Ah yes, spam - the bane of every blogger’s existence. And a nuisance that fortunately, thanks to the Akismet spam filter feature the Blogs-About Hosting folks incorporated into the WordPress software that drives this weblog, I don’t have to deal with much anymore. With the Akismet filter, the only thing you have to is delete the spam every few days as it accumulates - much like one would do emptying out the Recycle Bin on your computer desktop.

One of the things that cracks me up about this spam junk are the messages that accompany it. Some of them are actually pretty creative in their own way, though oftentimes spelling seems a bit of a challenge. This makes me think that much of this crap is bombarding the site from overseas. But, since every blogger from time to time welcomes a compliment or two about his or her work, and since The Great White Shank is not above shilling for compliments, here are some of the spammy accolades that have poured in recently to Goodboys Nation weblog:

* a7r9u05k@see.to says: “nice site, very informative, well designed, easy to use … what can i say ? i love it…”

* c33rqb@aol.com says: “finally got a chance to check out your web page, and I must say that I’m impressed. Hope everything is going well. Take care!”

* 1yakd4v79wbu@mail.me says: “I just want you to know that I think you did a terrific job on this websight.”

* znrljxocnfdmb@rocketmail.com says: “I happened upon this site while following the links from another site. Your site is wonderful and i bookmarked it. Thank your for the hard work you must have put in to create this wonderful facility. Keep up the excellent work”

* 9@mail.com’s message is short and sweet: “perfect site !!!!!!!! Perfect piece of work fellows !!!!!!!” Awwww, shucks….

* kdd52iux@usmail.com says: “Your website is beautifully decorated and easily navigated. I have enjoyed visiting this site today and hope to visit many more times in the future.”

* kllt71e6tqfolz@mail.ru says: “Keep it up (like I do ) Great site - loved the bit about yourselves.”

* hr6bxaz9si0z@classnet.pl says: “Could you please send to me the contacts of developer of your site? It looks so damn good!” Now there’s a compliment for you, not just good - damn good.

* I like this one, from d5tm9@aol.com: “The stuff on this web site is really witty and cool wise”

And last but not least, here’s my own personal favorite:

* From a2gv88kt@usmail.com: “Congratulations on finally setting up your site. I am sure the website will become a internet legend”

Well, doesn’t everyone dream of becoming an ‘internet legend’, at least one time?

They were a young couple that always seemed to keep to themselves. Their house, adjacent to ours, was distinguishable from the others on our street only because they were the only ones who didn’t employ a landscaper to keep their front yard tidy. Not that it was unkept in any way - just that the husband could be seen on weekends mowing his lawn, or plucking weeds from their walkway by hand. They had had a baby two years ago, but the only way their neighbors would have known that is that a crib appeared in their garage one day beside all their usual stuff.

When one lives in a development where properties are walled in and garages part of the house construction, oftentimes the only time one sees his or her neighbor is when their garage door opens when they leave for work in the morning, or return from work at night. When this life of isolation and anonymity is compounded by being situated on a quiet, dead-end street, the only way changes in a neighbor’s lifestyle or situation gets noticed is when the cars they drive (everyone on the street knows everyone else’s cars), or the possessions they store in their garages (laid out for all to see whenever the door is left open) change. People can live or die, and grow fat, old, rich, or poor, but as long as the cars don’t change and what’s kept in the garage remains the same, no one would notice the difference.

The first sign of change next door was the appearance of a car with out-of-state plates - Nebraska, I believe. Were it friends or acquaintances dropping by for a visit, such an appearance would hardly have been noticed - after all, this time of year, northerners drifting south to thaw out at a family member’s or or friend’s house isn’t that unusual of an occurence. But this car (a silver Lincoln) and its occupant (an elderly gentleman) didn’t just stop out front for a day, or a week, or any time like that - it would come by in the early afternoon each day, stay for an hour or two, and disappear until the next day, when it would arrive again. Except on weekends. And it was strange how the car was never parked in the driveway - rather, it would always be left in the same place, along the sidewalk between our two properties.

It wasn’t long after the first time the car started appearing - 2-3 weeks, perhaps - that the two cars that would always appear going in and out of their garage at morning and night became one car. And who of the two had been left behind became apparent one weekend afternoon when I saw their child out front, watching the husband mow the lawn and pluck weeds from their walkway.

This morning, the dogs next door sounded an alert of some activity out front, and I looked out front to see what was going on. There, a man was pounding an all-too-familiar kind of post into the ground in front of the couple’s home, and a few minutes later, a “For Sale” sign swung easily in the soft breeze. Later, when I went for my afternoon walk to the mailbox, two contractor trucks were parked out front, ladders and painters having set up shop in their garage, freshly-planted flowers in the planters along the walkway.

Returning from my walk to the mailbox, a couple of our neighbors waved a silent hello as they went about their chores, and I returned to my office and the work waiting for me there.

Thankfully, the Oscars are over with, and hopefully, all the overwrought, overblown, and over-done coverage of Hollywood celebrities in our over-saturated media environment. “Why’s Britney gone over the deep end?” “What was Angelina Jolie’s phone bill last month?” “Say, aren’t Jennifer Aniston’s boobs hanging 2 inches lower than they were last year?” “Nicholas Cage has a new pet iguana?” “Is that a varicose vein on Kate Hudson’s lower shin?” The mind boggles. I mean, even if you’re into movies, does anyone really care or need to know about this stuff? And, even more importantly, why does every time one of these pampered, self-absorbed, limousine liberals open their mouths about the latest cause de célibrité (three years ago it was Bush-bashing, two years ago it was Darfur, this year it’s, of course, “global warming”), the media breathlessly awaits every morsel of wisdom from the “Gospel According to Hollywood”?

