Author: Jay

Posted on

Christmas music

For an eclectic addition to your Christmas music collection, might I suggest Christmas Eve & Other Stories by the Trans-Siberian Orchestra? Here’s the 30 second Amazon preview of the better known song on the album. For those who don’t know the band, it is composed of a band named Savatage, plus a lot of other folks. Savatage has probably been kicking around for 15 years releasing one unusual concept album after another. They have this odd blend of thrash, rock opera, and I don’t know what.

I bought a Savatage album back in 1988 when I was in high school named In the Hall of the Mountain King. Since college, I hadn’t really listened to anything by the band until a couple years ago when I picked up Dead Winter Dead on a whim at a Half Price Bookstore. It tells the story of the fall of Sarajevo primarily from the point of view of a gargoyle on the cathedral in the center of town. Interestingly, the picture of the band in the liner notes has them standing way up high on scaffolding next to the gargoyle as the church is repaired after the wars. Here’s a review of the album.

Posted on

Smoking

When I came across a link to A Smoker’s Paradise on jh3k and saw that the author’s name was Micah Weedman, I thought the whole thing was a setup for a bad joke. Come on! Micah Weedman writing on smoking? Smoking what?

It is actually a rather interesting article.

Posted on

Ocean’s Eleven

I suppose I shouldn’t have mentioned Ocean’s Eleven without providing at least a thumbs up/down. I thought the movie was great and lived up to its hype as a slick popcorn-eating entertainment package. No deep thoughts here, just a fun time as the plot unfolds. It was also surprisingly non-vulgar given the trends these days. Mild language, mild sex, mild violence, etc. I had wanted to see the movie after noticing that it was getting universally good reviews, from CNN to NPR.

I’ll also have to admit that I almost fell out of my chair laughing during the preview for Orange County. I guess I have a weakness for well done, immature movies.

And now I just need to help arrange for a baby-sitter on December 19…

Posted on

NPR and contemporary worship

On the way to catch Ocean’s Eleven yesterday at a late matinee, I listened to an interesting segment on NPR’s All Things Considered that was delving into the contemporary worship scene. The real audio is linked six items down on this page. Linda asked some solid questions, but made two mistakes. First, she pretended that ‘tenderer’ was a word. Second, she didn’t point out a contradiction in two of the answers given. I’ll let you try to figure out which answers I thought contradicted each other. Perhaps there’s more than one. After all, I was dealing with traffic when listening to the segment…

Posted on

Anthrax and the USPS

I have a general question regarding the use of the US Postal Service as a delivery vehicle for anthrax: Is anyone surprised? Why not FedEx or UPS? Oh, that’s right… those organizations are run efficiently for profit, rather than losing $1.7 billion. They use these magical notations called barcodes, that allow simple people to wave wands over them resulting in the knowledge of where and when the package traded hands at all points in its delivery. They have a sane number of distribution centers, so that if irradiation machines are ultimately needed to fight terrorism, the cost would be more manageable. And the list goes on.

Posted on

Chiasm off the newswire

Here’s some news articles from the past couple days in reverse chronological order:

   Retail Sales Show Strength

      Number of Laid-Off Workers Plunges

         Mixed signs from US economy

      Employment Picture Seen as Bleak for Months

   Retailers Post Dismal Sales for November

There you have it. So for all of you who think journalists don’t know literature, you have just witnessed the use of a chiasm on the newswire.

Posted on

Woe is me

When I started this blog, I planned on a mix of topics ranging from the personal to the philosophical to the inane. I will now explain why the trivial/inane seems to be the main fare these days. As I blogged below, we had a rather interesting Thanksgiving vacation, culminating in a 19 hour drive back to Dallas on Thanksgiving day. The next day, Tricia and Abigail left for Atlanta, leaving Jonathan and I to have a grand time at home.

Now, the next part of this story depends on some very happy background information: we (meaning Tricia, my wife) are pregnant, due in mid-June. It was a bit of a surprise — we had sort of envisioned another year or so between Jonathan and whoever came next — but I could not be happier. The day before we left on our vacation in mid-November we got to see the little dude and his beating heart on the sonogram. It’s still a rush the third time around. Okay, a bit more background before the main point. Though we had had a bit of trouble getting pregnant the first time around, that was not the issue with our second (Jonathan). Though Abigail and Jonathan are only 2 years apart, we had two miscarriages prior to Jonathan coming on the scene.

Okay, back to the story at hand. A couple days after Tricia and Abigail returned from Atlanta (early last week), Tricia started experiencing symptoms very much in keeping with her previous miscarriages. Everything turned out okay, but it entailed several days of bedrest. During that week, we also discovered that Jonathan, who had come down with a cold while we were on vacation, now had both an ear and sinus infection. He was not a happy camper. After limping into this week, we started to pull together and try to return to a sense of normalcy in the past couple days.

Then Abigail woke up with a 103 degree fever in the wee hours of the morning last night and started vomiting. Though she felt terrible, she still didn’t seem to mind trying to play footsies with me from about 4:30 a.m. to 5:30 a.m. once we had her in bed with us for closer monitoring. Having only slept about 4 or 5 hours the night before (and having gone to bed at 1:30 a.m. last night), I was feeling like warmed over death around the time I got back to sleep at 6 a.m. Suffice to say I did not make it to work in a timely fashion.

The result of all these happenings is that I’ve not been thinking too many erudite thoughts of late. And now you know the rest of the story.

Posted on

Holy Land Foundation

Richardson, TX is in the news (see top item). For those who don’t know, I live and work in Richardson (a northeast suburb of Dallas, home to the Telecom Corridor). The ISP that got hit is just down the street from the offices of a friend of mine, who had the pleasure of watching a swarm of people wearing jackets with ‘FBI’ in loud yellow print on the back descend on the place.

Posted on

Goner virus

My first virus ever… I had quite a streak going, given that I download stuff all the time (broadband and all, you know). But my wife called me this afternoon to explain that Outlook was freaking out and that when she had opened this particular email from a friend of hers, she’d promptly seen several hundred email show up in the outbox.