Illusory Follies

In Gentoo, “emerge” is the package manager (the tool used to install new applications and software on the system). You can type “emerge mozilla-firefox” to install the most recent Firefox release or “emerge ruby” to install the Ruby programming language.

Here’s a slightly unexpected result…Diane will like this…

Okay, so it doesn’t do anything, but it’s kind of funny.

I’ll tell thee everything I can:

There’s little to relate.

I saw an aged aged man,

A-sitting on a gate.

“Who are you, aged man?” I said,

“And how is it you live?”

And his answer trickled through my head,

Like water through a sieve.

He said “I look for butterflies

That sleep among the wheat:

I make them into mutton-pies,

And sell them in the street.

I sell them unto men,” he said,

“Who sail on stormy seas;

And that’s the way I get my bread —

A trifle, if you please.”

But I was thinking of a plan

To dye one’s whiskers green,

And always use so large a fan

That they could not be seen.

So, having no reply to give

To what the old man said,

I cried “Come, tell me how you live!”

And thumped him on the head.

His accents mild took up the tale:

He said “I go my ways,

And when I find a mountain-rill,

I set it in a blaze;

And thence they make a stuff they call

Rowlands’ Macassar-Oil –

Yet twopence-halfpenny is all

They give me for my toil.”

But I was thinking of a way

To feed oneself on batter,

And so go on from day to day

Getting a little fatter.

I shook him well from side to side,

Until his face was blue:

“Come, tell me how you live,” I cried,

“And what it is you do!”

He said “I hunt for haddocks” eyes

Among the heather bright,

And work them into waistcoat-buttons

In the silent night.

And these I do not sell for gold

Or coin of silvery shine,

But for a copper halfpenny,

And that will purchase nine.

“I sometimes dig for buttered rolls,

Or set limed twigs for crabs:

I sometimes search the grassy knolls

For wheels of Hansom-cabs.

And that’s the way” (he gave a wink)

“By which I get my wealth–

And very gladly will I drink

Your Honour’s noble health.”

I heard him then, for I had just

Completed my design

To keep the Menai bridge from rust

By boiling it in wine.

I thanked him much for telling me

The way he got his wealth,

But chiefly for his wish that he

Might drink my noble health.

And now, if e’er by chance I put

My fingers into glue,

Or madly squeeze a right-hand foot

Into a left-hand shoe,

Or if I drop upon my toe

A very heavy weight,

I weep, for it reminds me so

Of that old man I used to know–

Whose look was mild, whose speech was slow

Whose hair was whiter than the snow,

Whose face was very like a crow,

With eyes, like cinders, all aglow,

Who seemed distracted with his woe,

Who rocked his body to and fro,

And muttered mumblingly and low,

As if his mouth were full of dough,

Who snorted like a buffalo–

That summer evening long ago,

A-sitting on a gate.

-Lewis Carroll

With three boys now, I’m seeing a fair amount of filth around us. If it’s not an excreted material, it’s a pulverized food product, or some sticky conglomerated mass composed of items A and/or B combined with other household objects. It’s not pleasant.

Today my oldest got into the spackle and dutifully applied it to not only to the walls, but also his younger brother. At least it doesn’t smell bad…

…But now the serious point: We have this massive amount of cleaning tools, equipment and supplies that we use on a daily basis to scrub ourselves, our children, our tables, floors, cars, etc. It’s sort of amazing how much effort we put into it. I think the wife and I are a little on the freakish side of obsessive compulsive cleaning but still, I would bet that most people spend an enormous part of their life cleaning. I think about people in the past… I have a strangely realistic-feeling episode in my head of “neolithic” people huddled in a cave with their bear pelt (carefully skinned and washed to remove the stench). And oddly I can picture that although we would consider them filthy, I bet they spent a LOT of their time cleaning things.

…But now to the REAL serious point: I don’t think we consider very much how incredibly revealing this is about us as Christians. An ordinary Christian hates sin just like your plain vanilla human (yum!) hates filth. It’s internal filth and it’s really pretty nauseating. But for my own part, I know I spend hardly any time at all cleaning out the internal filth with some spiritual Windex topped off with some heavenly PineSol. Why not? We’re so focused on the trivial filth of this world. Sometimes we complain about the bad smell of sin in our lives but we don’t spend enough time taking a shower in God’s grace.

