For God's sake...

God Hates Us:So the destruction in Asia is our fault...because God is mad.

Seriously, that's what some religious wackos are saying. From the above-referenced article:

"Traditionalists of diverse faiths described the destruction as part of god's plan, proof of his power and punishment for human sins.

'This is an expression of God's great ire with the world,' Israeli chief rabbi Shlomo Amar told Reuters. 'The world is being punished for wrongdoing -- be it people's needless hatred of each other, lack of charity, moral turpitude.'

Pandit Harikrishna Shastri, a priest of New Delhi's huge marble and sandstone Birla Hindu temple, told Reuters the disaster was caused by a 'huge amount of pent-up man-made evil on earth' and driven by the positions of the planets.

Azizan Abdul Razak, a Muslim cleric and vice president of Malaysia's Islamic opposition party, Parti Islam se-Malaysia, said the disaster was a reminder from god that 'he created the world and can destroy the world.'

Sheikh Ibrahim Mogra, a leading British Muslim cleric from Leicester in England said: 'We believe that God has ultimate controlling power over his entire creation. We have a responsibility to try and attract god's kindness and mercy and not do anything that would attract his anger.' "

This is bullshit. Sorry, but there's no other word for it but BULLSHIT. God didn't do this. More from the same article:

"In one modern view, he (U.S. Rabbi Daniel Isaak, of Congregation Neveh Shalom, in Portland, Oregon) said, God does not interfere in the affairs of his creation. Disasters like the tsunami occur for the natural reasons scientists say they do.

"This is not something that God has done. God hasn't picked out a certain group of people in a certain area of the world and said: 'I am going to punish them,"' he said.

"The world has certain imperfections built into the natural order, and we have to live with them. The issue isn't 'Why did God do this to us?' but 'How do we human beings care for one another?"'

Greek Orthodox Theologian Costas Kyriakides in Cyprus expressed a similar view.

"I personally don't attach any theological significance to this -- I listen to what the scientists say," he said. "God is always the fall guy. We incriminate Him completely unjustly."

Amen to that. And to the rest of you--quit blaming God.

With Apologies to Major Henry Livingston Jr.

Twas the day after Christmas
an all 'cross the blogs
Not a creature was posting
(they had too much Egg Nog)

The bloggers were quiet
this post-holiday
No whining, no kvetching
on this Boxing Day

And I with my keyboard
and my trusty old Mac
had opted out, too...
'cuz I am no hack

When out of my mind an idea was formed,
a thought for a poem in my brain had been born.
I sprang to my keyboard--
grabbed hold of the mouse--
my fingers were trembling as my thoughts they did roust

As starlight appears as it falls on the snow,
so did my monitor cast its soft glow
And what to my wandering mind did appear
but a homage to Christmas to those I hold dear!

More rapid than pixels the words then they came
To bloggers across the world's varied domains:

On Blogger! On LJ! On self-hosted sites!
On dot-com, and dot-biz, we're writing tonite!
Post your html ! Post your pictures so small !
Now blog away! Blog away! Blog away all!"

The electronic words filled the space on my screen
That soft glowing text--those electrons of green.
I thought of the blogs, and they lo, made me smile
Forgetting my troubles and fears for a while.
Will it be Bush or Kerry? What's the joke of the day?
Should my Cousin Rebecca admit that she's gay?
And what of my co-workers? They really stink!
Perhaps I will blog about my clogged kitchen sink.

And then, in a twinkling, I heard in my head,
"enough is enough. It's time now for bed".

So I blogged no more poem,
but I published my post.
Was it clever enough? Nay, not half as most.
But perhaps one would smile as they looked at these words
And in the back of my head, I was sure that I heard:

"Merry Christmas, and Kwanzaa, and Festivus, too!
Happy Channuka, Hannukah, or how it's best spelled to you!
Remember--God loves you and sends you His grace
May that one simple thought put a smile on your face."

The Ghost of Mr. Clean

From the Insanity Now...Serenity Later blog: "It's amazing the kinds of things you can think about when you are alone in your apartment. Scary things. I've always been one to get freaked out by the possibilities of ghosts and what not since I was little. It's exciting and terrifying to me at the same time. I guess I'm weird."

