more hectic than that of Ad-Rock's hotel room, the Beastie Boys played their first show as headliners in Los Angeles. They've been here twice before, as a notoriously ill-received curtain raiser for Madonna and as part of an all-rap extravaganza starring their good friends Run-DMC, which collapsed in unfortunate violence. Any reprise of that, they promised the crowd, "and none of us are ever coming back here again."
Not to worry. With no sacrifice of pandemonium, the show at the Hollywood Palladium ran like a dream, albeit a fever dream. It was a party any kid not completely out of touch with his or her baser instincts would have been proud to throw or thrilled to attend.
"We get a good mix," MCA will say later, "a lot of people from different cultures. A lot of black kids will come up to me and say, 'It's really cool that you play music for black kids.' That's the way they see it. And the white kids go, 'It's good that there's finally a white rap band,' and they sort of identify with you. The interesting thing is that they all think they're the ones the music is for."
Some features of a Beastie Boys performance: Eloise, a former Times Square "exotic" dancer, gyrating in a giant bird cage. Hurricane, the Beastie Boys' deejay, mixing and scratching at a brace of turntables set atop a two-story six of Budweiser (a corporate sponsor). Copious supplies of genuine brew, no can of which is opened before being thoroughly shaken, and as much of which ends up on the audience or on the band as in anyone's mouth. And a seemingly inexhaustible reserve of rude, crude, house-rocking, postadolescent energy -- "We drink and rob and rhyme and pillage|" is their chanted credo -- all of it freely spent.
The cherry on this sundae two nights ago was the surprise guest appearance of Run-DMC, with which the Beastie Boys share management, a record label (Def Jam, distributed by Columbia), a producer (Rick Rubin -- often, and to the group's continued annoyance, called Svengali) and a penchant for mixing rap with hard rock. That's the formula that's made both bands the forces they are today. Run-DMC's bestselling hip-hop remake of Aerosmith's heavy '70s classic "Walk This Way" drove rap's first wedge into white radio. When they performed it at the Palladium, the ground trembled for blocks around.
All that could follow it, and follow it did, was the headliners' own near-archetypal brat anthem "Fight for Your Right (To Party)," a megaton cruncher that pulled fists into the air, girlfriends onto boyfriends' shoulders and the irresistible chorus out of the mouth of every patron not yet too blitzed to form words.
Only days before the city of San Diego had canceled a sold-out Beastie Boys concert, perhaps in overreaction to reports of onstage exhortations to riot, flying beer cans and the much-discussed (by journalists, if by no one else) sociopathic cant of the group's Howitzer raps. But, Mike D points out, "We played L.A. and it was completely peaceful."
It is true that the Beastie Boys' songs have much to do with wholesale sex, drink, fast food (White Castle is several times praised), trash culture (snatches of the "Mr. Ed" and "Green Acres" themes have been scratched into the album's closing moments) and a cartoony sort of pistol-packing mayhem, equal parts Sergio Leone and Wile E. Coyote ("Because mutiny on the Bounty's what we're all about|"), with precious little thought paid to the consequences. And it is true that the three have been banned for life from a certain English hotel chain for enlisting bits of furniture in the service of an impromptu indoor cookout, and from the offices of CBS, parent of their record company, for that business of the missing camera, and then there was the sad affair of the executive whose wig or toupee or whatever it was fell off, or was pulled off.
But these are things, they feel, that could have happened to anybody| Really, they are not wholly irresponsible. For it is also true that a rider in the Beastie Boys' contract calls for their dressing room to be stocked not just with pretzels, beer, tequila, Jack Daniels and chocolate milk, but with a "rainbow assortment of condoms" as well. You could call that responsible, or at any rate careful.
"I've only been hung over once this tour," Mike D is saying. He's slouched into a low, thick armchair.
MCA, from the sofa, says, "I was hung over yesterday."
"Oh, yesterday|" says Ad-Rock, splayed out on the floor.
"Yesterday," Mike D reconsiders, "I was in bad shape."
"I got clobbered at the show," says MCA. "I started drinking at sound check was my main problem."
"Me too," says Ad-Rock. "I am so tired."
"What time did you get in?" Mike D asks.
"I was out until 4 in the morning."
"You should have come to the barbecue," says MCA. "The barbecue was so good."
"I had sushi," says Ad-Rock.
"Molly Ringwald took you to have sushi."
"The whole time -- "
"And drove you in her BMW."
