Sweden is a geek

Sweden is going to open a new embassy in a virtual computer world called Second Life, where 3 million people play make-believe and play dress-up. Honest to goodness. You can find the story here: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/16884633/.
When a country opens diplomatic relations with an imaginary land, you've got to think this is a country with way too much time on its hands.
In other news, Sweden placed second in the annual Dungeons and Dragons Tournament in Topeka, Kansas, and is looking forward to attending the big Star Trek Convention at the Des Moines Hyatt Regency in March - if it can get its Starfleet costume ready in time.

A big ol' thank you...I'm 3 for 3!

A while ago I asked you folks to help me on a scavenger hunt of sorts. I was on the lookout for a couple of plays and a video, things that I had been trying to find for 20 years or more. And you came up with clues and leads and one by one, I came into possesion of these things.
The writer of "Hospitality Suite,'' Roger Rueff sent me a copy of the play after a couple of very nice phone calls. I found somebody who actually had a DVD copy of the "Gospel at Colonus'' on the message boards of The Internet Movie Database (IMDb) .

But the text for a short play called "Rattlesnake In a Cooler'' was a tougher nut to crack. I called the playwright in Hawaii (again thanks to your snooping) shortly before the holidays and he said he was going to send it to me. Well, a month passed, and no "Rattlesnake." I thought of the holiday parcel rush, and figured maybe the package had to get to the mainland via dugout canoe.
I was loathe to call again because I hate to be a pest, so I gently e-mailed Frank South again, who was kind enough to e-mail me a PDF of the play. So Saturday morning, I printed the sucker out, took it to Kinko's and had it bound. I'm thrilled. More than my wife, who says if she has to watch the Gospel at Colonus one more time, I'm going to be the victim of Greek tragedy my own self. Looks like I married something of a Philistine. But that's neither here nor there. I'm convinced that there is nothing you and I can't accomplish together in the blogosphere.
Who do we want to elect to the White House?

No right to hope

I was listening this morning to the statement Joseph T. LePore made before the court in advance of his sentencing in the Seton Hall fire case. A sentence of five years with only 16 months of jail time guaranteed seems like an unjust gift. His statement only made the mercy of the court seem more unjust.

He said that he was sorry. None of us can judge a man's heart. We leave that to God.
But he also said, to the families of the dead and the burned and scarred vitims, that he "hoped they could move on.'' My God. LePore has no right to hope that, and in a moral sense, if not a legal one, less right to say it out loud.

He hopes they can move on, as if the pain and scars and loss of life are something about which anyone can say, "Easy come, easy go.'' Maybe it would have been better to just say nothing than to be arrogant even in contrition.

One of the seven deadly sins as a lifestyle choice

After three years, German scientists have given up on trying to get a sloth named Mats to cooperate in a scientific study. They wanted Mats to climb a pole to study animal movement. But Mats was having none of it, even after being tempted with cucumbers. The sloth just laid on the floor of his cage. The scientists were disappointed. Parents of adolescents everywhere know exactly how they feel.

Memory and the real thing

It was one of those moments when, even when it's happening, you say to yourself, "I want to remember this forever.''

Maybe we have a lot of those moments . When we're in high school, every second seems fraught with meaning and portent, and time takes the edges off things, and makes things fuzzy. All that stuff we thought was so memorable turns out not to be. And when you're young, life is nothing but sensory overload anyway, and the "I'll always remember this'' times tumble in and out of our heads like so many Styrofoam packing peanuts.

But when you get older, when you're so close to, say, the half-century mark that you can reach out and touch it , you get a clearer sense of what's important to make room for in the old noggin.
This past summer, I took my then 21-year-old son, Christopher, to a Bruce Springsteen concert at the PNC Bank Arts Center in Holmdel.

At one point in the midst of the music and the crowd, he turned to me, his face full of joy, and said, "I just can't get my head around how good this is.'' A nice father-son moment, to be sure, and I'd treasure it for that alone. But in the months since that time, I remember his face and his words, and those words have come to be the way I look at my life. I wake up every morning, and it comes to me that life itself is so good that I can't get my head around it: my wife, my kids, my friends, the chance to do work I like and do pretty well, the smell of the air, the taste of morning eggs, all of it.

