Purl & Java

Happy New Year, everyone who still has us in your feed reader.

We are still alive and well, though not really doing the blogging thing still. I've been spending a lot of time on Facebook battling pirates and abusing...I mean...using my right to take books out of the Boston Public Library. Leander's been settling in at his new job downtown and boldly fighting pirates of his own--or slow government systems, same difference. I'm also an English major...again. I believe this is my fourth time crawling back from a one semester fling with some other major, and I now have ten classes to go before graduation. Whoopie!

Though we aren't writing any ramblings here, we are doing a project that some of you might find interesting over here called Game a Week. We're also hoping to improve our web presence muchly over the next...little bit. I guess we'll see what happens.

Hello world. It's been a while.

I know you're supposed to have excuses when you go from blogging constantly to not blogging in a month, but I don't really. I haven't been too busy since we settled into our new place in Boston. I just haven't had much to say.

BUT!

I am on Ravelry, finally. If any of you are on, friend me and let me know you did, so I can friend you back. Those of you still in line have my sympathies.

Genre: Indie
Name: Dr. Freud and the M-16s

Credit my dear wife for this one.

I finally gave in and saw all of the Harry Potter movies and read Half-Blood Prince. (I'll go back and read the ones I missed after Deathly Hallows. I promise!) Now I'm waiting in line at the BPL to reserve a copy of Deathly Hallows.

...And I am 256th in line.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I know.

At least it's better than Ravelry:

• 11426 people are ahead of you in line.

Leander and I are sitting here looking at the Google results for "church in boston, ma."

There are lots and lots of First *insert denomination name here* churches. One of the listings is Twelfth Baptist Church. I can't imagine how that makes the parishioners feel to know that in the world of Old North Church and Old South Church and the Christian Science mega-church that their church's claim to fame is just being the twelfth Baptist church in Boston.

It made me think that planting the first church in an area must be kind of like, "First post!!!!!111bbq"

I am so glad I'm married and not dating anymore!

Do people really think this way? Judging a date by what the person orders?

I can't remember for the life of me what Leander ate on our first date.

Did you think less of me for ordering pasta, Dear?

The only winning move is not to play. How about a nice game of chess?

This is the product of a half hour of hacking to see what I can do with JavaScript on the Wii. Yeah, just tic tac toe. Call it Hello World for browser abuse, I suppose. Still, it's proof that you can get a simple, scriptful webpage up in Opera on the Wii without hassle. It ought to work just fine in any normal browser, too.

Recently I started watching Julia Child: The French Chef with Kristy. I used to watch it with my dad, so I told her about it, and she absolutely loves it. Except, unlike with my dad, we started at the beginning of the series, which was from around 1962--when she was actually young and not, like, 80.

Man, Young Julia Child could fuck you up!

It's a little known fact that, before she started making a cooking show, young Julia Child and the very young Samuel L. Jackson starred in the pilot of Snakes on a Plane as a network TV miniseries with Julia Child and Jackson as her kid sidekick, and the pilot wasn't picked up for production because viewers found Julia too menacing. Julia went on to be a very successful chef, and Samuel L. Jackson built a career on all he learned about being a scary badass mofo from Julia during the production of said pilot.

So, yeah. Good show, but Julia Child frightens me.

I'm touchy about energy.

It has nothing to do with peak oil.
Or the war.
Or the environment.

Leander and I recently moved into an old Boston brownstone with an antique electrical system. It's rather quaint, really--especially when the air conditioner and fridge go on at the same time when more than two lights are on. I don't think I'll ever again take for granted the ability to do something other than sit in the dark at 10 P.M.

Actually, it hasn't been that bad. We are slowly learning to turn off lights when we leave a room, and I've learned more than I ever thought I would know about the power usage of appliances. The experience has made me appreciate just how easy it is to be power hungry and not know it.

But it had the side-effect of making me slightly irritable when I hear whining about energy.

Irritable was exactly how I felt when I read about the Republican position on the energy bill that was passed in the House this weekend.

I'm not an unbiased source. Having now seen them in person, I think that the windmills all over Silicon Valley are beautiful, and the Republican Party is not on my Top 10 Favorite Organizations list, but the point here isn't the energy bill. For all I know, it could be terrible. I haven't read it.

What bugs me is all of the whining about how the tax payers can't afford to let go of the tax breaks for oil companies.

1. That argument makes no sense. If oil companies are getting tax breaks, that means that someone else is footing their share of the bill for government programs and the war. Gas companies may turn around and make consumers pay their taxes, but there is always the option of driving less. Not paying taxes isn't really an option.

2. People are perfectly capable of being responsible for their energy consumption. If two geeks can survive in an apartment with 15 amps, we sure as hell don't need the Republican Party deciding how much we can afford to pay for gas.