"The whole time I was going {in the voice of a Valley Girl}, 'It's like sushi, don't ya know?' And she was like, 'Tsk.' I kept going, like, 'This is so great. I can't believe it. I'm actually in the Valley, and I'm eating sushi'"
"With Molly Ringwald."
"With Molly Ringwald. That's right."
"Did you get her to let you drive her car?"
The Beastie Boys don't own a car, though they plan to acquire motorcycles as soon as they're home long enough to acquire anything. For a long while their necessarily preferred mode of urban transit was this: Mike D would ride his bicycle and pull Ad-Rock and MCA, on skateboards, along behind him. "Mike was on this exercise trip," says MCA, "and we said, 'Yo, Mike, if you're going to bother to go to the gym and ride the bogus bicycle, why don't you just ride around and pull us?' It worked better for everybody."
Those were the days they shared an apartment in New York's Chinatown, beneath a sweatshop and over a whorehouse. It was a hovel, but the tenants could play music all night long as loud as they wanted -- and they wanted it loud. The Beastie Boys began, in fact, as a hard-core punk band (and those are very loud), originally called the Young and the Useless. They plan eventually to reintroduce musical instruments into their performances. Meanwhile, they are quick to mention that with only a couple exceptions, they play everything on the album.
"We're still a hard-core band," Mike D maintains.
"We started doing rap in our shows," says MCA. "We'd put down the instruments and rap for half the show. Then we just decided it would be kind of exciting to be an all-rap band. And we met Russell Simmons {of Def Jam Records and the Beastie Boys' manager}, and he was like, 'Oh, this is really cool. A white rap group's really cool.' So he wanted to get down with it. And when we found out he was Run-DMC's manager, we thought, 'Wow.' "
"Russell was the first person to take us to black clubs," says Mike D, "where virtually no one had seen a white person rap before, and we were going in front of the worst b-boy crowds. This was real hard-core b-boy, up in the Bronx and the worst part of Queens. It was intimidating at first, but once our singles started to come out, and they began to know us, it was like we were just another rap group. It was almost like, 'Oh, those are those ill white kids.' "
Not only ill, but in the argot chill, fresh and definitely def. The elements of hip-hop are by now familiar to anyone who's spent more than two hours in front of a TV set -- it seems to have become the music of choice for ad jingles -- but not until the ascendance of the Def Jam boys has rap been so primed to explode into the general culture. It's the most potent youth music now going, and even given the eternally transient nature of pop, this party is far from over.
The Beastie Boys, for all the torpor of this morning after, are just getting warmed up. They'll make their second screen appearance in the forthcoming Run-DMC film "Tougher Than Leather" (their first was in 1985's "Krush Groove," the source of their first important single, "She's on It"), and by the end of February will have finished writing their own first feature, "Scared Stupid." They hope to begin production by the end of June, upon returning from Europe and Japan -- and a Washington stop this spring. "We're talking to {Monty Python's} John Cleese about directing it," says Mike D, "except that he says he wants to take a seven-year hiatus from the film industry."
And there's more:
"We're going to write our own book," says Mike D. "We wrote the Spin magazine Beastie Boys {March} cover story. That was the start of our literary career."
"I want to open a restaurant," says Ad-Rock, now back on the bed.
"I can't wait until you open your restaurant," says MCA. "It's going to be really cool."
"It really is going to be the best," says Ad-Rock.
"It's either going to be the best or really disgusting, or both at the same time," says Mike D.
"I'm going to come over and eat at your restaurant all the time," says MCA. "And I hope you let me eat for free."
"You know what the best thing about the restaurant's going to be? The bathrooms. You never go to a restaurant and have a good bathroom."
"The only thing I'm afraid of," says MCA, "is that you really have no taste in good food."
"No, you're wrong, man, because I like good food."
"You like the worst food."
"Yes, but then again, I like really good stuff, too. It's going to be a cre-perie with White Castle cre-pes."
"We'll keep writing songs," Mike D foresees, "so we'll keep making records, and we'll keep making records, so we'll keep touring, and as long as we keep on writing movies, we're going to keep on making movies."
"As long as we keep on selling records," says MCA, "we're going to keep on selling records. And as long as we keep on being famous, we'll be famous."
"We could be as rich as the Rolling Stones if we sold as many records," says Ad-Rock.
"We might even sell more records," says MCA, "because we don't have as many points. Figure if we sold twice as many records as the Rolling Stones, we'd be as rich as they are."
