Pictures and Images

"I'm caught in a crossfire between pride and fear
and my heart isn't bullet-proof...
I'm in pieces
think of something clever"
--Ginny Owens, "Pieces"

First off, Sharon promised a picture of Asher as Larry the Cucumber:



Many more recent Asher pictures can be found in the Asher in Grove City Album on our Picasa page.

And, before I ramble on about things that don't matter, something fun for musicians this holiday:



I'm headed back to Chicago for a whole week this time. I obviously don't want to be away from family for so long, but at the same time this promises to be the end of version 1.0 of the Jump archive, so I may be wrapping up an important milestone.

I've also gotten several emails about SAD, thank you to everybody who's taken the time to write.

Now, on to something truly important: TV. It appears NBC is pretty upset at the way "Heroes" has been going this season. I'm not truly surprised; when Sharon and I got sucked into "Heroes" its first season it benefited from snagging a huge portion of a Sorkin audience. The show wasn't as tight or fun as a Sorkin show, but it wasn't preachy or self-important like "Studio 60" and all the show's best qualities were on display against something that was struggling and failing. Now it's obvious the writers are comic book writers with all the good and bad that goes along with that, and with the sloppy plots and big jumps from what viewers were expecting (not just continuity breaks, but deliberate changes in intent of characters) the show has clearly lost its focus. Sharon and I are still watching it, but I at least feel like each episode is letting me down a little more.

"Chuck", on the other hand, has been wonderful this season. Faced with what is typically a show's death knell (the guy-girl relationship is made sorta possible) the show hasn't just thrown in the towel or turned into a rerun of itself. Instead, the writers seem to have grasped something that makes for really good television: theme and parody. The most recent episode was full of completely unbelievable points (really, Japan has a nuclear missle satellite in orbit that is controlled using a code available only if you beat the last level of Missile Command?) but the show manages theme and variation so well (especially as they tap geek subculture) that I just didn't care. It is caricature, but it's fun caricature, and even characters that seemed to exist only to be cardboard cutouts for the Chuck/Sarah story have been given room to breathe.

"Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles", despite having already been picked up for the whole season, seems to also be losing its footing. My fear (and the fear of many on Television Without Pity) when the show began was "how are they gonna make this interesting without turning it in to 'Terminator of the Week'"? The answer: they aren't. Basically, this season has been a different Terminator every week. It's a shame, because there are tons and tons of ways to take the show that don't involve massive time travel, but I guess since they don't capitalize on the Terminator part of the francise they're out. Also, they (like every other SciFi show ever) are having problems not regressing their android characters. Summer Glau is doing great, but their bad guy Terminators seem to be having problems finding where to draw the line between "human behavior I can emulate" and "human behavor I can't understand", tending to side on whichever involves the least impact on the scene.

(There's a whole different discussion here on the use of Christian imagery and the Bible in that show, but let's just say I'm mostly buying it and Sharon mostly isn't. The line is where the use seems forced versus an interesting theme and variation model. Sharon's mostly annoyed and I'm mostly interested. They can definitely ruin it if they start trying to use the Christian imagery as more than theme/texture and start trying to actually tie in story to foretold events. If they stay away from that I'm okay, and most of Sharon's concern is, I think, that they'll head that direction, at least with the former FBI character.)

I watched the second episode of "Fringe" and dropped it. Too weird, not enough for me to care about. I watched "Alias": people seem to forget that before "Lost" people watched Abrams's shows because he knew how to do characters, not just weird stuff with online hints. I wanted to know stuff about Alias too, but only after I was watching it for Sydney Bristow and (more, honestly) SpyDaddy Bristow.

"House" is turning into a completely different show (less about medicine, more about characters) but with the exception of 13 I'm pretty into the characters, so this is an okay change for me. It had to happen eventually, since you just can't have that many crazy medical things that aren't completely absurd (and, basically, they'd gotten to the completely absurd point during most episodes last season, and I'm not even a doctor.)

