socks

Uh oh. Is my Geek Card suspended for a month? :D--> A la, I've been trying to Chat myself, and I've used AOL, MSN, TalkBack, HappyNoiz, FreyndFynder, ComcastCallCard, WhoosDere, and every other tool I can find. I can't get the dang thing to work whenever I try to Chat. I start the program, bring it up, get my little library of emoticon smilies and everything all set, turn up the volume on my speakers and lean over and talk right in to the mouse and wait...and wait. Nothing happens. EVER! I'm chattin', I'm chattin', nothing comes back. I'm starting to think my mouse may be malfunctioning, not sure. I've tried even chatting directly in to the monitor and still, nothin'. I'm starting to think something's wrong. Well, good luck on your AOL Chat thing. Hope the reinstall works, or sumpin.

:D--> dmiller!

The teaching is best understood as a Steven Wright joke. Speak an octave lower, in a deep monotone voice and mumble this: "In the Way they told me the Household was where I wanted to be". "I couldn't buy a house".

Zag giggidy and boy howdy! There's holes in them darned socks! Defrog - a new procedure, excat? When you defrog, does it count the rivets in your computer? :P-->

A la, it may be that you've hit your "limit". You did know about the limit on AOL chat, right? Once you've typed in over 50,000,000,000 words, it starts over. You have to wait a few days for it to clear out and come back to where you can see what you type again. This was done in the interest of user-health, allowing time for the Power-Chatter to sleep. - - :D-->

Wow. A la, you must be tapped in! True story. I was in the dentist's chair Friday morning, having just gotten 5 shots of novocaine. 5, in various places and spots in and around an upper bridge I'm having some recontructive work done on. They're dropping in new pilings, they got tug boats hauling in timber, all kinds of stuff. Anyway, the dentist starts telling the assistant how he went to a concert last week and she says "who'd you see?" as she's hanging some hoses and scaffolding rigging on the side of my face that's now so numb and lifeless it's drooping down on my shoulder. (she's cool, actually seems to enjoy her work which kinds of fascinates me) So he says..."Credence Clearwater Revival!" Except it's two of the original guys with some new guys and they're calling themselves The New Water Revival Band or something, I can't remember as the left side of my face was so numb by this time I could only hear and smell things INSIDE my head not outside and the sound of their voices coming through my open mouth was kind of echoey. So I'm nodding and trying to make a comment and it's coming out like "Dwah Kwevance Kweeth hogger - dey ah FO AWFTHOME!" and they're saying things and the assistant is wiping drool off my arms which makes me realize I'm spitting rather profusely and don't know it. Anyway it struck me too.....and I wasn't sure if it was the novocaine or what. But now I can see the connection!!!! It's so amazing! that happened!!! I also should note to Bramble, I do believe that pink monkey's are actually the preferred color of the Amazing Sea Monkeys! Stuff pink monkeys - ROCK!!!

Refiner, I am split on that point when I look at the former president of the Way, V.P. Weirwille. I worked with him enough (about 7 years) on his staff at the Way Nash in Ohio to know he wasn't a 24/7 blathering nut out to deliberately hurt people and make himself wealthy using a bible scam. That's my opinion based on my personal dealings with him. At the same time I have to say there are a lot of things he did that I didn't know anything about at the time they were happening and that only unfolded later, and over time. And other things that I did see develop over many years. In essence, he became untrustworthy to me in some key areas of his life. He also managed over time to disqualify himself from a position of "leadership" or service to the flock you refer to. That didn't stop the Way from existing as it was his own shop and he was in charge, but over time I think I've seen the results. If you're reading around here, you've seen reference to what he said was a direct revelation from God in 1942 that stated to him that if he would teach it, God would teach him the "Word" (the bible) as it hadn't been known since the "first century". Namely, the way it was originally given and intended to be understood. In my mind, this constitutes what he called his "ministry". That was the specific means of service that he had to offer to people - this enlightened understanding of the bible that he would gain in an ongoing teaching ministry. That's why The Way was built as a teaching and research ministry - bacause that's what he said he believed he was suppposed to do in response to this calling of his - teach it. If I take that at face value, that's all well and good. As long as people don't break the law they can pretty much do whatever they want. He teaches, people that want to listen and respond, and so on. Fast forward from 1942 through to the 60's and we see that VPW formalizes his teaching into a live class and then a filmed class that he's charging money for. The price changes over the years but there's always a charge. So now, if you want the teaching that God said he would give VPW if he would teach it you have to pay for it. You have to buy it. A real conflict with the charging for the teaching is that what VPW said he had to teach was from God. Then he turns around and sells it. It's not his to sell. This information that is only known by VPW, that's said to be essential to even have a basic relationship with God, that constitutes a revolution in religious thinking that hasn't been seen for 2,000 years, that leaves everyone else in the idolatrous dust of darkness...you have to buy for money? VPW may have prayed every night before he went to bed, "God you know I'm just doing all of this because I want people to really get your Word" but it still doesn't make it right in my mind. Time and again people were refused the teaching of PFAL if they didn't pay the money. You could buy the books and attend a fellowship, but ultimately you had to pony up, pay and attend the Power for Abundant Living class to really get the whole thing. In my mind, something got seriously bent in VPW's brain to come up with that approach. He did say that when he "gave it away", nobody listened. When he started charging for it, people responded. Which makes me wonder how much more successful Jesus would have been if He'd thought to ask for donations of bread and fish instead of just giving food away willy nilly to his hungry followers.

