In the tradition of
If you visit their site, be careful. You can almost get ordained by accident if you’re not cautious. It’s just a few clicks away.
I’m kind of disappointed… I had heard you could pick your title, and I was hoping to be ordained as a Jedi Master or something like that. Perhaps that’s a different church.
I had a list of options:
Jedi Master
Captain G_d
Soul Man
His Holy Monkeyness
Chaotic-Neutral Cleric
But Reverend’s okay, too.
This morning as I was “driving” in (really more just sitting in 0 mph traffic on 400 Northbound), I was flipping through radio stations. There were two versions of “You’ve lost that loving feeling” on at the same time. It was timed so I could hear a line of lyric on one station, then flip to the other and hear the same lyric, but sung by someone else.
For absolutely no reason at all, I flipped back and forth that way for the entire song(s). When it was over, I had no idea why I bothered.
Atlanta traffic can make you craaaaazy.
When I perused my LJ Friends page this morning, it was all out of whack. The entries were all out of order, datewise, and the box with my image and links was further down the page than usual. Weird.
I’ve been assembling a subscriptions wish list…
Skeptical Inquirer $20/year
Entrepreneur Magazine $16/year
Atlanta Business Chronicle $87/year
I also have a predilection for essays. (I love the Best American Essays and Best American Nonrequired Reading series.)
Does anyone have a good recommendation for a periodical dedicated to essays?
Also, what are your favorite/desired subscriptions?
First off, I’ll admit something that I’m not necessarily proud of: I watch Smallville and enjoy it. I watch it in batches. We don’t have cable, and our reception at the old place was terrible; we only got in Fox. We get a few more channels now, but it requires effort, and I don’t really have time to watch any TV anyway.
Except that every once in a while, a coworker of mine loans me a VHS tape chock full of Smallville episodes. Recently he gave me one with 8 episodes. I know it’s a stupid show with poor dialog, but I enjoy seeing how they’re retelling the story of Superman. Some of it is fairly clever.
My point in admitting this is because a part of an episode we watched last night irked me. Consider this exchange:
Lex has gone into the IT lab of luthorcorp, and meets a sexy IT woman (she’s actually not an actual employee and has broken in, but that’s not germaine)
Lex: I’m trying to do some work, and my program keeps crashing.
woman: Hmm… It sounds like a virus.
Lex: That’s what I thought.
woman: Here. (handing him an unlabeled CD) This gets rid of viruses.
Is that not just the most generic, ridiculous dialog you’ve ever heard? I mean, aside from Star Trek: Next Generation, where every problem was solved with tachyon pulses?
It really irks me for no good reason when movies and tv shows don’t even try for verisimilitude concerning technology. I’ll bet there’s a website out there that tracks the egregious misrepresentation of technology in fictional media. I’m going to find it.
I’m a heterodox libertarian in the sense that I like firestations.
And public police. Water pipes, roads… I love public sector infrastructure.
I kind of explain it away by saying I’m for Large Scale Libertarianism, Small Scale Socialism.
On the other hand, wouldn’t it be cool if there were a private highway that was equivalent to the autobahn? Pay your toll, drive as fast as you like. I don’t know if I’d ever drive on it (65-70mph is just fine for me), but it would be comforting to know it was out there should I want to.
The Green Party is certainly a nice alternative. They seem to have a lot of the same social goals as libertarians (specifically abolishment of consensual or victimless crimes). Their heart is definitely in the right place.
I just worry that government organizations are inherently problematic, prone to corruption and inefficiency. Private charities and not-for-profits seem to be better at getting things done. At a not-for-profit, you find passionate people willing to work for less-than-corporate wages to accomplish a task. They’re willing to reuse paperclips, for goodness sakes.
“We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”
yeah, yeah… but could you be more specific on HOW?
The new paper towels in our breakroom have little sayings on them, to wit:
“Live Life to its Fullest”
“Live, Love, Laugh”
“Reach for the Stars”
“Follow your Heart, and your Dreams will come True”
So, I’m going to. Because the paper towel says so.
As I read the “word of the day” entry for today (lucubration), I was ruminating on the fact that my vocabulary has been shrinking at a distressing rate since high school. A while back, when I was unpacking at the new house, I came across an old high school essay and noticed that I no longer knew the meanings of every fourth word I wrote back then, seemingly with ease.
My best guess is that while I read about the same amount now, I write considerably less than I did back then. The knowin’ is in the doin’.
So, my objective is to work the “word of the day” into a daily journal entry from now on.
The problem is, since it is daylight outside (though overcast), I cannot consider this entry a lucubration. So I have no way to work that word in. Oh, well.
Wait! I did it! Awesome.
Just to bookend the passport story, it should be noted that no one made any comments about my passport on the way back in. When I got to the customs person, I dropped the passport on his counter and said “It’s been washed” before he could do the dead fish routine. He just laughed, stamped my customs form and said “welcome back!”
So, ain’t nothin’ all bad. Not even customs.
All the other divisions of our company have today off, except for Atlanta. And there’s not a lot of folks here.
And yet, my boss (who is technically off today) is still responding to emails in realtime.
This is the guy who called me from the line leading to Space Mountain to check on stuff. I mean, I guess that’s not too bad… the line is long, and what else are you going to do? Talk to your family? Right.
My extended family is in town, so I’m going to cut out early. steakums‘s sister Rene, her husband Frankie, son Jovanni, daughter Devyn and new daughter Julia (6 months) stopped by on their way from New Jersey to Louisianna (where half of Frankie’s family lives). We watched Cheaper by the Dozen last night, which had a funny bit or two, but otherwise blah.
It’s steakums‘s b-day today! She’s turning 43! She’ll try to tell you she’s turning 35, but that’s just vanity. Don’t listen to her.
Last night, Jovanni, Devyn and I walked down to the creek behind our house. Our conversation the whole way there and back was centered around the identification of “poison ivy”. Is that poison ivy? No. Is that? No, that’s a tree. Is that? No. Is that? Yes. AAAAH!
I’m going to mail in my taxes now.
One note on that point… The Fool discussion that started with the Net Worth table I presented in an earlier post ended up as an exchange of stories of the financially-unastute. There were a lot of folks who had gotten frustrated trying to argue with people who felt if they got money back on their taxes, then they “hadn’t paid any taxes”. When the Fools asked these folks about all the money that had disappeared from their paychecks all year long, the folks just looked blankly at them and showed them the refund check.
A few people said we should just get all of our paycheck all year long, and get a bill at the end of the year. I wonder what that world would be like? Undoubtedly, the taxes would have to be lowered just to quell the screaming somewhat so we could get some sleep.
The water is, indeed, on. So kudos to the water gods.