So, a pretty good memory becomes a way of looking at the world. Not too shabby, if you ask me.

Just give the man an Oscar already!

The Oscar nominations have come out, and I noticed that one of the nominess for best actor is this up-and-coming thespian by the name of Peter O'Toole.
Note the sarcasm. Here's a guy who should have won for "Lawrence of Arabia'', should have won for "My Favorite Year,'' "The Stuntman,'' "The Ruling Class'' and any number of other flicks.
He's nominated this year for a role in a small independent film called "Venus.'' I haven't seen it.
Doesn't matter. O'Toole could have spent all his screen time in the movie reading the phonebook with his back to the camera and he should still get the award in the name of justice and talent.
I felt the same way about Paul Newman. How many times did the Academy overlook his work in, say, the "Verdict" before giving it to him for a good, but not great, performance in the "Color of Money.''
Are we all in agreement here?

You Tube = Ulysses

You Tube is dangerous. It can take more of your time than is good for you, for your role as spouse and parent, particularly if said spouse and kids are way more tired of that video where one penguin slaps another penguin right onto his face than you'll ever be.

But the thing is that a You Tube session often turns into a stream-of-consciousness therapy session. For instance, I was looking for a video clip of a Peter Cook/Dudley Moore sketch called "The One-Legged Tarzan.'' I didn't find it, but I did watch some clips of the two of them in the original "Bedazzled'' with some pretty deep theology in them. This led inexorably to clips of bikini-clad women, then onto penguins who slap (because you really can't get enough of that) to old "Laugh-In" outtakes and finally to a six-minute concert clip of Bruce Springsteen and The Seeger Sessions Band performing "This Little Light of Mine.''

I know that eventually a lot of this is all going to go away, what with copyright law and everything, but it really does take you through a tour of your own inner cityscape, just like James Joyce's novel "Ulysses.'' Of course Ulysses didn't have penguins.

If a galaxy falls in the forest....

String theory is still in there swinging away for respectability, although there are some cosmologists who say that the theory is "so bad that it's not even wrong.''

The theory, as I understand it (and basically I don't, but who in the name of Stephan Hawking does) is an attempt to unify the theory of gravity and the working of quantum mechanics into one big Theory of Everything, by claiming that tiny tiny particles are string like and exist in more dimensions than we've got. (It's a math thing.)

But, according to an MSNBC.com story, some scientists are suggesting the existence of galaxy-long "superstrings'' of vibrating stuff that causes gravity waves that keep us all from floating away and falling apart. And, get this, a few of these vibrations may actually be audible, sort of like the last note in the Beatles' "Day in the Life.''

I have enough trouble with gravity these days, body parts sagging, heading south like the arctic glaciers, not to mention trying to cross an icy driveway in January. The last thing I need is to hear gravity snickering at me when I pass by.

What America is doing behind closed doors...

The February issue of Esquire magazine reports on the results of a survey it commissioned, along with Marie Clare magazine. The subject of the survey is modern American sexual habits, and I'd like to be able to report on the results, but this is a family-friendly blog, and while there is nothing more friendly to the creation of families than sex, it has been suggested that I refrain from the more graphic statistics and focus on the more, shall we say, modest elements.

For instance, when asked "Are you more willing to give up sex or sleep?'' 61 percent of women said sex; 65 percent of men would give up sleep to get some sex. This is no surprise to men who have tried to gently rouse their partners in the wee hours of the morning, is it?

Women are twice as likely to feel regret after a one-night stand then men, who are three times as likely as women to feel satisfied the morning after.

Does high school never end? Sixty percent of men surf the internet for porn compared to 17 percent of women. To which I would sheepishly have to say: "Define porn.''

There's penty of other stuff going on in this survey, and apparently everywhere but my house.

Idol-atry

Last night marked the season premiere of the television show that allows the whole country to become one big high school clique, catty and mean and all superior-acting. I speak, of course, of "American Idol.''

The beginning episodes always focus, to continue the high school metaphor, on the "kids'' who are wedgied and swirlied constantly. What is amazing is the total lack of self-awareness on the part of some of these doomed contestants. Don't they know how bereft of talent they are?''