From a historical point of view, I think I'd have to vote for PFAL and the Way Ministry being a multi-level marketing...I'll call it "plan or program" and leave the scheme part out. But in a way it was a scheme, even if I rule out a negative conotation to that word. VPW was teaching a PFAL series before it was committed to film in 1967. The filming put it into a form where more people could take it. So it could be run anywhere in the world, 100's of classes at the same time. In concert with the Way Tree and twigs "splitting", it does form a basic multi-level marketing program in my mind. The path of growth was - a twig with people attending, they take PFAL, tell friends, the twig grows and "splits". Now you have two twigs, with two "leaders". Do that a couple more times and you have a Branch of 5 to 7 twigs. From there a Branch leader is assigned who coordinates the twigs. That continues and when you reach 3-5 branches, you have an Area. 1 Area leader, 3-5 Branch leaders, 15 - 20 twig leaders and "leaves", people attending all the twigs. Once there's enough Branches and Areas, you get a Limb. I wanted to add that of course, this isn't the way a typical Limb grew in to having a Limb Leader, a limb being a state wide entity. What VPW set in motion very early was statewide coordinators at Limb levels when there were only a few branches in a state. Why? To help "move the Word" and get it going. More specifically to establish a homebase of Way leadership that would initiate and maintain outreach. What's moving the Word in the Way ministry? Running meetings that have teachings and enrolling people in classes. The fact that many people did many things to help people with their knowledge of the bible doesn't change the simple fact that historically in the Way, if you didn't run classes you weren't really "moving the Word" or really helping people. In fact it quickly became a value judgment that if you thought you could help people "on your own" with just God and the Word you were on an "ego trip". Money - PFAL costs money. Even if 2,000 people took PFAL in a year, at what? a 100 bucks a head say, it generates 200,000 dollars. A lot of money but not enough to generate all the properties, staff, equipment, etc. that they Way accrued through the 70's and 80's. Multiply that 2,000 by 10% income donations of say 200.00 dollars a year per person and it adds 400,000 bucks to the account. Add in some larger contributors and it adds up. (and some larger states like Florida were hitting a million a year in the mid-80's). It sure quacks like MLM, whether the aims were good or greedy. When I look at how the Way always uses it's money, it's always been used to capitlize internal growth and improvements - properties, staff, improvements, equipments, etc. This increases it's capacity to teach, run more classes, produce more grads, develop more programs for the grads and maintain staff and properties to do that. That's all it does - produce teachings, classes and grads of classes that take more classes. The people themselves are part of an organized and corporately maintained structure of "fellowships" that are self financing, so there's no built-in cost to the Way Nash for the maintenance of it's grads in this fellowship environment, outside of field and home office staff...who are required to do what? Teach meetings and run more classes. If I ask myself the question - exactly what is the Way International headquarters in New Knoxville built to do - what's the answer? House people and equipment to maintain it's teaching ministry. What's the teaching ministry do? Run meetings and run classes. That seems to be the core "business" of the Way. Everybody pays for classes they take and everybody contributes money to the ministry that teaches the classes after they take them. One heck of a self-perpetuating system.

Bob James! Earl Klugh, great stuff Tom. For awhile there, those guys were "it". Earl's "Fingerpaintings" release was a great one, think it was one of his first. Still have an old cassette tape of it around. Sweeeet. I gave up all my old Disney Tweety Bird 45's, the little yellow vinyl ones. The violent sections between Tweety and Sylvester were just too over the top. Some of that stuff was for the birds. Lotta passive-aggressive in that little canary, lot of it.

"DGN/BIT" = "Daggnabbit!" If you get that message, look out. You may have a wild hare in your system.

Charlie Parker - I guess while I recognize his genius I have a hard time thinking about the other side of his life and the fact that so many people revere him as if he could do no wrong. Like others who died young, we never saw what he would have done over the long haul. Chet Baker - I do like his music, his tone, his stuff. It was better when he had teeth. So many of these guys made great music while their personal lives were horrors, families strewn everywhere, abuse of all kinds. Yet they were heroes when they hit the bandstand. Separating their personal lives and values from their music is an exercise in intellectual restraint for me in some cases.