The election is over so it's likely that SNL will soon not be worth watching again (I mean, there will be highlights, but that's what NBC.com is for) and that pretty much brings us up to the present. (We could talk about "The Amazing Race" but this post is too long already.)

I'll talk about more weighty stuff another day, but the quote probably gives a pretty good idea how I'm feeling this days.

Bomblets

I know it's been a long time since I posted. As soon as I bother Kurtis to do it, or figure out for myself how to do it, there will be some pictures -- including the cutest Larry the Cucumber you ever did see.

Thanks to all of you for your prayers for my mom. She's recovering well, although her energy is still low. She's back home, and going to rehab 3 days a week. Unfortunately, there was anothe break-in/burglary at my folks' house -- this happened while they were helping us move in July, and now it's happened again. I am pretty worried about them -- their safety, since it's likely it was the same people both times, and their stress levels. And of course the burglars weren't satisfied with taking things; they had to dump over piles and empty drawers and throw things around, so now they have all that cleaning up to do, just when Mother is already tired, etc. So, things are going okay, but there's obviously plenty more to pray for.

Asher is growing and changing -- he's so capable in so many ways, that I almost don't notice it. But it really does strike me when we come across something he's not familiar with. This morning Kurtis and Asher made omelets, and while eating Asher kept saying "omelet" in many different, wrong ways. It's so seldom that he mispronounces anything that Kurtis and I were loving it! We miss cute mispronounciations. Anyway, in particular, he kept telling us that we had some egg bomblets to eat... would you like to share some of my embelopes? (pronounced like "om-be-lopes" It was a reminder of how much he's grown, and yet how young he still is.

Hobbesian Opaqueness

"we stretch and retract, we come and we go
measuring actions and leaving alone
but my measure of truth is that I wander restless until you are close"
-Heather Styka

Thank you all so much for the emails and comments since my last couple of posts. I have to be a little oblique about things because I don't know who is potentially reading my blog. I know that a friend of mine got in trouble with his employer for posting his resume online, and I just don't want to cause a lot of stress at a time when I can't really take it. In fact, that little paragraph is probably a little much already.

Things are going much better now, though why I couldn't say, which is a little scary in its own right. One begins to wonder in these times why we cling to the myth that there is a singularity to a person that someone can get to know when inside we are full of such internal conflict. It's no wonder that our conceptions of each other, even the clearest ones, are so full of potential pain; we base our actions and relations on what we think are hints and clues to the psyche of others but which bear more resemblance to chaos.

It is in these moments (whether of clarity or obscurity I don't know) that I wonder exactly what it is to be known by God. I don't even know or understand myself all the time, and while I take comfort in feeling known by Sharon, if I don't even understand me from the inside how can her vision of me really be accurate? Does God see past the parts of me that are dying to see the "true me", or is it more complicated than that, like, God in His triune nature is better able to deal with the multiple warring factions within my mind and body in His knowledge of me?

If the latter, then I start to despair of ever really knowing what God (or anybody else) is like, because my faculties are so tuned to distillation and refinement: I sift and reject whatever is not simple in order to create a predictable theory of otherness.

All I can say is that thank God something so complex as salvation is not left to me.

"You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in you."

Lamentations 3:21-23

"and I'm praying that we will see
something there in between
then and there that exceeds all we can dream
so we can talk about it

and all these twisted thoughts I see
Jesus there in between"
- "So I thought", Flyleaf

The Confusion Sets In

"confusion never stops
closing walls and ticking clocks...
come out upon my seas
cursed missed opportunities"
-"Clocks" by Coldplay

(Double references tonight. Name the band responsible for the title for bonus points, though it's pretty easy.)

This one should hopefully be pretty short. I have an open, non-rhetorical question that I hope isn't airing too much dirty laundry: how, in marriage, do you say you're sorry for something that you can't change? Corollary: how do you show your spouse that it isn't their fault either?