There is something sad about people who do not avail themselves of the prayer-like plea of Robert Burns: "O wad some Power the giftie gie us - To see oursels as ithers see us! ...''
All of us are sometimes blind as to how we come off to others, us with spinach in our teeth, the toilet paper on our shoe or the braggadocio that makes people avoid us. But for those who don't, I guess putting the results on national television is par for the course.

Womb to Move

Doctors say it may soon be possible to do a uterus transplant sometime in the near future, which I suppose, is the equivalent of putting wheels on a condominium and turning it into a mobile home.
A solution that seems more than a little bit cumbersome and inelegant, if you ask me.
Now I'm not one of those guys who carries torches and pitchforks to the castle to roust the mad scientist from his castle because he's tampering with things that are best left to God.
It's amazing what we can do, thanks to the brains the good Lord gave us.
And just because something is hard and fraught with risks does not mean that we should just quit trying.
But in this case, transplanting a uterus seems like a Rube Goldberg solution to a problem that already has a solution. Why build a new uterus when you can rent a perfectly good one through surrogacy?
An ethicist (now there's a job I'd like to get paid to do: just sit around thinking about right and wrong, good and evil) pointed out on a morning news show that when it comes to transplants, things like hearts, lungs, livers and kidneys are necessary. People die without a heart.
That's not the case with the uterus.
On the other hand, it's possible to live without a penis, but if I lost mine, I'd get on that transplant list as soon as possible.
One of the things I learned in my philosophy classes is that when it comes to ethics ''you can't derive the 'ought' from the 'is'.
Just because something is possible does not mean that we ought to do it.
I'm perfectly capable of socking an editor in the nose, but does that mean it is good or right for me to do it?
Not necessarily.
So it is with this newest foray into body part swapping.

Why not run for safety?

In the first church I ever pastored, there was a woman in the congregation who regularly got the crap kicked out of her by her husband and her adult daughter. They would beat on her like a pro-wrestling tag team.
And she stuck around for years, enduring this abuse. Even after she told me about the abuse, it was like pulling teeth to get her to agree to leave, to find a shelter and get her life back.
She had her reasons, she said. No driver's license, an older, mentally challenged daughter to care for, no job and no money. Plus, the beatings had gone on so long that I suspect she felt that maybe she deserved them.
It took every bit of ccourage she had to pack up her stuff, her daughter and make it to shelter.
She made a new life for herself after years of getting knocked around.
And yet I still wonder "Why?'' Why not get free?
It's the same thing we wonder about Shawn Horbeck, the kid kidnapped four years ago.
He was left alone a lot. He could have picked up a phone, run like hell, stopped a cop, a stranger, anything.
Fear, though, can do horrible things to the spirit.
Safe at last, maybe Shawn can again know what it is to feel strong, and brave.
It's the same prayer I prayed for that poor sad woman so many years ago.

We come, not to praise our kids...

The folks at the U.S. Census Bureau count the population every 10 years. Of course, once that job is done, they don't just sit around twiddling their thumbs until it's time to start knocking on doors again. They collate data and give us a keen look at our lives just in case we're too busy to actually live a self-examined life.

One of the facts they have tumbled on to is this: About 72 percent of kids under 6 were praised by mom or dad three or more times per day, compared with 51 percent of children 6 to 11 years old and 37 percent of 12- to 17-year-olds. As anybody who's been in the parenting game as long as I have could tell you, there's no mystery here.

Everything a toddler does is cause for confetti and ticker tape. Little Johnny makes tinkle in the potty and its time for a parade. Try telling a sullen 15-year-old, "Hey, nice B.M. there, pal'' and see where it gets you. Actually, parents don't praise bathroom behavior in their teens as much as interrogate it: "What in God's name are you doing in there?''

There's no question that we parents could add to the number of times we praise our adolescents as long as we're willing to lower the bar: " Hey, son. Way to go only missing curfew by two hours.'' Or "I just want to tell you how much I appreciate only having to remind you eight times to take out the trash.'' And so on. We'll have our teens feeling wonderful about themselves in no time flat.

What happens after what happens next doesn't?

