I was never a big comic books guy, but I watched a lot of “SuperFriends” as a kid and always thought Green Lantern was the coolest superhero. Not sure why. Maybe because Superman and Batman always were hogging the spotlight? Because he had a cool ring? Because of the time travel?

Then I got into “Fat Albert” during high school (ironically, of course) and would have told you as a 17-year-old that The Brown Hornet was my favorite superhero.

But Superman? Nah. He was boring. Never got much into him.

Which is why I’m a little disappointed to find out, via the SuperHero Quiz, that the superhero I am most like is the pasty-dull Man of Steel himself. Come on. He doesn’t even wear a mask! He’s got that dorky little hair curl plastered against his forehead! But that’s not all, because you know what’s also pretty disappointing? I match up with Supergirl as much as I do with Superman. Supergirl. Wow. That’s just…wow.

I guess if Gene Hackman ever bothers you, you can call me. After all, I love to help others.

Take the quiz yourself here. My results are below…

—————

You are Superman
You are mild-mannered, good, strong, and you love to help others.

Superman: 80%
Supergirl: 80%
Hulk: 70%
Robin: 70%
Spider-Man: 65%
The Flash: 65%
Green Lantern: 55%
Iron Man: 55%
Wonder Woman: 50%
Catwoman: 30%
Batman: 35%

(H/T: Mike at Deadly Viper)

Welcome to jasonboyett.com. Due to recent linkage from Church Marketing Sucks and a few other places, we’ve had quite a few new readers stop by over the last few days. Thanks to Feedburner, I know how many people visit this blog each day, and from what city, and via which browser, but I don’t actually know who you are. There are no names (unless you comment). And definitely no faces (unless you comment with an avatar).

Only disembodied cities: Philadelphia, Colorado Springs, Los Angeles, Narberth (!)

So…let’s get to know one another. If you are so inclined, leave a comment with your name and your location and any other information you think we should know.

(If you’ve never commented before, it’s pretty easy. You can sign in with OpenID, which means if you have a Blogger, WordPress, LiveJournal, or AIM identity you can use that. Or you can sign in quick and easy with the “anonymous” option. All you have to do is type in the occasionally tricky word verification thing. This keeps the riff-raff out.)

Today is Earth Day. It’s been around, in an official capacity, since the late 60s. The earliest I can recall hearing about it is during my freshman year in high school, which was 1988. We talked it up a lot at school that year, and the student council was selling Earth Day t-shirts with something about saving the earth and recycling on the front. Green silkscreen. The shirts were cool. I bought one and wore it proudly on Earth Day.

I’m not sure of the chronology, but I ran into my 9th grade Sunday School teacher while I was wearing the shirt. I liked the guy. He was nice and fairly young. He was big-time into Young Earth Creationism (the literal 7-day variety), so almost all of our Sunday School lessons turned into discussions about where the dinosaurs came in and how Noah could have fit some baby dinosaurs on the ark and whether or not “leviathan” in Job was a dinosaur reference. He was super-knowledgeable about that stuff and we ate it up.

This is the first thing he said when he saw me wearing my Earth Day shirt: “Why are you wearing that? You don’t believe that junk, do you?” He was not kidding at all. In fact, he was a little angry. I mumbled an answer about how they were selling them at school. His implied message — that there was something unchristian about Earth Day — was news to me. I was devastated. I don’t remember ever wearing that shirt again. I never talked to him about it, but I definitely looked at Earth Day differently for the next few years. I didn’t buy any more shirts.

It was another few years before I decided that my dinosaur-loving Creationist teacher was flat-out wrong (about a lot of things) but especially for being so jerky about my shirt. I still see him every once in awhile. Not sure if he’s come around or not.

But I have.

And I’m not gonna soft-shoe it, either. Christians need to repent for having gotten in the way of the last few decades of environmental initiatives — for treating any environmental talk with knee-jerk suspicion, for acting like it’s all some sort of pagan/liberal mumbo-jumbo, for forgetting that creation care is a spiritual issue and a poverty issue and a human rights issue and not just a corporate or political one. It is not an anti-Christian thing at all…despite what our 9th-grade Sunday School teachers may have said.

I’ll end the rant and try not to get too preachy about it. But here are some resources to consider on this Earth Day:

Read this: One of the best faith & environmentalism books I’ve read is Tri Robinson’s Saving God’s Green Earth. Tri is a pastor whose Boise church is doing some groundbreaking things when it comes to the intersection of religion and conservation. Some great articles at their website.

Another great book? Serve God, Save the Planet, by Matthew Sleeth.

Watch this: We have a big honking consumerism problem. I have a big honking consumerism problem. And it’s good to recycle stuff and walk instead of drive and try to turn off the lights when you leave the room. But those are tiny actions around the edge of the problem. They won’t fix the environmental crisis. Instead we need to get to the heart of the problem, and its heart is consumerism. We buy too much stuff we don’t need. That’s why I think the Junky Car Club is a great idea. That’s why I also want to recommend this short film by Annie Leonard. It’s 20 minutes long, but it’s a fast-paced, funny, eye-opening 20 minutes. You want to participate in Earth Day? The best place to start is by watching “The Story of Stuff.”