"Figure if we sold twice as many records as the Rolling Stones," says Mike D, "your lips might get as big as Mick Jagger's."
"That," says MCA, standing, "is another story unto itself."
Duty and the Beast — the Boys face parents at show
By Joe Brown
Monday, April 6, 1987
Hands in pockets, sheepishly mischievous looks on their scruffy, unshaven mugs, the three big, bad Beastie Boys stepped into the Capital Centre's Quiet Room before last night's controversial concert. They made their surprise appearance to reassure about 120 parents waiting there that despite the concern over the group's widely publicized deportment, the Beasties weren't really so beastly, and that for this engagement the usually R-rated show would be toned down to a G rating -- no breast-baring girls, no altered lyrics, no cursing or beer spraying.
And from all appearances, the Boys found it much tougher than facing the 10,000 screaming teen-agers waiting in the arena.
Butinstead of angry questions, the Beasties were besieged by autograph requests.
"So, was Dr. J ever in the Quiet Room?" asked MCA, a k a Adam Yauch, as the trio walked in to face the music.
"It's awfully quiet in here, isn't it?" said King Ad-Rock (Adam Horovitz) on entering the Quiet Room.
"This was a dumb idea," mumbled Mike D (for Diamond), surveying the friendly-suspicious eyes of the parents.
While the Boys mingled and signed their names for the folks who waited in the room for their kids, concert promoter Daryl Brooks addressed the crowd, a record number for the Quiet Room. "These kids," he said, "have been in your homes whether you know it or not. They don't have 20 foot of anything," Brooks said, referring to the 20-foot hydraulic phallic symbol the Boys usually use in their stage show. "They're just ordinary guys."
And they did look quite ordinary as they fielded questions. The Boys expressed disappointment at having to tone down their act for Washington. "We're going to do as well as we can with what we're constitutionally allowed to do," said Mike D.
Parent Adele Deery said that after reading an anti-Beastie Boys editorial, she initially refused to allow her 16-year-old son Steven to attend the show. "This is his first concert, and I was the mean old mother," Deery said. But she relented and said she was glad she still got to catch her favorite TV show, "Murder, She Wrote," on the Quiet Room's TV.
In the arena, a humming hormonal hive before the Beasties took the stage, boys wearing baseball caps and chains with VW logos shouted high-spirited propositions at girls -- who shouted right back. The men's rooms echoed with lusty, letter-perfect chants of Beastie battle cries. And Sabrina Loube, 17, and Darby Berry ("I'll be 17 on Friday") hopefully pinned their names and phone numbers to a stuffed toy monkey and tried to coax a boy into tossing it onstage during the show.
All words and no action. That's what seemed to be required of the Beastie Boys, whose Capital Centre contract called for them to bowdlerize the frat-boy bawdiness that makes up most of their act.
But though their million-selling brand of teen-age bravado-with-a beat is strictly flavor-of-the-month, musically speaking, the Beasties surprised with buckets of energy (and Budweiser, which they kept to themselves) and a bracingly professional unprofessionalism.
They raced recklessly around the stage, spraying each other with foaming geysers of beer while shouting out the rhymes to the titanic hip-hop back beat of numbers like "She's on It" and "No Sleep Till Brooklyn." The crowd, having memorized the album "Licensed to Ill," shouted every word in unison -- everyone was a Beastie Boy last night.
Also on the scene were DJ Hurricane, who, from his giant-beer-can booth manipulated the pretaped music and added a cyclonic scratching sound by wiggling records; and a volunteer go-go dancer (recruited in a local radio station contest), who gyrated enthusiastically (and fully clothed) in a giant bird cage.
The Beasties encored their 70-minute set with their biggest hit, the parental defiance anthem "Fight for Your Right (To Party)," which had the entire audience screaming along. And with the last demand to "PAAAAAAAARTY!" still echoing in the hall, the lights were snapped on, and the kids filed out to face the remainder of what was, Beastie Boys or no, a school night.
Beastie Boys' rap unchecked
By Joe Brown
Friday, May 22, 1992
THE LAST TIME the Beastie Boys came to the Washington, some five years ago, a flap over the then-controversial content of their R-rated show forced the bad boys of rap-rock to tone it down to a G rating. There would be no breast-baring go-go girls recruited from the audience, no obscene lyrics, no cursing or beer spraying -- and no 20-foot hydraulic phallic symbol for a stage prop.
