Category Archives: What’s going on

“Drive-Thru Frustrations” by my ten-year-old daughter.

Worker: Welcome to Burger Queen.  May I take your order?

Customer: Um… I’ll have a small drink, a triple cheeseburger, and Doc Flurry.

Worker: Sorry, we don’t have triple cheeseburgers or Doc Flurries.

Customer: Ok, I’ll have a Frapino and a Huge’n’Yummy— Ooh! And a bag of carrot dippers!

Worker: Ma’am, we don’t have any of that.

Customer: What?! Fine! I’ll have a Big Doc and a Doc Salad.

Worker: Ma’am, we don’t have any of that either.

Customer: You don’t have a very good selection!

Worker: Well, considering this is Burger Queen and not Doc Donald’s, we have a very good selection.  Now if you want to order something from our menu, it is to your left.

Customer: Fine, I’ll have a Freezie.

Worker: That’s not even on the Doc Donald’s menu! It’s on Whitney’s menu.

Customer: What happened to “The customer is always right”?

Worker: Ugh! You’re impossible!

Customer: Me? You are!

Worker: No, you!

Customer: You!

Worker: You.

Customer: Yo—

Worker: Do you want food or not?

Customer: Of course.

Worker: Good.  Then order something…

Customer: Fine. I’ll have a Doc Wrap.

Worker: …from the menu!

Customer: You know, I wanted fast food.  But this isn’t fast food.  Look how long your taking.

Worker: Why don’t you go to Doc Donald’s then?

Customer: That’s a good idea!  Could you direct me to the nearest Doc Donald’s?

Worker: Whatever.  Down the street and to your left.

THE END

My politics at the moment

I have gone about three weeks without getting any news/blogs/commentary feeds or listening to talk radio, or even channel surfing for news.  The only exceptions you will see is stuff that gets sent my way via social media.  I’m not cutting off friends just because they link to political stuff, so I’ll probably still see a few things and pass them on.  But it won’t happen as often as it used to.

I’m happier not knowing what the Beast is trying to do to me.  The drain caused by learning the latest is not commensurate with my ability to do anything about it.  This means that worrying about their destructive work is simply another tax on me: I bear with unnecessary and useless anxiety in addition to all the other burdens imposed by our political masters.

If I had money or time or any other surplus, I wouldn’t mind diving back in.  But I don’t have any surplus of anything right now.  Survival is pretty much my only concern.

This doesn’t mean I don’t have opinions.  I do.  Leaving aside the insane global war we are involved in, I think what George Bush, Alan Greenspan, Henry Paulson, and Ben Bernanke have done to the peons (including me) outside of the Wall Street, DC nexus is a whole new level of domestic evil that surpasses anything else heretofore perpetrated on the peoples of the United States.  And Obama is doubling, tripling, quadrupling down on all of it.

I hate it all.  I don’t want reform.  I don’t want the GOP to win (wouldn’t mind if they did next year, but that’s just an immediate visceral thing that will lead to other frustrations).  I want the whole regime to go the way of the Great Auk and the Dodo bird.  I want the territory between Mexico and Canada (and Hawaii, and Alaska) freed from the Parasite/Predator Class.

But, again, there is nothing I can do about it.  And God’s got his own time table and plan.  My job is to live a quiet life and work to support my own and anyone else I can help. Caring about politics in a news-following way is just a way to feel angry and waste time. Neither helps.

By the way, I don’t think that civil government is a necessary evil.  I just think the civil government that we actually have is an unnecessary evil.  But again, God has his reasons and I may not have enough information to have a correct opinion.

An apology for an earlier blog post.

Earlier, I made some serious accusations (going to motives etc) and used pretty crude language in the process referring to 19 men who signed a letter that accused a PCA pastor of denying justification by faith alone.

One of the nineteen wrote and confronted me about it and I’m posting my apology here to all of them since the original post was once here and was public for some time.  Here it is.

It was sinful of me to impugn your motives or to bypass the church courts and accuse all the signatories of serious sins. My intemperate and insulting language was an added sin.  I’m very sorry and hope the signatories will forgive me.  I also apologize to my own presbytery who are in the process of dealing with the accusations.  “I, the presbytery,” is not a godly attitude.

Since I could easily see it defeating the purpose of this post to allow comments, I’m going to disable them in this case.

I appreciate the prayers of all.

Pray for Michael Spencer, “The Internet Monk,” and his family

It is with a heavy heart that I bring my latest update on Michael. We have learned that his cancer is too advanced and too aggressive to expect any sort of remission. Our oncologist estimates that with continued treatment Michael most likely has somewhere between six months and a year to live. This is not really a surprise to us, though it is certainly horrible news. From the very beginning, both of us have suspected that this would prove to be an extremely bad situation. I don’t know why; perhaps God was preparing us for the worst all along by giving us that intuition.

The combination of the cancer and the chemotherapy is keeping Michael in a very weakened state. He is in bed all day, getting up once or twice only to eat a “meal.” His meals consist mostly of Ensure, with occasional mugs of soup, dishes of ice cream and milkshakes. He’s still taking fluids well, currently preferring Sprite and ginger ale. His tastes do change slightly from time to time, and I try to be ready to jump in whatever direction they seem to be moving. He is in no pain at all, for which I am unspeakably grateful.

Michael went through a period of depression, as I’m sure you would expect. He seems to have come through that now, for the most part. He knows he is dying, and he says he is at peace. Though he will still say with unashamed honesty, “I don’t want it to all be over at age 53!” he has the confidence of knowing that he has run the race God set out for him. He believes he has done the work our Lord intended for him to do, and if the last task God has for him in this life is dying, then he will do that to the best of his ability.

Read the rest at Michael Spencer Update, 3/9/2010 | internetmonk.com.

So far, reading Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot

  1. I’m surprised I’ve never heard King compared to Ray Bradbury
  2. It is refreshing to see a more Bram Stoker approach (so far) then the “vampires as enemy bike gang” approach which I have loved since watching The Lost Boys and Whedon used.  I wonder if King will give the vampire ghostly properties (bodies could become mist and then solidify in the original Dracula novel).
  3. It is so, so, so much better written than Stoker’s idiot book.
  4. But I do hate seeing Stoker’s rather inventive way of pasting together “journals” given up in favor of a standard third-person approach.  Then again, Stoker’s attempt was a failure, so maybe King was smart to not try to emulate it.

Channeling my inner Buffy

Particularly S5E1. Remember how Dracula said her power was rooted in darkness and she had this addiction to go preying in the middle of the night? I can’t be the slayer and as much as the internet is like a haunted graveyard, this blog can’t be my patrol.

Sorry.

If you don’t know what any of this means, then I don’t want you to.