bonar crump

bonar crump
husband - father - reader - runner - picker - grinner - lover - sinner

Friday, March 11, 2011

Top 10 guitar solos of all time

Starts @ 3:30

The Blind Man Who Taught Himself To See

by Michael Finkel
Men's Journal

Daniel Kish has been sightless since he was a year old. Yet he can mountain bike. And navigate the wilderness alone. And recognize a building as far away as 1,000 feet. How? The same way bats can see in the dark.

"The first thing Daniel Kish does, when I pull up to his tidy gray bungalow in Long Beach, California, is make fun of my driving. “You’re going to leave it that far from the curb?” he asks. He’s standing on his stoop, a good 10 paces from my car. I glance behind me as I walk up to him. I am, indeed, parked about a foot and a half from the curb.

The second thing Kish does, in his living room a few minutes later, is remove his prosthetic eyeballs. He does this casually, like a person taking off a smudged pair of glasses. The prosthetics are thin convex shells, made of acrylic plastic, with light brown irises. A couple of times a day they need to be cleaned. “They get gummy,” he explains. Behind them is mostly scar tissue. He wipes them gently with a white cloth and places them back in."


A Letter to Christian Songwriters



Jesus Wants us to use Common Sense

by Donald Miller

"I remember reading a big report from a church I used to go to, a vision statement outlining the plan for the church to grow. It involved buying new property and building a new building and  more than quadrupling the size of the congregation over the next twenty years or so. When I read it, I remember thinking that the vision lacked common sense. The church was in a rural area, and there was no growth happening in the community. It seemed like, if you wanted to reach more people, you’d just send another pastor into an area closer to town and plant another church. It would be a lot cheaper to do it that way anyway. But the vision was couched in a lot of God talk, a lot of talk about how it was “bathed in prayer” and the sort of language that creeps normal people out. That vision statement came out ten years ago, and very little has happened, save a church split and a lot of controversy.

I find it suspect when a vision for power and glory for man is couched in a lot of religious talk."



The Power of Partnerships

By DAVID BORNSTEIN

David Bornstein is the author of “How to Change the World,” which has been published in 20 languages, and “The Price of a Dream: The Story of the Grameen Bank,” and is co-author of “Social Entrepreneurship: What Everyone Needs to Know.” He is the founder of dowser.org, a media site that reports on social innovation.

"Some problems are simply too complex to solve with any single approach. Consider the fact that in the United States, a million students drop out of high school each year. To begin to turn back that trend, we need to work on several fronts — assist vulnerable families when children are infants, improve classrooms from preschool through high school, provide after-school supports and college access assistance, tackle the issue of summer-learning loss and get much smarter about addressing students’ social and emotional needs at every stage. In the words of Clay Shirky: “Nothing will work, but everything might.”

But doing “everything” in piecemeal fashion won’t work. We need not only to do all of these things better than we have in the past; we need to link them in smarter and more effective ways.

In Tuesday’s column, I wrote about an effort in the social sector that is gaining momentum called “collective impact,” a disciplined effort to bring together dozens or even hundreds of organizations in a city (or field) to establish a common vision, adopt a shared set of measurable goals and pursue evidence-based actions that reinforce one another’s work and further those goals."