I Love Her, I Love Her, I Love Her!

That's all. I love my wife.

You may now return to your regularly scheduled lives.

D is gonna have me begging for mercy!

When my brother D gets back from his current job, he's going to be able to pound me to a pulp! I can't wait! He's studying Aikido now and when we next meet he'll be ready to toss me around like a rag doll!

Well, maybe he won't get there with only a couple months of training under his belt, but I can always hope! I think I'll still be able to take him down since the typical drawback to Aikido is that they don't do much/any attacking except as something to practice against. That means they don't get to practice against the stronger and faster attacks of martial artists who have focused on and studied attacking more thoroughly.

Hopefully I'll be able to pick up some tips and pointers while flying through the air. Maybe I'll even learn how to do some of the throws myself! In old Japan, the serious practitioners did a great deal of cross-training under different masters. But then, they learned their basics well before moving around, so they didn't have the failings of so many of today's martial arts teachers who have black belts in four or five different school.

Home Sweet Home

Well, Massanutten was a blast and the indoor water park was terrific! J did the whole yo-yo deal: up the stairs and down the slides, up and down, up and down! :^)

Oh, and they had some good adult slides there too! And a cool go-cart track that J and I loved! The only draw back to the time was that we were all so busy doing fun stuff that we hardly had time to chat and relax together - not exactly the biggest downside to have.

Actually I take that back, there was another downside, though it was more a goof-up than a downside. We drove back home on Sunday and forgot to pick up C's car at PHC! Completely skipped our minds. So I get a call from C about 12:20 saying "My car is missing, how about a ride?" So I got to use that as an excuse to take a nice, long lunch to go see my wife.

Hmmm, that was a downside? I'm sure there was one in there somewhere, but darned if I can see it now! I'll have to figure out how to "forget" her car at work more often!

Homosexuality Debate

There's a roaring and (so far) well done debate going on over on Ed Vieth's blog on a post on homosexuality.

I would REALLY suggest reading it as there's a guy on there who seems to be a pretty grounded Christian, and is also homosexual. So far he's been a bit vague on whether or not he believes that homosexual sex is Biblically fine (though I think that's what he would say), but he has brought up some really good discussion on how homosexuality is viewed as the ultimate sort of sin - you can't be a Christian and homosexual.

Clogging on St. Patrick's Day

A definite must! Even though it was at an assisted living home in McLean, we had a nicely rowdy crowd who may have been slightly lubricated by the Irish beers they were serving there. The first performance was upstairs with the people who required a lot more care, so there was very little cheering going on, but it was really fantastic to see how much they enjoyed the performance even if they couldn't express it very vigorously. One little old lady kept dancing/shuffling her feet on the side and tried to join us a few times! She also stole a few kisses - quite the flirt!

The second performance, downstairs, was MUCH cooler (temperature) than the first one had been upstairs. Sunrise Assisted Living Home had rearranged the downstairs eating room to go for more of an Irish pub look and feel, had an Irish fiddler wandering around, were serving dinner for residents and their families, and as I mentioned before had imported Irish beers available.

Whew! If I ever get to such a ripe old state of infirmity that I have to be put into a home, make sure it's like this place! Ignore the fact that it probably costs $5000 a month NOW and will be $20000 a month by the time I reach 120, but hopefully C&I will have a hundred million or so saved up by then.

ArcIMS 9.2 now working on Linux!

YES!!!

Now I can FINALLY leave for clogging!

300

Hmm, bro put up his movie review, so I've got to put up mine. Isn't it supposed to be the other way around? I mean, isn't the little brother supposed to be trying to be like the big brother?

Meh. Oh well, on with the review. C is SO nice to me! She comes along and suffers through two hours of relatively mindless violence seasoned with heavy doses of blood splatters just to keep me company! If anyone has seen this movie, you'll already know exactly what I'm talking about: 300! I heard about it from a couple different Christian sources, all of which thought it a good movie. I'm going to have to be more careful about the Christian sources I attend.

The main movie theme - freedom is worth defending and even sacrificing one's life to preserve - is an excellent ideal and comes across loud and clear in the movie. Unfortunately it comes dressed in pretty heavy duty blood and gore, and the standard bed and skin scenes.