Last night, the president outlined a scenario of likely events if the U.S. got out Iraq, a scenario not so different from the apocalyptic visions of John the Evangelist at the back of the Bible, only without God leading the charge.

We have to stay, and not only stay, but escalate the conflict, the president said, because to do otherwise might well bring about disaster of Scriptural proportions. Let us, for the sake of argument, assume he's right.

It's also true the president let it be known that the U.S. is not going to stick around forever. Our patience is running out and the Iraqis need to step up to the plate and take care of their own damned country. Fine. What happens when they don't? How many last chances does that country get? And if they blow it this time, do we leave then? And if we leave in a year or so, and the Iraqis are still not doing the job, does the apocalypse get postponed?

Two more points:
1. Freedom is hard work and throughout history people have to be dragged kicking and screaming to embrace it. Not long after Moses and the children of Israel left bondage in Egypt behind, they started whining about how much better it was to be enslaved in a city than free in the wilderness. Of course, when God is kicking your behind, you get with the program pretty quickly.
As wonderful as the U.S. is, it's not God, and our country can't manufacture a pillar of fire by night to guide the Iraqis or provide manna from heaven to eat. (Although I hear that the boys from Halliburton are working on the former, and the Pentagon' MRE are full of creamed chipped manna on toast)

2. Beware of the phrase "mistakes were made'': the passive voice effectively eliminates the tricky questions of who made the mistakes and how will they be held accountable. It's the last resort of responsibility dodgers.

Deadman's hand

We were told Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction right up until President Bush admitted that it turned out that there were none. We were told the insurgency was in its last throes, right up until the time it was revealed that "last throes'' meant "descend into civil war.''
President Bush told us we were winning the war in Iraq right up until that he admitted that we weren't.

Now we're told that a surge of some 20,000 troops into Baghdad will turn the tide.
Compulsive gamblers chase the big payoff right over the cliff, believing, against the laws of probability, that they are one red queen, one roll of the dice, away from scoring. They lie to themselves, to their families and to their friends.
Governments don't gamble with filthy lucre, but with the blood and tears of our sons and daughters, our fathers, mothers, husbands and wives. The upcoming surge is one more gamble in a game where no one wins, not even the house.

Earth to Mars: Ooops!

A geology professor at Washington State University has come up with the idea that when the first Mars probes landed on Mars 30 years ago, the tests NASA performed to look for life might have wound up destroying the very microbes they were looking for.

The Mars probes weren't looking for cells that worked with a mix of water and hydrogen peroxide, and the Viking landers tests involved processes that would have drowned and/or overheated the little buggers, according to Professor Dirk Schulze-Makuch.

And God looks upon Earth and casts a gimlet eye our way. He's not happy, and if you listen carefully you can almost hear him say: "You see? This is why we can't have nice things in this solar system!''

Elvis taught me how to preach

Of course, we had professors for that back in seminary, professors of homilectics is what they were called. But I loved Elvis long before I loved Jesus, and the freedom, the longing and the power in his voice were prayers.

I wanted to be Elvis. Recently, I watched a DVD of his 1968 Comeback Special, a show my parents let me stay up late to watch back when I was 10 years old.

I can't sing a lick, but it occurred to me as I watched him that the passion in his voice was what I was going for every time I got behind a pulpit. And the way he would hold his hands when he was belting a ballad is something I've caught myself doing when I would tell one of the Old Testament stories or the Gospel accounts of Jesus' healing touch.

I was listening to the radio last night and they mentioned that Elvis' birthday is today, Jan. 8.
When I was in high school, the one thing you didn't want to be was an Elvis fan. He was considered a joke. So I had to hide from my friends the fact that I went to see him in concert.

But Elvis was a kind of prophet for me, whispering that there was more to life than high school disappointments, than the trailer parks and truck stop diners that circumscribed my life at the time. So, it makes me happy to think of him now and again.

What in the name of Eros are women up to?

Those who responded to a recent Women's Day magazine poll have finally answered Freud's question: "What do women want?'' Somebody else, apparently.

The 3,000 women polled were asked: "If you had to do it all over, would you marry your husband again?'' Forty-six percent said yes, 36 percent said no, and 20 percent said that they weren't sure. What that says to me is that a lot of us married men are skating on pretty thin ice. And by "us,'' of course, I mean you.

