30 November 2007

Crazy Pictures


I've been playing with my camera a bit lately, as I mentioned earlier. No lighted Christmas tree pictures, but I might have to fool with that, too. Anyway, here is a picture of Tampa taken from the balcony.


I've been playing with the tripod and it worked pretty well considering that it's darn close to falling apart. Next nice night we have I'm going to try some nice nighttime skyline pictures.
Anyway, using the tripod I took about 10 pictures at various apertures and shutter speeds. I should have used a single aperture and varied the shutter speeds for this to work best, but it was my first attempt. I combined all the pictures using a program called Qtpfsgui (no, that's really the name) and used a basic tone formatting filter to come up with this.

I frankly don't think that's any better than the first image, and probably is worse, really. Not that interesting; I definitely need to play a bit more, and maybe try some close-up things, too. You can see where the mimosa leaves in the lower left were being blown about by the wind.


I wanted to get something really cool, though, which meant using a funky fresh filter I don't understand. This one is called Fattal. I think that's the name of one of the developers. After about 27 tries I came up with this here. This I think is pretty cool, although of course it doesn't look a thing like a real picture. Still, it is nifty.

I don't know what is up with blogger but for some reason on this post it seems to be forcing you to download the full size pictures instead of just linking to them in the same window like it's supposed to. In any event, rest assured there's nothing hiding in these pictures to infect your computer. And the third one really is cool.

29 November 2007

Smittytree!

It's that time of year again! Yaay! Last year Smittygirl and I got an adorable little tree from the Target down on Gandy and decorated it. I don't think I have pictures, but it was very cute. This year we went back to Target and looked at small trees again, but there were only four to choose from and they were only $5 less than a six foot tree. So we have a six foot tree. Yaay, it feels like a real home with a real Christmas Tree! I've missed that so much the last few years, I can't even tell you.

Of course, we got Smittytree on a busy Sunday this weekend, and had other errands to run and chores to do, so we set the tree up and watered it and let it relax a little, but didn't decorate. So here is Smittytree before:
Of course we had to put the topper on right away, to make sure the tree knew it was loved. But I of course can't decorate during the day without Smittygirl (decorate the tree myself? It's a family thing, and we're a family now) and we've been ungodly busy this week in the evenings moving and cleaning and whatnot at Smittygirl's former apartment. Last night, after investigating the horrible racket being made by one of the vent fans on the roof of the condo, we put lights on the tree.

I could take another picture today and show you, but that would be silly because you couldn't see the lights. But I've been playing with the manual feature on my camera lately--it's always been there, but I never could figure out how to make it work--and let me tell you, it's like a new love affair with this thing now. I'm taking all my pictures on manual. It has a 2-second exposure setting, and this is what the tree looks like (from a different angle; I steadied it on the bookshelf):


Sweet, huh? Tonight maybe we'll add a few more decorations, and I'll take another picture.

Christmas is so much fun. Now if only I knew what to get ANYBODY on my list...

26 November 2007

I Am Not Alone

Read this. Or skim it anyway. It's long. Or just follow the jump and read on. I am pleased this morning to find that although I've spent a good deal of time sitting here reading instead of doing something productive, I've learned I am not alone in wondering what to make of Christian doctrines of eternal damnation.

This paragraph comes from a site written by a Christian seeking to debunk notions of hell. I can't find his name, but he links to tentmaker.org. Anyway
How can a God who said He came to save the world –Who said He accomplished what He came to do (draw all mankind to Himself) end up terrorizing 99 percent of all humanity by burning them alive forever in a lake of fire!? Satan is the author of confusion, not Jesus. This doctrine which says that God is love and yet has allowed a course to run in which almost all of those He created will be ultimately estranged from Him is NOT sound doctrine, it does not bring peace to the soul, it TERRORIZES people! And it is perhaps the greatest lie Satan has ever perpetrated on this planet.


I asked this question earlier, in the dream post. What are we, indeed, to make of a God who is Love but who condemns millions--billions--of His created souls to everlasting torment in hell? The notion of an eternal hell, a lake of fire if you will, is a great contradiction in teachings of Christianity. How can we love our neighbors and turn the other cheek if we're being taught that the Blessed will be saddened "Not in the least" (Martin Luther) by seeing their loved ones tormented in hell?

What kind of religion of love produced this:

St. Thomas Aquinas: "That the saints may enjoy their beatitude more thoroughly, and give more abundant thanks to God for it, a perfect sight of punishment of the damned is granted them."

