Online wedding invitations

As the wedding draws closer, I'd like to share some comments on one aspect of wedding planning: the invitations.

We decided to go the cheaper / more environmentally friendly / possibly easier route and do online invitations. We decided to use an online invitation service rather than just sending out an email ourselves, because those services can manage RSVPs and stuff. We figured Facebook invites would be too informal for a wedding. So we tried out a few other invitation services by sending Cathy and myself invitations to a sample event.

The first one we tried was Evite, because I'd heard of it before. This turned out to be the most annoying invitation website that we tried. When we replied to our invitation, it asked us to pick a password. It seemed to want all the guests to sign up for site memberships, but I think there was a small link allowing guests not to get a membership. Maybe there's a way for the event creator to disable this option, but I didn't go searching for it. I find it annoying when I'm pressured to sign up for a website (which is part of the reason this blog is on a service where you don't need a membership to leave comments), and we didn't want to annoy our guests, so Evite was out. They also have advertising on the invitations, which seemed tacky for a wedding invitation. We're trying to keep the wedding fairly simple and inexpensive, but it is still a much more significant event than an ordinary party.

Then we tried Pingg. Their free service is a lot less annoying than Evite. Guests don't get pressured into signing up. And you have the option of paying a small fee to remove the ads from the invitations.

Finally, we tried Sendomatic. They specialize in ad-free invitations, so their free service can only invite 10 guests per event. For their paid service, you have to pay based on the number of people invited. Like Pingg, they don't pressure guests into registering for their site. Overall, I think their invitations look a bit more elegant than Pingg's. On Pingg, you choose a dominant picture for your invitation, or upload your own. On Sendomatic, you choose a background image, and you can also upload an image that will appear over the background, above the text.

We decided to use Sendomatic, but I would not hesitate to recommend Pingg too. Either option is a lot cheaper and probably a lot less work than mailing invitations. And if some people on your invite list don't have email, you could print off a copy and mail it to them.

And now the downside of using a service like this: some email services will put the invitations in the spam folder. Fortunately, these services let you see which invitees have clicked on the link in their email to view the actual invitation. Then you can contact the people who haven't seen the invitation and remind them that there's an invitation in their email somewhere. You can also re-send the invitation (without paying an extra fee) if they already cleared out their spam folder. Contacting these people was probably at least half the work of doing online invitations, but probably still less work than managing the RSVPs from paper invitations.

So overall, I give electronic wedding invitations a thumbs up, but they have their annoying traits.

And as the wedding draws near, I'm counting my blessings. I've found someone who is fun to be with, a great friend and companion, beautiful, and who brings out the best in me. (That's four, but there are plenty more.)

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Gentile Passover

Last Monday I had the privilege of being a part of a combined passover and Easter celebration. Since the last supper that Jesus shared with his disciples before he died was a passover meal, combining the two makes sense for Christians.

I'm sure it wasn't the most authentic passover meal. We didn't follow all the instructions in Exodus 12, and that's not even the only source of passover instructions in the Bible. There are also traditions not found in the Bible that Jews follow at the passover.

We cooked lamb over an open fire, outdoors, and we had unleavened bread to go with it. One of the people there had made the unleavened bread, and the lamb was from a halal butcher. (Halal standards are similar to kosher standards.) Some of the conversation was about the passover and Easter, and some was casual conversation about other things. As part of the meal, we took communion together, as Jesus instructed us to do in remembrance of him. It was special to be able to recognize the death and resurrection of Jesus in a way that I'm not used to--a somewhat less ceremonial way that took more time, was more fun, and may have been more like the original Last Supper (in spirit anyway) than our typical communion celebrations.

But there was something disturbing about this too. As we read Exodus 12, verse 12 stuck out to me, in which God says, "On that same night I will pass through Egypt and strike down every firstborn—both men and animals—and I will bring judgment on all the gods of Egypt. I am the LORD." The Israelites' liberation so many years ago required other people to die, or to suffer because someone close to them died. Some of the ones who died would have had very little to do with the Israelites' suffering and oppression, and some were kids. And in the Christian remembrance of Jesus's death, we symbolically commit cannibalism, symbolically eating the flesh and drinking the blood of the one who told us to do that. Or if you follow the Catholic belief in transubstantiation, you're actually metaphysically committing cannibalism, but only because the one who gave his life for you told you to do that.

I believe it's important for religious people to wrestle with the disturbing aspects of our faith, not to just pretend they're not there, or use some semi-satisfying explanation to pretend they're not disturbing.

In both the passover and Easter stories, liberation required someone to die. Is it better that the people who died deserved it (as in some of the Egyptians at the passover), or that the one who died was willing but didn't deserve it?

When the imitation is better

There are lots of cheesy or unusual cover songs out there, but have you ever heard the cover version of a song before you heard the original, and then thought the original was just cheesy? Here are some examples that I've noticed:

The Renegades of Funk
Cover: Rage Against The Machine
Cheesy Original: Afrika Bambaataa and Soulsonic Force

Mad World
Cover: Michael Andrews and Gary Jules
Cheesy Original: Tears for Fears

These original versions may have sounded pretty good when they came out, but when creative people decided to make music in the 1980s, they doomed themselves to be made fun of by the future.

I mentioned this idea for a blog post a while back to a friend, and she borrowed the idea on her blog. Can you think of any other examples of this phenomenon?

Olympics are over

So the Winter Olympics have ended once more. It was special to be living in the host country, but I guess it didn't make much difference in my overall Olympic experience.

When I first heard about Canada's "Own the Podium" initiative, I was skeptical about Canada's chances of winning the most medals. Canada has a relatively low population, and no matter how much money we pump into our Olympic program, we can't buy talented athletes. The USA consistently dominates Olympic medal counts, and would be very tough to beat.

So during the Olympics when criticism of "Own the Podium" got more vocal, I don't think my opinion changed much. The Canadian athletes weren't doing worse than I'd expected. Yes, I'd hoped we could win the most medals and I figured we would do better than in most Olympics, but winning the most medals always seemed unlikely.

Then Canada won the most gold medals of any country. Not only that, we won more gold medals than any country ever has in the Winter Olympics. That surprised me. When you consider how Canada didn't win any gold medals the last time we hosted the Winter Olympics (and the time we hosted the Summer Olympics for that matter), this is an even bigger accomplishment.

Congratulations to all of our athletes, whether you won gold, silver, bronze, or a participant ribbon. (Or do they give out participant ribbons in the Olympics?)

God's revelation

Following up on my previous posts about ideas I've rejected (religious ideas in particular), I'd like to write about an idea I was raised with that I haven't rejected--the idea that God really has revealed himself to people, through prophets, the Bible, etc.

While this idea can be used to turn religion into a controlling, oppressive thing, misuse doesn't mean the idea itself is wrong. The idea of natural theology (that our ideas about God can just be based on what we perceive) is attractive, but it has its own problems. It's so subjective. Personally, I think God's characteristics are not obvious from looking at the world around us. If they were, there would be a lot less variation in the world's religions. If God actually has revealed something about himself to people, those things that he revealed would be much more accurate and beneficial than anything we could figure out ourselves.

That leaves us with a glaring question: how do we know what God has revealed and what's just made up by people? Or can faith somehow transcend this question? Is there some way we can have a devoted faith without knowing for sure, intellectually, that God revealed certain things?

My pooping has been politicized

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