But they faced an even tougher task than bowdlerizing their bawdy act for the 10,000 screaming teenagers waiting in the arena: The three big, bad Beastie Boys -- King Ad-Rock, Mike D. and MCA -- shuffled sheepishly into Capital Centre's "Quiet Room" to reassure about 120 parents waiting there that the Beastie Boys weren't really so beastly.
"That was really odd, pretty extreme," says Beastie Boy Mike D. (for Diamond), who "drew the short straw" and had to do the phone interviews this week. "There were other places that were equally freaked out. Hopefully we'll never have to go through anything like that ever again.
"It's kind of strange to me to look back at what we were talking about then, and to see what people talk about now on their records, and to think that people got so offended over what we said. That was only the precursor of all kinds of anger that was about to follow," Diamond says, referring to the tidal wave of violent "gangster rap" and 2 Live Crew-style raunch that broke big after the Beasties' big break.
On the steam of the parental defiance anthem "Fight for Your Right (To Party)," the Beasties' first album, "Licensed to Ill," sold more than 4 million copies, making it the largest-selling rap record ever. It served as the soundtrack for countless frat parties. Onstage and off, the Beasties prided themselves on their professional unprofessionalism.
But we've all gotta grow up some time, even Beastie Boys. Since "Party," the Boys released a critically respected (and minimally selling) album, "Paul's Boutique." Adam Horovitz (a k a King Ad-Rock) began a movie career and Diamond launched a B-Boy clothing store called X-Large in Los Angeles. And on their newly released album "Check Your Head," those trendsetting Boys actually play their own instruments, which they'll prove Sunday when their tour arrives at Alexandria's Lee Recreation Center. Diamond says there won't be much reason for a conciliatory visit to the Quiet Room this time out.
"I didn't really think there was any kind of occasion for people to freak out last time," Diamond says. "Then again, I suppose my standards are different from some of those censors at large.
"We do launch Ad-Rock out of a cannon -- that's only at special selected venues," he says, ever the wise guy. "And I'm supposed to utilize my tightrope and beat-playing skills. But basically we break up the set like in quarters, a tribute to our favorite basketball team, the New York Knicks. We'll change it each night, so some nights it's like a rap quarter, playing quarter, rap quarter, playing quarter."
Diamond plays drums, MCA (Adam Yauch) handles bass and Horovitz plays guitar; the trio is augmented by Keyboard Money Mark (Mark Ramos Nishita), who played on the new record, and longtime D.J. Hurricane, who adds scratches and samples to the live mix.
Diamond says the Boys will serve up a mixed brew from all three albums. "There are some songs, like 'Time to Get Ill' from 'Licensed to Ill,' that I really don't think are appropriate to play live. I mean, if someone were to cover those songs and do a playing version, I'd love to hear it," he laughs.
"We thought for about a second of going the Bob Dylan route and just making every song a mutation, just a completely undiscernible version of the recorded song. We do that a bit, but most of them are somewhat legible."
In what may be a rock-and-rap first, the Beasties sample Dylan on the new record. "We've got another couple of Bob samples on the rap shelf waiting to go," Diamond says.
After the commercial disappointment of the funk montage "Paul's Boutique," the new, decidedly rockier record has been well received by critics and seems to be selling well. "It's strange, because we didn't know what to expect," Diamond says. "That's what's cool about going on tour, because it's such immediate self-gratification. You play, people applaud."
And audiences, he says, seem to be coming more for the music than just the beer-spraying scene. "I'm kind of surprised how many kids go to our shows and say, 'Yeah, when I was younger, "Licensed to Ill" was really a big thing. Then I was really into "Paul's Boutique." But now I'm really into your new album.' It's because we've changed so much -- my theory is we lose a portion of the audience because we change so radically each time, but then we get something new. There is a fair amount of audience that kind of grew with us."
With "Check Your Head," the Beasties launched their own record label, Grand Royal, a subsidiary of Capitol Records. The label's name comes from a longtime friend, rapper Biz Markie. "Biz was hanging around the studio doing tracks and stuff," Diamond says, "and anytime he would play a record he was really into, he'd go 'Grand Royal, guaranteed!'
"I just got off the phone with the first group we're putting out," Diamond says. "Some girls we grew up with around the neighborhood, they call themselves Luscious Jackson, after the basketball player Lucius Jackson. It's kind of part honky-tonk, part hip-hop, part their own thing. Part of that new honky-tonk hip-hop movement.