Nah. Not weird at all.

I'm not a big believer in ghosts, things that go bump in the night, or other creepy-ghoulies. Such things just don't intrigue me, and I take very few things on faith alone. To me, believing in ghosties requires a huge suspension of disbelief and a very large leap of faith.

But when you're alone in your own domain, things take on a different meaning.

On the first day in the house I currently live in, I was upstairs renovating one of the munchkin's rooms (a renovation that still isn't done four years later...but that's another story for another time). Basicaly, I was trying to strip off 40-year-old wallpaper from a lathe-and-plaster 90-year-old wall. It wasn't pretty. And it wasn't working.

So a friend came over to help, and a few fruitless hours (and one very large crumbling wall) later, we kinda gave up.

Now understand...I had never been in this house before, except to view it twice and do our final walk-through. I wasn't familiar with it at all. In fact, pretty much all I knew was that in one of the high cupboards in the bathroom, the previous owners had left behind some cleaning supplies (Windex, etc.). That was the extent of my exploring.

Well, in the few hours that my friend and I spent in our fruitless effort to strip the wallpaper, we had some interesting conversations about ghosts and things that go bump in the night. Despite his training as a scientist and biologist, my friend is a firm believer in such things. He also believes he has a sixth sense about ghoulies, and claims that if you "listen closely, you can hear them. They talk to you". Poppykosh, I say (that's a good word that hardly anyone uses anymore). But I give him his due; he's a good friend, despite his weirdness. He told me about some of his alleged experiences, and the whole conversation veered off into creepyland. I was a bit unnerved by some of it, but that's what hours spent alone in an unfamiliar place at night will do to you, I suppose.

Anyway, we finish up the room as best we can, and my friend looks down at his hands, and then looks up at me with the strangest look on his face. Now understand: HE'S NEVER BEEN IN THE HOUSE BEFORE. In fact, when he arrived, I didn't even give him the grand tour. He's never been beyond this room. He doesn't know there's a bathroom on the second floor, he doesn't know about the cupboard, and he doesn't know about the cleaning supplies.

I'm sure you know where this is leading.

He looks up at me, and with that confused face, says, "There is a cupboard with cleaning supplies somewhere in this house."

Have you ever heard the phrase, "A goose walked across my grave?" You use it when you get that spine-tingling feeling of creepiness. Well, a goose didn't walk across my grave--a whole damn flock of them scurried over it, and the last one stopped to do a little jig at the headstone.

I gave my friend a weird look, and asked him to repeat himself. He did. Then I asked him how he knew. He told me, with a very straight face, "The house told me. If you listen, it will talk to you" (and yes, he does talk like that--he doesn't always use contractions).

So I led him around the corner, into the bathroom, and showed him the cleaning supplies. He wasn't surprised. But I still get creeped out whenever I think about it.

Now I'm sure there's some logical explanation. The cleaning supplies were located directly behind the room we were renovating, and maybe he has a really good sense of nasal perspicacity, and the smell of the cleaning paraphernalia wafted through the wall and he sort of intuitively surmised that there must be something, somewhere that he could use to get the gunk off his hands. Maybe he took a lucky guess.

Or maybe the house really does talk.

Nah. I haven't heard a damn thing.

Imagine that

Yesterday, of course, was the anniversary of John Lennon's death in 1980. So there were the usual tributes on radio and TV, and a great retrospective on Trio.

But December 8 will always hold a different meaning for me, because that's the date my Father died two years ago. Today is the anniversary of the day I got the news in a crushing phone call from my brother.

Dad was a complicated guy. He lived an interesting life, but I don't think he ever really appreciated it. A large part of his life was spent regretting things he hadn't done, and I'm not sure he ever really embraced life to its fullest. He was drafted into the military at a perfect time--right between Korea and Vietnam, so he never had to see full-on combat. He got to travel the world in the Navy, where he served as a medic. His pictures from that time show a vibrant, happy, excited young man.