Having the camera follow a freshly chopped head flipping through the air in slow-motion while spraying out blood for a solid 5 or 6 seconds is pretty messy. Do that several times throughout the movie and it becomes excessive. Add on top several very detailed views of the decapitated corpses' necks spurting blood up out from the heartbeat and it becomes a bit squeamish. Then add in the director's apparent fascination of seeing spear-heads pop out the back of bodies, flick off the blood, and then get pulled back through, and you've got a serious overdose of blood. Oh! And don't forget the monstrously deformed humans who can pluck a dagger out of their own eye and keep fighting. Oh, and the giant elephants going splat at the bottom of a cliff! And the stone wall cemented together with freshly slain corpses! And the legs getting chopped off of charging horses! And the wall of dead bodies getting pushed over onto the Persian Immortals!

And since it was made for a COMPLETELY male audience, it had the completely frivolous bed scenes and excessively displayed skin. Unless it's a sports movie, this seems to be a prerequisite for all guys movies. But after that first half hour, it moved on to the war and didn't have any other skin, proving once again that sex and skin in movies is totally irrelevant to the progression of the story and is added in with nothing else in mind than to grab the young-single-guy demographic.

Even with all that, I thought it was a fun movie! I got to critique the spear thrusts, the sword fighting, the phalanx positioning, the tactical ideas, etc. For the most part the fighting was absolutely incredible, and if they had just dropped off all the blood spattering, it would have been, far and away, the best fight scenes ever made! I don't suggest seeing the movie to anyone because of the sex/skin and blood, but if they could have left those out, the movie wouldn't have lost anything, and the fighting was so ABSOLUTELY AWESOME that it would still have grabbed every guy's attention! Oh, and some of the cinematography was unbelievable - the scenes where the Persian arrows literally blocked out the sun was absolutely insane!! Fighting in the shade! !!!ROTFLOL!!!

Thanks C for coming along while your husband got his fighting fix. We'll watch some romantic comedies soon.

Mavericks, Miracles and Medicine

The Purcellville library has an AWESOME series going on by Dr. Grauerholz. He's the same guy who was the state coroner for VA and did the Dead Reckoning series on criminal forensics. This time he's doing medical breakthroughs and the mavericks who brought many of them to reality.

Last week: blood transfusions! The original belief being that the 'nature' of an animal was contained in its blood, it should be possible to calm down maniacs by giving them transfusions of cow or sheep blood.

Yeah, that'll permanently calm them!

A guy who had fits of rage where he would strip, attack everyone he saw, and try to set fire to buildings, was the first recipient. The guy actually survived two transfusions of cow blood, and it calmed him down by making him sick. But after the second one, his reactions were so severe that the doctor refused to do another. The madman's wife begged and even got the doctor over to the house on false pretenses to convince him to do another transfusion. The doctor refused and a few hours later the madman died. The wife SUED the doctor for malpractice because he refused to give another transfusion. After an investigation, it turns out that the wife had been poisoning her husband with arsenic, and the doctor was let off.

After the 'lesson' comes a big question and answer session usually based on the lesson. Last week it veered off a little into genetics, cloning and stem cells. An interesting thing he said was that despite the ban on fetal stem-cell research in the US, there are procedures being performed which take fetal stem cells and inject them into sick people. The cells then disperse throughout the body and because they have not differentiated they will go to damaged tissue and start regenerating the tissue.

Another thing which I had known but which he expounded upon in a bit more detail was the extent to which genetics are turned on and off by the environment. Clones are not exactly alike, though they have the same genetic information. Because of the vastly different environments in which clones are born, they are actually less alike than identical twins. Twins get the same mother, same nutrients, same sounds and experiences in the womb and so are much more similar than a clone of someone who is born from another mother, had different nutrients and experiences. Their genetics are identical, but the expressions of those genetics take significantly different directions.

The last that I'll mention here is a case-study of how people know what is "normal". When SIDS first came to the notice of medicine one of the theories was that they were suffering from an enlarged thyroid gland. Babies who died from SIDS had absolutely massive thyroids compared to what was "normal". Problem - the standard of what was normal was gotten from autopsies of babies who had died, most often from sickness and disease. For quite a while, babies with "enlarged" thyroid glands were given radiological treatments to shrink the thyroid gland. Twenty to thirty years later these people started dying of cancer in HUGE numbers. Turns out that when a baby is sick, his thyroid glad shrinks because it is fighting the sickness. A baby is SUPPOSED to have an oversized thyroid gland, and the gland slowly shrinks naturally over time as the disease fighting cells are spread throughout the body and the lymph system.

