I am Alive

When I was sixteen, I was racing three wheeler Honda ATCs with my brother. I came up behind him just as he turned in, and I went up, into the air, and fell off the ATC as it soared... I landed on the gravel, and the ATC came right down landed on me, and bounced clear off of me, bounced a couple of more times, and fell in the ditch.

I got up, and looked around for my body, assuming I was dead, as I knew what happened when ATCs flipped. But I didn't see my body anywhere. As I felt my nose trickle, I realized I was actually alive.

I am alive today. But I know what it is like to die in an accident, and I take nothing for granted. I realize now I was given a miracle that day, one of many.

PWNED!!

Junior got caught smoking pot. So as a punishment, Dad sold his copy of Guitar Hero. Hence the title of my post.

While a very funny story, you have to wonder sometimes how stories like this make the news!

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,317014,00.html

Boy did this guy sign up for the wrong plan!

This is enough to convert even the most fervently mobile back to land lines!

http://www.reuters.com/article/wtMostRead/idUSN1322682220071213

Just want to be me

A young Toronto woman who just wanted to be herself paid the price for it at the hands of her father, who wanted her wearing the hijab, according to a slew of news stories.

http://www.nationalpost.com/opinion/story.html?id=162281

It is my hope for my own daughters to persist in the family faith, it really is. And perhaps they will, although young people frequently wander away from it, as I myself did.

But if they do, they'll stick with it on their own. I've done my part by providing a household that puts our faith in its best light. I've never understood cultures where fathers believe they can force their wills so completely on their kids. As a father, I may be responsible for my daughter's well-being... but as frustrating as it is when I make breakfast, I can't decide for her what she likes to eat. I can't set her tastes in clothes.

As for Aqsa Parvez, nobody will ever know what the course of her life was to be. She could have made her family very proud someday, as all kids have the potential to do. But because of her father's cold-hearted rigidity, they will now never know.

Living at home

That's what my daughter's doing, now, along with my granddaughter. It feels a little surreal. It is nice to have a toddler around the house again, doing all the cute stuff that they do. And it is exhausting.

But mostly it is hard to fathom. How could I possibly be old enough to be a grandfather? I certainly don't feel like a grandfather... (and the little one, bless her heart, does not call me grandpa yet... she calls me "Mommy!")

I don't have gray hair, there isn't hair pouring out of my ears, I don't have small spectacles that I stare out over, and I'm not bent and withered.  So how can I possibly be grandpa? Except that I am.

The Iraq war now has a personal dimension. My daughter is quasi-seeing (in this modern 'met over the Internet, never in person' way that people can date now) a young man serving in Iraq, a guy from Texas. So now I have another reason to hope that the war ends soon - the safety of this very polite young man.

It seems that my daughter will be moving into my music room. So my music making is going to be a little harder to do. That depresses me a little. I've grown very attached to making music the last few years... I don't have any sort of social life now, and making music has been how I connect to the world outside of these four walls.

If I lose that, what's left? I will have drawn so far inside of myself that I will be like a black hole with an event horizon... stuff comes into me, but never gets out.

Stupidest thing I've ever heard of

What's the most important issue in Sudan? The humanitarian crisis? The roaming bands of Janjaweed militiamen?

Apparently not. It seems we're worried about teddy bears.

No Muslims in Romney Cabinet

Mitt Romney says, "…based on the numbers of American Muslims [as a percentage] in our population, I cannot see that a cabinet position would be justified. But of course, I would imagine that Muslims could serve at lower levels of my administration."

Dude - not to put too fine a point on it - but does this not also disqualify you? Because, last time I checked, Mormons were a comparably-sized minority. And the Presidency certainly qualifies as a "cabinet position."