"We're in a position now where we can put out music by friends of ours that we think is good. And we have an instructional series of seven-inch vinyl records coming out -- like Horovitz teaching moshing," Diamond says. "But the most inspiring thing is when kids tell you, 'After I heard you guys, I started a band. Or a fanzine.' That really means something to us."


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The meetup:
A Year Of Entrepreneurial Experiments
In 2009 I created a miniapp every month (in actuality only several months). In 2010 I launched a minibusiness every month (in actuality only several products and a few minibusinesses). When I began at the end of 2008, my plan was to combine the two in 2011, by launching a serious tech startup or two, and that's one of the things I'll be doing this year. But I had interesting surprises along the way that made me question the whole idea of using tech to make money at all, when I discovered the existence of simpler and probably superior ways of achieving wealth, security, and similar goals. I'll talk about my successes, my failures, and why Hacker News brought tons of traffic to my blog - until the year I actually began making money as an entrepreneur.
The conf:
Easy Node.js Web Apps With Lisp
Lisp is a programming language which allows you to manipulate its abstract syntax tree directly. The popular quote about every other language being a partial implementation of Lisp is not just snark; all programming languages use an abstract syntax tree, so Lisp is literally and mathematically either equal to, or a superset of, every other programming language. However, if you've wanted to build anything actually useful with Lisp, you've historically been in the position of having no vibrant, powerful open source community to draw on. Not many people enjoyed this tradeoff, but fortunately, it is no longer the case. Sibilant is a Lisp written on top of Node.js, a new server-side JavaScript library for writing servers. Node has an active open source community, and it runs on the lightning-fast V8 JavaScript interpreter (written and supported by Google). Thanks to V8, Node, and Sibilant, it is now trivially easy to write web servers, command-line utilities, and applications (server-side, client-side, or both) in a fast, well-supported Lisp. This talk will show you how.


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I am sharing a page of printable ACEO/ ATC size backgrounds. They would also make great backgrounds for individual gift tags. This sheet contains nine designs and comes in a 8.5x11, 300 DPI png file. It prints lovely and crisp ...
I also just listed a fun fun package of 18 of these backgrounds and a special romantic overlay in my shoppe:
Thanks For Stopping by.
xo Mikel
PS... Check out my Motivation for making the backgrounds...
I made these to adorn some of the Truth cards I am making for Brave Girls. They have a project that is filled with love and will touch many woman through out the world. To find out about Melody Ross's Project, you can go here to watch a video.


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from ARGENTINA : +54 115 252 1423
from ITALY : +39 024 032 6417
from MEXICO : +52 554 628 2555
from USA : +1 866 376 7831
from UK : +44 203 318 6993
from SPAIN : +34 911878153
The Bienville House hotel is today the most exceptional boutique hotel in New Orleans. Our hotel is a truly excellent establishment with 83 elegantly appointed rooms with hand-painted murals and Old World furnishings.
Category: Epoque Superior - Learn more
The Bienville House Hotel is located in a prime location, amidst the cities finest attractions.The hotel is the closest French Quarter hotel to Saks Fifth Avenue, the Aquarium of the Americas, Woldenberg Park, Entergy IMAX Theater, the House of Blues, and only steps from Cafe Du Monde and Jackson Square. The Bienville House Hotel is a place like no other; you will want to visit again and again.
Address: - Bienville House Hotel New Orleans Map


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VvGHOSTvV wrote:How is it possible? What does it require?
mShred wrote:3. Let someone else do the hard work and role with it once they release it.
ghost107 wrote:For a black box mods(not legal, in some cases), injecting a script/plugin engine into a game engine I think its much easier to mod then modding it entirely into a low level language.
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George Mikes
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George Mikes (15 February 1912 – 30 August 1987) was a Hungarian-born British author, best known for his humorous commentaries on various countries and their citizens. He is Hungarian.
|This on article on an author is a stub. You can help Wikiquote by expanding it.
How to Be an Alien: A Handbook for Beginners and More Advanced Pupils (1946)[edit]
- An Englishman, even if he is alone, forms an orderly queue of one.
- Continental people have sex life; the English have hot-water bottles.
- In England everything is the other way round.
- On the Continent people have good food; in England, people have good table manners.
- Television is of great educational value. It teaches you while still young how to (a) kill, (b) rob, (c) embezzle, (d) shoot, (e) poison, and, generally speaking, (f) how to grow up into a Wild West outlaw or gangster by the time you leave school.
