Simply Ming

Chef Ming’s Top 5 Tips for Business Success


Always keep your door open to staff and treat them like family.

Do demographic research to help select the location of a brick and mortar business and ensure you’re reaching the right audience.

Be present–literally–Know what is happening with all aspects of your business.

Set yourself up for success before launch–have the ability to pay for expenses for several months, even with no profit.

Don’t underestimate the power of word of mouth.

-Chef Ming Tsai

Wright with Colbert

···········································································

Stephen Colbert (SC): Bishop, thank you so much for joining us. Now, you are a bishop of the Anglican church, correct?
Bishop N.T. Wright (NTW): Correct, yes.
SC: Okay, great. Well, welcome. Now, I'm a Roman Catholic; no hard feelings about the whole Henry thing. Okay?
NTW: Absolutely.
SC: Let's not try to make this... let's not try to settle any scores. Okay?
NTW: We actually have an annual golf match of Anglicans and Catholics, and I'm sorry to say that they won the first two, but we shared the one last week. So we're getting on alright.
SC: Okay, great. Well that's a good ecumenical step.
NTW: Absolutely. We played for a dogma a hole.
SC: A dogma a hole?
NTW: Go figure, yeah.
SC: That's very nice. Now, you talk a little bit about dogma -- really quite ancient dogma -- in your bookSurprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection and the Mission of the Church. I love the nameSurprised by Hope. I believe that will be the title of Hilary Clinton's next book, also.

 [Laughter]

Amend or Defend

Unpopular law

by | Janie B. Cheaney [abridged] World Magazine

  

… last month when Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg suggested, in a visit to Egypt of all places, that the document she has sworn to uphold is approaching its sell-by date. "I would not look to the U.S. Constitution if I were drafting a constitution in the year 2012." Other models might better serve, such as South Africa's: "That was a deliberate attempt to have a fundamental instrument of government that embraced basic human rights [and] had an independent judiciary."

It may be the first time a justice has actually said this, though the Court has been stretching the document for at least 80 years. Ginsburg's comments indicate that the elastic is shot, a notion seconded by Adam Liptak of The New York Times.

Liptak argues that nobody wants to model their sparkly new constitution on ours because it's "terse and old," with "relatively few rights," and is notoriously difficult to change. "Other nations routinely trade in their constitutions wholesale, replacing them on average every 19 years."

Ordination Charge

Charge at the Ordination of CJ Bowen to Preach
by Glen Knecht

Build your ministry on these 2 things:

1. Humility
Whitefield said on his death bed that he wanted to attempt to preach one last time.  Who is sufficient for these things?
2. Tears
Tears are the lubircation of your preaching.  They show you care for the hurting, sinful, tempted, sporadic attenders, those struggling with doubts.  They show you are a shepherd of the whole flock, not just a part.

Banish these 2 things:

1. Pride
2. Professionalism

Pray every day to be delivered from these.  You will overcome them.

Book List [what i've been reading/listening to lately]...

you are what your mind eats ...

Gospel Clarity

"This is the gospel, that sins are remitted in the name of Christ; and no heart ever received tidings more glad."

- Huldrych Zwingli
[photo:pbase.com]

Leviathan

"GOD TO JOB:

'Can you take leviathan home as a pet? 

If you merely touched him, you'd never forget.

So who is it that darkens my counsel?
Who speaks empty words without knowledge?
Brace yourself up like a man
And answer me now, if you can.'

JOB'S RESPONSE:

'I am unworthy, how can I reply?
There's nothing that You cannot do.
You are the storm that calmed my soul.
I place my hand over my mouth.'"

- Michael Card, Job Suite

[photo of Gideon at the Maryland Science Center by the [admittedly fanciful] dinosaur exhibit.]