A Musical Blog

How far I've fallen I'll never know
I've lived in the darkness that reigns below
The power of your mercy, the strength of your grace
Lifts me up to see your face

And so it is I've fallen down
To let all my sorrows drown

The rivers of tears I'll cry for your feet
I'll dry with my hair for the times I've been weak
Let me love much, Lord, let me love deep
Abundant forgiveness for the tears that I weep

How distant I've travelled to faraway lands
Squandered my riches, let got of your hands
And so I've returned, just call me your slave
But you've jewelled my finger, this son that you save

And so it is I've fallen down
To let all my sorrows drown

The rivers of tears I'll cry for your feet
I'll dry with my hair for the times I've been weak
Let me love much, Lord, let me love deep
Abundant forgiveness for the tears that I weep

Caught in betrayal, they bring me to you
They're asking to stone me, they turn to you
And down in the sand, you write my name
You say, “Who will condemn you?”
Breaking my shame

And so it is I've fallen down
To let all my sorrows drown

The rivers of tears I'll cry for your feet
I'll dry with my hair for the times I've been weak
Let me love much, Lord, let me love deep
Abundant forgiveness for the tears that I weep

So, anyway....

...not that it's really safe for me to talk about my personal life here, anymore, lest it become someone else's personal life as well.... but I'm not going to be scared off my own blog. Dammit, my sister-in-law's passing, becoming a grandfather... all the songs I wrote, like "Finish the Kitchen" and "If Nothing Else"... that all happened to me, and I'm taking it back.

So anyway, what's going on in my world? My daughter is moving out, or rather, she's moving home. We're happy she's ditching the unhappy situation she's in. But my wife and I have some misgivings about this, of course. The elder daughter does have a habit of finding ways to get you stuck with the baby while she goes off to do her thing. That's not going to work for my wife and I, as our careers are both taking off. I'm flying to Toronto once a week on top of being short handed, and that is really draining. My wife is working 50-60 hours a week trying to keep her staffing situation together; being in management during an economic boom means lots of staffing shortages.

So becoming proxy parents is just not possible for us right now. We're going to have to draw lines with my daughter to make sure she knows she can't do that to us.

She's also addicted to WarCraft, and will have designs on our Internet access.... to that I say, no way. My younger daughter and I do a lot of our socializing and networking online, and we should not have to give up the access levels we've gotten used to, particularly not with how much my daughter plays.

My stand on it is this: glad you're getting out, but I'm the grandpa, not the Dad. I've done this all already, and I'm not willing to do it all over again - not full time like a father has to. I like my life and the freedoms that have crept into that life with age, and I don't feel I have to let them be disrupted. That may sound selfish, but it is also not in a way; my daughter needs to learn that this is her life now, she's an adult, and we can't carry her now.

How to Defend Against Splogging

Here's a helpful link that tells you how to keep Sploggers at bay.

http://www.blogherald.com/2007/06/25/the-20-best-free-anti-plagiarism-tools/

I haven't quite figured out how to handle mine yet. First things first will be to put a Creative Commons license notice up on my site.

How distressing Content Theft can be

It is with a sense of both wonder, fear, and repulsion that I wandered through post after post that I had written about my life and my thoughts. I couldn't help but say, "Cool!!", a few times - I'm ashamed to admit. It turns out I have had a lot more readers than I thought I did! Many, many more.

But then, it isn't my life is it? I'd tell myself as I would sometimes see certain key details altered. My wife was now my "girlfriend", or sometimes a deceased "first wife" (the real me has only been married this once.) My locale was shifted out of Ottawa, and reset in a faraway place I have yet to go. And my story was intermixed with other stories that are not mine, as well as pictures of faraway people that my tales do not describe. I felt like a giant amoeba had vacuumed me up, subsuming parts of my personality, just like deer meat often tastes like Juniper berries.

I've always been generous with what I have. I post my music on music sites, and don't restrict downloads or charge for them. I Creative Commons license almost all of it. I didn't think I even had to license the content of Leave the Light On - since nobody reads it, who would steal it?

What floored me the most about this site which took and re-fashioned my words is that sometimes "I" would be challenged on some of "my" views, particularly in "my" theological posts. And then "I" would jump in with a response and clarification!! It is like running into my own pod person, and watching as my pod person engages other people on my behalf, sometimes getting it right, sometimes right.... and all the while, there I am silently screaming, "But this isn't me!!" This alternate me in one comment even described my guitar style at the music store!

