My younger son is in eighth grade. This is about the last year that I can help with math homework.
What happened to all that algebra, geometry, and trigonometry that I studied? Did it leak out? Where does all the leaked-out knowledge of parents go?
Why does so much worthless stuff “stick” (lyrics to “The Beverly Hillbillies” and lines from “City Slickers,” e.g.) while so much important stuff “leaks”?
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Brilliant ESPN commercials playing off of college rivalries. My favorite, of course, is where the A&M fan is playing charades. He figures out that there are three words. The first word is “hook” and the third word is “horns.” But he goes silent. He’d rather lose than utter the words “Hook ‘em Horns.”
By some accounts, those were the first words I spoke. As a campus baby while my parents were attending UT, I became indoctrinated in “Hook-em-Horns” philosophy. That’s why Vince Young made January, 2006 such a special month!
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You haven’t shopped online until you’ve shopped at “728b: The Ultimate Church of Christ Shopping Place.” Maybe we could all show up at the afternoon class at Pepperdine in one of those t-shirts!
My son is in 5th grade yet I, too, see the day rapidly approaching when I will be of no help on his homework. It’s just as well. He is already more mature than I.
I get your point on movie lines occupying limited brain space. And yet, why would I jump at the chance to watch Fletch again when Grant and I could very likely act out the entire movie? Still, so many situations call for a movie quote while I seldom need trigonometry.
Mike, how great it was to see you, hear you, and have a chance to share, even just a little, what is happening in our churches. Please keep College in your prayers as we begin a very important year.
I wish you guys were much closer. Not just for the chance to learn from you more often, but because I could repay the favor a bit. If nothing else, I CAN teach math!
If you read Stephen Kings book Dreamcatcher he touches on this topic quite a bit. Shows a guy in his brain taking things he doesn’t need to remember anymore to the incinerator and freeing up space in his mind. Other things he wants to remember shows him going thru file after file looking for it.
So true! But I love being able to throw out movie quotes at will and have an “inside joke” with those that know the movie as well as me!
And how in the world did you find that store? That is too funny!!
728b … It’s like the undercover secret code word for those who grew up in the church years ago. Now if I could just remember how the secret handshake goes
I’m embarrased. Even though I have “grown up” in the church and certainly “years ago” I have NO idea what the significance of “728b” might be, at least, not that I remember.
Please someone, anyone, add to my educational level. Clue me in!!!
Here is the link to said commercial:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=CqUpIWn9AN4
One reason I have a healthy respect for Aggie fans.
Boomer Sooner.
I’d be lying if I said I ever really knew how to do trig (or calculous, etc) and it just leaked out. Fortunately my husband can help the kids with the higher math. But, he doesn’t remember song lyrics half as well as I do. Somehow that is not really much consolation though.
Boomer Sooner.
Favorite movie lines of all time:
Guy to girl - “So tell me, what are my chances (with you)”
Girl to guy - “Not good”
Guy to girl - “Not good as in one in a hundred?”
Girl to guy - “More like one in a million”
long pause
Guy to girl - “So you’re saying there’s a chance…..YEAH!!”
My younger son is in 7th. So, I’ve got another year left, I guess. I’m just thrilled that he still wants to ask me for help.
I have always enjoying dropping movie quotes, book quotes, TV quotes, etc. into conversation.
Trouble is, I’m being surrounded by more and more younger people at work who just don’t get the references.
Kathy - 728B is “Our God, He Is Alive,” minus the stupid slow repeat of the refrain at the end. I always hated that.
If you’re really hardcore CofC, you buy .
let me finish my sentence …
If you’re really hardcore CofC, you buy the T-shirt.
Brad,
Despite what most people think about that movie, I still say it is one of the greatest of all time, and this is coming from someone who prefers cinema classics to the modern, stupid stuff.
How can you narrow down that movie to just one favorite line? There are so many to choose from. My favorites:
“Harry! Your hands are freezing!”
“I took care of it…”
“We got no food….we got no jobs…OUR PETS HEADS ARE FALLIN’ OFF!!!”
Bonus macho points: my first date with my wife (or “wife to be” at that time…) was to that movie. Only a true man can pull that off.
I concur with the “why do these things stick in our brain” thoughts. I have often told my wife that if she could write replacement lyrics to the thousands of songs she knows in her head, she could be a nuclear physicist.