Sharon and I did a lot of thinking and praying before coming to Grove City. I knew any move would be both exciting and hard for me; working remote especially was gonna be rough. At the same time, a move was in order; it was not only what we thought was the will of God but I can see so many ways it is going to (and already is) working out great for us. But the weather starts to turn, and I haven't been able to make the friends I'll probably need, and the last few days have been especially rough. We both know what's ahead, and it will probably be better than our worst fears but still worse than our hopes.

I hate the next part.

Politics and Entertainment

"Donna: Why are you a Republican?
Cliff: Because I hate poor people. I hate them, Donna. They're all so poor, and many of 'em talk funny, and don't have proper table manners... my father slaved away at the Fortune 500 company he inherited so that I could go to Choate, Brown and Harvard and see that this country isn't overrun by poor people and lesbians." --The West Wing

Pull up a chair for storytime, boys and girls.

Last night I watched this video a friend posted on her Facebook page. Turns out she meant to post this video. Watch a few seconds of each to realize they aren't the same video before continuing.

Now, Sharon and I have been talking about the amount of crap (read: utter distortions and falsehoods) being thrown around this election. I don't think we're denizens of policy, so when we recognize huge misrepresentations being thrown around surely that means that to real politicos this election must just be a whopper of spin. We saw the first video above last night before bed and thought it was really funny, because it is obviously so over the top that certainly it was meant to be funny (though, we've seen a number of email forwards with the same level of poise, so obviously it does hit home to some people.)

Today, I see this post on a blog of a new friend of ours here in Grove City. As you will see in my comment on said blog, I think he is referencing the first video posted above, when in reality he is referencing the second, and I say something over the top about propaganda. I was pretty upset, you see, because I thought he was taking the first video seriously, when in reality he was making the point that the first video was clearly produced to make fun of.

What is the moral of today's story, boys and girls (other than, of course, to always follow links and never do real work because if you don't watch the whole video there might be slaughter of innocent bunnies at the end!)? There is an unbelievable amount of crap in this election, and I think it's because both sides are very very scared of the opposition.

I'm not really sure how we got to this point. I've been friends with a lot of people pretty far to the right and pretty far to the left, and while I obviously have my preferences I don't think any candidate up for election is a terrorist or a Nazi or a bimbo or a normal middle class guy (Obama, McCain, Palin, and Biden, respectively - and yes, that last one was a joke). So can we please stop saying it and have an informed discussion?

So, anyway, I'm apologizing in detail over here on my blog (since a multi-page comment didn't seem to make sense) for misreading Warren, my new friend, about his post.

But it does open up the larger issue about why we care about what we care about in the political season. Warren's comment is telling: "If McCain was at the center of something like that, I would be just as creeped out and I suspect the McCain campaign would distance itself from it." I'll buy that, but why should it even matter much? People do creepy/strange/stupid things (yes, Warren mentions it was on the Obama website, but I doubt it would've been if people weren't looking for "feel good" reasons to vote anyway instead of hard facts.)

I think the reason it seems to matter (it certainly is for me when I admit it) is that politics actually is getting too complicated. I frequently read things in op-ed pieces that I later find out are just flat wrong or misrepresented: how many of the facts that I hold on to are actually opinions reached by oversimplification just to fit into a newspaper (or web) article?

Anyway, rather than offer you a bunch of cutting insight into a load of political issues (which I can't do) I'm gonna instead go to the other extreme. Here are the SNL appearences of McCain and Obama. (The Obama appearence isn't as funny, though the rest of the sketch mostly is. If you just want to see Obama say the famous line, skip to about the 4:45 mark. Also, I googled for that clip, and frankly the content on broadcaster.com is a little scary, so maybe don't look around too much. McCain's news editorial, on the other hand, is really quite funny.)

Numbers Matter

No fun quote. No cute title.

As a follow up to my previous posting about the election, I simply must take some time to yell at the two news sources I recommended. Since they don't read this blog you can just interpret this as venting.