Peter Lombard: "Therefore the elect shall go forth…to see the torments of the impious, seeing which they will not be grieved, but will be satiated with joy at the sight of the unutterable calamity of the impious."

Jonathan Edwards: “The view of the misery of the damned will double the ardour of the love and gratitude of the saints of heaven.”

John Calvin: "There are babies a span long in hell."

J.I. Packer, writing in Christianity Today in 2002: "...love and pity for hell's occupants will not enter our hearts."

That's not a religion of love! That's a religion of hatred! Of glorying in the damnation of others! That right there, that kind of talk, that is what leads to hatred here on Earth, leads to people supposing themselves good Christians seeking to destroy all those who don't believe as they do! And the men who wrote those lines supposed themselves great Christians, great leaders of the faithful.

It's this doctrine, this doctrine that hell is real and final and that seeing souls tormented there will please the holy, this doctrine has spread so much hatred and wrath in the Earth--in the real, actual Earth, that we're stuck with right now no matter what comes next.

Compare against the Buddha, who said that because death means nothingness, no more consciousness, then the current life is all we have. Thus we must seek enlightenment in this lifetime, and thus we must do good and have mercy, and seek to ease the suffering of all those who share the Earth with us, because we all have just this short time. Life is suffering! Life is dissatisfying! But it is so for all people, and so we must each work to reduce the suffering of our brothers. What a great message!

And look again at Christ's message: turn the other cheek! Repent! Love they neighbor, and do not speak badly about him. Watch your tongue, only speak positively or not at all; engage in right works, have charity, be kind to all others, show them the light. Teach them of God's mercy and love. Overcome your enemies with love, as Christ overcame his enemies with love; lo, for Christ overcame even the grave with love. Christ didn't teach us to slay the wicked, he told us to love them and teach them. The Bible doesn't include any reference to "babies a span long in hell;" indeed, it may not even reference what we think of as hell.

MT 15:13-14, ...Every plant not planted by my heavenly Father will be rooted up, so ignore them. They are blind guides leading the blind...
Not everyone who comes saying they know the word of God really knows, not everyone who teaches in the name of God teaches God's word.
MT 15:9, Their worship is a farce, for they replace God's commands with their own human teachings.
So much of religion is a human construct, it's tempting at times, especially for me, to say ALL of it is. But worship that ignores or cherry-picks parts from God's teachings is a farce. And worship that creates new layers not evident in God's teachings--babies a span long in hell, for instance, or indeed even the lake of fire itself--is worse still, not just a farce, but a man-made construct applied onto God's teachings by a preacher who doesn't think God's word is enough to win converts on its own.

That's the greatest damnation right there, people who feel they must add something else onto God's teaching to win people to the faith, because God wasn't good enough until they came along. Limbo, which Benedict XVI recently abrogated, is a good example. People asking questions about God wondered what became of unbaptized babies, so Catholic theologians created the idea of limbo, which has no scriptural basis. They added on to God's religion because it wasn't good enough on its own. How arrogant is that? It's the concept of Limbo that led to John Calvin's baby quote I've repeated here. Calvin was rejecting the Catholic creation of Limbo for what it was, a human farce, but he erred by insisting on something that Jesus certainly never said, that doesn't come from the Bible itself. Hell? Translated from "sheol" and "hades," both words meaning nothing more than "hidden" or "covered up" and both referring to the grave. What happens after death? You go to sheol--you are hidden, covered up, and we don't know any more beyond that.

Funny, mystical Talmudic Judaism and all that, but here they were thousands of years ago admitting that frankly, after you die, you go to sheol, the hidden place, and that's all there is to say about that. Indeed, let's go right back to Genesis, where God said that the penalty for eating from the tree of knowledge was death, not eternal damnation in a lake of fire. (I don't read Genesis literally and believe in evolution, but I like this part of Genesis a great deal because not only does it show God threatening Adam with death rather than eternal damnation, it shows God giving Adam a choice--God gave Adam free will from minute one.)