They have these sessions at 2:00 on Sundays at the Purcellville library. Maybe you'll think this is all boring stuff but I think these are really excellent sessions - come see!

Every Christian's Guide to Dating Homosexual Clones

Coming soon to a bookstore near you!

Or not. It's actually the joke title of my lesson for youth group last night! The second page had a great, big DON'T as the lesson. After that it was a bit more of a traditional lesson covering dating, homosexuality and cloning/GM as separate topics. Those are also debates I've been having over at Ed Veith's World magazine blog for a while now.

As I handed it to each person or clump of people at youth group I would lean in and confidentially tell them that they really needed to pay attention to this class because the title of the lesson was something that I thought they really needed to understand in their lives. I dodged two kicks and Lilly caught me with a smack.

A successful night!

Especially since this class had more questions from the class than most, and there were some good questions.

An Ode to Dr Smith

On some of these quotes you might need to know GS to fully appreciate them. He's an extremely erudite professor of logic with the driest sense of humor possible. These are gathered from his logic class at PHC by forChrist5liberty

Dr. Smith: “This was back in my wild, carefree days.”

Dr. Smith: “Most of what Dr. Smith says about Logic is true. This argument must be clarified as transitivity of implication. Therefore this argument must be clarified as transitivity of implication.”

Dr. Smith: *cough* “Excuse me. I get all choked up about logic sometimes.”

Dr. Smith: “This is just a grade in my logic class. It does not measure your self-worth or how much I love or hate you.”

Dr. Smith: “Yes, logic is concerned with relationships. Just not in the same way people are. Look, logic in an inherently difficult topic to make jokes about so any laughter you could give would be appreciated. Suppose you have a hundred pound weight and you drop it off the top of Red Hill. From the standpoint of Physics it doesn’t matter whether the object is a bed or your roommate.”

Dr. Smith: “Unsupported things fall... Brilliant.”

Dr. Smith: “ I saw some ads by democrats which claimed ‘Bob Urlich is George Bush.’ I also saw adds which said, ‘George Allen is George Bush.’ Therefore in a perfectly logical fashion I said, ‘George Allen is Bob Urlich.’”

Mari: “Question: did I just hear you reference an internal dialogue you are having with yourself?” Dr. Smith: “Yes” *long pause while Dr. Smith stares blankly ahead* “Sorry, I was having a conversation with myself.”

Matt: “Will you write my eulogy?” Dr. Smith: “That depends, can I do it in standard format?” Matt: “Yes” Dr. Smith: “If he was a good man” Mari: “then we would miss him.”

Dr. Smith: “When you entered this class you were logical larvae. When you leave you will be epistemological butterflies.”

Dr. Smith: “Now you know where my wicked, twisted sense of humor comes from.”

Dr. Smith: “The evil genius... is speaking.”

Dr. Smith: “It could be you are just a brain in a vat doing whatever a brain in a vat does.”

Dr. Smith: “We have to perform logical CPR.”

*Dr. Smith arrives in class and finds a kiwi fruit at his lectern. He proceeds to take the kiwi, draw a smily face on it*

Dr. Smith: “E.E. Cummings said, ‘one plus one equals three for sufficiently large quantities of one.’ This says a lot about poets.”

Dr. Smith: “Suppose for the sake of argument that there is a great pumpkin.”

Dr. Smith: “To give the baby cart a push at the top of the hill.” Brady: “ohhhh!” Dr. Smith: “I never said there was a baby in it... How evil do you think I am?” Brady: “Do you really want me to say.” Dr. Smith: “...Yes.”

Alas poor Sarah, I knew her well

Alas poor Sarah, I knew her well

Well, OK, she wasn't permanently lost, just temporarily misplaced?

