As a campus minister working with students, I always say that I'm either the first to know something going on in students lives (i.e. a dating situation or a job opportunity or a change of major) or the last to know.
When it comes to cool stuff on the internet, however, I'm much more consistent: I'm always the last to know.
So it's with great fear and trepidation that I introduce something cool that I just found out about last week: www.jumptheshark.com. "Happy Days" was a long-running, quality television show in the mid-20th Century. One episode they had Fonzie pull a stunt where he jumped a shark--I believe it was with his motorcycle, but I'm not entirely positive on those details. Clearly, when you've got one of your main characters pulling gratuitously silly stunts, you've begun to run out of quality, creative ideas. From that point on, the show began to go downhill.
Ergo, jumptheshark.com. They specialize in identifying when each show has peaked, and they look back at old shows to analyze the exact moment of the beginning of the end. Some shows never jump the shark, others jump the shark and yet manage to jump back over the shark with new writers, new plot lines, etc.
The person who told me about this was a pastor who was talking about applying the concept to churches or other ministries. Has your church 'jumped the shark?' Is your campus group on the way down hill? Fun questions every Christian leader likes to think about it!
At any rate, check it out, it's a pretty fun site with most of your favorite shows listed. I apologize to those of you who have known about this so long it's akin to me posting that "the earth is round" or "I heard that that Anakin Skywalker character in Star Wars will turn out to be Darth Vader" (both statements are roughly of equal import).
I've got meetings all day tomorrow and half of Wednesday, so nothing new tomorrow but hopefully I'll get a chance to post Wednesday afternoon.
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