How about Cain and Abel? Cain was banished, not sent to an eternal lake of fire and damnation. Cain and Abel is a parable and not a literal story (in my view), but if the writer seeking to teach from this parable also wanted to teach about eternal damnation, why would he simply have Cain banished? Hell is a recent invention, not ancient at all. Indeed, the Mosaic Law in Deuteronomy and Leviticus discusses blessings to come in this life, on this Earth, and curses that may come in this life, on this Earth. The penalty for disobeying God's commandments wasn't eternal torture in hell, it was real. It was present, and it was handed down by judges who's job was to determine what you had done wrong, and punish you in accordance with the law laid down by God. This is all very earthly stuff, and there's no mention of eternal damnation here.

The Jews burned children alive in the valley of the son of Hinnom (ga ben Hinnom, Gehenna in Greek, a place name that would later be translated as "hell") to appease their god Molech. God says in Jeremiah 32:35 that such a thing never even entered His mind. Why would God say that if He intended to--in fact was at that very moment--burn millions of souls in a lake of fire for all eternity? The fact is, the Tanakh has no mention of hell in it at all. It refers to death as sheol, being hidden and covered. It admits that death is unknown and unknowable. It does not claim the existence of hell.

Jesus spoke to listeners well-versed in the Tanakh, with great understanding of what "sheol" meant, and with a long cultural tradition of what ga ben Hinnom (Gehenna) was--a valley where the ancient Jews had sacrificed their children, angering and saddening God. A valley where the Jews had burned hundreds of thousands of the Assyrian invaders, the army of Sennacherib, after God slew them in the night as they laid siege to Jerusalem. A valley that in Jesus' time was a trash dump, a place where the bodies of executed criminals were thrown, where the refuse of the city of Jerusalem was burned. To be sent to Gehenna meant to be utterly wiped away from memory, burned with the garbage and common criminals. It did not have the connotation of eternity, except in the sense of being forgotten. It was a real a present calamity, and a threat that the Jews would have well understood--to be threatened with burning in Gehenna meant being forgotten by all, including God.

That's what hell should be, really, not a lake of pain and torture but the notion of being forgotten forever, never to return. That is what Jesus warned of. If the souls of the blessed will be raised again from the Earth, what will happen to the souls that were condemned? They will be forgotten. They will no longer exist. The blessed won't take comfort in watching the damned writhe in agony; they will have forgotten the damned. They won't remember them at all.

That's my own interpretation of course, and I just warned against that, but it is at the very least closer in my mind to what Jesus actually taught and what his listeners actually understand from their own religious writings than is any lake of fire or any span of babies.

Buddha said death was nothingness. Here we see that sheol also is an unknown end, the grave, being covered, being hidden. Jesus spent time in sheol, where He was hidden, covered, unknowable. When He returned He didn't describe his time in a burning lake of fire. He didn't even describe His time at all. He didn't come back and talk about a bright light, a corridor, meeting all his friends who'd passed away. He didn't bring a message from John the Baptist or Moses. He didn't spend time hanging with His pals. He was hidden. He defeated death and rose again from the grave, and that is sufficient, that is enough. That is all that we need to know. And Jesus' words and actions are consistent with sheol simply being a place of nothingness. What did Jesus do in those three days? He was gone, removed from the Earth, as we must all be. But he came back to show us that it could be done through faith in Him and God.

Here's another good bit. From Isaiah, 46:10, "I will do all my pleasure." God will do everything He wants to do. He is God, after all. 55:11-12, "It is the same with my word. I send it out, and it always produces fruit. It will accomplish all I want it to, and it will prosper everywhere I send it. You will live in joy and peace..." And what is it God wants to do? Ezekiel, 33:11, "As surely as I live, says the Sovereign Lord, I take no pleasure in the death of wicked people. I only want them to turn from their wicked ways so they can live." If God will do all He pleasures, and he wants everyone to live and does not take pleasure in the death of the wicked, why would hell exist? Why would God, who created everything, create a place for the wicked to be tormented for all eternity if He doesn't take any pleasure in that? Why, also, would any Christian theologian exclaim that the righteous would take pleasure in seeing the torment of the wicked, if God Himself would not? What were these people smoking?

Indeed, continuing on in Ezekiel 33, God notes that He will destroy those who are wicked, and again that the wicked shall surely die. Die, be destroyed. They will not rise again from sheol, in other words, but where does God say here that He will torment them eternally in a lake of fire? Why would he do that? He just got through telling them he wants them all to come to Him, and if that is what He wants then surely in time He will cause it to happen.

