Papa John's founder reunited with cherished Camaro

In 1983, John Schnatter had a gold and black 1971 Chevrolet Camaro Z28. It was one of his most beloved possessions. And then he had to sell it to help pay the bills for his father's tavern. The Camaro was bought for $2,800 and there was some money left over after his dad's business got out of hock.

Schnatter used the leftover dough to start up Papa John's Pizza. Everyone knows how huge a success that turned out to be, how John Schnatter has become a multi-millionaire from that initial investment.

And yet, John Schnatter still needed something to be happy. He wanted to be reunited with his favorite muscle car. So Schnatter went on a nationwide quest to hunt it down.

Last week, with some help from car enthusiast website Jalopnik.com, Schnatter's dream came true. The Camaro was in the ownership of Jeff Robinson of Flatwoods, Kentucky (not far from the headquarters of Papa John's in Louisville). And Robinson is now $250,000 richer after transferring the title of the car over to Schnatter.

Here's John Schnatter with the Camaro in 1983, and Schnatter with it today...

After getting his Camaro back, Schnatter said...

"The Camaro represents what I gave up to start Papa John's. Words cannot capture the emotions I am feeling in getting back that part of my history. I didn't have much back then, but for my business dreams to come true, I had to part with the one true asset I had to my name, and even then, there were no promises of success. I never gave up hope that someday I would get that car back. The foundation of Papa John's was built on my decision to sell the Camaro, and while it may not appear to be a huge sacrifice to some, it represents my roots in this business. And, perhaps it can serve as proof to others that hard decisions today can pay off for you later, if you're willing to believe in what you are doing. I'm extremely grateful for the success of Papa John's, and really wanted this critical piece of our history back."

What an awesome story! And methinks there's a lot of good lesson here about success, having faith in one's self and having hope that no matter how hard the sacrifice, it will be worth it in the end. It certainly did for John Schnatter. So it can be for anybody.

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I'm FINALLY watching STAR WARS: THE CLONE WARS

I'm either losing my interest in Star Wars (probably not) or just incredibly lazy when it comes to checking out new television (more likely). Whatever it is, at long last I'm getting to see Star Wars: The Clone Wars, the CGI-animated series on Cartoon Network set between Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith.

And against what I assumed would be my reaction, I must profess that I am very pleasantly surprised and delighted at this show. Star Wars: The Clone Wars is some of the saga's finest storytelling. The action and dialogue is vintage classic Star Wars, and in many ways hearkens back to the tone of the original trilogy. I've only watched a few episodes so far, and I'm told that what I've seen isn't even the best of the series: that better yet is still coming for me to behold.

So if you're a Star Wars fan too and have been wondering about The Clone Wars series: I'll stake my reputation as a true fan (maybe too true, LOL!) on telling y'all that this is something that you should look into. And I'll definitely be buying the complete Season 1 DVD set when it comes out soon.

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Thoughts on Ted Kennedy

I try not to speak ill of the dearly departed. Regardless of that, some things demand saying...

If it were not for his last name and his family, Ted Kennedy would have gone nowhere. The choices that he made as a person and that he continued to make would have been too grave a taint.

And then, to have held the same elected position since 1962 is way too much. I've known of some people who had been in office for just as long and even longer, but I'm hard pressed to think of any that came to think of their post as something they were entitled to. Ted Kennedy did however, and it thoroughly corrupted his character as a supposed public servant.

The only other thing that I can add is that I sincerely hope he made peace with God before passing away. I don't think that's impossible for anyone.

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"Weird Al" Yankovic imitates the inimitable Queen with "Ringtone"!

Yes, I'm up way early (or is that way late?) awaiting a new song by "Weird Al" Yankovic. But can ya blame me? Especially since Weird Al has bestowed upon us a better summer than we deserve with his "Internet Leaks" collection. A short while ago the fourth and final song from the set was released: "Ringtone". It's a Queen-style anthem celebrating/condemning cellular phone ringtones (duh!). And as always, it's uproariously funny! Can this Al guy make a song about anything or what?

