The one thing my very conservative friends and my liberal friends have in common is that they are extremely kind. I think kind people are kind and mean people are mean and it hardly matters whether they are conservative or not. It has more to do with irritable bowels, I think, or a persons controlling personality vs. their ability to trust Gods grace and speak His truth without associating a persons response to that truth with their own threatened identity. Regardless, I keep the kind friends and slyly slip away from the mean ones. Life’s too short.

Sometimes we associate kindness with weakness or fear of confrontation. We justify loud, angry, or rude behavior by believing that they are necessary to confront evil. We assume that because we are confronting evil, we are doing good. But if we confront evil without kindness, we are the blind leading the blind. Paul tells us that the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.

Kindness is not for wimps.

It’s a sign of God at work in your life.

Mostly, people were all over Bud Selig for not instituting instant replay last year. Bud Selig is an easy guy to get mad at because he’s never apologized for anything he or baseball has ever done wrong. When MLB reviewed and denied the use of replay, Bud said he wanted the Human Element as part of baseball. I think you could get this pretty well from the baseball players because I’m pretty sure they’re all human no matter 
how many steroids they are taking. But Bud thought the umpires ought to be human too. The UmpBot stock I bought went right in the toilet when he said that.

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NPR ran a story a few days ago about Senate Secret Holds. I listened to the story because I thought it was about professional wrestling. I imagined John McCain climbing to the top of Joe Biden’s giant desk and leaping across the chamber to drop a double axe-handle on Charles Schumer. I think McCain is the toughest member of the Senate. He’s scrappy and I wouldn’t bet against him, even if it was all fixed.

As it turns out, a secret hold is a lot like a filibuster, except it keeps the motion from ever getting to the Senate floor. And it’s anonymous. A senator can go to his or her party leadership and say ask for a hold without ever being identified on the floor. Listening to the story, it felt a little bit like a man walking into a 7-11 and asking for all the cash in the register because there’s a man outside with his hand in his pocket claiming he has a gun.

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Maybe Senators are smarter than we give them credit for. We Americans are pretty easy to wait out. In the short time since I started writing this post, no one is talking about Armando Galarraga. We’ve moved on to Stephen Strausberg, NBA playoffs, who’s holding out of NFL OTAs and college conference realignment. The first 28 out perfect game seems like last season.

It will be two weeks on Wednesday.

National news isn’t that different. We are always interested in right now. It’s true. Watch any of the cable news channels for a day. There is no “news.” There’s only “breaking news.” And that doesn’t mean it’s the most important. Around 16000 kids die every day from hunger. Fox News wants to tell you about “Stars With Sex Tapes”. MSNBC says “Pickup sales perk up along with economy”.

Twitter is breaking news on steroids.

Nick Carr and others have asked if our technology is making us stupid. It isn’t, but only in the sense that guns don’t kill people. We are choosing to buy in—to believe that the stories on the news or in our twitter feeds are the stories. We are choosing to live contextualess lives that move from one outrage to the next.

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In his last two starts, Galarraga has only given up three runs. Detroit has won both games. He’s pitching lights out.

No word yet on if John McCain will add the Flying Elbow to his arsenal.

Breaking news as it happens.

In light of the un-perfect game, here are my suggestions for a Major League Baseball instant replay system.

Put a fifth ump in a room with a monitor and a phone or a walkie-talkie or something. He is the review ump. His ruling is final. He stays in that room while play is occurring so that on the field umpires don’t have to leave the field for review. His monitor gets the same type of feed that is currently used in home run reviews.

The on the field crew chief can call for a review at any time at his discretion. He has the other walkie-talkie.

Each manager has one challenge per game. They do not get any more, even if they are correct in their challenge. Challenges are made to the crew chief directly, not to the umpire who made the call or to the review umpire.

Balls and strikes cannot be reviewed. The strike zone is set exclusively by the home plate umpire based on the MLB rulebook.

Homeruns, catches and plays at the bases may be reviewed and overturned. Play will resume based on the result of the corrected call.

Foul balls which have landed in the infield are not reviewable. (This is actually the one I’ve had the hardest time with. I’m sure baseball people smarter than me could come up with a good solution.)

Foul balls which have landed in the outfield and upon review are found to be fair will result in a ground rule double.

Fair balls which upon review are found to be foul will be played as if they were foul.

A salary cap will be implemented^*.

*Ok, I’ll give on this one to get replay going. But I’ll never let this one go.

1. Tweet less. Anything more than ten in a day and we’ll start to tune you out. Less is more.

2. Tweet better. One great link is better than twenty good links. Control the narrative.

3. Don’t put a link on everything. Especially if it’s to your Facebook status that says the same thing.

4. If you call yourself a marketer, we’ll think twice. If you call yourself a marketing guru, we won’t. Listen to you at all that is.

5. Following people is not a growth strategy. It’s a way of telling the people you follow that you’ll never read their tweets. Read the people you follow.

6. It’s social marketing, not bullhorn marketing. Interact. With. People.

In the race between ‘who’ and ‘how many’, who usually wins–if action is your goal. Find the right people, those that are willing to listen to what you have to say, and ignore the masses that are just going to race on, unchanged. —Seth Godin, Driveby culture and the endless search for wow

The irony of this quote is that because I mentioned marketing in my tweet, I’ll get 5-10 twitter followers claiming to be marketing experts who are already following eight to ten thousand people.