(See, it has nothing to do with politics. It has everything to do with being a stingy, independent Yankee.)

If the price of gas is painful, there are ways for individuals to cut the cost of travel that have nothing to do with the price of crude in Qatar:

• Telecommute.
• Use Peapod rather than driving to the grocery store.
• Plan errands ahead of time to minimize trips.
• Take the bus/train/subway part of the way or all of the way to work.
• Car pool.
• Move closer to work.
• Take advantage of local tourist traps rather than driving to see far away ones.
• Turn down the air conditioner while driving.
• Use Gas Price Watch.
• Buy gas during the week rather than on weekends when it's usually more expensive.

Those 10 options took me 10 minutes to think of, and I'm sure there are many more.

Sure, watching Gas Price Watch is easier than picking up and moving, but I can't help rolling my eyes at rhetoric that makes the government take the responsibility for the choices of responsible adults.

(Hat Tip: The Cranky Professor)

I've been thinking a great deal lately about the culture wars. Calling them wars is an appropriate way to describe the fighting, but I think that taking the analogy too far is more hurtful than helpful.

For example, a real war really requires everyone to fight. Families fight fear and anxiety when their loved ones fight in combat. War time shortages cause those many degrees away from the actual fighting to contribute to the war effort by conserving.

All analogies break down someday, and a key area where this one breaks down is that most people don't need to be fighting in the culture wars. In my opinion, the majority of us--especially us Christians, shouldn't be fighting in the culture wars. The first commandment is to love God, and the second is to love our neighbors. For me that is more than enough.

It got me thinking about alternatives to fighting. How can those of us, for whom the stakes aren't so high, respond to the conflict? What can we do to bridge the gap and live and work more effectively with neighbors with whom we disagree?

Rather than simply ignoring the questions entirely, one possibility is to transform the either/or questions into new questions that are open-ended. This would take the pressure off of already heated debates, and it would encourage new dialog that might reveal a surprising number of areas where the two sides agree.

Here are two examples:

"Should GLBT people be allowed to be priests or bishops?" could turn into "What are the characteristics of a good priest? In what ways is a priest responsible for modeling morality and stability in a parish? In what way should a priest's family's health play into his or her consideration for the ministry? How should a discernment committee weigh problem areas in a candidate's past?"

"Is it appropriate to refer to God as, 'She'?" could turn into "What are the names of God? Why have the obscure ones from the Bible become obscure? How can a person with trauma from abuses of power and authority approach God during the healing process?"

There would, of course, still be the temptation to go back to the original questions, but I think that (in most cases) the second questions could be more interesting and enlightening. At the very least, they'd be different than the standard fare being served up on these those topics these days.

I had a dream last night that I was a poor villager long ago in place a lot like England. There was a civil war that had ravaged the country side, and the people were starving. Most of the villagers were dead, but the ones who survived were the ones who learned that the soldiers on the battlefield would often stand there staring and shouting at each other for hours before a single shot was fired, so the villagers could weave in and out of the ranks on either side gathering wild strawberries and mushrooms when a battle took place in a meadow they depended on for food.

One day the war came to my village, and I watched as my family and friends went out to gather strawberries and mushrooms. The older girls, mothers, wise women tried their best to skirt around the edges of the battle like nervous chipmunks. The boys too young to hold a gun thought of nothing but, "Mushrooms!"

We were starving.

On this particular day, the game of Russian roulette that the villagers played on the battlefield landed on a bullet.

Did someone fire amiss?

Were the generals impatient with the ignorant villagers?

For the villagers, rhyme or reason didn't matter: They found themselves caught in the middle of a battle.

I screamed for them, but it was too late. All I could do was run from the battlefield pulled by the hand of an older woman I didn't know.

When we came back that evening, we found the bodies of our friends and families strewn around the field, but the bodies of the soldiers had been dutifully buried. We were helpless to bury the entire village, so we constructed a makeshift crypt out of the cellar of the cottage that had once been my home.

We locked the door and went away, leaving all we loved with strawberries and mushrooms still in their hands and mouths.

Kyrie Eleison.

Name: frEAKAtana
Genre: Nerdcore

Thanks to Justin for the spelling.

A month and a day ago I posted a response to J-Tron's response to the Episcopal priest, who converted to Islam.

We are Anglo-Catholics, so this line of discussion is much to simple. Oh, no. We like things much more complicated. (Can I hear an, "Amen!"?)

Now J-tron has e-mailed me a response to my response to his response to the Episcopal Priest, who converted to Islam because P&J is convinced that J-tron is a robot and won't post his comment.

