June 2004 Archives

we went to see fahrenheit 9/11 yesterday and, though i have many thoughts about the film, one moment stuck out for purely geographical reasons.

at one point, michael moore shows a clip from the today show in which the hard-hitting journalist matt lauer is interviewing an inventor from none-other-than three rivers, michigan who had invented some sort of parachute device for escaping tall buildings in the event of an emergency. the parachute only works when jumping from more than ten stories, which begs the question: is three rivers the best place to develop such an invention, seeing as our tallest building is a mere three stories high?

the scene is hilarious regardless of this knowledge. while the inventor is describing how easy the device is to operate, his assistant is struggling to strap the thing on. she finally gestures in frustration, prompting lauer to interject, "it doesn't look too easy ..."

as the kalamazoo audience murmured and/or guffawed around me while watching their unsophisticated neighbors to the immediate south making fools of themselves on screen, i thought, "great, no one's going to believe a cultural revolution can come out of three rivers after seeing this ..."

the thought that quickly followed was, "change always comes from where it is least expected." the revolution might not come from the old tripple ripple in michigan, but it will come from somewhere as unimaginable as here. and it will be amazing to see how God can use the least of these for God's purposes.

en?nui n

weariness and dissatisfaction with life that results from a loss of interest or sense of excitement

i'm trying to be a good blogger, posting everyday with interesting insights about topics of great interest. unfortunately, it takes me a million years to write anything and so i often don't get around to it at all. i think, "oh, this would be something to blog about ... but it would take far too much time."

i wish i were able to pontificate extemporaneously, ala gideon strauss or joe carter. perhaps it is a skill to be learned and perhaps i will learn it.

from a recent speech by bill moyer, in which he scathingly reviews the political milieu in the united states:

The middle class and working poor are told that what's happening to them is the consequence of Adam Smith's "Invisible Hand." This is a lie. What's happening to them is the direct consequence of corporate activism, intellectual propaganda, the rise of a religious orthodoxy that in its hunger for government subsidies has made an idol of power, and a string of political decisions favoring the powerful and the privileged who bought the political system right out from under us.

i think he's mostly right and i'd like to comment on it more, but i haven't the time. perhaps later ...

last night, world fare hosted the three rivers area chamber of commerce quarterly get together, an event that provides chamber members an opportunity to fraternize and to learn more about the host business.

all things considered, everything went well. we had about 40 to 50 people here, including many who had never been in the store before. because she is the person on whom such tasks fall, kirstin gave a brief presentation about fair trade and the store. folks were very receptive to the idea, which is always exciting.

unfortunately, we (and by we i mostly mean kirstin) made far too much food, despite losing an entire loaf of bread to one of the dogs shortly before the event started (he took it off the counter at home while it cooled). the house was happy to help with the leftover hummus, though.

we also have about 50 cups of coffee left over, so if you'd like to stop by for a cup today you're more than welcome. yes, i fully realize that one-day-old coffee isn't exactly the greatest, but it's such a waste to throw it all out.

from Joyce Carol Oates' We Were the Mulvaneys:

It was around that time I drifted from the party, needing to escape for a few minutes. I wasn't drunk, but my head was ringing like the cowbell.

Walking blindly in this place I knew to be my mom's new home but which I didn't exactly recognize like one of those dreams in which a landscape is subtly yet irrevocably altered. Thinking If this is another time, then who am I? I'd gotten to be proud of myself for the personality I'd built, piece by piece like shingling a roof. Precisely overlapping, imbricating to prevent water damage. Not that I'd allow Mom to boast about me in my presence, so young! already editor of a newspaper! nor did I give any thought to my professional accomplishments, such as they were. But I'd built a damned sturdy personality for myself, damned if I was going to dismantle it.

i registered our new server yesterday and have started moving sites from the old to the new. if done properly, no one will notice the sites have moved.

well, that's almost true.

i probably won't get to the culture is not optional or catapult magazine sites until the very end because they will pose the biggest challenges. these, unlike simple HTML sites, will most likely need to be taken down altogether for a few days to maintain database integrity. for example, i wouldn't want to have someone post something on the bulletin board right before everything switched over to the new server because it would end up getting lost in transition. get it? lost in transition?

well, that was almost funny.

... six strangers, seven to ten cats and two dogs who sort of stumbled into living in a house together and are in the process of finding out what happens when people stop being polite and start getting real.