In college, we replaced the lyrics of a song by Aerosmith called “Sweet Emotion” with the botanical (Latin) and common names of herbaceous plants so we could remember them for a test in horticulture class. The seven of us in my landscape architecture studio sang the song out loud for a week in class so we could all get it through our heads. The refrain: “Sweeeeeeeettttttttt….Allllyyyyyssssssuuuuummmmmm…”. Needless to say, we all made perfect scores on the test. Throughout the test, you could hear the tune being hummed from several spots in the room, all marked by landscape architecture students. The professor used us as an example to the rest of class, telling them how landscape architecture students knew their plants better than the horticulture majors. It was hilarious. Nobody ever told him how we did it.
So Mike linked to a similar 728b store in his original post…
…that’ll teach me to read the post the night before, assume it didn’t change overnight, skip quickly down to the comments, and ignorantly post a redundant link.
Ha! Don’t worry, Steve. That’s happened before. A few times I’ve written a post, published it, and then quickly decided to pull it back to a draft to “sit on it” for a while. What I didn’t know is that some people automatically receive it as soon as I publish it?
How do you do that?
More CoC merchandising ideas:
“NO FEAR (of molest-AY-shun)”
“I Lay in the Gravy and All I Got Was This Lousy T-shirt”
“CoCers Do It Three Times a Week”
“Old CoCers Never Die… Well, Yes They Do. But They All Go To Heaven.”
“Guide Garden Directus” (outsiders will really scratch their heads over that one)
Mike - sites like Bloglines feed the RSS from updated blogs to an interface, eliminating the need to open up 40 blogs every day. You instead only see the ones that have been updated.
Deana - did you come up with those? those are great! as Matt Elliott likes to say, I spit milk out of my nose on nearly all of them.
Steve — Yep, they’re mine. They’re a result of Tylenol P.M. and caffeine fighting it out in my system this morning.
Here’s another one:
“CoCers Do It Without the Aid of Mechanical Instruments”
Okay, Deana. Back off the caffeine.
“…feed the RSS from updated blogs to an interface…”
What’d he say?!
About a month ago, my Steve said a prayer that included Guide, guard and direct us. He said he can’t remember saying it because he was praying himself as he said it. I always listen and pray along with him, but at that moment my eyes opened. The world stopped and I thought “He’s just wondering if I’m listening along with God.” I just calmly told him “I wondered if God smiled today?” Nothing more was said.
lol…LOL! Steve Sr., “Confessions of a Luddite.”
Join the millennium, dude, and update your bloody lexicon. Your decade is showing.
qyouthfulb
Yep, Deana definitely went there.
Hey, now, qb … go easy on Steve Sr. He makes up for any technological deficiencies in good looks, which I’m certain he passed on to his children.
Deana - What? No “Go raise your Ebenezer” T-shirts???
The memories I have of 728b was it was sung at every ACU lecturship, gospel meeting in Abilene.
Kerry, I have no idea who you are, but I cracked up at your comment! My husband and I regularly say, “…. our pets heads are falling off”! It’s our own private joke that’s not as obvious as a calliope starting to play in the circus that we lovingly refer to as our house!
I honestly think we might need to order one of those shirts for Grant’s dad after leading C of C singing for a million years!
“I Hastened Glad and Free and All I Got Was This Lousy T-shirt”
Mike,
Any advise on pastoring Deana Nall?
Lynn
I remember looking for “728b.com” a while back, and seeing that it was taken by a church of Christ singles ministry guy in Oklahoma. Is he planning to retire on the proceeds from the domain name auction?
I believe “guide, garden, directus” is latin for “I think we’re just about through here”…
Every time I hear the good old “guide, guard, and direct us”, I start hearing John Wayne from The Searchers when the graveside preacher won’t stop talking: “Put an Amen to it, reverend…PUT AN AMEN TO IT!!!”
“The Church of Christ:
Raising our Ebeneezer Since 33 A.D.
Actually, It May Have Been 1832.
Or was it 1906?
Heck, We Don’t Know. You Tell Us.”
Does anyone remember the classic, “Gladly the Cross-eyed Bear”? or was that “Gladly, the Cross I’d Bear”?
Yea, and what’s wrong with my lexicon, qb?
Mike, congratulations on being able to do 8th Grade math. I had to stop helping after 6th grade. fortunately, my kids never needed much help in math (the one that occasionally needed it just asked her older sister) I think we are better off remember quotes from TV and movies, than silly things like drivers license numbers and the quadratic formula anyway. I never got the 728B thing. When they reprinted that book, could they not have a 729?
728b is one of my earliest memories. A small church of christ in Kermit, TX at my great-grandmother’s funeral. My Mom doesn’t believe I can actually remember losing my black patent leather shoe and singing that song as I was only 3 or 4 years old, but I do. I still get teary eyed singing that song!
