Saturday, April 24, 2004
A day's drive
Today I drove back from the Cultural and Literary Studies Conference at Emporia State. It's about a four hour drive, and today it was 200 miles of rain.
I had my iPod with me, as I do when I go on trips in the car, and listened to a wonderful mix of albums. In order:
- Love is Colder than Death, Oxeia
- Rasputina, Frustration Plantation
- The Pernice Brothers, Yours, Mine and Ours
- Muggs, Dust
- Denali, The Instinct
Sometimes that much music gets burdensome without a radio break, or some silence. Today the rain closed the car in upon itself, and the songs became meditative distractions in a small room.
Friday, April 23, 2004
This ain't your grandpa's funeral (oh wait, it is!)
My darling mom had sent me a great link to blog, but then my web browser locked up. Don't you hate it?
So anyway, here it is. I guess this minister is offering his funeral services on the auction block. Sounds like a strange deal, and it must be pretty slow living over there in Grand Island, NE. My father's a pastor, and I've never known him to want for an extra funeral here and there. One of the good things about your business being associated with people dying--there's always demand for your services.
But putting them on the auction block is a new idea. In a way, it sort of reminds me of those drive-up love chapels that are featured in Las Vegas and other select trashy locations nationwide. "Ministers" and anyone else licensed to hitch folks have been marketing their services through this rather nontraditional route for quite some time. It's time for those who lay people to rest to do the same. This could be the start of something huge--the drive-up funeral.
I can see how it would work. You'd stop by the convenient menu to select your options (Protestant, Catholic, etc; size and style of urn; number of urns; delivery of the whole or portion of the ashes to a special scattering location [at sea, the old family farm, the botanical gardens]). Then, just pull around to Window 1, where you drop grandpa off. Next, you put the car in neutral for the complimentary touchless car wash while you wait. Then, you'd throw the car back in gear and proceed to Window 2, where you'd hear the officiant's blessing, pick up urn(s), and provide payment. Then you're off! You wouldn't even need to sit there for the lengthy tributes some family members provide at funerals--just bring the whole crew and do that in the car on the way home!
Now, I need a catchy slogan....
Thursday, April 22, 2004
Ah! You got me! Now, let me see your legs....
Brett's post today talked about funnel-web spiders, and delightful as they sounded, I thought I'd look them up.
As it turns out, that ad he mentioned is right--funnel-web spiders are indeed venomous enough to kill a person, though there is an antivenom available that'll fix you up in a pinch. This great fact sheet is provided courtesy of the Australian Museum, which has a really cool and informative site. For example, now I know that funnel-web spiders can live in trees. I also know that if one bit me it could give me mouth pain, sweating, numbness, abdominal pain, and puking, but that if the same darned spider bit my dog it would probably just make the dog mad.
Apparently you can confuse this nasty fiend for the utterly harmless trapdoor spider, whose bite is more likely to produce a minor freakout than any injury whatsoever. The difference? The deadly male funnel-web spiders have this little spur on their second leg (see above; the one on the left is the male). In fact, I appreciate knowing that. Because if I'm in Sydney and some monstrous spider flies out of a hole in the ground and chomps my arm, I'll be sure to let him hang in there long enough to check what the heck his second freaking leg looks like.
"Oh, sh--wait, might as well have a look...closely grouped eyes...obvious, finger-like spinnerets...tell-tale spur on the second leg...."
Can't ever be too careful.
Wednesday, April 21, 2004
Changes
Turns out it's tough having a productive brother. Mine has switched his blog onto Typepad, and now it looks super professional. Check it out; he's off to a really great start.
In today's post he talks about our parents, and how important they were to getting him through school without riddling it, himself, or his classmates with bullets. I'll second that. He and I weren't ever really loners in school, but we were certainly not a part of the in crowd. Not at all. I think most every kid has some kind of story about not fitting in, not being "cool" enough to do something the "cool" kids were doing. That's the tough part about it; when you're that young, and when you're trying so hard to see how you fit into something, it's easy to miss that the vast majority of people are not like the people you're trying to be like. The popular kids simply can't make up the majority of the student body. When you look at it that way, trying to fit into the "popular" crowd is really a blind effort toward excluding one's self.
This doesn't make sense to you when you're so affected by what you're body's doing it becomes a task to walk around without bumping your newly-large feet into everything. Thank God for parents who have done enough growing of their own to give us some perspective.