I don't know about flying with American Airlines any more! Our flight out to Kansas was canceled less that 5 hours before it was scheduled to leave, and the airlines reservation people couldn't tell me the reason. Thankfully we were able to do a frantic shifting of flights and took off from Reagan at the same time, with the only drawback being that Reagan is an hour further away from us than Dulles. On the way back, one of their flights was delayed in taking off and that worked to our benefit as we were able to catch it (an earlier flight) instead of our regularly scheduled flight.

Then just yesterday, poor Sarah got stuck at Wichita for several hours when one of the planes developed engine trouble! Thankfully they dropped her off back in the terminal and she was able to hook back up with the Gates to pass some of the time. But that canceled flight meant that she had to take other flights that didn't get her back to Virginia until 12:15, and it was all the way out in Reagan again! Yech!!

Thankfully she didn't flip out and use her m4d T43 |<wAn D0 sk1lz on the poor airline personel, and considering this was her first solo flight, it would have been entirely understandable! I'll never tease her about her Sidekick again, or at least not for a week, whichever comes first. I got emails at work, St. G was able to IM with her, and all the teens at clogging seemed to be up-to-date on what was happening with her flights! I guess being permanently plugged-in to communications networks can be very cool!

Welcome back Sarah!

Does anyone know of a plane company that DOESN'T have regularly occuring delays and cancelations?

Superman!

Here's J in his superman costume from my mom holding his cousin CRM. He LOVES that costume!


GenesisSupermanBatmanFiremanDog to the rescue!!!

Back from OZ

*Happy Sigh* Everything went well in KS. We're happy to be back, and a bit tired, but very happy!

Sarah S came out with us to visit with St. G. We had a marvelous little scare about 4 hours before our flight was scheduled to take off. C. had checked on the flight status Friday morning and everything was fine, but when Sarah's mom checked around 2:30, she discovered the flight had been canceled! So C gives me a call saying "Fix please!" The flight out of Dulles was supposed to leave at 6:35 to St. Louis and then down to Wichita. I was able to get us all transfered to a flight out of Reagan at 6:40 to St. Louis that landed in time for us to make our regularly scheduled flight from St. Louis to Wichita! Whew!

Saturday got off to a good start when Saint G and I went paintballing! We each got shot up, though St. G got it the worst. I'm proud to have contributed several bruises to his backside! I got a couple nice bruises to the inside-upper thigh when a person I thought was on my side opened up on me from 15' away. LOTS of fun!

Reception went well, and C had a couple college friends make surprise appearances! The clogging performance was pretty rough, but the floor was awesome and nobody there did clogging, so everyone thought it was da' bomb. C's freshman roomie (Am) came with her husband and daughter, and I'm afraid that her husband and I made a bit much of a pair. Am was in despair, and C was probably praying we didn't go off the deep end and start doing some stand-up comedy acts of Jeff Foxworthy's.

Sunday was good too, but different. It was the first time their family had seen a Jericho March in church. In some ways I really get uncomfortable when doing something like that, but on the flip-side I'm introverted enough that I need the practice of standing out to do something odd or different. If I can't take part in something like that in front of a group of brothers and sisters in Christ, what makes me think I'll be willing to make a stand in front of people who may actually ridicule me? So it was good for me. I think a few other people were a bit surprised by the march too. :^) Hopefully poor Sarah (attends a relatively staid Baptist church) won't go back to VA thinking we're all a bunch of nutcases!

The weather out there was lovely (60 with lots of sun) and friends came over to the Gates' for lunch and visiting. Then we got to take SuG back up to Sterling and I got a quick tour and my first experience at a Sonic restaurant!

Plenty more good times were spent with family and visiting and stuff, but I'll not bore y'all with recitations of those. Suffice it to say it was all good!

p.s. I was too tired to feel even the slightest bit awkward at the Gates house, so that was a relief. In fact, I didn't even think about it until now.

Google Analytics

Ok, this is really cool! I've started using Google's Analytics tool to track traffic on my blog. So if you are reading this, I know who you are! Or at least I know your IP address. Then I should be able to ping you, and if your firewall isn't properly configured (which the Microsoft Firewall leaves pretty open by default) I can start messing with your registry. Once I'm in there I can turn off your firewall and get in more fully.

Of course I would never do that. But that was a rabbit trail. Back to what I originally intended to say...

