Author: Glen

Christ, Christmas, and Credit Cards

Randy Jumper, an old friend from grad school, just post­ed a won­der­ful piece from NPR.

Excerpt:

I’m not fight­ing the com­mer­cial­iza­tion of Christ­mas; that fight was lost ages ago. What I’m after is more rad­i­cal: Dis­en­tan­gling Jesus entire­ly from this blight on his good name. I’m out to change the bumper stick­er from ‘Keep Christ in Christ­mas’ to ‘Free Christ from Christ­mas.’

Heresy? Well, com­pare Christ­mas with Mar­tin Luther King’s birth­day. On his birth­day, nobody ever pays any atten­tion to his birth. Instead, it’s ‘I have a dream’ and his impact on soci­ety. We mark Dr. King’s birth by focus­ing on what he said and did as an adult. Christ­mas, by con­trast, has no time for what the adult Jesus said and did. Christ­mas keeps him safe­ly shut up as a baby in the manger, where he can’t make his usu­al noise about peo­ple repent­ing and liv­ing a god­ly life.

…

I’m not propos­ing that we can­cel Christ­mas. I know, the econ­o­my would col­lapse with­out it. Fine. Keep the gift-giv­ing and the jin­gle bells. Let’s just sub­tract the remain­ing Jesus ele­ment from it and move that over into East­er. Call Decem­ber 25th Sol­stice. Call it Retail Day. Call it Hol­i­day Num­ber Nine. I don’t care, just leave Christ out of it. He was not born to be the patron saint of fourth-quar­ter earn­ings.

Merry Christmas, Nina!

You know those white ele­phant gift exchanges–the ones where you bring a gag gift and it goes into a pool and every­one picks out a lame gift at ran­dom and then opens it in front of every­one?

Well, they just did that at UNC Chi Alpha, and they caught the fun­ni­est gag gift I’ve ever seen on tape. See what Nina got for Christ­mas! (a 40 sec­ond movie in Win­dows Media Play­er for­mat)

It’s not obvi­ous on the video, but the gift is indeed a live rat.

My com­men­da­tions to Brad Novosad for his most excel­lent dis­ci­ple­ship of these stu­dents in the ways of mer­ri­ment.

Thanksgiving 2004

Thanks­giv­ing was quite won­der­ful.

My broth­er Greg vis­it­ed (and we played through Halo 2 on co-op–he had the same reac­tion I did to the abrupt end­ing), we had a ton of stu­dents over for Turkey Day itself, my friend Antho­ny got XBox live and we gamed togeth­er, and I bought a 200 gig hard dri­ve for under $50. Got­ta love those Fry’s “day after Thanks­giv­ing” spe­cials…

Any­way, giv­en my new abun­dance of disk space I decid­ed to install Lin­ux. I did it once in col­lege and enjoyed play­ing with it. I expect­ed much the same expe­ri­ence (name­ly a few days of fight­ing with arcane and need­less­ly obscure con­fig­u­ra­tion files), and I have to say I’m blown away by how far it’s come. I down­loaded the Fedo­ra Core 3 dis­tri­b­u­tion and set­up was a snap. Fedo­ra auto-detect­ed every­thing (includ­ing my sound card and net­work con­fig­u­ra­tion) and installed a very nice graph­i­cal inter­face called Gnome.

And to top it off, it kept all my exist­ing infor­ma­tion intact so that my com­put­er will now boot either Win­dows XP or Lin­ux at my whim.

How cool is that?

Strongbad 118

On a much hap­pi­er note, Strong­bad #118 is one of the fun­ni­est Strong Bad emails in a long, long time.

Ouch.

I was out of town all day yes­ter­day and got back late enough that I did­n’t both­er to check any sports scores. I had had some inti­ma­tion of the rude infor­ma­tion that await­ed me in the San Jose Mer­cury News sports sec­tion (owing to an ill-timed con­so­la­tion call from the Chi Alpha leader at Berke­ley).

