OMG, My Wife Doesn’t Like “Stand by Me.”

Certain things should be hammered out before people get married.  The other day I discovered that my wife doesn’t like Stand by Me.  This is ridiculous.  What’s not to like?  Underage drinking and smoking, dead bodies, adventure, guns, pie eating contests, LEECHES, vandalism, good friends, and great music.  Oh yeah, and not one single girl in the whole freakin’ movie.  Perfect.  As if you needed further proof that this is one of those rare instances where the movie is better than the book (though the book “The Body” by Stephen King, is great), take a look at this scene (HN is a friend of the site and this is her favorite part of the film):

I found out this little nugget of information about my wife the other day because I had this song stuck in my head (big surprise, I know), that I was positive came from this movie but it wasn’t listed on any of the soundtracks.  Thanks to the beauty of netflix instant streaming, I was able to pull up the movie right away.  I watched (and quoted every line) until I finally heard the song in the background during the scene when the boys have camped out following the train dodge on the trestle.

And what a great song it is.  I bring it to you here:

I chose the live version there even though the radio version is better-his voice is just so perfectly clear (you can hear it here), because I LOVE the dancing.  I mean, wow.  Those are just some inspiring moves.  Nice and repetitive, all upper body.  That’s really good stuff.  I don’t give a damn what those scientists say:

How big is the church you grew up in?

Doing some research today about megachurches and came across this money quote from Chaves (2006):

The bottom line is that the number of very large Protestant churches has increased in almost every denominalion on which we have data…[however]…Roughly speaking, if you look at the 20 biggest churches at time 1, only half of them are still on that list 20 years later, only one quarter are still on the list 40 years later, and only 2 are still on the list 60 years later. It is not that these very large churches peak and then shrink dramatically, although some do.  Rather, the biggest churches of the moment are overtaken by a new cobort of churches that have caught that decade’s cultural wave and ridden it to the top, and then those churches are overtaken by the next wave, and on and on.

So in essence, while the trend over time is toward a greater percentage of church goers in larger and larger congregations, it is not the case that large churches keep getting bigger.  Rather, new, even larger churches are springing up out of whole cloth.  Fascinating.