You may think me crazy. But I'd like to see concrete scriptural evidence for hell as envisioned by Calvin and others. Instead I see Isaiah noting (53:11) that Christ's salvation would be satisfying to God: When he sees all that is accomplished by his anguish, he will be satisfied. And because of what he has experienced, my righteous servant will make it possible for many to be counted righteous, for he will bear all their sins."

Even in Isaiah 66:22-24, the Lord does not threaten the unrighteous with eternal suffering. Their bodies will lie in a ditch, and the worms that eat them will never die, and the fire that burns them will never go out. The bodies will lie there, and all who pass by will be horrified (they certainly won't rejoice and find comfort in watching the bodies of the unrighteous burn). That certainly speaks to the notion that God will indeed destroy those who turn against Him, but it doesn't make any claims about lakes of eternal fire.

Hell is a human construction, a human notion, used by humans to frighten other humans into behaving in a certain way, a way that for many hundreds of years allowed the vast majority to live in grinding poverty while the privileged few grew fat off their work, all while claiming to glorify God. Christopher Hitchens wrote a book called "God is not great: how religion poisons everything." I agree with the latter clause, because we humans create religion and use it to exert power over others, even to the point of breaking the rules of the religion we created. God, on the other hand, is surely Great, if we could just get around to finally living as He suggested, instead of using Him as a sword and a ram to slay and batter those around us.

23 November 2007

Until Proven Innocent

There is a lot to think about in this book. It is far from perfect, quite far. But it is fascinating, it is exceptionally well-researched, it makes an effort to include every known and provable fact about the case, and it certainly leaves no question as to who the real criminals were in the much-publicized case. Read more after the jump.

The case, of course, is the infamous Duke University lacrosse team gang-rape case of 2006. You remember when this was all over the news last spring and summer, when every news show had the faces of these rich, white Duke lacrosse players who had gang-raped and shouted racial slurs at an innocent black single mother who was studying for her degree at a nearby historically black college.

You may or may not remember what actually turned out to be the truth: there was no rape, no crime, the "victim" was lying, the prosecutor knew it, the prosecutor sought to put the three "rapists" in jail to help him win an election even though he knew they were innocent. The prosecutor actually engaged in a conspiracy to cover up exculpatory evidence, failed to actually interview the "victim" for over six months after the crime, and deliberately sought ways to make the lacrosse players seem guilty in the media before he ever made a single charge and despite multiple police interviews and DNA tests that showed they were innocent.

It was one of the worst cases of prosecutorial misconduct in recent memory, certainly the most public (which is sad, because the misconduct only really came out because the accused had good lawyers; poorer folks could easily have been sent to rot in jail to further this DA's political career). Worse, it was rather damning evidence that the mid-1990's spate of extreme political correctness on college campuses nationwide (remember the "water buffalo" incident?) hasn't gone away, as dozens of Duke University professors and much of the administration took a position that the lacrosse players were guilty without ever hearing a single piece of evidence.

This is one of those books that will make you mad. It made me mad. I couldn't read more than a chapter or so at a time before I had to put it down and walk away for a while. The only reason you can get through it at all is that you already know how it ends: you know the guys get off in the end, they're proven innocent. You know Nifong is in trouble. You know that. But it doesn't make reading about the intervening months especially easy.

Of course as I said the book has flaws. It needs a copyedit, badly. Very badly. One of the authors, KC Johnson, a professor at Brooklyn College, is a noted blogger, and the book reads at times like a blog entry, very informal. That's fine, but the copyediting is blog-like, too--which is to say, there hasn't been any. Words repeat, are misspelled, there are words missing, punctuation is missing or inappropriate... it isn't awful, it's not on every page, but it's blatant (I'm not talking about "it's" v "its", I'm talking about leaving the e off the end of the word 'are') and distracting and takes away from the book's power.

Similarly, the authors are both guilty of using the same sort of loaded language against the professors, the DA, and the administration, as they accuse those actors of using against the team members. The lacrosse players were 'trashed' in the media. The assertions of the professors were 'outrageous.' Loaded words like that are thrown around on almost every page, and while as I was reading they fit right in with the narrative, they're a problem. Quite simply, they make the book an easy target as being "biased." It seems like the authors have an agenda (which they clearly do and admit to in the last three chapters), but the story stands on its own merits. You'd be plenty outraged by the facts as they exist without the additional hyperbole. The beast is cooked by the facts; there's no need to continue stabbing it with language.