Somewhere along the line, though, he lost that enthusiasm. He found himself in what he considered to be a dead-end factory job, and began a life of "could have/should have". When my Mom died in 1984, he descended into a deep blue funk that never really left him. The heart attack that finally took him home was really the end result of a broken heart that happened many many years before.

I've written about this before (and won't rehash it in this post), but when my brother and I were forced to sell his home, I came to the realization that Dad was like the pre-Clarence Jimmy Stewart in "It's a Wonderful Life". I don't believe he ever knew how good he had it. Despite the heartache and regrets that he felt, he really did have a wonderful life.

I'm the kind of person that looks for meaning in everything. I think there's a lesson to be learned in everything we go through. Dad's death made me realize that I didn't want to go through life regretting anything. I haven't quite lived up to that, but in the ensuing two years, I've made some major changes in my life--the biggest one was leaving an 18-year career to strike out on my own business venture. I've tried hard to embrace life with a passion and excitement that I lacked before. Sometimes I've succeeded, sometimes I've screwed up quite badly. But I've done my level best to do it with enthusiasm.

I'm sure that more than a few people look at me now like I've completely lost my mind. And I'll admit, I'm not the same person I was two years ago, or even one year ago. The longer I live, the more I want to live...you know what I mean?

So to my Father: I hope you found the peace you were looking for. And don't worry about us...the kids are alright, pops. We love you, and we'll see you soon enough.

Don't call your sister that!

I had to drive on location for a job today, and came across the curiosity pictured below.

I always wondered where the "Bar Ho" parked her car. Now I know.

Slap it on the side and flop it on the plate

50 cents to the first person that figures out this title ;-)

OK, so I'm standing in line at the local Mega*Whop*Mart today, waiting while the little old lady argues about whether she should get change from her gift card (she shouldn't), and whether she can put the remaining balance on her credit card (she can't), and wondering why the clerk doesn't either use the paging phone in front of her to actually call for help instead of relying on the flashing light which, incidentally, has been ignored by FOUR passing managers in the past five minutes while the aforementioned clerk stands there with her hands crossed, waiting for the mysterious Crisis Genie to appear and magically resolve all her issues with this increasingly irate customer and the growing line that awaits behind her.

Did I mention this was the express lane?

So as I'm taking copious mental notes with the idea that this will make great blog fodder later in the evening, I start perusing the impulse items for sale in the aisle. Nope, don't need an eyeglass repair kit. Nah, I'm all set for batteries. Don't need a tree-shaped car air freshener either. And I have enough gum. Hey...what's this?

Some sort of collector's card.

When I was a kid, there were basically two kinds of collector's cards: Baseball and Football. And they came 10 to a pack, with a piece of (alleged) gum, and retailed for about 50 cents (or so it seemed. I don't really know what they sold for, or how many cards were in a pack, but it makes for a good story. All I know is that it was a bunch. Besides, it was the 70's...my memory's fading, so work with me here). But THESE cards...holy crow. They retail for about 5 bucks, they come in this really cool gold foil packaging, and they have--count 'em--NINE cards! What a ripoff! I don't know who Yu-Gi-Oh is, but he's got a helluva racket going on.

So anyway, on to my point. In big bold letters on every package, the marketers selling this stuff to kids proudly proclaims "One RARE Card In Every Package!"

Now wait a minute...here's how Webster's defines rare:

-----
\Rare\, a. [Compar. Rarer; superl. Rarest.] [F., fr. L. rarus thin, rare.] 1. Not frequent; seldom met with or occurring; unusual; as, a rare event.

2. Of an uncommon nature; unusually excellent; valuable to a degree seldom found.
-----

Did I mention that there are NINE cards in every pack? And that every pack is guaranteed to contain "One RARE Card"? Just how RARE can these cards really be if you have a one-in-nine chance of getting one? How do they get away with this?

It's stuff like this that makes my head hurt. Am I the only one that asks questions like this?

Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

That has to be the greatest marketing device ever. I hope that the person who suggested "repeat" got a big fat raise and a pension that let them retire in the sort of luxury that makes Bill Gates drool with envy, because it probably sold more shampoo than all the Breck Girls throughout history combined.