Here’s a teaser.

Watch the whole film at www.storyofstuff.com.

Try this: If a young person gets excited about something good — something that’s beneficial to someone else, even if you think it might be somehow misguided — do not discourage him or her from pursuing it. To do so is mean, selfish, and a crappy way to be human.

On a Saturday morning a few weeks ago, my 7-year-old daughter, Ellie, was riding her scooter down the block. She came back in a hurry, a little frantic because, four houses away, one of our neighbor’s sprinkler heads had come off and water was gushing down their driveway. Ellie had learned at school that week about not wasting water. She was upset about the lawn geyser, “because we might run out of water someday.” She wanted me to go fix it. Or go turn off their sprinkler. My first response was to tell her it wasn’t our yard and we couldn’t really do much about it. And that their broken sprinkler was not going to drain our water supply. Then I thought about my Earth Day shirt, and my Sunday School teacher. And about Ellie’s out-of-nowhere passion for water conservation. So I walked down to that house and — despite getting soaked and muddy — screwed that sprinkler head back into place. Water crisis solved. Ellie was happy. In a small way, we saved the environment that morning.

Baby steps.

Experiment time. I want to let you in on a fun little opportunity that involves small acts of kindness, teensy sacrifices, and the potentially big power of viral web-based fun. Some friends of an online friend of mine in Delaware have the crazy habit of taking a homeless person out to lunch every Wednesday. One of these homeless people they’ve really grown to admire is a guy named Herman. Herman is a fantastic chess player, a community leader (among others of his social status), and the kind of guy most of us totally ignore.

So these guys, Terry Foester and Ben Cooper, want to do something nice for Herman. But they want to do it in the smallest way possible: they’re looking for 500 people to send $1 in the mail to the Herman Fund. Please understand…as far as I can tell, this isn’t George Costanza and “The Human Fund” (slogan: Money for People), though the names are way similar. It’s completely legit, but you’ll just have to trust these two guys with your dollar. And they don’t want anything more than a dollar, because they’re hoping — Shane Claiborne-style — that “a bunch of smalls come together to form a bigish small.”

If you’re interested in being part of something that could end up being really cool, go to the “bigish small news” post at Terry’s website, scroll down, and follow the instructions. If you decide to participate, make sure to comment on the post and tell where you’re from.

Give Herman a dollar.

(H/T: Ken Grant. Also posted at the Junky Car Club and my blog at Relevant.)

Here’s what you should know. Most scientists now believe that the dinosaurs were wiped out 65 million years ago by the asteroid or comet that slammed into sea near the Yucatan Peninsula, leaving a 186-mile long hole. Mass extinction followed. Ninety percent of species vanished.

And in 1908, a comet fragment 130 feet wide dropped onto Tunguska, Siberia. It exploded in the air and flattened a thousand square miles of uninhabited forest. Its force of detonation would have been something like 10 megatons — 700 times the power of the Hiroshima bomb. Had it hit modern-day New York or a related metropolis? The city would have disappeared.

Which is why NASA’s always on the lookout for asteroids that have the potential to hit our planet. Because it could be bad. Return to the Ice Age bad (and not the kind of Ice Age that has funny talking mastodons). A piece of space debris with a six-mile diameter could pretty much cause global extinction. They seem to blast through our atmosphere every 50 to 100 million years, and more than a thousand of these monsters are thought to be floating around in Earth’s general vicinity. So far everything’s cool, but we’re paying attention.

Anyway, not long ago the brains at NASA fixed upon 99942 Apophis, a 1350-foot long asteroid with a goofy name. They didn’t fix upon it very long, though, because they concluded pretty quickly that, if Apophis hit the earth, it would happen in 2029, and there was only a 1 in 45,000 chance that would happen. Not too worrisome.

But wait. Some 13 year-old German kid named Nico Marquardt — getting by with only a telescope and a calculator and an even bigger brain than the NASA geniuses — took a look at Apophis on his own. He noticed that NASA apparently made a mistake in their calculations. Sure, Apophis could miss the Earth in 2029, but what if, in the process of not destroying us, it hit one of our thousands of communications satellites? And what if that strike knocked Apophis off-course? What then?

He concluded that if that were to occur, there was a 1 in 450 chance Apophis would strike the earth. Not in 2029, but in 2036.

There is a major difference between 1-in-45,000 odds and 1-in-450 odds. And NASA admitted that, yep, the boy was right. They hadn’t thought about that whole satellite thing.

So…what do you have planned for 2036? And what else do our 13-year-old astronomy geeks need to be looking for?

[Update: Wait! That kid made some miscalculations. Upon further review, NASA now says they are confident in their calculations and you don't have to cancel everything you have planned in 2036. I think we've all learned a valuable lesson here: you can't trust complicated logarithms in the hands of 13 year-olds. You can't always trust NASA, either.]