Phantom of the Opera. The movie "Phantom of the Opera" was very good, but could have been outstanding except for two things:

• The lip-synching was off, and it was very distracting. I'm glad that the actors did their own singing, rather than having other person's voices dubbed over them. But they just did a poor job of dubbing in their own voices after the acting was done.
• I wasn't all that crazy about the guy who played the Phantom. His voice was nothing special. Or maybe I just had Michael Crawford's voice too firmly in my head.

Newsboys. Pam got me the Newsboys "Adoration" worship CD for Christmas. I love it. The song "Presence" is especially outstanding. It's been playing on the local Christian radio stations for quite a while now. The Newsboys may just be my favorite Christian group at this point, narrowly edging out Third Day (whose last album was very poor). Our worship team does "He Reigns," and the congregation loves it. I'm hoping we can do "It is You" and "Presence" in the months ahead. The Newsboys are putting out some really great stuff.

Tsunami. ABC and CNN had superb specials last night on the tsunami, which is probably the worst natural disaster of my lifetime. Amazing stuff. I'm fascinated by some of the video which is coming now of the waves actually approaching. I always assumed a tsunami featured a tidal wave. I guess it can include a tidal wave, but not necessarily. In this case, it looked like a regular wave breaking on the beach...except that it didn't break and recede, but just kept going inland, pushed by masses of water behind it.

At work today, I sent out two emails to our church constituency reporting on the tsunami. Our missionary couple in India live in a town back from the coast, so they are fine. But about 5000 people from coastal villages, which were struck hard, descended on their town, and they were able to provide help.