We know we’ll get dirty again as humans but we still make a real and conscious effort to avoid it. Shouldn’t we have the same attitude towards spiritual gluck? I don’t believe “cleanliness is next to Godliness” but maybe if we synchronize the ideas in our heads we’ll end up spending more time thinking about our Godliness (or lack thereof).

There’s not too much else to do in the shower — why not pray for spiritual cleansing? I think I’m going to try to do that from now on.

For those of us that already have a keener sense of their sin and God’s grace, take this post the other way around and hop in the shower a little more often! Your friends and coworkers appreciate it and being clean is at least nice even if it’s not morally required!

Yes, that’s right, this post IS categorized as “Actual Events”.

Is it just me, or do others notice a lot of people around them who are:

1) Pretentious

2) Obvious about it?

I think everyone’s a bit pretentious (myself included — notice the pedantic use of alliteration and long words in the title –and, oh darn, the use of the word “pedantic” just now). I think that as a Christian, and in particular who experienced a rather long period of life under a pastor who was a big on “mortification” I may be more sensitive to this than others. I was always able to see the dark side of my own actions (for example, “I’m writing this blog post because other people write more interesting things on their blogs and I need to be better than them”). Maybe it’s unhealthy… It’s definitely highly pessimistic. But I can’t help but be somewhat annoyed when people think they’re so clever but they’re not very gracious about admitting their shortcomings. I think I mostly feel that people are “real” when they’re able to say that they may not know what they’re talking about.

So, if anyone ever asks you if your “motives are pure” answer immediately, “No!”. I don’t think this side of the pearly gates we’ll ever have pure motives. I think that friends and relatives admitting faults to each other is amazingly refreshing. And to be clear, this is not the same as inventing trivial, almost good sounding faults. “I’m so sorry to give you such a large and expensive present!”. Honesty, especially when talking about motives makes me feel so much better. “Sorry that I was abrupt with you today” is not nearly as helpful as saying, “I was in a rush and didn’t consider that you had something you needed to tell me.” Or even, “Sorry that I was abrupt but I was angry from before with you and took it out on you.” (By the way, I tend to be abrupt with people when I’m irritated with them and I know that this last statement is one that I should say more often.) There’s something there that isn’t usually mentioned in an apology… It’s a statement that you didn’t do something right but now you’d like to make it right. It’s not passing the buck or making excuses. We always can make excuses (I was in a rush, it was a stressful day, you were hard to deal with, etc.) but the reality is that these simply don’t help the person that we’re supposedly apologizing to. And the point is to help them.

But I’ve wandered a little bit — I was talking about pretentious people. From the Free Dictionary I get the following definition:

Claiming or demanding a position of distinction or merit, especially when unjustified.

So, my gripe is that everyone, absolutely everyone has tons of problems and should be awfully careful that they don’t act as if they deserve distinction or merit for their actions. And furthermore, that being humble will go a long way to really connecting with people. I was just listening to some lectures by Gordon Clark from a class that he taught. He was asking students in the class if anyone knew what the “Lycopersicon esculentum” was and making it sound like they should. No one knew. But instead of blithely going on and pretending that this was everyday stuff to him, he sort of stumbled over the term himself making it abundantly clear that he had simply written the name down himself and probably wouldn’t remember it tomorrow. I know this is trite example but it was something fresh in my mind. He could have made himself seem incredibly smart but he instead really connected with his students by admitting that he didn’t have this stuff memorized and then went on to make his point.

I was watching (I’ll admit it) a rather horrible show called The Next Great American Band. The idea is that bands get up and perform and are one after the other eliminated until the voters (the watcher’s of the show) have determined the final band that “makes it”. Anyway, the point is that after each band performs the judges make some statements about how they think the performance went and what needs improvement. With one exception, all the bands said things like “That’s just who we are”, “that’s how YOU feel”, “We don’t agree”, etc. It was kind of disgusting. Because they “made it” to the show, they were too proud and self-important to admit fault at all. I thought some of the bands did well, but I was immediately disgusted afterward when they acted so pretentious about their performance. It’s so commonplace now in America to act like this and it’s sort of sickening.