- The trouble with tea is that originally it was quite a good drink. So a group of the most eminent British scientists put their heads together and made complicated biological experiments to find a way of spoiling it. To the eternal glory of British science, their labour bore fruit.
- When people say England, they sometimes mean Great Britain, sometimes the United Kingdom, sometimes the British Isles, – but never England.
- Teach foreign how to be alive in England.


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<EDIT date="2/3/2015">
rawTCP2HTTP never was a perfect solution, but things have become really bad:
- While the passthru/passthru trick with FSH timeout of 1sec works for clients not sending a FIN with rawTCP2HTTP running on <220.127.116.11 firmwares (there DataPower did not send a FIN to client when FSH timeout occured), networking behavior changed starting with 18.104.22.168 firmware. Now connection is terminated completely on frontside timeout, resulting in an Internal error response to client.
- What remains is that sending rawTCP binary message from client terminated with FIN (like netcat command "nc" does) still works even with 7.0.0.x firmware.
- There were Requests For Enhancement, but I cannot find any of them anymore in RFE tool :-(
<EDIT date="10/19/2011">
See the details on this slide (packet capture screenshot on the following slide):
The status of DataPower rawTCP data processing is:
DataPower does support rawTCP processing (XML and Non-XML) to the backend (tcp:///, tcpssl:///, ...),
see slide http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg27019118&aid=1#page=14 for an example
DataPower does provide rawTCP Front Side Handlers for XML processing
Configuring a stateless raw XML handler
Configuring a stateful raw XML handler
- since quite some time there exists an Enhancement request for a rawTCP Non-XML Front Side Handler
1.5 years ago I developed a prototype of a rawTCP2HTTP converter in DataPower Firmware which allows to convert
rawTCP Non-XML data to HTTP chunked data which can then be processed by any (DataPower) HTTP service
(see IBM publication Bridging raw TCP binary data to HTTP, http://priorartdatabase.com/IPCOM/000197959)
So it seems that processing rawTCP binary data is not possible with DataPower appliances.
Even one week ago I would have said "it is impossible to process Non-XML rawTCP data on DataPower appliances".
But that is not true, and this posting is just another one in the series of "does not work out-of-the-box on DataPower but can be made working"
- Non-XML data processing on DataPower XS40?
- Adding latency during service development for backend simulation
- Sending zip archives to DataPower
- Processing UTF-8 URL-encoded URIs with WebSphere DataPower
- Enhancing "near" SOAP With Attachment data
- Processing embedded stylesheets
- ...
So now that we know that it can be done the question is how.
It turns out to be really easy to create a rawTCP2HTTP service as MPGW service on DataPower.
Even though XA35 and XS40 do not allow for binary data processing they at least allow for Non-XML UTF-8 data processing by the first link of above list.
We make use of the fact that binary input of Non-XML transformations needs to be "consumed", otherwise the default behavior is that it will be copied to the output (see 3rd and 1st link above).
In addition we use a rawTCP XML Front Side Handler as that is the only one not complaining about protocol violations.
And then we make sure that INPUT is guaranteed to not being consumed -- thats all.
So this is rawTCP2HTTP MPGW service:
- Front Side Protocol: Stateless Raw XML Handler listening on port1
- Request Type: Non-XML
- Type: static backend
- Backend URL: http://127.0.0.1:port2
- Response Type: Pass-Thru
And this is rawTCP2HTTP policy:
- match all
- Results action from NULL to OUTPUT
In the example port1 is 2091 and port2 is 2092.
Sending data with a HTTP POST to DataPower can be easily done with with cURL or ApacheBench tool:
- curl --data-binary @file ... http://dpbox:port1
- ab -p file ... http://dpbox:port1
Sending rawTCP data can be done by Netcat tool (nc), this statement sends file to service listening on port at host:
- nc host port < file
To have a basis for measurements I chose a very simple Non-XML example service (toHexb.xsl).
It just returns the (Non-XML) input as hexadecimal string, see posting DataPower "binary" node type (binaryNode) for details:
$ cat toHexb.xsl
<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0"
<dp:input-mapping href="store:///pkcs7-convert-input.ffd" type="ffd"/>
<xsl:output omit-xml-declaration="yes" />
<xsl:template match="/">
Now sending a request is not that spectacular -- we get the same hexadecimal output for file te3t we can also get by octal dump (od) tool:
[stammw@bl3d2027@de ~]$ nc 192.168.10.1 2091 <te3t ; echo
[stammw@bl3d2027@de ~]$ od -Ax -tcx1 te3t
000000 t e 003 t
74 65 03 74
[stammw@bl3d2027@de ~]$
But this is really over rawTCP!