All is not lost; the authors are not some wild-eyed arch-conservatives. Stuart Taylor, Jr., is a fellow at the non-partisan and centrist Brookings Institute (if you think Brookings is conservative, bear in mind an equal number of people think it's liberal; that's how we know it's centrist), a lawyer, and a legal reporter for a number of media outlets (almost entirely on the left of the political spectrum); KC Johnson is a history professor who's scholarly output focuses on American progressives and their role as dissenters from American foreign policy, a registered Democrat and public supporter of Barack Obama's presidential campaign. These are not raving right-wingers. Johnson was once denied tenure for having the temerity to question whether a panel set up by CUNY to discuss the 9/11 attacks should maybe have at least one person who didn't think American foreign policy was the proximate and only cause of the attack. The very last chapter of the book is clearly Johnson's axe-grinding; two chapters before looks to have been Taylor's work, an attack on the grand-jury process and the inadequacies of the justice system to guarantee defendant's rights and prevent the innocent from being convicted.

It would be easy to write this book off as a right-wing attack on left-wing academia, and no doubt a number of the academics mentioned in its pages (disparagingly, for the most part) have said just that. Unfortunately for that story, the facts don't bear it out. In any other book, chapter 23, a plea for the rights of the accused in criminal cases, would be taken as so much left-wing hand-wringing when we should really be focused on victim's rights. Both authors actually appear to be somewhat to the left on the political spectrum--though to those on the farthest fringes of the left, moderate liberals are often seen as conservative (exactly the same phenomenon occurs on the far right; note the number of conservative politicians labelled "RINO" (Republican In Name Only) by the far fringe).

This is a story that needs to be told. This book was much needed, as a historical work, as an attempt to force the named parties to come to grips with the truth of what they did, as an effort to provide public proof that the three accused men were indeed innocent of any crime and should never have been treated as they were by the police, the press, the DA, and their own university faculty and administration. It is precisely because the book was so needed that it's glaring problems are so bad--an important historical work that seeks (and needs) to be taken seriously should take itself seriously; another two weeks at the editing desk would have cleared up the copy problems, and a two-week rewrite could have neutralized the language. Then we'd have had a book that would have to be taken seriously; this one compares to much to a blog, and that's a shame. The last line of the book states that "it's the facts that matter," and that's true, but in such a political atmosphere as this book and this case play out, style goes a long way to getting people to pay attention to the facts.

It's a good read, a rather ripping yarn, and an important book; but it's not what it needed to be.

Until Proven Innocent

There is a lot to think about in this book. It is far from perfect, quite far. But it is fascinating, it is exceptionally well-researched, it makes an effort to include every known and provable fact about the case, and it certainly leaves no question as to who the real criminals were in the much-publicized case. Read more after the jump.

The case, of course, is the infamous Duke University lacrosse team gang-rape case of 2006. You remember when this was all over the news last spring and summer, when every news show had the faces of these rich, white Duke lacrosse players who had gang-raped and shouted racial slurs at an innocent black single mother who was studying for her degree at a nearby historically black college.

You may or may not remember what actually turned out to be the truth: there was no rape, no crime, the "victim" was lying, the prosecutor knew it, the prosecutor sought to put the three "rapists" in jail to help him win an election even though he knew they were innocent. The prosecutor actually engaged in a conspiracy to cover up exculpatory evidence, failed to actually interview the "victim" for over six months after the crime, and deliberately sought ways to make the lacrosse players seem guilty in the media before he ever made a single charge and despite multiple police interviews and DNA tests that showed they were innocent.

It was one of the worst cases of prosecutorial misconduct in recent memory, certainly the most public (which is sad, because the misconduct only really came out because the accused had good lawyers; poorer folks could easily have been sent to rot in jail to further this DA's political career). Worse, it was rather damning evidence that the mid-1990's spate of extreme political correctness on college campuses nationwide (remember the "water buffalo" incident?) hasn't gone away, as dozens of Duke University professors and much of the administration took a position that the lacrosse players were guilty without ever hearing a single piece of evidence.

This is one of those books that will make you mad. It made me mad. I couldn't read more than a chapter or so at a time before I had to put it down and walk away for a while. The only reason you can get through it at all is that you already know how it ends: you know the guys get off in the end, they're proven innocent. You know Nifong is in trouble. You know that. But it doesn't make reading about the intervening months especially easy.