Many people in America simply do not understand basic math. It is import that you, as news sources, have a duty to report the facts, and if you report the facts such that a majority of Americans misunderstand them, you aren't doing your job.

For those confused: Congress has recently been debating a $700 billion authorization of the Treasury to purchase illiquid assets off of Wall Street balance sheets.

Two things are incredibly relevant here:

1. That number may go higher. This is bad news.


2. That number is not the amount of money the government will "be out". This is the good news and the part most people don't understand.

See the government isn't saying "here, have $700 billion." They're saying "here's $700 billion, give us (essentially) $700 billion dollars worth of mortgages."

According to David Loenhardt those mortgages are probably now valued (mathematically) at 75% of their original value. The problem right now is that because nobody is willing to buy, the few that are selling are selling for 25% of their original value.

You can see where I'm going with this. Most of these mortgages are going to be paid off. Even if several don't, a very large chunk of their original value will come through (thus the 75% estimate.) Even if Treasury paid 75 cents on the dollar for them (way higher than will likely happen) it is very very likely the US Government would break even. I can't say that enough: these mortgages still have value, and it is likely they have a great deal of value. But because there are no buyers right now they aren't selling: that's what illiquid means.

The government doesn't even need to pay 75 cents on the dollar, though. Most holders will probably sell for something much lower. (I'm gonna pull a number out of the air here and say... 50 cents on the dollar, becuase it makes the math easy.) Even if twice as many people foreclose as it looks like actually will, that kind of purchase would still let the government break even.

Now, will some bad things happen? Yes. But let's say the market is right, and they are really only worth 25 cents on the dollar and we buy at 50 cents on the dollar. That means out of our $700 billion, we'll only lose half: $350 billion. That's still a huge number, but is, for instance, lower than what we spent on the Iraq war last year (at $1 billion a day) so doesn't that make the number not seem like the apocalypse?

So, please, news organizations of America: please point out that we aren't buying worthless stuff for our $700 billion. This is a serious issue, worthy of serious discussion, but it's not what you're painting it to be.

Sorry for the lack of updates

Mother's been "home" for about a week now -- she left the hospital on Saturday (9/13) and has been staying with Aunt BJ and Uncle Arnie. They're not technically related to us, but they've always been Aunt and Uncle to me (I'm told it's a Southern thing?) Anyway, Aunt BJ is the one who originally convinced Mother to head to the ER when she was having a heart attack -- for which I'm VERY thankful. And she's a nurse (a doctor nurse, actually -- PhD in nursing, and a prof at UT's nursing school now) and wanted to have Mother at her house for a while so she could help take care of her. I'm so thankful that she's doing this, and that Mother has so many close friends around her while Evie and I are far away.

Anyway, she went home on oxygen, but is gradually using less and less -- she's down to using it only when she sleeps and occasionally other times. They finally decided that the nerve that controls the left side of her diaphragm (frenic nerve?), which passes very close to the heart, had been damaged or just "frozen" during surgery, so basically the left side of her diaphragm is paralyzed. Most of the time, this repairs itself in 4 months to a year (!), but in any case there's nothing they can do but watch and wait. Her body may just adjust to only breathing on one side.

She's generally feeling pretty good, but could still use prayer for:

• digestive health (she's having some troubles there, and it's making her very uncomfortable and frustrated)
• less coughing, especially while lying down -- this seems to have improved in the last day or two, but it's still painful and annoying for her
• increased energy and endurance every day, and eventually returning back to "normal" activity levels
• that her MS wouldn't have an exacerbation (apparently it's not uncommon after major surgery, and also she's been off her usual MS meds because they didn't want the medicine interfering with her surgical recovery)

Thanks!

And now an update of another kind -- our friend Xiao died this weekend in hospice care. Please pray for Michelle and their kids -- Nathan (the older one) especially, since he is old enough to really understand that Daddy's dead. Michelle has visitation/funeral info on Xiao's care page (link to the right).

