Jesusween? Really??

Earlier this week a minister in some town I opted to ignore declared we should have Jesusween rather than Halloween.  My original intent was to mock him.  I have a better idea.  While Jesueween is an idiotic name, we should still change the name of Halloween.  We should call it Christmas.  Here is my logic

Based on the account in the book of Matthew, the shepherds were tending their flock in a near by field. (traditionally shepherds were pre-teen or early teens, and usually girls since the boys were off learning a trade, but I digress).   Under normal circumstances, the shepherds would drive their herds around the countryside looking for open pasture.  These were free range sheep, in the most literal sense of the word.  The only time they tended their flocks in fields was in the fall.  October makes much more sense than December from a historic point of view.

There is no biblical evidence to support Christ's birth in winter.  I have seen arguments for late spring to late Fall.  No one believes it was in December.   The Greek and Russian orthodox churches celebrate in early January.  Then there is the timing of Christmas itself, which is to coincide with the winter solstice and the pagan Yule celebration that went with it.  December 25th is the heathen New Year's Day.

To sum up:
 Halloween should be Christmas.
Christmas should be Yule or just New Years
Jesusween is an idiotic name.

Amused again, naturally

I am amused at how tightly bunched up the old folks have their tightie whities.  There are kids protesting corporate excess, ON WALL STREET!!!   For one, I am glad they are protesting.  I was afraid we had raised a generation of self centered pussies.   It is good to see they care enough to take a stand for something.

The conversation with my wife went something like this:

Wife "What is the deal with interest only home loans?"
Me "Banks are lending up to 125% of your home's value and all you have to do is pay the interest, there is no scheduled principal repayment."
Wife "Isn't that stupid?  You will always be in debt. What happens when you try to sell your house and you owe more than what it is worth?"
Me "They are betting the can make more in appreciation than the loan, which is questionable."
Wife "It is still stupid."
Me "No argument"

I don't blame the kids for protesting.  Mortgage banking  stupidity triggered the recession.  For home loans, it was the equivalent of selling liquor to a high school student with his blockbuster card as ID.  If I had a pile of student loans and no prospects of paying them off, I would be pissed too.

Jury Duty

I spent today at the county court house because I was summoned for jury duty. It was 8 hours of hell, being herded like cattle and waiting around for them to get their judicial shit together. I was excused from service so I was spared of going back on Tuesday and Wednesday.   All they told us was a felony drug case.  A few observations:

I am an ex cop, even though it was 10 years ago and I was on the reserves, it still counts.  Ex cops for felony cases are almost always excused.

I loathe defense attorneys, especially word weasels.  This guy was a weasel in a sport coat with a circumference 4 inches too small.  It rode up over his belly.  He picked on me with questions, I suppose since he knew I was going to be eliminated.  I pushed back.  Being an asshole back to the defense counsel is a good tactic.

The last card I played was 2 deceased brothers, both drug abusers, and I didn't see it as a victimless crime as the defense attorney was trying to pitch.  The devastation on the family alone is impossible to measure. He kept pushing and trying to pin me down with his questions.  I finally relented his point with "you are doing a good job.  OK your generalities are generally true."

I hate weasels.

Opportunity Cost: - The cost of an alternative that must be forgone in order to pursue a certain action.

In other words, what is the next best use of that resource?  In terms of the macro economist, every moment of time, dollar, gallon of fuel and board foot of lumber has an alternative use.  If you choose to make a bed out of that lumber, what are you not making?  A bench, a table, a book case?  What is it you are giving up?

I am at one of the junctures in my life where again, I am evaluating everything. Some things, like my marriage, are sacred and need no evaluation beyond I want to spend more time with my wife.  Everything else is up for discussion.  All people should have times of self evaluation.  This is a very good process.  I need to thank the Kardashian's for being the catalyst for the latest round of reflection.

I have never been much for watching TV.  Most of what I watch now is in the company of my lovely wife, who likes mystery shows (mostly on USA network). Which brings us to what collapsed the house of cards which is the entertainment industry.  The Kardashian wedding.  This was a fake event for fake people in fake situations, all being sold as real.  The K Klan (THEIR TERM NOT MINE) were anointed as "royalty" by the  self proclaimed  high priest (and carnival  barker) of entertainment, E!  Never mind E! created the monster/marketing machine.  I reached my saturation point and stopped watching TV of any kind a full 2 weeks before the alleged event.

(As a side note, if the K Klan is going to continue with their reality show, they need to invest in action lessons.  Their line delivery is terrible).

