The rules:

1. Take a picture of yourself right now.
2. Don’t change your clothes, don’t fix your hair…just take a picture.
3. Post that picture with NO editing.
4. Post these instructions with your picture.

It’s hard to remember a time when if you didn’t catch a show when it came on TV, you just totally missed it. My Dad says The Rifleman would come on once a month along with several other programs.

Watching all these shows you quickly realize that the TV western is a dead genre. Maybe like good old country music, it represents a longing for simpler times and the belief in certain values. The Rifleman is full of moral lessons: what it means to be a man, responsible for others and standing up for what’s right; the importance of hard work and honesty. Each episode Lucas McCain never misses a chance to instruct his son Mark on how to do the right thing. Watching a show like The Rifleman, you realize that popular media has the amazing ability to promote certain values through story. It just doesn’t seem to anymore. Can you think of any recent music, film, or television show which tries to promote certain values beyond the purely political? In what venue do we now consider larger moral questions?

Another argument for casting your net widely is that you learn about new and fascinating things that rarely pop up in daily conversation, especially in our cloistered workaday lives. Today by way of a diary entry by Samuel Pepys, the ‘Eikon Basilike’ (full text), the “Royal Portrait”, a purported autobiography by King Charles I published after his regicide following the English Civil War.

I am not so old, as to be weary of life; nor (I hope) so bad, as to be either afraid to die, or ashamed to live: true, I am so afflicted, as might make Me sometime even desire to die; if I did not consider, That it is the greatest glory of a Christians life to die daily, in conquering by a lively faith, and patient hopes of a better life, those partiall and quotidian deaths, which kill us (as it were) by piece-meales, and make us overlive our owne fates; while We are deprived of health, honour, liberty, power, credit, safety, or estate; and those other comforts of dearest relations, which are as the life of our lives.

Though, as a KING, I think My self to live in nothing temporall so much, as in the love and goodwill of My People; for which, as I have suffered many deaths, so I hope I am not in that point as yet wholly dead: notwithstanding, My Enemies have used all the poyson of falsity and violence of hostility to destroy, first the love and Loyalty, which is in My Subjects; and then all that content of life in Me, which from these I chiefly enjoyed.

Indeed, they have left Me but little of life, and only the husk and shell (as it were) which their further malice and cruelty can take from Me; having bereaved Me of all those worldly comforts, for which life it self seems desirable to men.

Did you see it? What do you think?