The bric-a-brac of late July.

My current events.

Mom’s trying to figure a trip to Disneyland for the family next week. Logistics are always a tricky thing: fly or drive, which hotel, visit relatives or not, accommodating Tim, the cost, the temperature, etc. I’m not particular. It’s been eleven years since I was last at Disneyland and I want another Goofy hat.

Been pounding out the last of the philosophy papers, but I took some time off between 11 and 4 (that’s p.m. and a.m.) to finally write, produce, upload, and post my current podcast. I was tempted to jabber about postmodernism again, but I decided I’d had enough of the subject (since I’ve had to write so much about it for the philosophy class) so I decided to go through the Things that Annoy Me About Living on Campus. I haven’t added to the list since February, and I don’t plan to; but here you can listen to me in full sarcasm mode. Website here. Podcast here. Or try iTunes; but make sure you have a solid internet connection because if you get cut off for any reason, you can’t fix the broken downloads.

I started subscribing to Blockbuster’s DVDs-by-mail service and have attempted this July to get more than my money’s worth by going through 30 movies in a month. I haven’t been successful; their system is a little too slow for me. It takes two to three days for the distribution center to receive my old movie and send a new one. But I can get 25 movies out of them per month, which puts the cost of the service at 60¢ per movie. So there’s that.

One of my cousins is frantically calling the rest of the family members. Someone claiming to be him has sent an email to everyone, “confessing” that he’s been having internet sex with 13-year-olds. Since he wants to be a P.E. coach, this is not the sort of thing one wants to become known for. Just a reminder: Don’t let evil bastards borrow your computer. But on the up side, if my cousin wants to sue this guy for libel, he’s got a fantastic case.

Another hot day today. I may have to hit the air-conditioned coffee shop. It’s a beautiful thing when the air conditioning is so good, you can order a hot coffee and comfortably drink it. I did that Monday. I may have to do it again today. We’ll see.

Stupid Internet Survey: Eucharistic theology.

Your eucharistic theology.

You scored as Martin Luther.

You’ll stick with the words of Scripture, and defend this with earthy expressions. You believe in an orthodox Christology. You believe that the bread and wine are the Body and Blood of Christ, but aren’t too sure about where he goes after the meal, and so you don’t accept reservation of the Blessed Sacrament or Eucharistic devotions.

Luther	100%
Catholic	75%
Zwingli	50%
Calvin	50%
Unitarian	0%

Eucharistic theology
created with QuizFarm.com.

Everyone makes a big deal about how Martin Luther was a sola scriptura kind of guy, but they forget his most famous statement:

Unless I am convinced by scripture and plain reason (I do not accept the authority of the popes and councils, for they have contradicted each other) my conscience is captive to the Word of God. I cannot and I will not recant anything for to go against conscience is neither right nor safe. God help me. Amen.

In that statement from the Diet of Worms, Luther gave three sources of his theology:

1. Scripture.
2. Plain reason.
3. Conscience.

He might have coined the term “sola scriptura,” and he might even have believed that his reason and conscience had fully conformed to it. In that, he was fooling himself. No one’s theology comes from scripture alone. If that were true, we wouldn’t have so many contradictory theologies—Luther’s main complaint against the church. In fact we’d have no theologies. We couldn’t use reason to determine which of the things in the scriptures must be applied to our lives; we couldn’t use conscience to recognize the difference between truly applying the scriptures and manipulating the text to fit our selfish lives.

As I remind people all the time, postmodernism isn’t a recent worldview. It was always there, if repressed.

Yes I know the result is Luther, not Luthor. Laugh with me!

Fiddling about with fake age.

The title is, of course, not referring to the Who song “Fiddle About.”

Whenever I have a half-hour of spare time on my hands—enough time to do something small, but not enough time to begin a major project—I tend to fiddle with things on my computer. I sort files and throw away useless ones. I get on the blog or the website and tweak the layout. Nothing huge or time-consuming; nothing significantly creative. Just something that’ll kill a brief bit of time.

I’m sitting in the wonderfully air-conditioned Mocha House in Vacaville, looking out the window at the shopping center’s equivalent of fiddling with things. For some reason that never makes any bloody sense to me, they’ve decided to take certain little portions of the street, rip out the asphalt, and replace it with bricks.

Most of the cities in Solano County, California have decided to renovate their downtown areas. The current fad is to make them look old-fashioned… but not really. Y’see, in California in the 1890s they looked a lot like old Western movies. I’ve seen the photos: Dirt roads, wooden sidewalks, wood and brick buildings (back then they didn’t know how to build earthquake-proof buildings like they do now), and dust, mud, and horse feces everywhere. Any automobiles were given a speed limit of 10 miles an hour because of all the dust they generated. Any towns that have an Old West downtown look like novelty tourist spots, like Old Sacramento. So the only towns that do this are tiny, near-extinct Gold Rush towns that can’t attract any business otherwise.

The rest of them, like Vacaville, have created this kind of faux old-fashioned feel to them. The buildings are renovated with enough old-fashioned touches to resemble something that’s indistinctly old; from sometime in the past, but no actual historical period. Lots of decoration, but no obnoxious Victorian gaudiness; lots of bronze and brickwork; and for some reason, red concrete sidewalks and those stupid bricks at every crosswalk.

Don’t they realize that bricks break? Don’t they realize they’ll be replacing those bloody things every decade? Don’t they further realize that nobody has ever paved their streets with bricks before the late 20th century? Bricks cost too much. Before asphalt, there were cobblestones, gravel, concrete, and in some parts of the U.S., boards.