Tuesday, April 20, 2004
Running for something
I had a friend run the Boston Marathon today. This is, I think, the second consecutive year she's run it. I'm sure she finished, but I don't know for sure. They have a very high-tech way of timing and monitoring everyone and their progress--electronic chips that are coded with each individual runner's bib number, all this other stuff--yet their website's search engine just plain sucks.
I was able only to search by category of runner--so the most narrow I could get my search was down to a pool of 3000 female runners in my friend's significant age range, the "open" category, which accepts the youngest contestants to those who are 39. Furthermore, I could only search the top 1000 runners in this category, which meant that a full two-thirds of the finishers in this category went untouched by my search. And when I say "search," I'm using loose terminology; there was no "search," really, as the only criterion I could enter was for age range. I could not search by name, state, hair color, body proportion, shoe brand, or any of the other categories the broader internet has accustomed me to. I could not even search by time it took individual racers to complete the race, nor could I see more than the top 1000 finishers.
I didn't think I was asking a whole lot. I decided to use my web browser's "Find" capability to search the "search" results for her name. I was bound to save myself some time, at least somehow. The slap in the face: I could only view 25 records at a time, and I could not jump ahead more than one page at a time. It took several pages for me to find out my friend must not have been one of the top 1000 female finishers in her division.
To finish the marathon is a gigantic feat, especially the heat like they had today over there in Boston. It's an epic race, with epic athletes and an epic story and an epic history. Can't searching the results, at least, not be so incredibly difficult?
Monday, April 19, 2004
The "True" Protestant's Protestant
Ever seen a Chick Tract? Well, they're small booklets that tell a story in comic book form.
You wanna know how to scare people into being Christians? This is the place to start.
Chick's strategy includes a rather trite scenario where someone is in a non-Christian situation. Then they are very scared, and often demons show up and scare them more. The resolution comes when the Christian pops in, and the panel of Our Holy Lord on the cross shows up, and the person accepts Jesus. It's like the sitcom of conversion stories. And they're available in tons of languages, so yes, even you Cable fans can get them in Creole.
Key to Chick's message is the use of grotesque images to drive the point home, and really give you the willies. One of my favorites is in the tract Doom Town, which is about homosexuality. The Christian giving the scary dish about homosexuality refers to that famous ancient Near-East flesh farm, Sodom. In detailing this, Chick details a pedophiliac with the care and love of a Ren and Stimpy close-up.
Another of my favorites is the tract against Catholicism, Man in Black. Now, I believe there are Protestants for a reason, and I count myself as one of them. And the Catholics have had their fair share of sinful leaders--the same, I'm sure, can be said proportionately for all the other denominations; it's just so much more obvious in Catholicism, because it's been around for a full thousand years longer, and for the vast portion of the Church's history was the Church's only structure.
Let me stop defending anyone right there--I'm glad there was a Reformation. We needed it. But I'm gonna...uh...draw the line at saying that, way back in the Middle Ages, "Satan and his Roman Catholic Whore ruled the world."
Plain proof Chick's taking it too far can be found in the collage of small Catholic "idols":
The thing to check out is Chick's claim that the "IHS" on the wafer stands for Isis, Horus, and Seb, "the Egyptian trinity". This plays straight into his theory that Catholicism is a new form of pagan idol worship.
Funny. I always thought that "IHS" was a summary of the Latin inscription Pilate wrote out for Jesus on the cross, Iesus Hominum Salvator, or Jesus, Savior of Humankind. Crap, was I wrong.
Sunday, April 18, 2004
Mature chocolate
Though no Easter bunny brings it by these days, I still get to enjoy some Easter candy. Mine's no longer in a basket, but now resides in a plastic bag, the baskets having been stashed away. Susanne has a bag of her own, labeled clearly with her name on it, of candy that was in a basket at my house. She had no basket this year. As my brother lives far, far away, my family loaned Susanne my brother's basket, which has his name in faded marker across its white plastic handle. The basket, with someone else's name on it, still manages to be more meaningful than the personalized plastic baggy.
I've been enjoying dark chocolate. It was, I suppose, one of those things where your taste buds change as you grow older; I used to simply hate dark chocolate, citing its similarity to dirt as my primary repulsion from it. Now I really enjoy it, and have decided I'd much rather eat a piece of dark chocolate by itself than milk chocolate. My milk chocolate needs nuts in it, or something like that. This new love for dark chocolate makes me feel grown up, a little like the first time you realize dressing up in nice clothes can be goood.