Here's the video for "Ringtone" on YouTube, directed by Josh Faure-Brac and Dustin McLean of Current TV's SuperNews. And on the video's page you can find links where you can purchase the "Ringtone" song or the "Ringtone" video from various online outlets like iTunes. Or you can purchase both and put more coin in Al's pocket (as sound an investment as anything these days).

And if you haven't purchased any of the "Internet Leaks" collection yet (though Lord only knows why) you can buy the whole shebang at iTunes with one lump sum. Or, perish in flames.

It's your choice. But not really.

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A thought from the weekend's contemplation

They who sacrifice enlightenment for power are never free.

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Factory worker steals motorcycle one piece at a time

So the very next day when I punched in
With my big lunchbox and with help from my friends
I left that day with a lunch box full of gears
Now, I never considered myself a thief
GM wouldn't miss just one little piece
Especially if I strung it out over several years.

-- "One Piece At A Time"
Johnny Cash
(written by Wayne Kemp)

Zhang, a worker in a motorcycle factory in China, was no doubt thinking of Johnny Cash's 1976 hit single when he embarked upon his scheme to steal a motorcycle by smuggling one part at a time home with him. "I don't have that much money, so I came up with the idea of taking the parts home and assembling them on my own," he said.

It took him five years but he was able to pull it off. And then he was pulled over as soon as he hit the road for lack of driver's license and title to the bike. Zhang was fined, put on probation and had to return the motorcycle to the factory (and presumably fired).

(It also reminds me of that episode of M*A*S*H where Radar is trying to mail a jeep back home one piece at at time :-)

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Back from the weekend

A lot of zaniness piled up on my desk. I'd better get to work.

I heared you people behaved yourselves pretty well while I was gone. For that you can buy a candy bar and pretend I got it for you :-P

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Gone for the weekend

Back Sunday night or Monday. Unless something crazy/bad/extraordinarily ridiculous happens that demands posting about, no new articles for the next few days.

Probably some fresh and new stuff when I resume next week :-)

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First trailer for James Cameron's AVATAR

Haven't been able to find it on YouTube yet, so for the time being you'll have to watch it in Quicktime format. Which may be for the best anyway, since Quicktime is much more high-res.

Avatar certainly looks good. So far as what the story is supposed to be about, I'm not quite jazzed about it. Yet, anyway. But hey, I've been pleasantly surprised about a movie before, maybe this one will too.

Avatar opens this coming December 18th.

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12,000-year old barbecue joint found in Cyprus

Archaeologists working on the island of Cyprus in the Mediterranean Sea are saying that a cave discovered there in 1961 may have been a take-out barbecue diner used around twelve thousand years ago. Except that instead of beef or pork, those ancient Cypriots were feasting on small hippopotamuses... and the human's appetite may have helped drive the species into extinction.

Thousands of prehistoric hippo bones found in Cyprus are adding to a growing debate on the possible role of humans in the extinction of larger animals 12,000 years ago.

First discovered by an 11-year-old boy in 1961, a tiny rock-shelter crammed with hippo remains radically rewrote archaeological accounts of when this east Mediterranean island was first visited by humans.

It has fired speculation of being the first takeaway diner used by humans to cook and possibly dispatch meat. It also adds to growing speculation, controversial in some quarters, that humans could have eaten some animals to extinction.

In Cyprus, where islanders' love of the barbecue is alive and well to this day, it would have been the pygmy hippo, or "Phanourios minutus," an endemic species resembling a large pig which apparently vanished around the same time people appeared on the island...

I wonder what kind of sauce they used on those hippo ribs.

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Two giants of journalism have passed away

Enigmatic but always sincere and true to himself. That's how I'm always going to think of Robert Novak - called and not without reason "the last of the shoe leather newspaper reporters" - who passed away yesterday at age 78 after a heroic battle against brain cancer.