*deep breath*

Got it?

Thanks be to God!

I thought that his response to my response to his response deserved the chance at a response from all of you, so here it is:

Thank you for your kind words about my post. I do know what you mean about the difficulty of praying a corporate office in private. Sometimes I do the individual reflections instead, but that still leaves gaps.

As to your other question, I don't think things are better in Orthodoxy or Roman Catholicism, despite the way they sometimes look rosier in our current unending battle in Anglicanism with heresy on one hand and apathy on the other. What moves me at this point is the continuing realization that Anglicanism holds within something precious that God doesn't want me to give up on. And there are a number of us younger folks coming up in the Church whom I believe God is calling for a purpose, one that perhaps will come to fruition in the years ahead as the baby boomers start to let go of their death grip on ecclesial power and politics.

Creating a new text file from selected text takes, by my count, takes four steps:

1. Select.


2. Hit Ctrl+C.


3. Click on the Open Office icon.


4. Hit Ctrl+v.

Because Open Office is slow, this process can take as long as 2 minutes.

Firefox's AutoCopy extension helps by knocking off Step 2, but it doesn't do much about OO's slowness.

*doo-doo-doo-dooooo*

Ubuntu (or Gnome? or just Linux in general?) to the rescue!

Apparently, it is possible to just select text and drag it to the desktop in order to create a new file.

How cool is that?!

--Especially since it leaves Windows out in the cold. This trick works for Mac users, but Windows users have to download a separate utility in order to do the same thing, which includes just one more thing to clog up the system tray.

This handy little trick won't solve world hunger, but it might get me to blog more...if someone creates a new Firefox extension to create new and inspiring posts automatically, while I'm outside enjoying the sunshine!

(Hat tip: Chad, for posting a link to Lifehacker.)

I've been a very neglectful blogger. Bad, bad blogger!

Leander and I have been in the process of moving to Boston. We finally got DSL set up in the new place, and life looks like it just might get sort of/kind of back to normal sometime in the distant future.

...I suppose that depends on my definition of normal. Boston and Nashua are very different, but it's good to be home.

I'm not usually all that interested in local politics, but the welcome note we got from the mayor of Boston and the BPD (attached to our lease) telling us how very naughty students are made me wonder if it won't be long now before a student group realizes that the mayor and the police making blanket, negative public statements about a minority group is probably profiling--or even age discrimination.

Maybe not, but being told that I am part of a problem that "plagues the neighborhoods" and would subject me to "close scrutiny by the police" didn't make me glad to be me. This combined with the mayor's insensitive campaign to make Boston "America's Walking City" doesn't exactly put him on my favorite politicians list.

If only I actually was Hermione Granger...

You scored as Hermione Granger, You're one intelligent witch, but you have a hard time believing it and require constant reassurance. You are a very supportive friend who would do anything and everything to help her friends out.

(Hat Tip: David Piske)

Is this true or not?

I like David's title for it, "The Backwards Logic of Redemption," because without redemption this is just a cool trick with words with nothing to back it up.

After almost 2 years, i finally got all of my music off of Leander's computer, and i'm ecstatically rediscovering all of my old music:

Death Cab, The Postal Service, Interpol, They Might be Giants...

Heaven!

A surprise favorite has been Atom and His Package--who, unfortunately, stopped touring as Atom when i wasn't looking.

i somehow also missed Emo Game.

i've been sleeping my life away for the past 4 years, but i think i'm ready to wake up now.

We're moving back to Boston this week.

50 points to whoever can guess the reference in the title.

You're The Guns of August!

by Barbara Tuchman

Though you're interested in war, what you really want to know is what causes war. You're out to expose imperialism, militarism, and nationalism for what they really are. Nevertheless, you're always living in the past and have a hard time dealing with what's going on today. You're also far more focused on Europe than anywhere else in the world. A fitting motto for you might be "Guns do kill, but so can diplomats.


Take the quiz at the Blue Pyramid.

(Hat Tip: Surviving the Workday)

Please, take my Blog Reader Project survey.

(Hat Tip: Kat with a K)

An ice cream truck with a particularly deafening jingle just drove through the parking lot here, prompting me to this idea: remember (well, from bad movies) those vans from the 60s that would drive around town, spouting propaganda for ${political_party} at obscene volume?

This needs to be applied to an ice cream truck. A big, square, olive drab one, with a red star on the side, and instead of a jingle, an Informational Message about how the proletariat must rise up and seize for themselves the means of production of tastiness! Bring the revolution, comrade, with jimmies and caramel sauce!

Ahem.

Clearly, this idea would only be feasible in Cambridge, MA, or possibly San Francisco.