George, music preferences are personal preferences. It doesn't bother me that someone doesn't or didn't like music from my particular era (or any for that matter). There were people that I worked with prior to Joyful Noise who heard our first albums and scratched their heads. "What's that all about?" They just didn't get it....what's with all this cabaret stuff, the tinky tink tunes? Where's the bass on these songs? What's the drummer doing for gawds sake? What're you plugged in to, a transistor radio? We were really trying to put together a range of very disparate backgrounds, skill levels and interests. Most people assume that VPW was sitting there everyday waving the wand over the whole thing and saying "Now write me a song about PFAL, session 5, and make it a real goo-ud one keeds". That isn't what happened. We had to find the songs or write them, learn and arrange them and make them work with what we had. One of the things our good brother Ted is exceptionally gifted at is writing lyrics in standard modern song form, with catchy little hook lines that tag the song. That's illustrated 30 years later, people still remember them, like "Attic of Your Mind" or "Ready to Go". They very neatly captured the language we were using and the main ideas that were percolating at that time, and they flowed out of Ted like water. Not everyone can do that. The music didn't always do them justice, but it was what we could do at the time. And one of the problems you run into with a song that gets established is going back to it later and doing more with it, you can't really move too far out of the range of it's original arrangement. So I think what we did with a lot of them over the years improved, but slowly, as songs went and came back in our repertoire. But I'd be the first one to recognize that what I contributed to some of them was basic and could have been done much better. But as far as liking anything, that's a personal preference. No one has to like something, and most of us all don't like a lot of things simply because we don't. I love Kenny Burrell and saw him last year and he had people stomping the floor after a quite solo rendition of "Greensleeves", arranged like a f-king orchestra with a bridge section that sounded like something they listen to on Mars. We were seated 10 feet from him and the table next to us had a guy in freaking tears. I swear, he's an old guy now but there was a woman a few tables back from us practically ready to throw her bra on the stage. I also like Barry Manilow and can't get past "Week in New England" as one of the most underrated ballads of pop music. How many people can sing "When will this strong yearning end?" and make it sound right? So I'm conflicted. I'm just a troubled soul I guess. :)--> No wonder some of that old stuff sounded strange? :D-->

Aw, Ted don't be too hard on George, he's comparing a 19 year old kid playing piano and learning to write songs with Art Tatum. George is in to jazz. Jazz heads have no mercy because they know that when Charlie Parker puked up his last belly of stomach-acid-soaked heroin, there was more soul and talent in the corn chunks than any 20 players you care to name because they all came out in the key of B flat diminished and spelled out "Chet Baker" on the sidewalk. :D-->

Dunno, Tommy. I've got a semi-large vinyl collection and have played with moving the audio over to digital stereo, mastered and then burned them to CD. It's fairly time consuming that way, but it works out. Someone wrote me out of the blue last year and asked if I had anything so I sent them what I had. No idea who they were really, but I guess they got them. To sidebar for a second, I heard about the CD set you refer to long after the fact. I really don't even know if they were made from the master tapes or copies. The person who did them felt he had the right, I guess. I didn't mind, but it intrigued me that someone else apparently felt enough ownership of the collections to do that. In that sense, they were recorded in the spirit of them being owned by "the ministry". I can't swear by it cut for cut, but the songs themselves that were written and recorded by Joyful Noise were copyrighted to the Way - for the most part and "as far as I know". I had no problem doing that. I was employed by the Way, in the Way Corps and working in Way Productions and my job was to play music, write songs, perform, etc. It wasn't that cut and dried of course, there was a huge amount of personal ownership of the songs, lyrics, etc. because they were being written "from the heart", even when they were written to a theme idea that was proposed. But in the same way the company that I work for owns the computer applications that I write or training materials I develop, the Way owned the music I wrote because they were paying me to write it and because in most cases, I gave the copyright to them. Still and all, the music was recorded in the spirit of a family effort. I am absolutely certain the current Way has no interest whatsoever in that old music. They haven't duplicated it, used it, performed it or done anything at all with it in many years and some of the material in question was written over 30 years ago. So personally I have no problem with duplicating it or anyone else doing it. Out of respect for the other contributors I wouldn't do a large scale "formal" duplication effort without the agreement of the primary contributors though, but that's because I participated in it. I've long been out of touch with some of the folks involved and it would seem the courteous thing to do, but that's me. Some ex-Wayfers could give a damn about that kind of thing - when they want something they just do it. I suppose they may still feel there's an echelon of those "still standing" ex-Wayfers who carry on the ancient traditions and rituals and apparently one of those is self-service. (not referring to you TommyZ, or the individual duplication of the music, just the formal duplicating of the collections for distribution to a select few).

