Honk if you love hostility.

The appropriate response to a honking car is a raised middle finger.

I don’t greet people that way… although I used to, many years ago. Unfortunately, a honking car still provokes that sort of knee-jerk (or finger-jerk) reaction in me that I find I still have to suppress, because it doesn’t happen often enough for me to have completely unlearned it.

But it still happens. Happened today, actually. Why? Well, for some idiotic reason, when people drive past someone they recognize, they honk at them.

Now, the car horn is there for only two legitimate reasons: (1) to warn someone or something that your car is on the verge of hitting it, or they are on the verge of hitting you; (2) to remind the daydreaming driver in front of you that the light is green.

Some would add a third—to tell your date, who’s still inside the house, that you’ve arrived—but that’s just rude, and in my father’s neighborhood it’s a behavior that will guarantee Dad will come out of his house to correct you, bringing a camera in case he has to prove to the police you were hostile. But let’s not get into Dad’s hobbies right now.

In general, using your horn for any other reason than the two legitimate ones is a form of rudeness. That’s why the one-digit salute. And it’s very tempting to respond that way.

Consider it from my point of view: When I get honked at, it’s usually because someone sees me walking. I am a pedestrian; I walk just about everywhere. When you’re driving past me at 40 miles per hour, I haven’t necessarily seen into your car to know who you are. You could be some psycho for all I know. I am also not insulated from the loud, obnoxious sound by being in a car. I get to hear the horn full blast, coming directly at me—sometimes at my back, because I was recognized from behind and didn’t have the opportunity to recognize you first. Sometimes I’m listening to my iPod; sometimes I’m thinking, or praying, and I just had my train of thought firebombed by a car horn.

And why on earth does it matter that you’ve recognized me anyway? So you recognized a pedestrian. Big freakin’ deal. I recognize lots of people. I don't blast an air horn at them to say hi. I wave. Wave, you noisy bastards.

Comments back... for now.

Update, 12/11/2024: And comments are off again. Weren’t worth the hassle.

It’s quite possible that I’ve lost my senses, but I’ve decided, on a provisional basis, to allow people to post comments on the site. With one caveat: I may delete them.

That’s right. Instead of spending way too much of my shrinking amount of free time responding to each and every post, with supporting quotes in the original Greek, I’m just going to delete them. If you want to bellyache about your right to free speech, that’s fine; but this is my blog, which means it’s all about the freedom of my speech. Get your own blog if you want to rant unedited.

Just so you know, I will likely delete the following things, so if you post them, don’t expect them to stick around long.

• Smartass one-liners. Any responses, witticisms, comments, or critiques that I don’t really find substantive. If you’re gonna post, have something to say.
• Nut mail. And by “nut mail” I mean “people who don’t agree with me, but can’t disagree respectfully, or make any sort of sense.” It is my blog, after all.
• Non sequiturs. For those of you who don’t know Latin, comments which we might call “random,” and don’t have anything to do with any blog entry I might have written.
• Responses to things I have put on your blog. The comments aren’t meant for you to comment about your blog, they’re to comment about my blog. It’s about me, remember? Me me me me me me me.
• Responses that are longer than my posts. If you have that much to say, stick it on your own blog.
• Complaints that I deleted something. That’s annoying.
• Anything I find annoying.
• Anything I bloody well feel like deleting. That should cover it.

Got the idea? Good. Get to commenting. I’ll get to deleting.

The Sabbatical Diet?

Update, 12/11/2024: The Sabbatical Diet’s inventor, Robert Robinson, died in September 2021 of Covid. Insert your own morbid jokes here about how at least his diet didn’t kill him.

I get a daily email newsletter from Christianity Today, which is great because for a long time I couldn’t afford the magazine, and the newsletter had the content plus a few extras. The guy who does their weblog is great at gleaning every last religion story off the internet and posting them. That’s a full-time job in itself.

The ads that come with the newsletter are another thing.

There’s some schmuck who’s currently promoting what he calls the Sabbatical Diet. In a nutshell, it’s “eat like a king six mornings per week and like a pauper one morning per week.” His words. His book goes into further detail, his website offers testimonials, and at first glance it looks like a lot of bad science. If you follow the program you’ll “achieve perfect body structure, slow aging and reverse and improve the Syndrome X Diseases (Diabetes Mellitus, Hypertension, High Cholesterol, Artherosclerosis)”. Again, his words; he’s supposedly a doctor but he can’t spell arteriosclerosis. Achieve perfect body structure? Slow aging? Next he’ll be telling us that we’ll turn white and delightsome.

Bad science; and bad scripture too. He has a scripture page in which he mangles a few verses in order to back his claims. Most of it comes from Exodus 16, and some poorly interpreted bits of Acts 11; if I went into the other passages I would just get more annoyed, so I’ll stick to those bits.

Exodus 16 is where God tells Moses he’s going to feed the Israelis “bread from heaven,” which they rename “what’s that?” or manna. Every day they could gather a liter per person; on Friday they had to gather two liters because God was taking Saturday off. If they kept any overnight, it went bad. Manna apparently still can be found in the desert, but unlike Exodus, it doesn’t go bad overnight, and you can gather it on Saturdays.

This doesn’t strike me as eating like a king: It’s eating a loaf of bread every day, and it’s the same thing every day, which is why the Israelis eventually got to grumbling. You won’t starve, but you won’t look forward to mealtimes either. Kings historically have eaten themselves stupid. Plus, the Israelis had the same thing on Saturday—so technically the Exodus 16 diet is eating like a pauper daily. But it’s better than starvation, and it was meant to condition the Israelis to be dependent on YHWH.