Rev. Scott Wells at Boy in the Bands thought of a great idea to help charities and spread the word about Linux:

Here’s an idea: send me your tired, old (but bootable) laptop—the one that makes you ask, “Why would anyone want that?”—and I will give it some kind of new life with Linux. I’ll document the transformation and find a charitable home for it, perhaps a church or other ministry.

I think that's a great idea on all counts. For more info on giving to and receiving from this project, check out Laptop resurrexit.

I've been hearing a lot of buzz lately about the Farm Bill, and I've been having an impossible time finding out what it is. But finally! This morning the Cornucopia Institute posted about what exactly the Farm Bill means.

I balk whenever I see a bill that would increase spending on a long list of things, but just a quick skim over the articles posted by the Cornucopia Institute over the past few weeks is enough to show just how much of a problem food is in this country:

• Our food is less nutritious.
• It is increasingly coming from far away places--which means it is less fresh.
• A great deal of the food we eat is genetically modified.

The Farm Bill isn't a cure all, but it attempts to fix some of these things. It will spread the agricultural funding around, so the smaller farms that are more apt to take a risk on organic food--or even just growing fruits and vegetables, will have more of a chance to survive. It will support organic food research, and it will help ensure that children and the poor have access to better food.

If this bill is everything that the Cornucopia Institute says it is, I think it's a no-brainer. I'm shocked that there's so much controversy surrounding it. Everyone knows that there is a health crisis going on in this country. How could we possibly justify continuing to fund corporations, whose only response is to just grow more mutant corn?

I woke up this morning to messages on Gaim from a friend asking questions about the Bible and dinosaurs:

How come the bible doesn't mention dinosaurs? What is the Christian view on them?

I'm not a Bible or dinosaur expert, but I decided to attempt an answer.

This is what I said:

The answer to those questions has required more words from people smarter than me, so I'm going to do my best with what I know--which is small, being that I'm a lit geek without much interest in science.

Whether or not the Bible mentions dinosaurs is actually up for debate. The word "dinosaur" wasn't actually created until the the 1700 or 1800s, so trying to find dinosaurs in ancient texts isn't as easy as just searching for a word. There are several mentions of "dragons" in the Bible. People who take the Bible more literally than I do believe that two monsters discussed in Job 40 and 41, Behemoth and Leviathan, are a water dinosaur and a herbivore dinosaur, respectively. If you read those sections, and you see it, that's great. Case closed.

In my opinion, that's the "Look! See! The Bible covers everything!" answer. It's much too complicated. The more simple answer is that the Bible doesn't mention dinosaurs (as far as I know) because it doesn't need to. When the Bible mentions animals, it does so because it advances the story. As far as I know, guinea pigs and hamsters aren't mentioned in the Bible, either, but the Bible doesn't say that they don't exist. They just hop around and sleep a lot and aren't as interesting as talking donkeys--which is probably why there is a talking donkey in Shrek and the story of Balaam (Numbers 22) rather than a guinea pig. The Bible doesn't say that dinosaurs don't exist, so the answer you'll get from most Christians on the question of dinosaurs is, "Why not?"

I have a hunch, though, that your question has more to do with the debate between science and the Bible than it does about dinosaurs. I'm, again, not an expert, but I think that the debate is a false one. The idea that everything we know to exist from science has to be mentioned in a book less than 3000 words long, written before 100 AD is absurd. It would be a really magic book that could cram that much material into that small of a space. To Christians, the Bible is and should be a valuable window into the character of God. The God of the Bible is the same God, who created our minds, creativity, and curiosity. If he told us about everything in a book, that would take all the fun out of discovering things for ourselves. From what I know of God, he very much likes surprises: "The Son of God being born to a peasant girl and fostered by a carpenter? Who would have thought? Buddha was a prince!" How much better for us to dig up dinosaurs ourselves and create a story around them. At its most basic level, that's what science is. It's a particular medium useful for telling stories about ourselves and the world we live in from what we have on hand. The Bible is a finished work in a different medium created for a different purpose.

As far as the Bible is concerned, scientists need most of all to be true to the discipline. (Weigh the evidence carefully. Don't fudge data, etc.) By its nature there's nothing "Un-Christian" about doing science. Christian scientists have only the extra burden of respect for the world as a work of art created by a loving God, but that is no different than what is required of all Christians. One of the prophets said: "He has told you, O mortal, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?" (Micah 6:8).

Of course, I could be full of it. I'm going to post this to my blog and see if anyone better trained in theology and science can give a better answer.

I don't feel so crazy now for nearly having a panic attack when I couldn't find a Dunkin's in the Bay Area.

Oh, and I am so calling Starbucks "Bucky's" from now on.

(Hat Tip: MetaFilter)