Of course as I said the book has flaws. It needs a copyedit, badly. Very badly. One of the authors, KC Johnson, a professor at Brooklyn College, is a noted blogger, and the book reads at times like a blog entry, very informal. That's fine, but the copyediting is blog-like, too--which is to say, there hasn't been any. Words repeat, are misspelled, there are words missing, punctuation is missing or inappropriate... it isn't awful, it's not on every page, but it's blatant (I'm not talking about "it's" v "its", I'm talking about leaving the e off the end of the word 'are') and distracting and takes away from the book's power.

Similarly, the authors are both guilty of using the same sort of loaded language against the professors, the DA, and the administration, as they accuse those actors of using against the team members. The lacrosse players were 'trashed' in the media. The assertions of the professors were 'outrageous.' Loaded words like that are thrown around on almost every page, and while as I was reading they fit right in with the narrative, they're a problem. Quite simply, they make the book an easy target as being "biased." It seems like the authors have an agenda (which they clearly do and admit to in the last three chapters), but the story stands on its own merits. You'd be plenty outraged by the facts as they exist without the additional hyperbole. The beast is cooked by the facts; there's no need to continue stabbing it with language.

All is not lost; the authors are not some wild-eyed arch-conservatives. Stuart Taylor, Jr., is a fellow at the non-partisan and centrist Brookings Institute (if you think Brookings is conservative, bear in mind an equal number of people think it's liberal; that's how we know it's centrist), a lawyer, and a legal reporter for a number of media outlets (almost entirely on the left of the political spectrum); KC Johnson is a history professor who's scholarly output focuses on American progressives and their role as dissenters from American foreign policy, a registered Democrat and public supporter of Barack Obama's presidential campaign. These are not raving right-wingers. Johnson was once denied tenure for having the temerity to question whether a panel set up by CUNY to discuss the 9/11 attacks should maybe have at least one person who didn't think American foreign policy was the proximate and only cause of the attack. The very last chapter of the book is clearly Johnson's axe-grinding; two chapters before looks to have been Taylor's work, an attack on the grand-jury process and the inadequacies of the justice system to guarantee defendant's rights and prevent the innocent from being convicted.

It would be easy to write this book off as a right-wing attack on left-wing academia, and no doubt a number of the academics mentioned in its pages (disparagingly, for the most part) have said just that. Unfortunately for that story, the facts don't bear it out. In any other book, chapter 23, a plea for the rights of the accused in criminal cases, would be taken as so much left-wing hand-wringing when we should really be focused on victim's rights. Both authors actually appear to be somewhat to the left on the political spectrum--though to those on the farthest fringes of the left, moderate liberals are often seen as conservative (exactly the same phenomenon occurs on the far right; note the number of conservative politicians labelled "RINO" (Republican In Name Only) by the far fringe).

This is a story that needs to be told. This book was much needed, as a historical work, as an attempt to force the named parties to come to grips with the truth of what they did, as an effort to provide public proof that the three accused men were indeed innocent of any crime and should never have been treated as they were by the police, the press, the DA, and their own university faculty and administration. It is precisely because the book was so needed that it's glaring problems are so bad--an important historical work that seeks (and needs) to be taken seriously should take itself seriously; another two weeks at the editing desk would have cleared up the copy problems, and a two-week rewrite could have neutralized the language. Then we'd have had a book that would have to be taken seriously; this one compares to much to a blog, and that's a shame. The last line of the book states that "it's the facts that matter," and that's true, but in such a political atmosphere as this book and this case play out, style goes a long way to getting people to pay attention to the facts.

It's a good read, a rather ripping yarn, and an important book; but it's not what it needed to be.

21 November 2007

Chirac Formally Probed Over Scam

... is the headline on a BBC article right now. It just showed up in my Google desktop news ticker.

There's no way to carry across the following in text, but I mean this both literally as a question, AND with a heavy dose of sarcasm as a statement:

There was no better way to say that.?

20 November 2007

Pounds and euros

I have a key on my keyboard here dedicated for the Euro symbol, €. Handy thing to have I suppose; there's also a dedicated $ key so I don't have to press shift-4. Not that I need it; I type a $ symbol once a month maybe, and a € less frequently than that. But now I find myself writing a story set in Telford, UK (at least partially), and it would be particularly useful to be able to type the pound character, unicode 00A3: £

Right now I am forced to press Fn-NumLk, then Alt-0163 just to get that character. Oy vey! Is there a way that I could rejigger my already-jiggered keyboard so that the dedicated $ key was a dedicated £ key instead? That would be most useful. Please help if you know how!