Acts 11 is where Peter has a vision of a sheetful of non-kosher animals, which he’s instructed to kill and eat, and where he rightly says, “No.” This passage is not about how it’s okay for Christians to violate the kosher laws; it’s about how “what God has made kosher, you must not call non-kosher.” [11.9] God was conditioning Peter to preach the gospel to the gentiles—and according to then-current custom, gentiles were treated as if they were unclean, but God never said they were. He never said any such thing. The non-kosher animals were an object lesson. It's only because Christians can’t control our gluttony that this passage has been reinterpreted to say we can now eat whatever we want. (Don’t believe me? How many pastors do you know that aren’t overweight?)

That said, the Sabbatical Diet guy misinterprets Acts 11 and says we don’t have to eat kosher—as if God meant for us to eat dog and vulture and blood puddings—and says if he didn’t mean any such thing, he used a very poor example to make a spiritual statement. Apparently this guy doesn’t realize sometimes God uses the outrageous to get our attention; he must not have read the prophets nor Jesus’s parables.

If one wants to actually read the bible and find out what it says about diet, one cannot help but return to the kosher laws. You want to find a biblical diet? That’s it. Anything else is an artificial construction, meant to either sell books or get around the bible. This guy is doing both, and promising some rather miraculous results if you follow it.

The bible never promises miraculous health if you eat kosher; it just says “Don’t,” and if you don’t have the faith to follow that commandment, then why should you trust some nutjob who writes a diet book?

The foulness of the water.

The local water isn’t toxic—that I know of—but it’s really undrinkable.

I think I’ve said before that the tap water in Scotts Valley tastes horribly wrong. I still don’t entirely know why. It’s a more affluent than average community, so you’d think they’d have the tax infrastructure to pay for a better water treatment program. But it may just be that the locals are willing to buy their own water, so they don’t care that what comes out of the taps and public drinking fountains tastes like it’s coming out of an ass.

I drink a lot of coffee, and water is obviously a huge component of coffee. It’s not a component most people think of. I’ve seen many of the locals make coffee from the tap water, with the excuse, “Oh, it’s boiled; so it’s fine.” But it’s not. To my mind, it’s mostly ruined. Every once in a while you can find a blend of coffee that can largely mask the taste of the tap water—or render it ignorable—but very seldom. I’ve been drinking a lot of medium roasts lately, and the tap water turns them into what tastes like Folgers made with used swimming-pool water. I completely ruined a perfectly good 1-ounce sample bag of Colombian because I naïvely thought the coffee would overwhelm the water. It tasted like I had strained old grounds with heavily bleached notebook paper.

When I first moved to Scotts Valley to go to school, I did what most college students did—I went to Safeway™ and bought water. Like my dad, I had always figured buying water was a waste of money when I lived in communities where the tap water was barely less pure than the natural spring stuff. (I don’t know that the Scotts Valley stuff is actually impure; I just know it tastes like a coin collector has been boiling old pennies in it, so I presume impurity. It’s gotta be better than the ocean, but not by much.) Later, I took a five-gallon container to Vacaville on vacation and filled up with their tap water.

Now I have one of those Brita™ pitcher and filters. Works great. I’ll have to get another for the office. Currently I’ve been taking a 1.5-liter water bottle full of filtered water to work, but sometimes I need to make two pots of coffee (especially since I invite others to drink it).

Comparatively, I’ve noticed a lot of people who, when they want coffee, don’t make it themselves; they go to Starbucks.™ Now, I’m a big fan of their coffee, but I can’t reasonably see myself going to Starbucks™ every morning and paying $1.60 for decaf what’s been sitting in the urn for the past two hours. I’ll want more than one cup; and I don’t have the money for a $20/week coffee budget. If you drink a lot of coffee, you have to find ways of keeping your habit economical. But I can see why they frequently excuse this habit with, “It tastes so much better at Starbucks.™” Of course it does. Starbucks™ filters their water.

How much ground could a groundhog hog if a groundhog was ground up?

Today is Groundhog Day, a day in which the citizens of Punxatawney, PA harass a large rodent into seeing its shadow. Or not. Based on the way in which they harass the rodent, the people of Punxatawney will either have a longer winter, or not; something no one seriously believes, but they do it anyway and have a five-day celebration to commemorate it.

Man, would it be fun if PETA invaded.

So about that new job...

I am now working for Barnabas Missions, and though I’m currently not certain what my title is, my job is an odd combination of evangelism and marketing… and anything else that needs to be done around the office. Tomorrow I get to learn how to cook the books. Do the books is what Brian calls it, but in every business, honest or not, legitimate or not, for-profit or not, some massaging of the books has to happen in order to make everything nice and tidy. Not everything fits into the neat little pre-set categories in the bookkeeping software.

Wonder how much the IRS massages its books? And the scary thing is that it reports to the Congress, which doesn’t have the best track record at keeping itself financially honest. Nor do the individual members of Congress, especially with their campaign funds. No, there’s probably a giant cycle of malfeasance going on in there, but since it’s within the government, they can usually get away with it, yet they put the thumbscrews to poor doped-up Willie Nelson….

So now I get to rant professionally about how the church is blowing it on evangelism. Cool.

Amusing comic strip: One more day.

The Perry Bible Fellowship by Nicholas Gurewitch.