See the following screenshot of a "All Interfaces" (3.8.2 firmware) packet capture.
The Filter for ports 2091 and 2092 just selects the "interesting" part of packect capture.
At the bottom left you see the command execution and output.
On the bottom right you see Follow TCP Stream for services on port 2091 (rawTCP) and 2092 (HTTP).
Hexadecimally displayed content of packet 116 is just the HTTP post of 2091 service to 2092 service after FIN ACK has been received.
This is the first restriction of rawTCP2HTTP service -- it cannot deal with HTTP persistent connections.
Time stamps for packets 110 and 128 show that the transaction took 2.003ms.
But that is not the value which is important.
Important is the average transaction overhead of rawTCP service on 2091 over HTTP service on 2092.
There are quite some tools like ApacheBench (ab) mentioned above for getting performance information of HTTP services.
I was not able to find a similar tool for benchmarking rawTCP performance.
Therefore I wrote one myself based on TCPClient.c (
It was able to benchamrk rawTCP as well as HTTP data (by sending the necessary HTTP Post data).
For persistent and non-persistent connection HTTP benchmarking my numbers were similar to ApacheBench results (-k option for "keepalive").
These are the average results for sending 20000 requests with a concurrency of 20 to a 9004 DataPower from a directly connected Laptop:
- 0.1985ms per request for rawTCP service on 2091
- 0.0809ms per request for HTTP service on 2092 (without persistent connections)
- 0.0647ms per request for HTTP service on 2092 (with persistent connections)
So the overhead of rawTCP2HTTP service is 0.1985ms - 0.0647ms = 0.1338ms.
While for this very simple example service the overhead time dominates the total transaction time, 0.14ms overhead for rawTCP processing enablement is a good price for many real world Non-XML processing scenarios -- until now this is the only way to process rawTCP Non-XML data on DataPower appliances.
These are reasons why the "real" Non-XML rawTCP Front Side Handler of above mentioned Enhancement Request is still needed:
- enabling persistent connections
- reducing/eliminating 0.1338ms overhead of adding/removing of HTTP headers
- having to use "XML rawTCP Front Side Handler" for dealing with "Non-XML data" sounds "interesting" at least :-)
Last, but not least, see that NonXML rawTCP processing on a XA35 or XS40 DataPower appliance is possible by above technique and
the technique from 1st link posting above (by "prepend=" trick with convert-http action):
$ od -Ax -tcx1 test
000000 t e s t 1 2 3 t e s t 1 2 3 t e
74 65 73 74 31 32 33 74 65 73 74 31 32 33 74 65
000010 s t \n
73 74 0a
$ nc cosmopolitan 2091 < test | tidy -q -xml
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<args src="url">
<arg name="transaction">1</arg>
<args src="body">
<arg name="prepend">test123test123test</arg>
$ soma/doSoma admin soma/version.xml cosmopolitan:5550 | xpath++ "//Version/text()" -
Enter host password for user 'admin':
I tested rawTCP2HTTP on all supported release branches.
Finally I just tested it on a box with 22.214.171.124 firmware without problems.
188.8.131.52 DataPower Firmware was released in 1H2009 -- since then rawTCP2HTTP service waited to be discovered ... ;-)


text:
New SpectrAlarm AB121
The SpectrAlarm family from E2S has been designed to offer high performance audible and visual signalling in a single unit. Sound outputs of up to 126dB can now be combined with a powerful beacon with a choice of rotating mirror, flashing Xenon or LED technologies.
Until now, most products available on the market were limited to a 5 Joule Xenon beacon, which is not powerful enough for outdoor use, especially in bright sunlight. The AB121 with its choice of 15 Joule Xenon or rotating mirror beacons provide effective signalling in all conditions.
The integral design is not only visually more attractive than separate units, but also saves on installation time, reducing cost. The sounder and beacon can be connected separately, allowing the user to silence the alarm but leave the beacon flashing until the emergency or fault has been cleared.
Manufactured from UV stabilized polycarbonate, SpectrAlarm units will not fade when exposed to direct sunlight and are protected to IP65, making them suitable for outdoor applications.