19 November 2007

Teknologie ist amazing

This month's Popular Science magazine, which is in the main bathroom, has the annual Best of What's New awards. One of the new things is this Nanosolar solar film, basically a photovoltaic cell the thickness of aluminum foil that costs about 30 cents per watt to generate electricity. That's less than half the price of coal people. Holy shit. I'm looking up how to invest in this company right now. You could coat your car with this stuff, your roof... you could coat your sidewalk in this (although I doubt you'd want to walk on it). Got a dead patch in the lawn? Use it to generate enough electricity to power your water heater! I mean damn, this is cool.

Another thing that caught my eye was the AQUS Watersaver, a device that goes under your sink which treats your sink water and runs it into your toilet, saving water. The copy says the device should save 10-20 gallons a day in a 2-person household; Popsci's article says 14 gallons. I was curious about this. 14 gallons a day. That's 5110 gallons per year. The device costs $295, and I was curious how long it would take you to pay for it, at the rate of 5110 gallons per year. So I wondered, how much does water cost? I decided to look up the price of municipal water; I used Greenville, SC, as my test market for reasons that I may discuss later if I feel like it. Turns out, if you live outside the city limits but use city water, they charge you $2.03 per 1000 gallons. So this device will save you $10.37 per year. You'll pay for it, then, in about 28 years.

There's also sewerage, of course. I don't pay for water here (it's part of the homeowner's fees), but if I recall from water bills in North Lauderdale and Clemson, sewerage is about five times as expensive as water itself. Still, in Greenville County at least, city sewerage will only cost you $10.15 per 1000 gallons (roughly). That's $51.87 in savings per year, added to the $10.37 gets $62.24. So then the device should pay for itself in less than 5 years. That's not so bad.

After doing all that calcution... I decided water is way too damn cheap. First of all, bottled water runs you at least $5/gallon. City water runs you less than a penny per gallon. And it's treated, filtered, and fluoridated.

And there's a damn 100-year drought going on in South Carolina right now. And water still only costs a fifth of a penny per gallon? What the hell is up with that?

17 November 2007

Smittygirl is awesome.

Moving is hard. It's always hard, for everybody. Although often we move with fond hopes for the new place, packing up, selling off, and moving your possessions to a new location is neither easy nor enjoyable.

This is not an easy time for either of us right now. It's a shame it's during the holidays here but this is what it is. Smittygirl's apartment lease is up at the end of this month and we're moving her things into my place. It's been good, much of it—we've sold off a lot of my junk, and a lot of her junk, and picked the better furniture we each had, rearranged all the rooms… this was the impetus behind fixing up the kitchen this year. Good stuff has come out of it. We still have some boxes and piles here but the new living room—some new furniture, some old, but all shifted around—is great. The dining room is cleaner and nicer than it's been in months. The bedroom is still a mess and we haven't got it all sorted out, but it's getting there. It's a nice place to live now, and it'll get better. That's good.

But from my perspective, while there's been some difficulty, getting rid of some pieces of furniture I like, clearing out years of accumulated junk, throwing away a lot of things, I've had this pretty easy. Once I consented to giving up my glider rocker, that was really the hardest thing I've done. The labor hasn't been tough, certainly. This is still my house, and even though now it has our stuff in it, it's home regardless.

Not quite so easy for Smittygirl. I lose sight of that sometimes, but she's the one who really has a lot of stress to deal with. First of all, we're getting rid of a lot more of her things than mine. We're not terribly attached to our possessions, for the most part, so that's not that big a deal. But she has to move everything else, too. I've had to move out some of my big stuff and go through some of the little stuff, but Smittygirl has to go through everything. We're looking through everything she has, everything she owns, and deciding what comes with us to my place, and what we're getting rid of.

Think about that. This isn't an ordinary move. Yes, I have a small place, and because we're moving in together here we can't have too much stuff. But whereas I can just move things to another place when we need room—need space to move the desk? Take the stuff off the desk and put it in that corner there—she doesn't have that option. She has to look at it all, decide about it all. You don't have to do that when you're moving to a new state. She hasn't had to do that in any of her previous moves. This is sort of final for a lot of her things.

I don't want to give the impression that we place all this importance on things. What's important is us, not stuff. But no matter how non-material we claim to be, anyone claims to be, you have stuff, it's yours, and because it's yours it's important to you. And you don't go through everything you own every year and condense down, do you? Nobody does that; we all should, but nobody does that.

