Aug 24

“There’s a guy outside…

Church was over and Tim came and got me and Rob.

“There’s a guy outside and he says he wants to talk to a ‘church leader.'”

Rob and I look at each other and go outside. The guy is tall and thick-built, middle-aged. He has a medium-sized brown and white dog.

“I drove out here from St. Louis looking for work….”

It’s a long story and haltingly told, he said, because he was so tired and lethargic. He said he had work lined up, he was just waiting for a callback. He had panhandled enough money for gas, but he had nothing to eat.

Our church doesn’t have a food pantry, but Rob and I said we would check the kitchen and see what we could find. We found some leftovers from breakfast the day before: biscuits, bacon, sausage, homemade apple spice cake, orange juice. We cut the biscuits and heated them up with the bacon and sausage, and put everything in a grocery bag with a tract and a couple of cold bottled waters, some napkins, jelly, and utensils. One of my students included some donuts he purchased that morning. Finally we poured him some hot coffee from our inter-service carafe. It wasn’t fine dining, but it was fresh and hot.

Mr. St. Louis didn’t seem very happy and quickly left. He refused the coffee so I enjoyed that myself. Within a couple of minutes Rob was back in the kitchen–with the bag of food. Apparently as he walked back to his van St. Louis had said bitterly:

“Thanks for the leftovers. Hope there’s no mold on them!”

He had left the whole bag on the sidewalk. He didn’t even take the non-leftover bottled waters.

Of course we had realized that he might have been expecting us to give him money, but, on the other hand, there have been people who passed through professing hunger who were only looking for something to eat–and who never asked for a dime.

Still, St. Louis’s unabashed rudeness was kind of a surprise. I mean, it’s one thing to try to grift a small church, but it’s another thing to act indignant when they don’t fall for your grift. Of course, if you are willing to grift a church, there’s probably a very short list of things that are beneath you (though, apparently, eating leftovers is on that list).

It would be easy to say that in the future we just tell people who show up at church for purposes other than worship to hit the road, but we’re not going to let the occasional thief keep us from giving to others in need.

The whole experience still kind of irked me even after we went home for lunch.

And ate leftovers.

Aug 19

Bad Computer

Found on a PC I went to fix:

Aug 17

Bamboo forest

I found and took a screenshot of this when I was searching for images of bamboo.

Aug 12

Review: The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus

It was Heath Ledger’s last film (he died during filming), and it was directed by Terry Gilliam (Monty Python’s Flying Circus, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, The Brothers Grimm). It also stars Johnny Depp, Jude Law, Colin Farrell and Christopher Plummer.

I realized going in that Terry Gilliam films are guaranteed to be weird, that the storytelling is kind of a crapshoot, and that my favorite, Munchausen, is probably low-proof Gilliam. Still, the movie was so many kinds of weird, and most of it for no real reason other than the sake of being weird. The plot was hard to follow, and it was hard to figure out who the movie was about. So much of the weirdness detracted rather than enhanced the plot.

I really wanted to like Imaginarium. The overall visual look of the film is beautiful. Besides singing sad songs like Cookie Monster wearing a blood-stained shirt stained with whiskey, Tom Waits was born to play the Devil (complete with Waits’s trademark bowler hat). The funniest moment was probably when Verne Troyer (Mini-Me) was describing midgets.

Unfortunately you find out virtually nothing about the characters, and you don’t care about them. You don’t really want to root for anyone, don’t want to see any of the characters really succeed.

It just isn’t good storytelling. Also, if you’re already sick of CGI overuse, you’re in for a bad time.

Aug 10

Mmmmm…cloves

Cloves are one of the greatest things ever. If you don’t know what they are, they are those little spiky things you see sticking out of Christmas hams.

I first got hooked on cloves back when I used to smoke. I know, I know, I was supposed to get addicted to tobacco and not the cloves, but both the flavor and the aroma are so intoxicating. Sometimes I walk in the kitchen, go to the spice cabinet and huff the cloves.

In the autumn and winter you can be sure to smell cloves at our house whether it is from the fresh spiced cider, the oatmeal-raisin cookies, or the Christmas ham.

Aug 05

Superman saves the day

Last year one of my students graduated from high school. Travis is a very mild mannered guy who always keeps his nose clean, and also a huge Superman fan. He was one of my very first students, and we hang out once in a while. However, the fact is, graduations are always boring. So I skipped it.

What I didn’t know was that he and his best friend had a plan: they were both going to wear Superman costumes under their graduation robes, and then when they received their stage diplomas, they would reveal their super identities. Travis was in the middle of the procession, and his buddy Scott was toward the end.

It went down like this: when Travis hit the stage to get his diploma, he started unbuttoning his robe. His dad, watching in the audience, silently mouthed, “No! No!”

Travis busted out of his robe in full Superman regalia and flew (ran) out of the gym. He was a huge hit.

But the event was not without some consternation, however. After seeing the superintendent’s reaction, Scott chickened out and stayed robed. It was starting to look like Travis might not get his real diploma, so he took out an add in the paper that week to apologize to anyone who was offended (read: stuffy).

After the whole thing kind of blew over, the mother of one of the other graduates told Travis’s mom the following: her son, who was right behind Travis, was planning to disrobe when he got to the stage as well–except he wasn’t wearing a superhero costume–or anything else. Like Scott, this guy chickened out after Travis’s stunt went off.

“So in a way,” she said, “Superman really did save the day.”

Aug 03

Quotable: Roger Moore

“I like cats. And I don’t like people who don’t.” –Roger Moore as Rufus Excalibur ffolkes in ffolkes.

Jul 29

So I Watched a Boring Movie

Before my wife met me she had gone on a date with some dude, no doubt neither as smart or handsome as me, and they went to see Mike Myers’s So I Married an Axe Murderer. She said it was so boring that she fell asleep.

Years later when I started my current job, Jimmy talked incessantly about how hilarious this movie was. I never could find it to rent it, and was so close to buying it a couple of times. Anyway, now that we have Netflix, we watched it. More accurately, we watched the first 20 minutes and then decided to watch something else.

Now I can see why Heather fell asleep the first time she saw it.

Jul 27

Amen, brother

Back in the old Mac OS 9 days, when an application wanted to get your attention, it would just sit quietly and blink without interrupting what you are doing (like Windows did).

However, ever since Apple shipped Mac OS X ten years ago, this has not been the case. Now when an application wants to get your attention, it, like Windows, just pops a window up in front of whatever you are doing (they call this ‘stealing focus.’) Unlike Windows, this behavior cannot be turned off (in Windows XP you can use a free Microsoft tool called TweakUI).

While I was searching messageboards for a possible solution/hack to fix this issue I came across this entry by a similarly frustrated user:

“YES AAAAAAAAAH THIS IS A REAL AGRESSION TO THE NERVES ! ! !”

Jul 22

Sad but true

From the Wikipedia article on bonded leather:

“Bonded leather is not as durable as other leathers, and is recommended for use only if the product will be used infrequently. An example for the use of this type of bonded leather is in Bible covers.”