Which brings me back to the question at hand.  For the time and mental energy of watching TV, what is the opportunity cost?  This thought process has expanded to all areas of my personal and professional life.  If I am going to do something, what is the opportunity cost? If I am going to work on a project in the shop, what is the next best use of my time, doing dishes?  Shop wins.  At work it becomes a decision of not who is yelling loudest for something, but what is the best use of my time. I am starting to apply this methodology to the smallest parts of my life.  So far, it is working well.

This is where it gets tricky, because you have to start making judgment and value calls.  Making decisions based on values always has a trap.   I cannot subject someone else to my values.

Clearly writing out the rationalization was the best use of time this morning.  The opportunity cost was not reviewing a procedure for the export of technical data.  Good call if you ask me.

Just a thought

It is the job of the next generation to challenge the thought and traditions of the previous.  Is that still happening?  It feels like the are towing the line with their parents. This not the way my generation, or my parents, or their parent's generation did it.  This is not how we reached the moon or ended segregration.  This is not how thing should be.

I read a news story about a girl who challenged her high school over some innane policy.  Her schoolmates called her a communist.  Apparently her schoolmates failed World histroy since clearly the young lady was just excercising her God given right to challenge the establishment.  No communial living, no seizing of private assets by the man/school.  Just challenging a policy she thought was wrong. 

I blame all this on global warming. 

Mark

We lost another one last week and the trend is not good.  The official story released by the family is non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.  Actually that is enough since that particular diagnosis is fatal.  There underlying issues were not discussed.  The same ones that were not discussed when AIDS took my brother.  I guess technically AIDS is just a complication; it is always something else that gets you in the end.  Mark, like my brother, had various organs sprinting to see which would be listed as the official cause of death.

Mark was just a year older than I am.  We were in boy scouts together, went to the same high school.  His sister married my cousin.  He had a Chemical Engineering degree from Purdue and a JD from Indiana University law school.  Overall he was just a cool guy.  The e-mail said his partner of 23 years and his sister were by his side when he passed.  I guess in the end that isn’t a bad way to go. 

Men are sloth

I am worried about mankind in general… and men specifically.  I know you are wondering if world peace, nuclear meltdowns or excess body hair is raising the level of my concern.   I am afraid that men are getting lazy, perhaps to the point of sloth.  We are, apparently, unable to flush toilets.

It is true, with the wide spread use of automatic flushing urinals and commodes, men are no longer able to manually flush porcelain, at least out in public.  In my house all of the regular male lavatory users are able to flush.  The sampling is pretty small, so I am statistically unable to draw any conclusions. 

In restaurants, airports and other public venues, we have apparently lost the ability, or perhaps the will, to reach up and push the 4” lever to whisk our waste water downstream.  To be honest, it is kinda gross to step up to find a filled urinal.  I find myself obligated to flush for you before taking care of business and flushing for myself later. So any argument on saving water is invalid. And then the next level, finding an un-flushed commode, I am not even going there.  Wrong, very wrong. Guys, you don’t even have to bend over, just tap the handle with your foot.  You can make ninja swooshing sounds if that helps the process any. 

On side note, some of you need to drink more water.  You appear to be dehydrated.  Orange pee is bad.

I am trying to figure out if this is a left wing, right wing or communist conspiracy to render the American male useless.  It could be an alien conspiracy as well.  We don’t give enough credit to those pesky aliens taking over the world one task at a time.  I think it started back in the late 60’s with automatic transmissions.  We are now unable to manually shift a car.  I made sure all of my kids could drive a stick.   My middle child is still traumatized by me making her learn to drive in our 5 speed Jetta before allowing her to drive an automatic.  My oldest daughter’s first car was a Ford Ranger with a 5 speed.  Learning the hand eye coordination and timing necessary to drive a manual transmission is a life skill.    

There have been other attempts to render us helpless.  Happily the horrible trend of automatic seat belts failed.  I hated that ridiculous contraption running around my head.  I rode in a few cars that had them; I was hit by the damn thing every time I opened the door.  If we are too lazy to reach over and buckle our own seat belt, then we deserve to be tossed out of the gene pool. 

This is part and parcel of process making us the Jetson’s.  You know good old George Jetson, the alarm clock triggers the bed, launching him up onto the conveyor belt and into the machine that showers, shaves and automatically dresses him. That has to be in the not too distant future. Although I will happily trade dressing myself in the morning if I can get a car that hovers over traffic.  The future isn’t all bad.  

Tempest in a Tea Party pot

“A Christian should get very nervous when the flag and the bible start holding hands.  This is not a romance we want to encourage.”  Jesus wants to Save Christmas, Rob Bell & Don Golden

I have a multitude of problems with the Tea Party.  Starting with the minor complaints;

They felt compelled to add Patriots to their name.  This falls into the legal category of “puffery.”  Much like adding the word Estates to the crappy trailer park on the south side of town, if you have to sell it that hard, no one is buying.  