(Actually, I was speaking with a friend this week about the upcoming holiday, the orgy of consumption, and she mentioned the idea that kids should be taught that if Santa's going to bring new toys, you've got to make room for them by getting rid of some older toys. Make your kids go through what they have and get rid of stuff they don't use, play with, need, and donate it to somebody—and parents should do it, too, of course. That's a great idea and we should all do that—after Thanksgiving, instead of rushing out at 5 in the morning to get that must-have toy, go through the house, the closets: find the clothes you haven't worn in a while, toys that don't get played with, books that you never plan to read again, furniture you want to replace—all the stuff you have that you don't actually need, and collect it all together, and donate it, recycle it, something. And let that be both a continuation of your giving thanks—be thankful that you have the means to have more stuff than you need—and the beginning of the season of giving. Season of giving is much better than season of getting, isn't it? Isn't this is a great way to make giving the focus?)

The point is, it's been years since I've had to sit down and look at every single thing I own and decide, permanently—this goes, this stays. Period. Lord, I moved a box out here from Texas that I had never opened. In a year, I had never bother to open and unpack the box. I didn't even know everything that was in it. It was still here when we started going through things to sell/donate to make room for this move. That's disgusting.

And Smittygirl is doing that. And she's going to work every day, and making bridesmaid dresses for people at the last minute, and planning to recover some of our furniture, and making Halloween costumes, and she still manages to cook a third of our meals and help me keep the place clean. And she has to put up with me while she does all that.

Damn. I don't give her enough credit and I don't tell her enough that she's amazing. She tells me how much she appreciates what I do, and I frankly don't feel like I do all that much right now. And I've been getting cranky because I don't feel occupied, and she's been tolerant of that.

Well. Nothing left to do except tell her that I love her.

13 November 2007

It never ends!

It never ends that way, too...

We have most of Smittygirl's effects moved into the house now, with just a few small items to go. It's been a busy couple of weekends, and we have a couple more busy ones coming up. But it's looking so nice in here right now! We cleaned off my dining room table to swap it out for hers (hers is bigger), and right now the dining room just looks so nice without all the usual crap piled up on the table. I've moved the small round table that had been in the kitchen, then moved to in front of the dining table. Now it's beside my favorite chair. It's a little weird there, I'm still getting used to it, but on the bright side the silk bamboo is much closer to my favorite chair and I'm enjoying that. We moved the TV stand, which opened up the room a lot. Now we just need a couple of DVD/CD racks and we'll be all set in the living room (mostly). The bedroom still has some work to be done, which I'm not doing right now even though I should be. Hmm. I guess I should be doing that.

I'll post pictures maybe. Those of you who've been here will appreciate the changes.

Listening to now: The Safety Dance (Men Without Hats)
I love this song. I also love Christmas music. I put my "Before Thanksgiving" Christmas CD in the player yesterday, George Winston's December. It's nice, relaxing piano music, with only one explicitly Christmas song on it (The Holly and the Ivy, which is very nice). Smittygirl and I both like it, and I don't mind playing it before Turkey Day since it's not really a Christmas CD. Come the 23rd, though... I'm just kidding. But I will be putting up Christmas lights on the 23rd--I found green ones at Wal-Mart! $2 for a hundred of 'em! Yaaay!

09 November 2007

Interview

Well, the interview went well enough, although I have nothing to compare it to. They should be making a decision just before Thanksgiving. Which by the way oh my word what happened to the year? It's already almost Thanksgiving! That means it's already almost Christmas! And I'm still in the bleeding Air Force!

My oh my.

Oh well. I have a busy day ahead of me and must get started.

08 November 2007

Think Happy Thoughts

I'm interviewing for a job.

I haven't done that before. EVER. The two jobs I had before I joined the military, I was the only applicant for the one, and there were more openings than applicants for the other. In both cases it was a "Welcome to the team, here's what you need to do," rather than an interview. I suppose I interviewed for the jobs I had in college, but really, college jobs... let's just say I don't recall the interviews and they weren't a big deal if there were any.

So anyway. Today at 2. Think happy thoughts about me, or at any rate think thoughts about me that don't involve me saying stupid things to interviewers. Lord knows I can say some mighty stupid things.

In other news... it's been a while since I posted anything of substance with any regularity, and I apologize for that. I'll try to do better.