So we lost Big Game. Again. And we lost Big Game big. Almost as bad­ly as it has ever been lost (although out­ranked by our 1930 41–0 romp over Cal).

I think the prop­er atti­tude is con­veyed in Mark Pur­dy’s col­umn:

Oh, it could have gone worse for Stan­ford on a windy, blus­tery after­noon. But only if a tree had fall­en on The Tree.

Cal’s 41–6 vic­to­ry Sat­ur­day was so awful, Stan­ford fans spent the sec­ond half leav­ing in droves — in lux­u­ry cars, actu­al­ly, but in drove-like for­ma­tion.

Heh. It’s a game we lost, but it’s only a game.

Of course, had we won I’d be singing an alto­geth­er dif­fer­ent tune about the rel­a­tive impor­tance of squash­ing one’s rivals like bugs. But we did­n’t win, and so I adopt the more ratio­nal atti­tude. 🙂

That Awful Sinking Feeling

This morn­ing around 9:50 I glanced at my cal­en­dar and real­ized that I had a rather impor­tant meet­ing at 10:00. In Sacra­men­to. 125 miles away.

As my stom­ach sank into my socks I began mak­ing those pathet­ic, des­per­ate sounds I am prone to make in such situ­ta­tions, “Urgh. Ack. Jeez. No. Must be a mis­take. Shoot. AARGH!”

That may seem mild, but I assure you that if I was pos­sessed of a more flex­i­ble vocab­u­lary I would have employed every unwhole­some utter­ance at the stereo­typ­i­cal sailor’s dis­pos­al. As it is I prob­a­bly pushed the bound­aries for some­one in my line of work–at least inter­nal­ly.

Any­way, I was out the door in a flash and arrived just in time for lunch.

As it turned out I only missed the infor­ma­tion­al part of the meet­ing and was able to be present for the deci­sion-mak­ing dis­cus­sions.

Which is for­tu­nate, because the world needs more unin­formed peo­ple mak­ing impor­tant deci­sions… 🙂

My Halo 2 Stats

This is too wild: you can check out my Halo 2 stats (updat­ed as I play), down to the details of an indi­vid­ual game.

You will note, by the way, that I am not par­tic­u­lar­ly good com­pared to the lead­ers (but I guess I should­n’t feel too bad since over 300,000 con­tenders have thrown their hat into the ring).

Inci­den­tal­ly, the cam­paign sto­ry­line is absolute­ly mad­den­ing. It’s cool as can be up until about 3/4 of the way through, and then it takes a detour into crazy­town. And the end­ing makes you want to rip your eye­balls from your sock­ets and hurl them at the screen in protest.

Mul­ti­play­er rocks, though.

Ukiah, Here We Come!

We’re going to be at Red­wood Val­ley Assem­bly of God this week­end, so I decid­ed to do some quick research about them.

What I dis­cov­ered floored me: they meet in the old build­ing which Jim Jones (yes, that Jim Jones) used for cult meet­ings.

Both cool and creepy at the same time.

This snip­pet from the church web­site says it best:

What once was a place used for self­ish ambi­tion is now a place of redemp­tion.

I know the pas­tor, but I nev­er thought to google his name before now. I bet he’s got the most fas­ci­nat­ing sto­ries. I real­ly look for­ward to learn­ing more this week­end.

XBox Live

By the way, if any of my pals out there have XBox Live accounts email me your gamertag. We’ll have to play some Halo 2 togeth­er.

Curt Harlow Blogging

A good friend of mine Curt Har­low has begun to blog. Check out http://www.curtharlow.com/. He also has a Xan­ga site which does­n’t seem to have the same con­tent, so you can also check it out (or just sub­scribe to his Xan­ga RSS feed).

Curt, inci­den­tal­ly, is relo­cat­ing from the Chi Alpha cen­tral office in Spring­field, MO to serve as our West Coast overseer/coach/supervisor type. His for­mal title is “West Coast Field Rep­re­sen­ta­tive.”

We can’t wait to have him out here!