We invented a myriad of extra rules to enhance the game. If you had the exact same card as the one that was just played, you could play it and play resumes from your spot. Play three skips in a row, everyone draws a card. Three reverses in a row, everyone passes their hand to the left. If you throw a card to the pile and miss, you get your card back and lose your turn. Drop a green three and you got to try slapping the cards out of someone’s hand. During Advent and the Twelve Days of Christmas, play a red following a green, proclaim Merry Christmas in any number of languages, and get rid of any card in your hand.

The most notable rule was that penalties accumulated. If someone plays a draw two on you, no problem—just play another draw two and the next sucker has to draw four. If she plays one, the next guy is drawing six. And so on. If it comes all the way back to you, your penalty doubles. After one guy played a draw four, he watched in horror as seven more were played as it came back to him, he found himself picking up 64 cards.

Green three!

Whenever we got stuck drawing a fist full of cards, my friend John was quick to remind the unlucky soul, “You don’t have to draw 32, you get to draw 32.”

He was right, you know. You didn’t have to draw. You could walk away, go back to work and get on with your day sans half the deck.

But we didn’t quit. Drawing cards was part of playing. Playing was what we wanted to do, even if that meant picking up 16 honey mustard stained cards off the floor.

We don’t do things because we have to. It might seem like we have to, but we don’t. My friend Jim pays taxes because he doesn’t want to go to jail. Teresa does the laundry because she enjoys clean clothes. Paul test his blood sugar and injects himself with insulin because his body and brain to function correctly. Matt has to brush his teeth if he doesn’t want them to fall out. Makeesha mentioned urinating. She’s right. But you don’t have to use the bathroom. Former NFL lineman Mark Schlereth used to pee his pants during games because he didn’t want to walk back to the locker room.

I tend to look at life as series of have-tos with a few get-tos dropped in here and there.

But it’s really not that way.

It’s mostly get-tos.

Maybe we think of them as have-tos because we forget why we’re doing them.

The two questions I can’t get away from and thus I ask you:

1. Are the things I see as have-tos getting me toward the things I want?

2. How can I make my have-tos and my get-tos line up more often?

For the past few years, I’ve given up something for Lent. I wouldn’t say I’ve enjoyed it, but I’ve appreciated what I’ve learned about myself.

In different years, I’ve given up coffee and meat and alcohol.

This year, it’s politics.

No reading political stories or emails.

No listening to, reading or watching the news if it might include political items.

No visiting facebook groups to see if a piece of used wrapping paper has more fans than a Senator.

And most of all, no talking (or writing) about politics.

Because we’re here on Ash Wednesday (or we were when I wrote this…technical difficulties), I won’t detail specific examples of why I’m giving this up for Lent.* But I will say, in general, why I’m fasting from politics.

Part of it is that politics makes me angry. I get really worked up over people who don’t know what they are talking about telling other people what to think. This is my broad brush assessment of the political climate in which I find myself. From the top office in the land to the average Joe on Facebook—nearly everyone talks past each other instead of with each other. Those who agree with us are smart and those who don’t lack common sense. We slander our opponents and misrepresent their positions as if truth were a luxury unaffordable in the most prosperous nation on the planet.

Politics is a game that we must win at any cost.

Most of us see politics as a game like any other. Maybe a bit more like professional wrestling than some other games. Really, it’s better than any other show on TV. The characters, the stories, the fights, the lies—it’s all an amazing melodrama.

And that’s just the news.

Even though I see this is happening, I still think I buy into it. I think I believe that winning—getting the right people in or keeping the wrong people out or whatever—will be some magical event that makes everything instantly better. And that because of this, anything I do or think or say about someone is fair game.

But that’s not true.

I’d say why, but then I’d be writing about politics.

All that said, I’d love to hear about your Lenten vow.

What are you giving up for Lent and why?

*This really should have been posted on Fat Tuesday and I tried to keep as much political opinion out as possible. But if this day is supposed to be solemn, this post has definitely brought me to that place.

Step 2: Be great at it.

Step 3: Get a different job with unrealistic expectations, no support, and an exclusive contract that keeps you in that job for multiple years.

Step 4: Whether or not it’s your fault, under-perform so badly that your employer is so unhappy that they will actually pay you to leave.

Step 5: Get paid.

Step 6 (optional): Repeat.

It worked for Conan and Charlie Weis. It can work for you too.

Most of the things are good for work, my computer especially. Somethings are for decoration.

All of them are meaningful.

There are other useful and interesting things that I have in my office, but I don’t want them on my desk for any extended period of time. I may get something new I’d like to add (like this, if you’re in a buying mood). There may be things, like my coffee press or a project I’m working on, that need to be on my desk for a short time.

But most things don’t need to be there all the time. When more things start to collect on my desk, it’s harder to find the things I actually want.

Social networks are like this.

It’s easy to fill up our Twitter feeds with tweets from thousands of users. It’s easy to friend every single person we have ever met and some we haven’t.

It’s easy to be a mile wide and an inch deep.

But being a good neighbor isn’t easy, is it?

Creating a meaningful feed is a great way to be a good neighbor. By filling your feeds with people you actually want updates from, it makes your life easier and validates your friends and those you follow. It’s a way of saying, “Here are people I really want to hear from.”

(Because of the different natures of Facebook and Twitter, I’ve broken out some ideas for creating meaningful feeds into two different sections.)

Creating a meaningful Facebook feed:

Creating a meaningful Twitter feed:

How do you create a meaningful social media feed?