Think!

"Mitch: Did you know there's a guy living in our closet?
Chris: You've seen him too?
Mitch: Who is he?
Chris: Hollyfeld.
Mitch: Why does he keep going into our closet?
Chris: Why do you keep going into our closet?
Mitch: To get my clothes - but that's not why he goes in there.
Chris: Of course not, he's twice your size - your clothes would never fit him. Think before you ask these questions, Mitch. Twenty points higher than me? Thinks a big guy like that can wear his clothes?" -Real Genius

Many of you know I cut my adolescent teeth in speech and debate, but I do (I think) an admirable job of not bringing up things on this blog that might be divisive among our friends. After all, you aren't here for political analysis; if you're like most of the populace you either already have your mind made up or you deliberately fence-sit because ultimately you aren't sure your opinion matters. You're here (probably) to see pictures of Asher or (less likely) because you're on Facebook and bored. (Or you're with the telemarketing industry... how y'all doin'?)

I'm not going to make an exception to this rule now, but I am going to talk about politics. Please please please for the love of whatever is important to you in your life, take this election seriously. Make your friends take it seriously too. Our candidates want, I think, to take this election seriously, but when every news cycle is dominated by pig quotes or kindergarten sex ed or poking fun at "drill, baby, drill" it's hard to get a message out. There's a lot of blame to be placed for this particular predicament, and while I have thoughts and opinions you won't see them here (see the above paragraph).

But, please take your job as a voter in a democracy seriously in these elections. The founders didn't believe in vast-unwashed masses taking a direct hand in their governance because they would always be underinformed, easily manipulated, or otherwise truly incapable of making the decisions necessary to good government. I agree with this, mostly because I often find myself in that very category.

James Madison wrote in Federalist 10:

Hence it is that such democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths. Theoretic politicians, who have patronized this species of government, have erroneously supposed that by reducing mankind to a perfect equality in their political rights, they would, at the same time, be perfectly equalized and assimilated in their possessions, their opinions, and their passions.

(Before you go off ignoring the point I'm trying to make; yes, I know Madison is talking about pure democracies, arguing in favor of republic, which of course is the shape we have taken. But I think Madison would agree with me in our current state, especially since he is talking about the problem of faction in governance. Making the logical connections is left as an exercise to the reader, but they are there.)

Since, however, we find ourselves in such a mess as that described, whereby all of us, regardless of time, intention, or qualification are given exactly the same sway as every one else (electoral college considerations not withstanding) in the selection of our highest government official, let us vow (at least to ourselves) that this election season we will try our best to make a rational decision.

This will not be easy given the current news coverage. I'm thoroughly post-modern in my view that an objective source of news/debate is impossible to find. Let me therefore suggest that those of you on the left read (at least once a week) all the articles and editorials from that poor-hating, business-bedding rag called the Wall Street Journal, and those of you on the right read (at least once a week) all the articles and editorials from that hippie-infested, elitist-catering propaganda machine called the New York Times. (For extra credit, read an overseas source of news as well, although this will probably involve some financial outlay on your part. The Economist, Financial Times, and others all qualify.)

Most of you will know all the viewpoints discussed. Few, if any, issues you decide elections on will change in your mind. But at least you will be deciding this election based on something instead of nothing.

Both candidates for our highest office have deep convictions and political values that run both with and contrary to their party (again, despite the coverage). You will never know the wheres and hows of this, however, from 5 minutes of shouting by pundits or reading/listening/watching your one biased source of news.

While you're bemoaning the waste of time it seems to be, remember to be thankful for the blessing it is to be born in this country, where such an investigation is even possible.

Links

After reading Sharon's recent update I realized that, based on email traffic, I think about a third of the people occasionally visiting this blog know us from Rice, and thus there is a good chance that you know John, Abby, Michelle, and Xiao.

So, I added their two blogs to the right side of the page. They're in the links section.