Why does the media (and, I’m guessing, millions of people out there, for if the people didn’t crave it, the media wouldn’t feed it) care so much about, and publicize so broadly what actors and musicians think? These clowns may have worked hard to get where they are because of some talent (or supposed talent) they possess, but simply because someone can read lines from another’s script and emote for the camera, or play a guitar while singing on-key, why should anything they blabber to the media be any more sage or viable than that expressed by you, me, the check-out girl at the supermarket, or Carmelo my landscaper.

(This has never been more true than when it comes to this seemingly new-found celebrity obsession with “global warming” and the latest round of headlines the so-called “experts” have been screaming about. And now we have an “all-star” group of celebrities and musicians saying we’ve only got ten years to save the planet, and Al Gore organizing benefit concerts? Madre di Dios!.)

Is it that our lives are so depressingly ordinary and boring that we need celebrities to fill some unfulfilled vacuum? I know this is nothing new - the “yellow journalism” rags of the 19th and early 20th century were just as audacious in the kinds of stories they would dream up, and people just as thirsty for the kind of swill they’d print. Perhaps it’s just that in our media-saturated culture there’s just so much more of it, from so many different sources.

But that doesn’t mean we should have to jump simply because Jessica Simpson thinks the temperature of her swimming pool is running hotter this year than last, or Barbra Streisand sees some doctored photograph of polar bears stranded on ice or Bono one of those Christian Children’s Fund commercials while eating his lobster thermidor. Laura Ingraham used her saying, “shut up and sing!” to push her best-selling book; on this Oscar night, while we all recover from our self-imposed celebrity stupor, I would add to that, “shut up and act!’.

For months leading up to this past week’s gathering of Anglican church leaders in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, the Internet was buzzing with all kinds of speculation and prognostications as to what kind of actions would be taken against the Episcopal Church (TEC) as a result of its perceived slowness (some would say, unwillingness) to adequately make amends to the rest of the Anglican Communion for its role in ordaining a non-celebate gay man as a bishop, and looking the other way as certain U.S. dioceses permitted the blessing of same-sex unions - actions considered contrary to both the Church’s historic teachings and traditions, and the “will of the Church” as dictated by the Eames’ Commission’s Windsor Report of 2003, and Resolution 1.10 from the Lambeth Conference of 1998.

With progressives like Integrity (a gay/lesbian/transgender activist group within TEC), those on the orthodox side of the aisle (like David Virtue), and any number of others in between speculating as to what would happen (everything from nothing, to TEC being expelled from the the Communion), the leaders of the worldwide church body gathered amidst extremely tight security to pray, exchange ideas, and try and work together towards a solution that would draw the Communion back from the one thing everyone feared - schism.

In the end, there were no hysterics, or crashes of thunder and flashes of lightning, just the simple release of a communique in which Church leaders both rebuked TEC for its past actions, yet gave it time to formulate a suitable response that would address the concerns of the Global South (i.e., Africa/Asia/South America) churches, who see TEC as a runaway train acting on its own accord in the face of the Christianity’s traditional teachings and doctrines. I’ve read the communique, and, as is typical of these kinds of things, it is not - shall we say - the most riveting piece of work one will ever read. Fortunate we are, then, that none other than the New York Times (surprise!) got the jist of the communique in this article by Sharon LaFraniere and Laurie Goodstein:

Facing a possible churchwide schism, the Anglican Communion yesterday gave its Episcopal branch in the United States less than eight months [Ed. note: by September 30] to ban blessings of same-sex unions or risk a reduced role in the world’s third-largest Christian denomination.

Anglican leaders also established a separate council and a vicar to help address the concerns of conservative American dioceses that have been alienated by the Episcopal Church’s support of gay clergy and blessings of same-sex unions. Although the presiding American bishop, Katharine Jefferts Schori, agreed to the arrangement, some conservatives described it as an extraordinary check on her authority.

…

The communiqué yesterday detailed at length what the Episcopal Church should do to heal the rift over homosexuality. It called on the House of Bishops to adopt an explicit ban against blessings of same-sex unions and to make clear that clergy in homosexual relationships cannot be confirmed as bishops.

Hey, you gotta give credit where credit is due, so hat’s off to the Times for setting aside the usual spin and for once getting the story right. For years, the Western Churches within the Communion (the Church of England, the Anglican Church of Canada, and TEC) have used their affluence and traditional positions of power to impose their wills and their progressive, post-modern agenda upon the churches of the Global South, even as they themselves were suffering significant declines in membership and their African and Asian counterparts were experiencing explosive growth through the teaching of traditional Christianity, oftentimes at their own peril due to the equally-explosive growth of fundamental Islam.

But with the issuance of the Dar es Salaam communique, all that has changed, for the leaders of the Global South have parlayed the growth of their churches and their power and influence within the Communion to draw a line in the sand - a line that will ultimately force TEC to choose whether its future lies as part of the Anglican Communion, or in some other arrangement. And in my view, this is both a good and necessary thing. For, regardless of one’s view as to whether homosexuality (and/or homosexual behavior) is, or is not, compatible with the teachings of Holy Scripture, there is little question that for far too long, the churches of the Anglican Communion (and every other Christian denomination, for that matter) have wasted far too much time, energy, resources, and good will struggling over the issue. And by issuing this communique, a majority of the Communion’s leaders have said enough is enough. As Virtue Online’s David Virtue observes:

What has emerged from the communiqué and in private talks VOL has had with leaders is that the communiqué is the last line in the sand for The Episcopal Church. The Primates will no longer discuss the rightness or wrongness of homosexuality