(By the way, I am actually an expert guitar player, other me... and you probably got that one wrong.)

Here it comes

Winter that is!



To anyone in the US who is reading, Happy Thanksgiving!

Fish girl

My granddaughter sees her first fish tank. We went out to dinner for my birthday a week ago, and she kept rushing over to the fish tank to check out the interesting goings on inside the water. It probably helps that there were two clownfish and a blue tang, just like Marlin, Nemo, and Dory.

My wife got me this camera with which I took this picture. It takes video, too, which I am very happy about.

Goodbye for Robert

Mindful of my own belief that people must be remembered primarily as people, and not victims, I will let Robert Dziekanski have the last word.

"Ludzie staja sie dobrzy poprzez praktykowanie dobroci, rzadko sie zdarza czlowiek dobry z natury. Dobroc istnieje wcale nie po to by z niej korzystac. Dobroc nie moze wyplywac ze slabosci tylko z potegi."

"People become good by doing good; it is rare that a person is good by nature alone.

Goodness does not exist so one can make use of it. Goodness does not flow from a place of weakness but one of power."

http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/news/story.html?id=968afa27-6404-4718-acb0-1d3ee17656ae

No mercy

A month ago, a man boarded a flight to Vancouver from Poland. Robert Dziekanski, a construction worker, was on his way to his new life in Canada with his mother, who had spent years saving to bring her only son to live with her, where they would go into business together after he learned how to speak English.

He never made it.

After disembarking, he got lost in the airport; not speaking English, he did not know what to do, and ended up stuck in the secure baggage terminal where he stayed for over ten hours. Getting agitated that nobody was coming to help him and get him out of his Plexiglas prison, he got upset and tried to prop a sliding door open with some chairs. Perhaps as a plea for help, he picked up an electronic terminal and threw it. A woman spoke to him, trying to calm him down, but nobody nearby spoke Polish. In fact, as the police arrived, an airport worker repeatedly told the approaching RCMP that, "He speaks Russian, no English."

"How are you sir," as the police, all business rapidly approached him. "Policia, policia", he said, hoping perhaps they could help him. Staring uncomprehendingly at him for a few seconds, he turned away frustrated that even they could not help him. He walked over to the Plexiglas wall, picking up an ordinary office stapler on his way, and turned to find the police had semi-circled him, surrounding him beside the wall. In Polish, he said something to them loudly, but didn't get to finish his sentence.

Instead, one of the officers had pulled and fired a taser at him. "Shrieking in pain he staggered forward, and then fell on the ground as another taser crack split the air. Looking like a sick parody of a break dance, he writhes on the ground screaming in agony. Four police officers kneel on him. He shakes and screams some more while the officers hold him down like some sort of tranquilized rhino. Someone shouts, "Hit him again," but it wouldn't be necessary. The screams slow, and the shaking stops.

So does his heart. Robert Dziekanski lies dead on the floor, never allowed to set foot inside his new country.

And I am ashamed to be Canadian. We all failed him - the people who could have welcomed him off the plane, or let his mother find him, the airport staff who seemed think he's some crazy Russian and could have easily figured out from the arrivals who he was and where he was from, and the police who seemed to be in too much of a hurry to settle things. We all failed him.

is this how we will be welcoming our Vancouver 2010 guests?

Do you want to win the war on terror?

Bill O'Reilly's asked this before, and I guess is not happy that it's come up in a new Meryl Streep film.

The obvious answer to the question "Do you want to win the war on terror" is of course, a "hell yes!" But it is easy to forget that the "war on terror" is a marketing term, a way of understanding a specific problem and the multi-pronged approach we take to solving it through law enforcement, diplomacy, peace keeping, and yes, if needed military action.