There have been some cries of racism which I cannot substantiate with the people I know who identify with the cause.  Because they are ultra conservative and mostly middle aged and middle class, by default this makes them white.  That is not to say there are not at least a couple nut jobs in the woodpile.  By in large though, they seem an open lot if you are part of their team.  I am sure an ultra conservative, middle class person of color would be welcome.  I suspect they would put you on the marketing material too. 

The Christian right wing is long on rules, condemnation and stone throwing.  They are short on compassion, and the basic understanding of their own religion, other than to carve out the sections of they like the most, then throw away the rest. Just so you know my scale of compassion, I have been told multiple times (mostly by my wife) that I have the compassion of a stump.  My idea of counseling is, “that was stupid, stop it.”

 This is the same type of people who excommunicated my brother from their Baptist church because he used drugs.  They would have had a fit had they found out he was gay.  This is the group of people who made a pregnant teenager get up in front of the congregation and apologize for having sex.   Here is how the right wing church works.  You get pregnant and are not married, you get the red A.  You have an abortion you are branded as a murder.  You do the right thing and have the child as an unwed mother, you are an outcast.  You get the “E” ticket to hell no matter what you do. 

 Jesus taught none of that.  This is the 21 century Pharisees spinning the rules; at least that is how it looks from my lowly desk chair.  But that is not my primary complaint about the Tea Party and Co. It is specifically the flag and bible going on a car dates and making out in the back seat.    

Rob Bell is a Christian author and pastor of a mega church in Michigan.  He accurately sums up my biggest fear with the Tea Pots.  They want to make the US a Theocracy.  Even though by most standards I would be considered a conservative and described by someone as a serious Christian (although I am not at all religious), I do not want to live in a Theocracy.  Not a Muslim, not a Christian and CLEARLY not a Tea Party lead government.  I like the idea of lower taxes and small government.  The idea of their government scares me more than I would like to admit. 

I am tired of my face

“Every man over 40 is responsible for his face.”  Abraham Lincoln

I am tired of my face. 

Seriously, I am tired of looking at ME!  This is not some transparent ploy fishing for compliments.  I am not talking about looking like Brad Pitt. There is nothing wrong with my face.  I don’t need plastic surgery or anything.  I am not misshapen, or asymmetrical.   I am talking about staring at the same stupid face in the mirror every morning, every time I wash my hands, every time I pass a reflective object. 

What do you do when you are middle aged, and bored with yourself?

I am getting a hair cut on Friday but that doesn’t change the basic issue. My face is still the same.  I trimmed my mustache back, but that doesn’t help. I may let it grow back out to resemble a small shrub. I have had a mustache for nearly 30 years.  Shaving it off is not an option.   I hate my face without the mustache (plus it feels really freaky).  I grew a “beard” around Thanksgiving.  It wasn’t much of a beard.  I don’t know why my mustache radiates out from my upper lip half way to my eyes, but I have a massive bald patch on each side of my face. 

I had the beard for about 3 months.  I would have shaved it off sooner, but it irritated my mother, so I left it as a public service.  She needed something new to complain about.  She said it made me look “dirty.”  She said dirty the same way she says “dirty Mexican” so I took it as a compliment.  She told my long haired, goatee’ed  son she like his beard better than mine.  She loathes the little patch of hair on his chin, so for her to like his better to the point of commenting says something. 

 But I digress.  I am still tired of looking at me.  After 51 years I am bored with me.  I cannot imagine how my lovely wife of 31 years feels.  She should be tried of me.  The good news is I am handy around the house, so my position should be secure.  Then again, I still enjoy looking at my lovely wife, so maybe there is yet hope for my mug?

I thought about guy liner, but in Ft. Worth Texas, that is pretty much a non-starter.  Especially since I work in the defense industry, where even the ladies are part of the old boy’s club.  Besides, that might lead to me shaving off my eye brows and redrawing them with R E A L L Y  high arches.  Adornment is out.

NO FACE TATTOOS. See the comments above. 

My face is neither too fat nor too thin.  No weird scars or oddities.  Maybe I need more character?  According to President Lincoln, I can no longer blame my parents.  It is all my fault.  I could accidently cut myself with my Japanese sword, leaving a really cool scar.  In addition to the mess it makes on the dojo floor, likely as not it would set my martial arts training back at least 2 years.     

Other men I know have grown tired of their face.  They dumped their wife, got the same model 10 years younger, along with a Corvette or some other tired cliché of middle aged men.  Years later the fundamental problem remains, the same old tired face is still there.  Only now they have alienated their family, friends and ruined their lives. 

In the end, I don’t have a really good answer. I am still working this one out.  This is a conundrum to be sure. 

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