It’s not really about authenticity anyway. It’s about the illusion of age. Actual age is inconvenient; like I said, those old buildings weren’t earthquake-proof and are constantly in need of repair. Fake age is the thing today, much like fake youth is so popular among socialites.

So the shopping center, which is less than a decade old, is adding some fake age to its environment.

…Or maybe, ironically, the developers are recognizing a new trend of putting bricks in the driveways and is getting on board with the fad. I can never tell anymore.

Not missing people, nor being missed.

My Xanga fans didn’t follow me here. Good.

Dad had this annoying habit while I was growing up: The Air Force would send him off someplace for a week or two, then he’d come back and one of the first things he’d ask us kids was “Did you miss me?”

To you, this may not sound like an annoying habit, but you’d have to understand the circumstances. Dad is a lousy parent, and not having him around was one of the all-too-infrequent joys of childhood. Whenever Dad was around, we kids were either annoyances or projects. “Annoyances” meant that we made too much noise; that we played too roughly; that we lacked proper decorum in front of Dad’s friends; that I hadn’t brushed my teeth 10 times that day like I was supposed to (a little obsession with cleanliness on Dad’s part); and so forth. “Projects” meant that Dad wanted to put in some “quality parenting time,” so he’d play ball with us, or teach us something, and it inevitably ended in misery because whatever we were doing, we weren’t doing it right.

You know how nostalgia works? The brain has a tendency to remember the good stuff and, as a defense mechanism, blot out the bad stuff. That’s why, even though high school sucked, people attend high school reunions. (That, or to show off their worldly improvements, both real and imagined.) So most people remember only the good parts of childhood. But—sad to say—I have no good memories of Dad from childhood. None. The only good memories of him that I have came after I grew up and moved out of the house.

So when he said, “Did you miss me?” what on earth was I supposed to tell him? I didn’t miss him. Half the time I prayed that the Air Force would make his trips longer.

I don’t really miss him now, but it’s different. I expect that if I hung around him all the time I would be very annoyed with him. Brief visits keep things reasonable.

I bring this up because Kerry has lately developed the annoying habit of going someplace briefly, then returning to ask me, “Did you miss me?”

She didn’t grow up with Dad, so she doesn’t understand how loaded a question that is for me. (In part, she does. Dad still asks that question.)

Comparing news shows.

It’s interesting to watch BBC World News, then flip over to ABC’s World News Tonight and compare the stories. (KVIE shows the BBC news nightly at 5 p.m.) It was especially interesting after the July 7 bombings in London. I could watch the full BBC version, then watch the summarized ABC version. ABC is pretty good at summarizing (and at infographics) and I discovered that they borrow a lot of video from the BBC. Obviously ABC’s producers watch BBC World News too.

Knowing this, I find it disturbing lately that ABC News—and, for that matter, the other American news—have left the famine in Niger completely unreported.

Back in October 2004, Niger had a plague of locusts. That’s right, a plague of locusts. It doesn’t just happen in biblical history. Bearing in mind that Niger is a desert country, and you can’t grow squat there (which always reminds me of that old Sam Kinison stand-up routine: “See this, people? This is sand. Nothing grows in sand. Move to where the food is!”) the people are now starving.

It has nothing to do with bad government, food-stealing warlords, or civil war (not that those things are any excuse for the world to ignore suffering); it’s entirely natural causes. Like the tsunami. Yet while people responded immediately to the tsunami disaster, the world has been sitting on this famine for nine months—and now that children are starting to die, the U.N. and Oxfam and other agencies are finally getting off their collective asses and shipping them food. And I don’t blame you for knowing nothing about it; I knew nothing about it until Monday, when the BBC decided to get off its ass and start reporting on it.

Anyway, donate to Oxfam here.

Fake blind people on TV.

Two sheriff's deputies died last Wednesday in a helicopter crash, so all my usual morning news has been pre-empted by their funeral Mass. I didn't want to listen to the overly long hymn (what is it with how Catholic choirs feel they need to sing every single verse?) so I switched the TV to a rerun of Little House on the Prairie.

It's the episode where Mary goes blind. She depicts blindness by fixing her eyes on a point in space, and talking to it instead of the person whom she's talking to. No actual blind person does this; all of them can hear where you are, and face you when they talk to you. (It's rude otherwise.) But for some stupid reason that I've never understood, actors do this and somehow it's the audience's cue that they're playing a blind person.

Give you another example—have you ever seen The Miracle Worker with Anne Bancroft and Patty Duke? Patty Duke, who plays Helen Keller, not only does this; she keeps her head pointed at that point in space, even though nothing she does has anything to do with it. And she got a freakin' Oscar for this. Good Lord.

Intellectual conversions—no such thing.

Decision-making is almost always emotional, and this is especially true with people who choose to follow Jesus.

When people make decisions, most of the time they make emotional decisions. They only make purely intellectual decisions under these circumstances:

• In the past, emotional decision-making has had horrible results, so they try to eliminate emotions from their decision-making process.
• They honestly don’t care which choice they make, so an intellectual choice will do.

And then there’s the self-delusional fun we can have with the emotional choice that appears to be an intellectual one—the emotional choice that’s backed up with a lot of intellectual reasons, but deep down is based on emotions. You’ve seen it before, especially in politics. “I chose that candidate because she’s a very moral person, and she wants what’s best for her community. So she was the only logical choice.” Never mind the fact that morals are emotional factors; after all, immoral people (no matter your standard of morals) are evil. And no one is morally ambiguous towards evil.