Entries in Life

Eric points to Clifford Stoll’s (of The Cuckoo’s Egg fame) TED Talk. While I enjoyed the book, I think it suffered from the problem you see in his talk; Stoll is a bit scatterbrained.  While something has his interest he can maintain a maniacal focus, but when he loses interest, he no longer wants to be bothered by it.  He isn’t a bad guy, I just don’t think he makes a very good folk hero.

Today, I’m 35.  Since I’m finally old enough to run for president, I’ll put this one-day-only offer out there: Elect me and everybody gets a kitten!  Or a puppy if you’re more of a dog person.  Maybe a nice goldfish. But elect me!  MAH for president!!

I love Nate’s 6-word Memoir.  I would love to use it.  But he came up with it first.  Let’s see:

Five others? Jeremy, Jim, dcm, a1an, seraphimsigrist The rules:

1. Write your own six word memoir
2. Post it on your blog and include a visual illustration if you want
3. Link to the person that tagged you in your post, and to the original post if possible so we can track it as it travels across the blogosphere
4. Tag at least five more blogs with links; and
5. Leave a comment on the tagged blogs with an invitation to play!

I’ll let this entry do the tagging. (Also Updated the grandparent post)

Michael Rosen is the current Children’s Laureate, and seems like a wonderful person.  On the death of his son:

“I went in in the morning to see how he was, and he was dead….

“The ambulance got there in five minutes. And they came running up the stairs and put the finger on his neck, did exactly as they do on the telly and said, ‘No, he’s dead that one, yeah, he’s dead’.”

That sounds harsh. No, Rosen said, it’s “the right approach”. Children often ask what happened to Eddie, the cheeky boy of his poems. He had to face this question months after Eddie died, at a book festival in front of an audience of 400 children.

“It was quite difficult for me to say it, but I just thought I’ll go ahead. I explained how he died, that’s all you can do.

“In our culture we think we’re supposed to shield children from death . . .because we as adults don’t yet know how to deal with the fact that we’re all going to die. You don’t have to make it part of life by being obsessed by it, but you have to find a way in which it’s part of the conversation.

Related, a Sunday School publisher decided that pre-schoolers couldn’t handle the Easter story.

Here is their reason, “because of the graphic nature of the Easter story and the crucifixion specifically, we need to be careful as we choose what we tell our preschoolers about Easter.” Further they say, “We have made this choice because the crucifixion is simply too violent for preschoolers.”

(More discussion here and here.) So, we should stick with Easter Bunnies, I guess?

Since going to Rwanda, I’ve been more interested in keeping tabs on what is going on in the country.  I set up a Google Alert and have been getting some interesting things.  I’ve been letting these build up, so it is time to clear out my browser.

• Bikes to Rwanda and Wells for Life were two charities working in Rwanda that I found.  While I like the Bikes charity, the video in this blog post is filled with familiar yellow water containers that I saw rural Rwandans lugging along the road.
• This journalist goes to see some gorillas in Rwanda and mentions the Mountain Gorilla’s Nest hotel that we stayed in to see the golden monkeys.  He describes it as “an unsympathetic mishmash of a place”, but I prefer their rates to the £347 (US$687) a night in the posher hotel he used. Did I mention Rwanda isn’t cheap?
•  Can the Congo Save Itself? talks about the fighting along the Congo-Rwanda border. I met a couple at the Serena who traveled around Africa quite a bit. They were the first to say what others have confirmed many times since: Rwanda is a one of the safest, quietest places in Africa. “A good place to start” was how they put it, with vivid examples from other countries to reinforce the idea.  Even though it is fairly safe, the guards we had on our trip to see the monkeys hinted at the dangers along the borders.
• What is Unspoken in Rwanda talks about the beauty of Rwanda and the constant awareness that some of these people are former genociders. Kesse Buchanan recognizes the friendliness of the country, but, in the end, can’t reconcile it with what she knows about its past. This isn’t the chaotic Africa I am used to! … I just can’t comprehend how everyone can be so friendly but capable of genocide. The genocide is everywhere and nowhere. How do people go on?
• Then genocide in Rwanda 14 years ago are something Kenyans and Zimbabweans are thinking about.  Evidently along the lines of “Do we have to get that bloody to get democracy?”:
  

  At one point, a stunned delegate from Rwanda was even asked whether the genocide in Rwanda had been worth it as it had paved the way for a more democratic and open society that was based on progressive, egalitarian laws. He responded by saying that the price Rwanda had paid for its peace and democracy was too high, not just in terms of the cost of reconstruction, but because it was written in the blood of hundreds of thousands of his country’s men, women and children.

• A Catholic Priest was convicted of participating in the 1994 genocide.. His participation was particularly gruesome — he had his church, which was filled with 1500 parishioners — bulldozed.  Of course, there are many people who don’t like the institution of the Roman Catholic church and they jumped on this case as further fuel for their hatred.  This is the sort of person who will tell us that Mother Teresa is evil and the pope is a Nazi.  Many of these people misunderstand the purpose of the church, but, there are those who understand it perfectly well and are just opposed to it. Arguing with willful ignorance is just as futile as attempting to persuade those who understand but disagree they they are wrong, so I won’t attempt either here.