P.S. I like the slow part at the end:)
I’m blown away by Wade Hodge’s article you posted Mike - wow and thumbs way up - required reading for all church leaders IMO. I realize we’re poking a little fun at our cofC roots, but maybe it’s truly time to tax an ax to some of those roots.
728B, including the slowly repeated refrain at the end, brings back fond memories of Camp WAMAVA and area-wide youth rallies.
Steve Sr., if ya hafta ask…
qcheerfullyb
P. S. Deana, how about testing your skills with a variant on, “Passing the Plate: Still Separate and Apart after Two Hundred Years.”
And can you work some magic with that grand ol’ tradition, “for those of you who were not able to partake this morning (you slackers!), the Lord’s Supper has been left prepared…you may excuse yourself during the singing of our last hymn and pass through the doors at the back of the auditorium, where you will be shown where to go?” I never had the guts to let some sour-pussed deacon tell me where to go, but my friends always seemed to come back in one piece.
Consider the final verse of 728B:
Our God, whose Son upon a tree
A life was willing there to give
That He from sin might set man free,
And evermore with Him could live!
But what is the subject of the final verb “could live”? It can’t be “man,” because “man” is the object of the verb “might set.” The same noun cannot be simultaneously objective and nominative. Or do we mean that the Son died so that He evermore could live with “man”? No, surely “Him” in the last line means the Son.
Since I have much to learn and still lack the ability to discern who in that verse is living with whom, I customarily keep quiet on 728B’s final verse whilst the rest of the congregation throbs on through it. I want to sing only with the understanding. I conscientiously rejoin on the chorus, where I can, without error, both live and survive.
But, in the interest of upholding truth and exposing error, I once, prior to leading the anthem by request, pointed out 728B’s particularly impossible final verse error and recommended substitution of “Who” in lieu of “And.” My efforts came to naught, however, as the congregation stuck with what is written. The gospel preacher, who was just about to mount the pulpit and expose various other errors prevalent in the religious arena, even exponentially turned up his volume on the last line of the verse, drowning out my feeble corrigendum.
Sometime later, when my courage had partly returned, the editors of a new hymnal sought my advice on what hymns and gospel songs to include. Although with a different number, they knew that 728B had to be in there, partly as a marketing issue among “our people.” Leaving a verse out was unthinkable. I merely recommended my one-word revision to that final verse so that it would parse. No way, they said. They knew something there didn’t stack up, but that’s the way “our people” sing it. It had already been that way through numerous printings of various books, and you can’t argue with success.
Lynn Cook -
No help there. It might be a good investment for the church to keep her in plenty of Target gift certificates.
Mike
Steve, Jr. Gracias, mil!
I’m so impoverished! If ever I learned songs by their numbers, that information has gone way, way back into passive memory, helped along by the use of Spanish language hymnals for 30 years [and I don't rememer a single number of any given song in Spanish either.
] Also, I remain probably the only participant here that has never been to either Nashville nor Searcy, and didn’t attend ACU nor camp. How about that for being one of the marginal poor? 
David,
my english prof at FHU made the same argument, that verse grammatically makes no sense whatsoever.
ahhh…the Church of Christ Anthem
every movement needs an anthem
Civil Rights had “We shall overcome”
we have 728B
Mike, I’ve just recently found your blog, and I’m so glad I did! I’ve almost commented several times, especially when you’ve written about women serving in more public roles. What brings me out of lurkdom, though, is your comment about the ‘Horns.
I was born in Austin. When I was 2 and people would ask me how old I was, I’d hold up two fingers–but not the usual two. I’d give them a HOOK ‘EM! Although our kids are growing up in Fort Worth, I’m trying to indoctrinate them appropriately. In ‘02, I took my then-4-year-old daughter to Austin after UT won the CWS. I must be on the right track because when she saw the Tower lit with #1, she said it’s because “there’s one God and one Bevo.”
And about those T-shirts, how about “Church of Christ MEETS HERE”?
Peas, perfect peas?
My husband and his brothers wrote alternative lyrics to a hymn or two. “A Beautiful Life” became “the spam song.” And they put their hands over their hearts when singing 728b.
What about, “And bless it to its intended use”? When he was very young, my son pulled on my arm during communion(where this phrase was heard over & over for 100 years), & whispered, “Mom, what does intended juice taste like?” I whispered back, “I don’t know, because we’re not allowed to drink it in the cofC”. No, really, what I said was, “it tastes alot like this grape juice we’re drinking.” Bless his little heart.
Kathy:
Put “Our God, He Is Alive” into a good search engine, and you will probably come to it. One location is
http://everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=1023357 . The number it had in a widely used hymnbook is 728B. There were 728 numbers, and then “Our God, He Is Alive” possibly came out after the agreements and printing arrangements had been made for the first 728.
