walking paths

This is pretty non-sequitur, especially since I’m not posting at my usual 3-post-a-week rate right now… but it proves that I’m a left-over nerd that I still find xkcd funny.  I was clicking “Random” and laughed pretty hard at this one, because it’s so true for me.

Classmates.com | The Onion

I love the Onion.

SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY
Classmates.com Employees Don’t Have Heart To Tell CEO About Facebook

SEATTLE—Employees at Classmates.com—an online service that enables users to find and communicate with people from their past for a monthly fee—have done everything in their power to keep the company’s CEO from finding out about the wildly popular social networking site Facebook. “He knows something is going on,” Classmates.com web coder Josh Krzysch said while combing his boss’s newspaper and removing any offending articles. “The other day he asked me why people aren’t interested in getting in touch with old friends anymore, and I told him that the Internet just isn’t very popular right now. What else was I supposed to say?” Employees claim that unless things somehow miraculously improve by next month, they plan to quietly pack up their desks and leave in the middle of the night.

—

spring letter from over the rhine

If you know me, you know Over the Rhine is one of my favorite bands.  Not the least because they write like being human depends on rich description and late night adjectives (maybe it does).   Checking e-mail here in the early afternoon felt a little bit less to-do list ish because Linford sent an e-mail that warmed up gmail enough to make me want to share parts of what he wrote:
(the photo of Linford is when they played here in Chicago on 5 Nov 08)

April, 2009

Hello friends and extended family,

I know of a glass blower who gets up every morning in the dark to do his work. Before the world wakes up, before the phone starts ringing, in the sacred remains of the night when all is still, he gathers and begins to fuse his raw materials: the breath from his lungs, glowing flame, imagination, dogged hope.

I used to work from the other direction. I loved the feeling of still being up after the rest of the city (and world) had grown sleepy, the light of a lamp making my third story bedroom windows glow while I leaned over my desk and sailed towards something I couldn’t name.

Someone sent me this little excerpt awhile back, in a beautiful letter of encouragement I should add, the sort of letter that makes everything slow down, hold still:

Here dies another day

During which I have had eyes, ears, hands

And the great world round me;

And with tomorrow begins another.

Why am I allowed two?

(GK Chesterton)

I’d really be okay with this being my epitaph.

When I was younger I would often write myself short job descriptions. I was thinking out loud about what might be worth hanging a life on, a life I was willing to sign my name to:

-Create spaces where good things can happen.

-Give the world something beautiful, some gift of gratitude, no matter how insignificant or small.

-Write love letters to the whole world.

-Build fires outdoors, and lift a glass and tell stories, and listen, and laugh, laugh, laugh. (Karin says I’m still working on this one. She thinks I still need to laugh more, especially at

her jokes, puns and witty asides.)

-Flip a breaker and plunge the farm into darkness so that the stars can be properly seen.

-Do not squander afflictions.

-Own the longing, the non-negotiable need to “praise the mutilated world.”

-Find the music.

I still crave the extravagant gesture, the woman spilling a year’s wages on the feet of Jesus, the rarest perfume, washing his feet and drying them with her hair, a gesture so sensual it left the other men in the room paralyzed with criticism, analysis, theoretical moral concern – for what – the poor? Or was it just misdirected outrage in light of the glaring poverty of their own imaginations?

(Some friends of mine were talking about this scene the other night. We got to imagining Mary with a pixie haircut, which made the drying more difficult. We were drinking wine and Rob had made something to eat late at night: take a cracker, put a thin slice of fresh pear on it, then some sautéed goat cheese from the skillet, and top it with walnuts drizzled with honey from the oven. At midnight?!)

Someone once described our music as a mash-up of spirituality, whimsy and sensuality.

Thank you, thank you, thank y

ou.

Music and art and writing: extravagant, essential, the act of spilling something, a cup running over…

The simultaneous cry of, You must change your life, and Welcome home.

…

His PS was great:

PS Pls pass this letter around freely to your friends and family. Chop it up and twitter it. Crumple it in your mind, strike an imaginary match and start a fire. Print it out, line the birdcage with it and let the white doves crap all night long. Spread it on the floor and train a puppy to squat and pee. Make a paper airplane out of it and toss it off the Golden Gate Bridge. Slip it between the pages of an old Southern Baptist hymnal, or into the yellow pages of a phone booth phone book if such a thing still exists. Maybe a writer will find it, God help her.

birds outside my window

My brain is close to 100% fried from finals week and end of term writing. Here are some birds that were sitting outside my window.
(they’re prolly better if you click the blue link to jump over to my picasa album, instead of viewing really tiny here)

truth invaders

I love it.  So, some nerdy, politically motivated programmers have now created a Space Invaders aracade game based on lies told by the Obama and McCain campaigns!  Based on PolitiFact‘s ratings (which is a great site, although I more often use Factcheck.org), the site lets you choose a statement you think is a lie, and attack it until it reveals the truth about the matter.

Hee hee.  Go play Truth Invaders (btw – it seems like you’ve gotta use Internet Explorer, Firefox didn’t work for me)

the biblical narrative reveals itself along the south wall

Dr. Jim Bruckner, Dr. Bob Hubbard, Dr. Klyne Snodgrass, and Dr. Stephen Chester.

In order. 🙂

 

via my Treo 700p

obama meets president bartlett

Many people know I don’t own any DVDs.  Except, well… all seven seasons of The West Wing.  Though I know he mostly lives in writer-genius Aaron Sorkin’s head—the favorite President of my lifetime is none other than Jed Bartlett, the firey but compassionate economist (there’s part of the appeal) that Martin Sheen sometimes gets mistaken for on the street.

 So imagine my grin when Barack Obama meets him.

palin and clinton, live from NY

This has me laughing so hard I was tearing up. Can’t believe how well Tina Fey picked up Sarah Palin. Gotta wonder if anyone on the current cast could have done as well. Still, I think SNL’s got some juice to it. Plus, I love nerdy political humor.

fourth of july at the estes park center, ymca

The YMCA feels a lot like a small town, and Fourth of July carries holiday excitement that anonymous communities don’t seem to have.  Who dresses up for the 4th?  Everyone.  Plus the winners of the parade contest will dog the other departments for at least a week.  Here are my photos of our morning parade under the visage of Long’s Peak, featuring LT students in almost every department.

dragon un-naturally speaking

A friend of mine a while ago let me have his copy of Dragon Naturally Speaking, the voice recognition software. I’ve had limited success with it (although admittedly I haven’t been able to use it a lot).

It has one feature that will take a pre-recorded audio file – i.e. MP3, and transcribe what it hears into a Word doc. Sweet! I wanted to use this a couple weeks ago when I transcribed a talk by Mark Driscoll on the emerging church. It was a one hour sermon, and doing it manually was going to take serious time. This seemed like the solution.

Uh, not so much. Here’s the Dragon transcribed file. Compare to the original I did by hand. Heheh.