Novak embodied and epitomized everything that it's supposed to mean to be a reporter: working hard, cultivating sources, and never taking anything at face value. A lot of people are calling him a "conservative" commentator. I don't know if that could really be said about Novak. He was the kind of journalist who, better than most, separated his politics from his profession. But when he had to weigh in on the issues he did it on his own terms. As Novak once observed: "Always love your country — but never trust your government!"

And it goes without saying: Robert Novak was a damned brilliant writer.

And then today comes word that Don Hewitt has died at age 86 from pancreatic cancer.

Hewitt's place in television history would have been secured for any number of things: the first nationwide satellite news broadcast, producing and directing the presidential debate between Kennedy and Nixon, and a bunch more during his more than half a century at CBS.

But it was his idea for a new format of television journalism that Hewitt will be most remembered for. As he wrote in his autobiography "The formula is simple, and it's reduced to four words every kid in the world knows: Tell me a story. It's that easy." In 1968 60 Minutes premiered. It has been the most acclaimed, the most respected and at times the most feared television news program ever since.

Thoughts and prayers going out to the families of both men.

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Awful quiet lately

Too quiet.

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"Too funny!" Billy Bobb videos on YouTube

Holy cow!! Now I have seen everything.

Years ago there was a local television station called WGGT Channel 48, broadcasting from Greensboro. This was back when unaffiliated stations were extremely independent in their programming and such. Well, WGGT might have been one of the last to have what many people will fondly remember as a "horror host": a home-grown character who presented various scary movies and sci-fi flicks on Saturday afternoons.

Except that WGGT did things a little different. It's "horror" host was a goofy redneck named Billy Bobb, and his show was called Billy Bobb's Action Theatre.

And believe it or not, someone somewhere has a trove of old recordings of Billy Bobb from WGGT and is now putting them on YouTube.

Here's a set of promos for Billy Bobb's Action Theatre...

And here are some commercials featuring Billy Bobb for area businesses...

I wonder whatever happened to Billy Bobb's puppet sidekick Junior Prankster. Probably moldering away forgotten in a sock drawer somewhere.

What else can be said but "Too Funny!" :-)

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Mozart killed by strep throat?

That's what researchers are now saying about the famous composer. Instead of foul play or fouler pork, it might have been nothing as mundane as an infection of streptococcus that took Mozart's life at the age of 35.

Read the rest of the story here, including all kinds of neat details about gory death in the Austrian Empire.

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Southeastern Conference bans social media at sports events

"No Twitter, Facebook, YouTube or TwitPic!" That's the dictate being sent to sports fans and students of Southeastern Conference member schools if they want to attend athletic events. Under its newly adopted media policy, the SEC has informed its schools that "Ticketed fans can't produce or disseminate (or aid in producing or disseminating) any material or information about the Event, including, but not limited to, any account, description, picture, video, audio, reproduction or other information concerning the Event."

It's effectively a ban on all so-called "social media". Per the new regs, a fan could get ejected from the premises simply for using his iPhone to take a picture of himself at a Gators football game and sending it to his friends on Facebook.

So what's behind this boneheaded move? The $3 billion contact with CBS for the next 15 years, giving that network exclusive media rights to cover SEC games. In other words: if you go to an SEC event, you and your cellphone are potential competition to a multi-billion dollar broadcast television corporation equipped with the latest cutting-edge high definition technology.

This isn't entirely unheard of, but for a collegiate athletic conference to crack down on the fans themselves is certainly new (and treacherous) ground to tread. Not to mention darn near unenforceable.

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Don't sin at your own funeral, sez cult leader Johnny Robertson

If anyone still harbored doubts about Johnny Robertson - leader of the local cult calling itself the "Church of Christ" - those were erased during last night's broadcast of What Does the Bible Say? on WGSR Star 47.1 from Reidsville.