My wife Sue is fine and dandy with her choice. She's convinced she got the pick of the litter, the cream of the crop when she got me. Which is not to say that she's some starry-eyed romantic, like the women who read Woman's Day - 80 percent of whom believe in the idea of "soul mates'' and 52 percent of whom believe they have found theirs.

Soulmates is a doozy of a concept, one that seems to operate on the principle that a lifelong relationship is made with magical fairy dust instead of sweat and tears and heavy lifting.
Besides which, doesn't the math seem a little off here? If 56 percent of women would dump their husbands, doesn't that mean that 4 percent of women would leave the soulmate they've found.

Another bummer in the survey is that I didn't make the list of the sexiest married men in America, which leads me to believe that the poll is fixed. Sue, by the way, has a crush on one of the goofiest-looking actors around: Brendan Frasier.
There is also a question about flirting, but I think we'll save that for another time
For more on the poll, go to http://www.womansday.com/home/11092/behind-closed-doors-a-womans-day-and-aol-survey.html

Toilet trek

You've got to love a good old-fashioned archeological free-for-all. Especially when the rhubarb concerns 2000-year-old caca. At issue, according to a recent AP story, is whether an ancient latrine proves that the settlement at Qumran was populated by the Essenes, an ascetic, apocalypse-minded Jewish sect that may have written the Dead Sea Scrolls. Most scholars, including the professors who taught me at seminary hold to this view. The minority viewpoint says that the Dead Sea Scrolls were plopped into the nearby caves by a whole other set of Jews.

I'm in the Essene camp myself, but I'm not sure the existence of buried human excrement on the outskirts of a settlement tells us anything about who once lived there. It is true that the Essenes had some pretty strict ideas about what to do with poo, and wrote them down. But that doesn't mean that everybody else in the world took no care about where they relieved themselves. Those archeologists who posit the latrine as the repository of Essene excrement (and try saying that 3 times fast) believe that such evidence makes it more likely that the Essenes wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Of course, the controversial latrine was a nine-minute walk from the settlement, which seems to me a long haul when nature calls. Of course, a nearly one-mile hike to go number two is just the sort of thing you'd expect from those wacky Essenes.

'Til death do us part

Following a state study commission recommendation, New Jersey seems all set to abolish capital punishment. This is basically a moot point since in the 25 years that New Jersey has had the power to kill certain convicts, it has not used it.
What's the use of having the gizmos to send murderers on to wherever it is they go if you're not going to use them. It's like keeping that "in the shell egg scrambler'' you bought after watching some late-night infomercial and not taking it out of the box. Use it or lose it, some people say.

I've always been ambivalent about the death penalty. It seems to me that there are some people who are so far beyond the pale that the possibility of rehabilitation is laughable. And redemption? Probably not going to happen, but that's not really my call, is it? Still, "Sic semper tyrannis'' and all that (Saddam Hussein, anyone?)

On the other hand, innocent people have been executed (Jesus, anyone?)
And 30 years in an 8x10 cell is no day at the beach and may be what has been called a "fate worse than death.''

But even as I get older, less patient and more conservative, the one thing that stops me from a full-throated endorsement of Old Sparky, the gallows or the Lethal Drip is that I just can't picture Jesus as an executioner, head on the switch, saying, "You gonna ride the lightnin' now, son!''

Happy New Year, leftovers and stuff

It's good to be back here in the blogosphere with a new year upon us all.
I thought it might be a good idea to catch up on a couple of issues that we all kind of pounced on in the waning days of 2006:
1. Margaret is laying off the saki from now on, so we can all celebrate that decision.
2. There seems to be some question as to whether my kids can be both smart as the dickens and morally upright. I don't think it's an either/or proposition.
When Susan was pregnant with our first child, I told her I thought the most important thing was for the kid to be smart. Sue answered by saying there are far more important attributes to be hoped for.
"Like what?'' I asked.
"Like being a loving, caring person,'' she answered.
And she was right. Smart is good. But compassion is better.
But let's not get all bent out of shape about literature. Great literature can help a person become more loving, and more caring.