I just noticed that Amazon has a ridiculous $5 MP3 album sale going on. This time around, they're bucking the typical "$5 Friday" trend and putting 50 albums on sale for Black Friday (instead of five).

Miss the Viva la Vida (Coldplay) or Narrow Stairs (Death Cab for Cutie) sales earlier this year? Now you can get another crack at 'em. Not to mention music by some other great bands: Radiohead, Fleet Foxes, TV On the Radio, Portishead, Vampire Weekend, Ra Ra Riot, The Walkmen, Shearwater, and REM.

A good half-dozen of the 50 albums on sale right now will be on my Top Ten Music list for 2008. Go take a look,...just keep in mind, you may have to restrain yourself.

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UPDATE: You can now view and download the official NCAA BRACKET 2009. And NCAA Bracket Predictions are now up.

Thanks to the good folks at ESPN, we can begin engaging in NCAA tournament speculation in November. KU comes in as a #6 seed, which will probably be about right...although if the young (very young) Jayhawks win some games down the road, their "national champion" braggin' rights could pull them higher.

In the current bracket, KU opens the tournament against MU (#11). Which would be, quite simply, a regional grudge match on a national stage, culminating in an MU slaughter. Not as fun as shocking North Carolina, but not a bad opening round prospect...

In this bracket, KU would have to beat UCLA and win the West before they could play the Tarheels and fluster Tyler Hansborough again.

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Early in the life of this blog, I posted pretty frequently about my founding premise and guiding principle: the idea that life is bittersweet, and some of the most revealing insights into the nature of our lives, and the goodness of Jesus Christ, emerge in those paradoxical moments when good and evil, pain and joy, dark and light, commingle.

I stand by all of that, and you can still read those posts, although I talk about a lot of other things these days. However, when I cracked Spectacular Sins by John Piper, I couldn't resist passing along this excerpt:

We are pushing our way through a blood-spattered life that makes us feel connected to the world and disconnected at the same time. We are here but not here. Love binds us to the tragic earth, and love binds us to the Treasure of heaven. Christians are strange. Our emotions are inexplicable in ordinary terms.

If I may be so bold (as the ragged, penniless church planter complimenting the famous man): John Piper gets bittersweetness. And Spectacular Sins is shaping up to be a spectacular book.

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These are the three youngest kiddos in the Vanderhorst clan. We went on a photo shoot in Kansas City, Missouri's West Bottoms area a couple weeks back and had a lot of fun.

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