Genius. Pure genius.

Spitz

No, not Mark.

(did anyone get that?)

Recently, an online acquaintance e-mailed a group of us with news of the death of his pet. His aging cat had passed on, and he was quite bereft about the whole thing.

Whenever I get an email like that, my first instinct is to say to myself, "well, it's just an animal". Yeah, that makes me a coldhearted soulless creature, but really--I've had so much loss in my life that on the grief scale, pets and animals come in much much lower than say, parents and grandparents (all of mine are gone). I've seen people barely bat an eye at the loss of a human, but practically go into hysterics when a rat dies. It confuses me.

Still, I felt for this person. Deeply. Because the email reminded me of the one pet that I had to have "put down" (there's a euphamism that deserves a blog entry of its own--another day, perhaps) a few years ago.

Her name was Midnight. She was a Schipperke, and if you haven't seen a Schipperke, you're really missing out on something. She was absolutely the best dog I have ever owned. Scratch that. I was proud to be owned by HER.

Towards the end of her life, Midnight developed severe arthritis--to the point that she couldn't even stand up to go to the bathroom. Every step was misery. We tried everything we could think of to help her, but in the end, there was nothing we could do. I held her head in my hands as the vet administered the fatal shot; I wanted to be the last thing she saw before she left this earth. I wanted her to see love, and not the cold hard white walls of the vet's office. It may not have meant much to her, but it meant a lot to me.

We buried her in the back yard under the lilac bushes. The munchkins sometimes go out there and talk to her, but their memories are starting to fade, and eventually they'll probably largely dissipate altogether. Life goes on, and no pet lasts forever (except the African Gray I bought...that bird will probably outlive me, given my lifestyle choices. Again...another blog for another day).

So what does this have to do with the title of this post?

Well, I was going to blog about the next dog we bought. A Finnish Spitz named "Cassie". Cassie looks like a fox. And by that, I mean we had a keychain made for her that says, "I am not a Fox!", because when she runs away, people are literally afraid of her. People stop me on the street and ask if she's a fox. She runs like a fox. She hunts like a fox (no, I don't take her hunting, but she catches squirrels in our backyard, and if you've ever watched a fox stalk its prey, you'd know what I mean. She catches small birds, too. And she's a better mouser than the cat).

She's a cool dog.

But she's not Midnight. Middie was one of a kind. And every time I think about pets I own, she'll always be my touchstone. Hell, I can't even blog about my current pet without thinking of her.

So the next time I get one of those "my pet died and I'm really depressed about it" e-mails, I'm going to be much more tolerant.

After all, look what I just put my readers reader through.

Cuz I'm broooookennnnn...

I hear that song every day on the radio.

So anyway, I went to the UPS store (formerly Mail Boxes etc.) to ship out a fairly expensive ebay item to someone far far across the country today (I had a reasonable expectation that it'd be quite costly, but I was pleasantly surprised. End of plug for The UPS Store).

Now understand, I'm a cynical person by nature. Blame the wannabe-Journalist in me, but I never really stopped asking "why?". I don't suffer fools lightly, and I don't have a whole lot of tolerance for self-imposed stupidity (let me explain that...if you're capable of learning, then for cryin' out loud, LEARN. I wholly and absolutely exempt those with learning disabilities from my rant).

So here's the question that really got me going: as they're packing up the item, the friendly person dressed in brown asks, "Is there anything breakable"?

Now seriously.

HOW am I supposed to answer this? The obvious snarky response would be something along the lines of, "Well, dear, unless the laws of physics have been rescinded since I last took a Science course, EVERYTHING is breakable including time (if you accept the recent research showing that quantum effects do not necessarily prevent the occurrence of loops in time) so I guess you'll have to check YES".

Well, maybe that's not such an obvious response to EVERYONE, but it crossed my mind. Everything is breakable. Heck, they even break ROCKS. I've seen it in prison movies.

The truth is, I didn't really know what to say. So I just muttered something along the lines of "well, it's a camcorder" and let it go.

They checked the "breakable" box on the form.

Why wouldn't they?