During the program, which included pre-recorded footage of Robertson speaking yesterday at his "Martinsville Church of Christ", Robertson exclaimed that to have the wrong funeral is grounds enough to displease God! Robertson told his followers to make sure that no instrumental music be played during their last rites.

Here's the transcript of what Johnny Robertson said at "Martinsville Church of Christ" on August 16, 2009 (with bold-faced text indicating spoken emphasis)...

"If you haven't determined how your funeral is going to go, you need to! Because you have family members who do not agree with what I just quoted from the Bible in Ephesians 5:19 about speaking to yourselves in songs, hymn and spiritual song! They will have you in your funeral, all kinds of pianos and stuff like that playing, and you won't want that not at all! But if you haven't said so, guess what? Your family gets to do what they want to do. So let me encourage you today, as we sing that song and we think about going home: when you leave us here behind, as you go home, make sure you leave us some instructions and your family some instructions so EVERYBODY knows how your funeral is SUPPOSED to go. We won't want people dishonoring you, your memory when you leave, what we mean by that is dishonoring you before God. So make sure you make those instructions, young or old, and give them to somebody else who is faithful and will make sure those things get carried out."

So according to Johnny Robertson, you are sinning before God if you have musical instruments playing at your funeral. Which makes it all so vital that you leave explicit directions prohibiting pianos, organs and the like from being used when you can't raise any objections from your casket or urn.

That is hyper-legalism to the nuttiest extreme that I have ever heard of.

Heck, Robertson and his followers are worse than the Pharisees were! Jesus took the Pharisees to task for the ridiculous lengths they went to in following the law. In the case of the "Church of Christ" cult (again, it has nothing to do with the regular Churches of Christ) they can't follow the law nearly enough so people like Robertson have to make up law that's not even scriptural! Ephesians 5:19, from the New International Version, simply states "Speak to one another with psalms, hymns and spiritual songs. Sing and make music in your heart to the Lord". Nowhere does it ever say in the Bible that to have instrumental music is an affront to God.

And then there's the glaringly obvious fact that for all his boasting about "knowing the Bible better than anyone", that Johnny Robertson does not have much of a sincere knowledge of the Bible at all. Because if he did, Robertson should already understand that...

"We are confident, I say, and would prefer to be away from the body and at home with the Lord."

-- 2nd Corinthians 5:8 (NIV)

We can't dishonor God after we have already left this world and gone into His presence. And not Johnny Robertson or anyone else should have this kind of unhealthy focus on whether our funerals are "right or wrong" anyway.

It's the life which Christ has given us that matters most of all: that life free by grace according to the rule of love, and not enslaved to the rule of law.

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I have an idea...

It came to me when I happened to catch tonight's CBS Evening News (which I don't usually watch at all).

Want to know how to economically revitalize the newspaper and television news industries, and increase enlightenment among the general public in one fell swoop?

It's very simple: ban the words "conservative" and "liberal" from usage by professional journalists.

Those words are worse than useless. They are woefully outdated terminology. The only function of "liberalism" and "conservatism" is to excuse one's own intellectual laziness.

(And truth be known, I'm seeing a lot of laziness in CBS's reporting tonight... but not really more than one would expect from CNN or Fox News either.)

That's no doubt a big reason why television and print journalism is suffering a slow and lingering death. The alternatives on the Internet - which are not confining themselves to a paradigm that was faulty well before it was obsolete - are attracting a vast audience wanting and demanding a fresh look at things replete with new ideas. Dumbed-down "debate" along the conservative/liberal lines is horridly boring... and doesn't represent reality at all.

People are getting tired of fakery and illusion. There is a dire and growing hunger for truth that we haven't known very much in living memory. And if the traditional media has any desire at all to survive, it's left with no choice but to commit to the higher standard of ideas, and abandon adherence to the lowest common denominator of cheap ideologies.

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