Brian:
I’m pleasantly surprised that the FHU prof had the audacity to question The Anthem, but I cautiously avoided stating that the final verse “makes no sense whatsoever.” What I did write was that I “lack the ability to discern” the sense that is there. Further, in staunch Campbellian hermeneutics, the age of miracles having ceased, yet here one witnesses a noun which is simultaneously objective and nominative, like the cow with two heads, a phenomenon which Cotton Mather could ascribe only to supernatural cause. Although nothing unclean can enter into heaven, The Anthem avers that God holds “the germ” within His hands. Be nice to The Anthem until one day when “We Shall Overcome” and “the crooked shall be made straight and the rough ways shall be made smooth,” presumably even in 728B, and we shall understand.
I still don’t understand why it wasn’t just 729.
Thanks, David. I’ve sung this hymn all my life, including 30 years in Spanish, but just didn’t know it was a revered number, an after-thought number, but revered all the same.
Hey Mike,
Thanks for the post and link to my shop. I have thoroughly enjoyed the discussion that it started.
I also thought you might like to see a few new designs that I put up today. http://www.cafepress.com/728b
-Jeremy
Matt Elliott:
I’m not sure, since I find even the final verse of 728B inscrutable, but I suspect that the book had been legally planned with 728 numbered items, and all copyright permissions had been granted on the basis of publication in a book of 728 numbered items. Thus 728B was a way of stretching without having to renegotiate everything so that the book could have 729. But I’m not sure. I do live in Louisiana where that book was published, and many years ago, long before that book was published, there was a state highway which bore the number 99 1/2, evidently because highways numbered from 100 up received a lower priority, notwithstanding my father’s attempt to convince me as a lad that LA 99 1/2 was just the left lane of LA 99. In my post for November 9, 2006, I observed that Louisiana is paradise. Now, one of the reasons why our license plates can claim that we are in paradise (”Sportsman’s Paradise”) is our entrepreneuring outlook down here. It happens not only with numbers but also with words. The State Constitution posits that “the Legislature shall define and suppress gambling.” So one day the Legislature defined a casino as being something other than gambling, and, voilà, a casino became not gambling but gaming. The 728B Anthem is insightful in its insistence that in God “we live and we survive.” In casinos, it is doubtful that we do either.
Kathy:
El himno se admira en español. ¡Bravo!
The Anthem is revered in Spanish. Superb!
I’m surprised Wendy P didn’t mention “The congregation listened with that pain and agony, he bored them all, that they might sleep.”
I had the interesting experience of attending worship at a “Northern-most” cofc, and I heard ALL the 50’s phrases like “guide, garden directus” (definately LATIN - Southern Latin) and it was like a “flashback” to my 40’s-50’s homechurch in a small town. Three songs and a prayer. Now that’s ONE target-rich environment for Zoe!! The fields are still teeming, Mike. (I’m so sorry I missed you at Zoe Conference.) I sent my nieces some Zoe CD’s in that northern-most congregation…they’ve never heard of them. Heh heh…I may have made a few people uncomfortable as I raised my hands toward the heavens during one hymn. But…the music was appropriate for my action, and it’s what I felt!
If Deana actually gets Target cards out of this…. Seriously!
Until I was in the fifth grade I could have swarn we sang about A “night with Ed and Pin-yon”…and I wondered who the heck was named “Pin-yon” and where was “Ed” in the Bible?
Hard to type and feed a baby…..
Jeremy - I have a confession to make. I didn’t make it home with my 728b mug. Here’s my guess: I went to the back to grab my Powerbook before rushing off to the airport. I’m afraid I set it down there. Just wanted you to know that it wasn’t intentional! Just in too big of a hurry. Great new additions to the site!
David R.
Gracias - sin embargo, no se admiraban el numero, sino el himno.
Thanks! However, the number wasn’t revered, only the hymn [Anthem] itself.
I’m sure this is too late to be of any use. It was 728b because the publishers had already numbered a song “729″ and it was printed on the inside of the back cover.
Mike,
Sorry you didn’t make it back with the mug. Randy Gill told me he saw that you had left it, and he made absolutely no qualms about stashing in his bag for himself. You know, he might have even had a chance to remind you, but decided instead to seize the opportunity in front of him…you know how that Randy can be.
I’ll try to remember to bring you another one at Pepperdine.
I didn’t grow up in the church, but I’ve been around long enough to know the significance of 728b.
I seem to remember there’s a hymn in that particular songbook with a number and then “a” after it. Can’t remember which number though.
Wow, David. I can’t imagine a more thorough answer!