I confess; I don’t care that much about the quality of the sound my electronics produce. As proof, I’ll just point out that when we bought our Honda mini-van, I was amazed at how good the stock sound system was.  At home, we have an old ten-year-old TV and I haven’t seen much need to spend money on a sound system for it (or even get a new TV), so the surround-sound system that came with car impressed me. So, today as I watched people discuss headphones that retail for $100 to $600, I was a little taken aback.  I’m just not used to making large purchases (where “large” is anything more than $75) for personal entertainment.  Dropping a few hundred on my monitor was a big stretch for me.  I was happy to do it, but I had to change my mindset a little. (Don’t let me fool you, though.  I tend to be a spendthrift — historically I’ve not been very good at managing my money.  I just don’t buy $600 headphones.) Anyway, this being Lent (still, for us Orthodox, but “Happy Easter” to the rest of you), I started think about this when I read what Fr Stephen wrote in his blog post titled The Passion to Consume:

To be fully human does not include becoming a passive receptacle to marketing forces … few ages have lived as we do now in which the passions are actively used as a means to maintain the very affluence of the culture.

A day or two later, as if to illustrate the point pefectly, I came across this quote in a Wired profile of Apple and Steve Jobs:

No other company has proven as adept at giving customers what they want before they know they want it.

This sort of thinking has become habitual for us.  What new thing can I desire today? And this is why spiritual askesis like fasting is so important. By fasting from particular foods, I become more concious of the food I do eat.  How much am I eating?  Why am I eating?  In the same way, I can limit my indulgence in TV and I start asking “Why am I watching this?  How much have I watched?’ But any attempt to remain free of desire, to abstain, is completely counter-cultural.  We often see it as an unnatural act.  Why put an in-human effort into being uncomfortable? You can even see this in the discussion of Wikipedia’s Asceticism page that I linked to.  Instead of seeing Asceticism as the self-empowering act that it is, people think it is self-destructive and anti-human. Indulgence has become our natural state.  Any exercise of will-power is ridiculed. And we wonder why America has an obesity crisis.

I just finished Making Money, Terry Pratchett’s latest Discworld novel.  He couldn’t have possibly written a more timely book. Zimram, the HTML hack with an economics education, today writes:

I would love to see any discounted cash flow for gold, an inert, industrially useless metal, whose only savings graces are 1) Bernanke cannot make more of it, 2) neither can anyone else, 3) people have agreed it’s money for ten billions years.

Along with the rising popularity of gold-bugs like Ron Paul and their ilk, Gold prices have been going up recently. But even though gold has given a relatively large return lately, that doesn’t mean you should invest in it:

With all the bear markets, through the oil crises, Black Monday, the implosion of the dot-coms, stagflation, and all the economic risks you can think of, do you know which asset class was the only one that lost money in a 10-year time frame? Yup, our favorite precious metal: gold.

Anyway, what does all this have to do with Making Money?  Not much, except that Gold Bugs tend to be Gold-Standard Luddites. and Terry Pratchett’s novel covers the path of a fictional city-state away from the gold standard.  After reading the book, Zimram’s statement makes for entertaining reading.

They could build canals and dam floods, level mountains and make roads! .. That is value! That is worth!  What is the worth of a gold coin compared to the dexterity of the hand that holds it?

For several years, I’ve talked with friends about doing a century or just a nice weekend trip.  I always wimped out at the last minute or forgot about it. It isn’t like a century is especially hard.  A couple of weekends last fall I rode 50 miles solo and unsupported.  OK, well, there was that one woman I got some water from… but that’s it, I swear. Anyway, a couple of months ago, Jim asked me if I wanted to do RAGBRAI with him.  I said “Sure, but only the last three days.”  And then, Rwanda happened and aside from some guilty feelings that I wasn’t riding enough (it has been cold!), I’ve mostly forgotten about the trip. Well, no more.  I’m doing RAGRAI if it kills me.  Yesterday, I hopped back on my bike for the first time in a while.  20 miles and I felt it in my legs.  Tomorrow, and every day from here on out, I’ll do another 20 till I can get back to 1:15 (or better) on my time.  Then I’ll get a decent road bike and do the rest on that.  I expect the road bike will let me get down to one hour on my time.  I’ll have to fill the weekends with 40-60 mile rides. 125 days till RAGBRAI. (UPDATE: Just noticed that the first RAGBRAI was the same year I was born.  We’ll turn 35 together!)

The Sacrament of the Present Moment:

It has been a common observation that when various reformers set about to reform the Church, they declared “all days to be holy days,” and thus rid the calendar of any particular holy day. The unintended result was that before long not only were all days not holy days, no day was a holy day. In the same way, the decrees concerning the “priesthood of all believers” rather than making every individual a priest, became a meaningless phrase, for without the sacramental priesthood, the phrase lost its reference of meaning. No one had seen or dealt with a priest so to be told that they had some kind of “priesthood” from Christ was meaningless. The same has been true of the more recent democratizations of the liturgy where the “people” gather around the altar and God is in our midst. Somehow, God becomes lost. All boundary between myself and the holy disappear and I can no longer know the holy. … we are never separated from God who is freely with us, but also giving Himself to us in everything around us. This is no profession of pantheism. God has not become everything else. But everything else holds the possibility of encounter with God as surely as the holy water within the Church or every sacrament He has given us. “The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof.” … So this brings us to the “sacrament of the present moment.” Everything, everyone, every place, filled with God, becomes a moment of communion and theophany. Thus we pray for the whole world, and finally know the fullness for which God is preparing us.

I think I’m done writing about this trip, but I wanted to point you to some rough videos I took with my camera.  They’ll give you some idea of the dancing we saw.

• Semi-professional Dancers at Gorilla’s Nest (~10m)
• More (~15s)
• Women dancing with Baskets on their heads (~15s)
• Children from the Volcano Lake (~1m)

Sorry for the quality and lack of editing.  But you get the idea.