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Old Super Bowls and Gas Station TV

Here’s a random story for you: Tonight I decided to pull out an old DVD set I hadn’t watched in a couple of years. It set me to thinking.

The DVD set in question was a set I bought after the Indianapolis Colts won the Super Bowl in January of 2006. That 2005-2006 season was a magical one for me as a sports fan. I had grown up rooting for the St. Louis Cardinals and the Buffalo Bills. The Cardinals were the regional fan-favorite where I am from, and my dad is from New York and was a Bills fan, which led to me rooting them on with him. Needless to say, my teams suffered through a lot of heartache.

Then came Peyton Manning. I was a Tennessee Volunteers fan as well. And I absolutely idolized Manning. I played quarterback for four years in high school, and he was my absolute hero, even surpassing my early childhood hero, Bills quarterback Jim Kelly. Kelly retired the year that Peyton entered the NFL. Thus I became a Colts fan. And of course my fandom has followed him to Denver – in fact, I am wearing a ‘Keep Calm and Peyt-on’ shirt right now (and his autograph rests on a hat that rests in the armoire a few feet away from me).

Both the Cardinals and the Colts won championships that season. It was the first time a favorite team of mine won a championship in my lifetime. I rushed out and bought a set of DVDs with every Colts playoff game from that season (four games), in their entirety, without commercials. I’ve watched the ’06 AFC Championship game against the Patriots at least a dozen times from start to finish, including tonight. It was a magical game, the Colts coming back from being down 21-6 at the half. But I digress.

There are two movie scenes from movies released during my childhood that come to mind every now and then relating to the their forward thinking. The first is from the movie Big (starring Tom Hanks). There is a scene in the movie where Tom Hanks, as a boss at his company, requests a commercial-free VHS copy of the Giants Super Bowl victory against the Broncos. I always thought it would be nice to be able to watch any game you wanted, especially without commercials.

The other scene I have in mind is from, I think, Back to the Future II. In this story, Marty (Michael J. Fox) travels to the future in order to help his (future) son. At some point in the movie there is a gas-station scene in which there was a television screen at the gas pump.

And now, the future is here. Maybe it’s not quite a The Matrix future. Maybe Back to the Future II didn’t get it all right. But in 2014 I can watch the Colts Super Bowl victory, without commercials, 8 years later and watch television at the gas pump. I am amazed at the power of YouTube as well. I can watch so many things that I never imagined I would be able to watch again (like old Bills games). And I chuckle to myself every time I watch TV while pumping gas, and my kids (who I won’t let watch the movie yet) never get tired of hearing the story of how this scene played out in a movie 20 some odd years ago.

I think about (and have written on this blog about) technology quite a bit. I am leery of where we are headed, but I am thankful for some of the happy perks. Now if we could just ban the use of cell phones in public!

Asking Questions, Answering Stories

During my reading for a summer course on interviewing, I found this interesting take on the importance of narrative and the aptness of asking questions in order to elicit such stories:

The advantage of asking questions to initiate conversation is that it encourages the other person to talk about him or herself, an approach that Fisher (1984, 1987, 1989) called the narrative paradigm…According to Fisher, five assumptions underlie the narrative paradigm theory: ‘(1) Humans are essentially storytellers, (2) human communication is achieved fundamentally through stories, (3) through discourse humans use “good reasons” for believing or action, (4) humans have an inherent narrative logic that guides their assessments of communication, and (5) the world as we know it is a set of stories that allows each of us to construct and adapt our realities” (Fisher, 1987). Interview techniques can be particularly helpful at eliciting such stories and getting people to talk about themselves.

-Jonathan Amsbary and Larry Powell, Interviewing: Situations and Contexts, p. 19

I’ve made it a practice in my daily life to be constantly asking questions of people. I was first made a conscious decision to do this after reading Isaac Watts’ book (which I highly recommend) called The Improvement of the Mind. He writes,

If you happen to be in company with a merchant or a sailor, a farmer or a mechanic, a milk-made or a spinster, lead them into a discourse of the matters of their own peculiar province or profession; for every one knows, or should know, his own business best. In this sense a common mechanic is wiser than a philosopher. By this means you may gain some improvement in knowledge from every one you meet (p. 80).

Becoming an ‘interviewer’ has resulted in me getting to hear many stories I would never have otherwise heard. Don’t be afraid to ask questions. Questions often illicit stories. And stories can lead to all kinds of good things. Besides from the entertainment value, you might learn something new. Do not be so prideful as to think that you cannot learn something from everyone.

Stories are…Catechisms for Your Impulses

In a recent post of mine titled, Anthropomorphism, Unlikeness, and Reality in Fiction: Opening the Eyes of the Blind I write this:

I often reference C.S. Lewis’ statement to the effect that fantasy literature does not make children (and I would say adults as well, so long as they’re not prone to pure escapism) forget, or despise, the real world. He said basically that a child who reads of an enchanted forest does not thereby begin to hate real forests. Instead all forests take on some of this enchantment. For instance, I’ve never thought of forests in the same way since reading the Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings. I’ve never looked at peaceful walks the same since I read the Princess and the Goblin (I’m always ready to sing a goblin song should the proper situation arise). I’ve never looked at lions the same since reading the Chronicles of Narnia. I could go on, but I won’t.

For the past month or so I have been immersed in N.D. Wilson’s 100 Cupboards trilogy. I posted my initial thoughts on the first book HERE. I have a lot more to add to that original post at this point, but I won’t – the whole point of my ‘recent reading’ series is to give initial impressions and applications. The series certainly gets more weighty as you go on and some of the philosophical (though I’m sure Wilson would call them Christian, not philosophical) undercurrents are emerging more clearly. But, actually, that’s beside the point.

I came across a YouTube video (watch it HERE) of an interview with N.D. Wilson a while back. I have now watched it twice in its entirety. He’s a pretty sharp guy and it is taking time to process some of the things he said. One of those things hit home yesterday in a conversation with my family about Wilson’s book Dandelion Fire. I won’t get into that now, but I want to record the relevant quote from the interview (transcript courtesy of WORLD):

Q: You’ve said you learned more philosophy, maybe even theology, from C.S. Lewis and Tolkien than from anything you studied in college. Is that one reason you write fiction rather than theological tomes?
A. Christians have sometimes been suspicious of stories, because they really can influence you. If you read the Twilight novels once a month for a year, I think you’d be a different human afterward—and not a sparkly one. Stories are like catechisms, but they’re catechisms for your impulses, they’re catechisms with flesh on.

This is precisely the point I was making (and I was only echoing C.S. Lewis) in my own post quoted above. Stories are catechisms for the impulses, fixing the questions and answers as to how you will view the world in which you live, how you will respond. To use the Lewis idea I often paraphrase (see above), the fairy story, or supernatural story, or whatever you want to call it, asks us, ‘Can our world be enchanted?’ And, if it’s a good one, we’re left saying, ‘Perhaps. Just maybe. Yes, actually, I think it is after all.’  And thus we act accordingly, however that may be.  Bad stories have an effect as well. But that’s a topic in itself. Let’s not go there presently.

I really just wanted to record that quote. It’s worth putting in the old computer, as they(or maybe just I) say. But let me also say, hats off to Mr. Wilson for coining (I assume) a phrase that I think will be quite helpful (he’s rather wordsmithy). Hats off to him for boggling my mind and forcing me to meditate hard and heavy on the concept of a word-made world (more on that to come, when I finish Dandelion Fire). I’m appreciating his work, consider checking him out if you haven’t.