Google analytics has a really cool feature that lets you see on a world map where your visitors originate. I'm used to seeing the regulars: Carrollton, TX; Purcellville, VA; Wichita, KS; Pittsburgh, PA; Springfield, VA; Eustis, FL; and Los Angeles, CA. But suddenly, yesterday I got a whole bunch of visits from various points overseas:

Brasov - Romania
Hamburg - Germany
Ivry-sur-Seine - France
Needham Market - England
Nanzhuang, Shangxi, Jinhua, Nanyang, Beijing, Fushun, Harbin, and Qiqihar - China!

Wow! I don't know what happened yesterday that suddenly catapulted my blog onto the global radar, but that was cool! I used to do some online gaming with a bunch of people from Germany and Australia, but by and large I'm fairly provincial when it comes to my Internet habits, rarely straying outside US borders.

But now I can claim to have an International audience for my blog!

Krull gets published!

A friend of mine, Jonathan Krull by name, is always putting up deep theological discussions on his blog, which I enjoy. I'd like to be able to write so well that I wouldn't feel silly putting my thoughts on some significant topic out for all the world to see.

So, in spite of being deeply envious of his boldness, I'm going to link over to a story of his which he got published in Relevant about C.S. Lewis. Way to go Krull!!!

What I more commonly see is an ignorance about Lewis when anything beyond Narnia or friendship with Tolkien is brought up. But to be fair, I see about the same about of recognition given to Sproul or Chesterton - I know I don't regularly study apologists' writings. Krull's article has definitely inspired me to read them more fully, so at least on me the article was a success. I hope it prods many more people toward studying great Christian writers.

Jack's confused sense of rejection

And I'd be remiss to not link to his blog: Bread and Circuses

She's so good for me!

'cuz she keeps me humble. In two areas (well a LOT more than that, but just two for now) I've always been a bit cocky. I can hear the derisive laughter now - "Only a BIT cocky!?!" Yeah, yeah, yeah.

One physical and the other mental. I like being skinny, even when it means it's hard to find a good pair of jeans or slacks. So, I got cut down to size last week. C mentioned that the pair of slacks she wanted to wear to work were wrinkled. Smug in my own slimness, I tell her "Hey, I've got a pair or two that might fit. Here's my slacks that are the snuggest around the waist for me." I think they're a 28" waist, and after a t-shirt and button up shirt are tucked in, they're tight. So she tries them on and there is an absolutely hilarious amount of room still left in the waist! I don't know if two of her could have fit in there, but I'll bet one and three quarters of her could have!

Hmph. So much for my self-confident skinniness!

Then last night we were working on a crossword puzzle and there was a clue of "Trojan Saga" with 5 spaces available. I pipe up, "Darn, it can't be the Illiad or the Odyssey, not enough spaces." C comes back with "It'll fit if you spell it with only one 'l'." I laughed! "Sure, if we spell it any way we want we could solve this thing in no time!"

So confident am I in my spelling abilities! Well, you can guess - "Illiad" was spelled with only on "l". She made me feel better when she said she's seen it spelled four or five different ways. Hopefully I've learned to not be so quick to assume I know how to spell everything!

I'm so lucky!!!

Lost in a fog

A man was flying to the airport in a helicopter to catch his flight when an extremely dense fog settled in for miles and miles around the city's airport. Then, suddenly, the chopper's instrumentation shorted out! The fog was so thick that the chopper pilot couldn't see for more than a hundred feet in front of him and he was in the middle of the city, still miles away from the airport. He couldn't figure out exactly where he was and didn't want to fly blindly through the city. As they inched along, a tall office building loomed ahead of them.

"Quick," said the pilot. "Write "WHERE ARE WE?" on this poster and I'll fly close to the offices and they'll be able to tell us where we are and I can get us to the airport."

So they flew up to the office building and lots of workers inside are looking out the windows, pointing and waving. When they see the sign, they start running around looking for paper and markers. Finally the get the message written in big letters and hold it up: "YOU ARE IN A HELOCOPTER".

Immediately, the pilot sketches a couple lines on a scrap of paper, waves to the office workers, and flies directly to the airport.

His passenger is amazed! When they land, he turns to the pilot.

"That was fantastic! How on earth could you have possibly known where we were with that ridiculous message?!"

Oh, that was easy. The only building that could have been was the Microsoft building. Their error messages are always accurate but totally useless!"