The Real World: Three Rivers

okay, it isn't all that dramatic or as entirely unintentional as the above intro makes it sound, but this is the life kirstin and i have been living since january. well, almost. see, we decided to move in with our friends, jeff and bri, at the beginning of the year to attempt living in community. headcount: four people, one dog, seven cats.

a few months later, bri's sister, morgan, decided to move back the three rivers. about the same time, morgan's boyfriend, adam, lost his job and decided he might as well move down, too. during a house meeting, we (jeff, bri, kirstin and i) decided we would extend them the offer of living in the house free (room and board) for six weeks while both of them got on their feet (jobs, apartment, etc.). headcount: six people, one dog, seven cats.

during this time, bri, whose passion is animal rescue, brought a dog home from animal control who had been treated quite horribly by his owners. they kept him outside on a chain all the the time and they had never loosened his collar while he was growing, causing it to grow into his neck. apparently he jumped off of a deck and nearly hung himself on the chain; his owners had dropped him off at animal control to have him euthanized. when bri brought him home he had a huge gash in his neck, but was otherwise fine. initially, we were only going to foster him until we could find a good owner, but, after jeff jogged with him, we decided to keep him. headcount: six people, two dogs, seven cats.

several cats also visited us during the last six months, hence the range of seven to ten given above. one arrived after his owner died. we watch another cat when its humans are away. and a neighbor girl brought over a tiny kitten, knowing that bri would most likely be able to find a good home for it. and bri did.

and now we've also found a good home for adam. although it took a good deal longer than six weeks, adam, who grew up working with dairy cows, found a great job at a dairy farm that also provides him a house in which to live. he happened to call the farm out of an online phone directory the same day the farm's chief feeding guy quit.

having just watched magnolia, it is this humble narrator's opinion that all of this could not have been, as they say, "just one of those things."

okay ... maybe not ever, but apple's new airport extreme is an amazing little piece of equipment. not only is it a wireless access point, it also allows users to share a USB printer and, best of all, to play music wirelessly from their iTunes library on any stereo it's hooked into. man, that last feature almost makes me giddy ...

so, if you've never met me and had the extended conversation about computers that i often have with fellow industry folk, you might just now be realizing that i'm a bit of a computer geek. but, i'd like to think that i'm not your run-of-the-mill, average technology guy.

first, i am a passionate mac user, having converted from the PC world about four years ago. most tech folk (though certainly not all) are begrudging PC users. but, since the advent of apple's OS X, an operating system based on UNIX that is completely different from every mac OS before it, more PC tech folk are coming to realize that a lot of productive work can be done on a mac.

second, i'm of the opinion that technology should do what it's always been advertised to do, namely make our lives easier and/or more productive. apple does this better than anyone else. for example, when we set up a wireless network in our house, kirstin and my apples connected seamlessly in less than a minute. our housemate's PC laptop was an entirely different story. it literally took three weeks to get it to connect. we even had a PC expert come in and, after about five hours of tweaking a million different settings, he finally got the PC to work--some of the time.

and that's my point. i'm not really a full-fledged tech guru (though i've had my parents fooled for years), the mac merely allows me to do things that most average folks should be able to do with their computers. isn't that what technology should do?

last night, kirstin and i watched the magdalene sisters, a rather horrifying true story about catholic church abuses in irish laundries run by nuns for the purpose of saving young wayward girls. i'm not sure when these laundries started, but they were finally shut down in 1996.

the four main characters were sent to the laundries for various sexual sins: being raped, giving birth to a child outside of marriage, flirting. for these crimes, they were made to work, essentially, as slaves, all the while enduring prison-like conditions (gruel for food, absolutely no talking out of turn, constant surveillance, etc.). at one point, the girls are lined up naked in front of two nuns and completely humiliated and denigrated as the nuns hold an impromptu contest comparing the girls' body parts.

while the film was a little too simplistic in its portrayal of catholic authority (for example, there isn't one redeemable nun in the entire film), its story is an incredible reminder of the dangers of moralism and power. humanity seems infinitely capable of committing heinous atrocities in the name of morality and religion; at the same time, we seem utterly incapable of recognizing the incompatibility of these two things. and that, it seems, is the implicit danger when making faith about morality instead of love for God and neighbor. i should also clarify that when i speak of love, i mean an all-encompassing love that is concerned with both the here-and-now as well as eternity--not merely the latter, a rather common error that has allowed christians to legitimize injustice in the name of Christ.

after i finished school for the year, i thought i'd be able to slow down a little bit. unfortunately, this has not proven to be the case. i've found that i neglected far more *cino-related work than i had realized during the busyness of last semester and now i'm working almost every waking moment (almost) to try to catch up.

one of the most exciting projects we've got going is cultureVision, our cultural discernment curriculum, which should be ready to go my mid-summer. we'll then be testing it in a small number of schools during next school year to see what inevitable changes will need to be made in order to make the curriculum more effective when we do a full-scale launch next summer.

but, alas, i'm getting ahead of myself. first i need to finish the site!

well, it's been about a million years since i last posted to this blog (okay, more like a month), but i have a good excuse. no, really, i do. see, i'm in the middle of moving all of the *cino sites over to a new server and, in the process, re-coding everything in a new programming language.

so i've been spending most of my time this past month trying out new blog code. i installed about seven different packages only to find that most didn't do what i needed them to do (things they claimed they could) until i finally stumbled onto a great package called nucleus that does everything we need and more.

i didn't really want to post anything in the old blog knowing i'd just have to transfer it over eventually.

and there you are. my excuse and an explanation for this new blog.