This has been sort of a long post and I don’t know what else to mention. It just bothers me a lot and it seems like people don’t realize how bad they make themselves look. Doing something stupid makes you look bad but not admitting it or making excuses makes you look much worse than just stupid. Being smart makes you look good, but being smart and admitting that you don’t have all the answers make you truly seem wise. And that’s what we should all try to be!

Vertical Farming is a neat, futuristic approach to producing food within urban environments. I’m not terrified of running out land and of populations booming too much nor am I running scared of global warming or cooling or whichever it is but I still think that the idea is very neat.

I think it could actually be made a cost saver in large cities. The idea is sort of similar to terracing unusable land to make it usable but instead of making land flat, you stack it. I really do think that the answer to a lot of “society’s woes” is that these things will at some point become cheaper than doing them the “old” way. I just see this one as becoming worthwhile sooner than some of the other wacky ideas. So I guess I view this as more of an investment in new technology than just philanthropy to support these projects.

The reality is that shipping and transportation is becoming more and more difficult and massively increases the price of products. I’ve not seen it mentioned, but why not have the first floor be the “fresh produce” grocery store?

Just count the black dots:

I stumbled across a website that was talking about the “magical number seven, plus or minus two“. The Wikipedia article that I link to has some great stuff. It’s really quite fascinating. I myself have found that I am able to really track 8 things at a time. If I’m stressed it seems to drop to 6. I use this quite a bit for making lists. Most lists I wish to make are short (less than 7 items) but I often wish to make them when I’m without a writing device (no PDA, pen and paper, etc.). So what I do is simply think out the list and make sure I firmly remember the number of items. Then, when I need to recall the list, I quickly think of the appropriate number (which is easy to remember) and the items tend to “fall out” of my memory quite easily. I have tried to track multiple lists and can succeed in juggling a few (although it’s unnecessary since I rarely have more than one list in my mind at a time).

Sometimes I wish I was autistic (since many of autistic people seem to have this cognitive numeric limit removed). It would be fun to track lists that contained hundreds or thousands of items.

Okay, well maybe not “fun” but useful.

Or I could just get a digital voice recorder.

I have a terrible memory. Even so, I remember enough of what I do to realize that I’m always somewhat disappointed and underwhelmed by my past self. I feel as if the person I was 6 months ago was a much more immature person who said and did all sorts of ridiculous things. Now, the odd part is knowing that 6 months from now, I’ll scroll the archives of my blog (but not too far since I don’t post much) find this entry and gently shake my head and tut-tut.

It’s disillusioning.

There is at least a slight benefit though. If people think poorly of my opinions, just wait! I won’t be the same person in 6 months and I’ll have the class and sophistication to agree that I was wrong!

Rev. Rayburn preached on Mark 3:31-35 this last Sunday.

And his mother and his brothers came, and standing outside they sent to him and called him. And a crowd was sitting around him, and they said to him, “Your mother and your brothers are outside, seeking you.” And he answered them, “Who are my mother and my brothers?” And looking about at those who sat around him, he said, “Here are my mother and my brothers! For whoever does the will of God, he is my brother and sister and mother.”

It’s interesting to note that Christ mentions specifically the “doing of his will” as being what makes a person a member of His spiritual family. He doesn’t mention believing here but doing. It must have made an impact. Both of Jesus’s brothers, probably confused at the time that Jesus told them this, later understood and wrote fairly strong words that put the doctrine of grace into perspective.

James 2:14

What good is it, my brothers, if someone says he has faith but does not have works? Can that faith save him?

Jude 3b,4

I found it necessary to write appealing to you to contend for the faith that was once for all delivered to the saints. For certain people have crept in unnoticed who long ago were designated for this condemnation, ungodly people, who pervert the grace of our God into sensuality and deny our only Master and Lord, Jesus Christ.

Interesting stuff… It’s neat to realize that the particular circumstances that led to the convictions that James and Jude held were probably the rather dramatic event in Mark 3. Yes, it’s inspired, but it somehow feels so much more human when you see these things.