No Grasp of Your Reality

Nero Bush fiddled strummed while Rome New Orleans burned flooded?

Today is our 6th Wedding Anniversary. To celebrate, Tom and I went to a concert in Phily last night. Tonight, we took the kiddies out to dinner at the Longhorn Steakhouse - all of the manners-practice at cheap food joints paid off. They were very well behaved, making mommy and daddy quite proud.

XXII

When our two souls stand up erect and strong,
Face to face, silent, drawing nigh and nigher,
Until the lengthening wings break into fire
At either curvèd point,–what bitter wrong
Can the earth do to us, that we should not long
Be here contented? Think. In mounting higher,
The angels would press on us and aspire
To drop some golden orb of perfect song
Into our deep, dear silence. Let us stay
Rather on earth, Belovèd,–where the unfit
Contrarious moods of men recoil away
And isolate pure spirits, and permit
A place to stand and love in for a day,
With darkness and the death-hour rounding it.
- Elizabeth Barret Browning from Sonnets from the Portuguese

A question for God: If Christians have the same spirit, why do they disagree so much?
I am really struggling with having patience with legalistic christians whose only joy comes from the delight in robbing it from others. I missed the part where holiness is defined by how loud one can gasp or by the ability to refrain from cracking a smile.

So, you all saw that news that Pat Robertson, former presidential candidate, and now impotent spokesmen for disillusioned dispensationals, had called for the assissination of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. Now, granted the U.S. doesn’t like the guy that much (Chavez, I mean), but after hitting the airwaves, the U.S. Federal government distanced themselves from Robertson pretty quickly.

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Hear my voice, O God, in my meditation;
Preserve my life from fear of the enemy.
Hide me from the secret plots of the wicked,
From the rebellion of the workers of iniquity,
Who sharpen their tongue like a sword,
And bend their bows to shoot their arrows—bitter words,
That they may shoot in secret at the blameless;
Suddenly they shoot at him and do not fear.

They encourage themselves in an evil matter;
They talk of laying snares secretly;
They say, “Who will see them?”
They devise iniquities:
“We have perfected a shrewd scheme.”
Both the inward thought and the heart of man are deep.

But God shall shoot at them with an arrow;
Suddenly they shall be wounded.
So He will make them stumble over their own tongue;
All who see them shall flee away.
All men shall fear,
And shall declare the work of God;
For they shall wisely consider His doing.

The righteous shall be glad in the LORD, and trust in Him.
And all the upright in heart shall glory.

Google Talk is Google’s new IM service that they’re supposed to be announcing tomorrow. All you need is a Jabber client, and a GMail address (your id is going to be the part before the “@gmail.com”)… read this and hop on the service today!

I do have some extra gmail invites, so if you’d like a free email account, and I have some idea who you are, just ask and I’ll send you an invite.

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I’m surprised I haven’t written anything about Google Earth yet, but I’ve only had a chance in the past two weeks to really play with some of the features. If your computer can support it, I strongly suggest you take the time to download and play with it.

One of its coolest features is the ability to linkify places anywhere in the world. After you download and install the software, try clicking on the following links to see some of the places I’ve stayed in Japan and Australia:

• ANA Hotel Tokyo
• Oakwoods Aoyama
• Waldorf Canberra

Jonathan Schwartz, president and COO of Sun Microsystems, has written a very insightful post about a conversation he had with the CTO of a “big media company”.

This CTO wanted Schwartz to support technology that would allow media companies to watermark digital media, and prevent thieves from stealing their content. This is the same technology that already attempts to prevent me from backing up my copies of Finding Nemo so my kids don’t break the original.

Schwartz turned the question back the CTO, asking if the CTO would support the same technology regarding the software running the big media company’s systems? He then writes up the response from the IT folks at the media company.

After a few days, I got a response. He’d spoken with their CIO, who dismissed the relevance of my proposal to manage all digital assets under the same scheme. “You’d have to start by proving I’ve stolen something.”

Exactly! Prove that I stole something before you start proactively preventing me. Why should I accept you crippling my system simply because there are thieves out there, who, by the way, cracked your scheme the day it was it released? Your DRM technologies are a headache for the honest, and hardly noticed by the thieves.

I knew I linked to that Schwartz guy for a reason.

Behold the power of Adobe Photoshop. This is the website of a photoshop artist who “retouches” photographs of models. So, if you ever thought that the pictures of the women-folk in Sports Illustrated and Maxim were real… well, I hate to burst your bubble.

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Witness the idiocy of our public school system. Slashdot has the story of 13 Kutztown students who are facing felony charges for reconfiguring the laptops the school gave them. The student’s side of the story describes the administrator password taped to the back of the laptop.

Now, I don’t feel like getting into a debate about the intent of the laptops or whatever. My point is the attitude of the school towards the children. The students, as near as I can tell, did nothing immoral or illegal. They received a piece of hardware from the school, and the more curious, intellegent, and driven students wanted to make the most out of this equipment. As near as I can tell, the only changes that were made were installing chat software and some games.

These are the kids that I would probably like. These are the kids who tinker with their legos, mod their Xboxes, and generally make their toys do more than they were designed to do. These are the kids who take lemons and make lemonade.

These are the kids that have received felony charges for thinking different.

UPDATE: The charges have been dropped in exchange for 15 hours of community service.

Remember that story about the guy who was shot by the cops in London? Remember how the police say they were justified in shooting him because he was wearing a jacket that could have been concealing a bomb, was running away from the police, and jumped the turnstyle to get into the Subay? Remember that?

Well, it turns out that it was all true, except that he wasn’t wearing a padded jacket, he never jumped the turnstyle, and as for running away when he was shot. Well, he wasn’t quite running away… it was more like he was restrained when the cops shot him in the head. Eight times.

Details, details.

For those of you out there trying to avoid hording graph paper around the house because you might need it someday, here’s a link to a site where you can generate and print your own graph paper as you need it.

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Sorry for this being protected for a little while. After I posted it without comment, I thought that perhaps it could get me into trouble. I put the password on until I was able to write up these comments.

Yes, I’m caustic, polarizing, and transgressive. As the title of this blog alludes to, I readily admit that I live in a world who’s rules I’ve never agreed to. Have you ever seen the offense generated when children are playing soccer and one kid picks up the ball, breaking “the rules”. Everyone playing gets angry at that person because by playing the game, it’s assumed that everyone understands and agrees to abide by the rules. I make no such concessions.

I live in a world where the established rules are often in conflict with one another, and with God’s revealed moral law. People go through life with their own made up rules, without realizing that they don’t make any sense, and get upset when I blaspheme those rules.

Of course, I don’t do it through provocative story telling, or obscene works of art. I do it through humor, and my humor (consciously or unconsciously) is designed to offend people’s subjective sense of propriety. If someone thinks I’m in sin by drinking a beer, I make sure they know that I brew it in the basement and give it away for free. If someone is offended by overpopulation, I make sure they know that I have four beautiful children, and hopefully I’m just getting started.

So, the question is whether the analysis below that my humor is “vulgar” is accurate. I would say that it is, since vulgarity is often needed to upset many people’s Victorian sensibilities. It’s more than just being “shocking”… it’s forcing people to challenge the assumptions that they make when they impose their subjective morals on me. What right do they have to do that, and where does that authority come from? Think about it.

So, with that background, you can check out my scores on the 3 Variable Comedy Test.

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We’re finally getting a chance to use the cherries that Sarah and the kids picked at Highland Orchards. The first beer is going to be a light ale called “Cherries in the Snow”.
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