WG, true, true. Ohio does have a wonderful feel to it. Walking in to that song every morning sometimes made me feel like I was in "Morning of the Living Dead". Sort of an underwatery, slow motion feel..."coming this summer, the movie that will change how you look at your Fig Pep....forever!...they're up, they're awake and they're....hungry!" Shaz, I hear ya. "Choooo choooooo!" A children's record, a lot of the songs did sound like that come to think of it. Can't recall how the jacket came together, but the front was a collage of stuff laid out and on the back a color photo of a suited VPW, holding a bible and with his left hand tucked up on his hip in one of those photo-studio poses that are supposed to make men look "natural" but in fact look like they're about to say "These heels hurt".

Summer school, 1971, first morning on the way to the BRC for some breakfast. Mist coming off the pond, birds chirping. Slight nip in the air and a sweet quaint atmosphere permeating the place, rural, pastoral. Seeing others slowly walking up and in from various spots around the grounds and then suddenly... "Beautiful Ohio" hit the air. Scared the crap out of me, first time.

a lA- Songwriters call that a success. :D--> :D--> :D-->

Shaz, be happy to and glad you asked. Joyful Noise members in the first draft were actually coal miners prior to taking up musical instruments and striking up in song. This accounts for why some of the JN male members weren't tall people, being former miners and of a stature that allowed for burrowing and wriggling around down in very tight places underground. Also the odd hair styles in the early years of JN - it took several years for the hair to actually return to a normal look after so many years wearing those little hard hat helmets down in the mines. Little known fact - mining small amounts of coal and other minerals and ore provided JN with the means to support itself on many of the later itineraries. We were able to sell it and trade it for petroleum products like fuel and oil for the vehicles as well as groceries, guitar strings and miscellaneous toiletries. It was amazing! It proved to be a very useful means of... Wait. Wrong life. Sorry. ;)--> :D--> Ted wrote that song (I think...) if I remember correctly, for a theme album titled "All Aboard!' The theme was derived from teachings and topics related to "the mystery" teaching. It was a play on words, sort of, mining the ore out of the ground, mining the Word for truths, that kind of thing. I can't remember where the imagery of coal miners digging away with bibles in hand came from exactly but that's the general idea. As far as any relationship to coal miners, we weren't trying to come off that way although it's occurred to me now I guess someone could have though that. Outside of maybe using charcoal briquets now and then I don't think we were alleging to have any actual first hand experience with mining. Although we did use picks of course.

Exerino! Plurality Palace...ah, yes. So much abundance....the Plurality Plate seemed so strange to me, don't know why. Not the sharing so much as the fact that there was this plate of moderately tepid food sort of congealing around on this plate and sitting there, "available". :)--> Hmmmmmm... "does anyone want this other biscuit that was on my plate and I put back a 1/2 hour ago and now has carrots on it?" "that's not a biscuit, that's my jello!!!" eeeerrrrrwwww!

On a return visit once to Na Na Land, I was befuddled to hear this one at the lunch table during mealtime: "Plurality Plate". Anyone else remember that?

Hey Mark, couple things to try- go here and download the free Hijackthis! program and install it, run it and see what it finds. It can help get rid of some very persistent pests. There's also a program called X Cleaner, you can get the freeware version here. Install it and go to the Expert tab and view what's in your startup and delete stuff. (It will also put itself in your startup so that it will run when you reboot, which you may or may not want to do forever) AdAware too, as IGO pointed to. Run these, they'll find stuff and you can find out what's on the pc. Might help.

Brother Tom, it's time for that love, the most amazing! love of all, the love all the kids are talking about, the love that gives 100 per cent more protein and 100 per cent less cavities... Sea Monkey love!!! Tell your neighbor you love 'em while singing "Hey Ya!" by OutKast. Now, tell them you're name. Here's mine. (Yeah, he stole it, but he made a very compelling case and I didn't want to embarrass him)

Sooooo....let me see, Paw...if everyone here did that, there'd be some pretty short threads, but very loaded up email inbaskets. Are you working for Hotmail Sales now? I'm just kidding. I was mostly kidding above in my post. I would hate for you or anyone to get out the Rule Book. That's gotta be just....BAD!!!!

:D--> Ha, OM! Personally, I'd like to see Pat taken out and thrashed right now. Enough is enough. :D--> Did you really put their first name up, Pat? That's not kosher ever. What a quote though, and worth reading: "Things have changed and our ministry is stronger than ever"...that's like the captain of the Titanic saying "Waddya mean the boat sank??? It just changed direction!"

This new development is, in fact, both exhilerating and joyous for many many people I'm sure. The Way Internationale Carnivale, answering their phones, answering simple questions, and actually selling books to - not just the Holy Roller Disciples, but anyone, average people, perhaps even people who can't read but just want them for the pictures. Wow. What next? Maybe next, if everyone prays REALLY HARD, they'll actually let the staffers have antennaes for their TV's so they can watch the Lima news. (smack!) Stop it socks! Baby steps! Baby STEPS!!!!