It is an easy motherhood issue to say "Yes" to something as innocuous as, "Do you want to win the war on terror?" But the O'Reillys of the world want something more: they want affirmation and approval of the current government approach to it; acting as an agent of the current political status quo, this question is designed to solicit approval and endorsement of the current strategy the government uses to counter terrorism.

And no, I'm not prepared to fully give that; neither am I fully prepared to withhold it. I decide for myself, based on common sense and reason, what I think are the supportable techniques to be used against terrorism.

I can even itemize it as a shopping list:

For:

• NATO, US, and Canadian forces in Afghanistan - this, after all, is the country where the terrorists were, and where their state sponsors are still fighting to regain power.
• Increased funding for CSIS, RCMP, and National Defence, as well as emergency preparedness programs.

Against:

• Security Certificates, at least as currently designed: far too arbitrary for my tastes, too easily allows non-Canadians to be subject to unlimited detention at the arbitrary whims of non-judicial officials.
• Any involvement in Iraq.

...now of course, I could go into a lot more detail, and I only note the above just to say that I have a point of view.

But suffice it to say that I disapprove of meaningless generalities designed to coopt broad approval for a specific party or ideology's politics. And I'm sick of ideologies, and I am tired of politics, to tell you the truth. Do I want to lose the war on terror? No. Do I want you to ask me inane questions designed to make specific political brands look good? Also no.

We'd all do better discussing the details, and not "gotcha" litmus tests.

Born to Love

A friend of mine once wrote in a song, "You were born to love."

That was true when you were born, and it is still true now. Anytime you are not living up to this ideal, understand that you were still born to it, even if you are falling short.

And it is never too late to make a change.

God's not a drug, and you are not going to be able to get - or stay - high on him. The change, the call to discipleship is something you have to respond to. God can give you the motivation to love, but the choice to do so - this has always been up to you, and is only going to happen if you are the one to do it. You are not a prisoner of your life, you are the author of it. Time to write a better story.

"Yesterday is gone. Tomorrow has not yet come. We have only today. Let us begin." (Mother Theresa)

Red-heads

More info about Neanderthals: at least some of them were red-heads. My elder daughter is a red head, as was my wife's mother. No wonder I'm so interested in Neanderthals... I've married into their clan! (My wife will kill me for that one. :)

Seriously, I find it fascinating that we are now learning so much about an ancient people through their DNA. Much more interesting to me, at least, than SCI is.

Will the circle be unbroken?

Where there is hope there is love. And where there is love there is hope.

Lake Ontario is drying up

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/22/nyregion/22oswego.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

The article describes Lake Ontario as being down seven inches. But you can't know how much that is, unless you've seen it.

I have.

My parents live on an island in Lake Ontario, and at the base of their property is a limestone beach. It is one of my favourite spots in the world, because the water is clear and not murky at all, and I can dive in and explore a huge range of underwater terrain. There are lots of interesting fish swimming there, and I enjoy going down and cataloguing the various fish species I've seen (I once saw an eel, which my mother was not thrilled to learn.)

The last time I was up there, two weeks ago, I did not recognize the waterfront. The water is an acre away from where erosion has washed away the cliffs, which the water can no longer come close to reaching. There is now a huge expanse of limestone terrain (I won't call a lot of it beach now - some of it, now, is simply not close to the water.)

The extent to which the water has retreated from the shore is incredible. It is literally like going to the sea, and finding that the sea is drying up. (Lake Ontario, if you've never been there, looks like the ocean.)

So far in my world, global warming has meant more pleasant falls, and shorter winters. But this? It is dramatic, and frightening.

I Knew it

I've often complained that there is a certain amount of speciesism involved in our portrayal of Neanderthals. We've seen continuous paleontological evidence arise of extremely sophisticated Neanderthal behaviour.  From making tar anaerobically, to tanning hides, to making flutes, all the way to burying their dead, Neanderthals did things that are so cultural and complex, that it is ludicrous to think that they didn't talk.

If you doubt the sophistication of Neanderthals, you only have to watch a demonstration of the Levallois core shaping technique they used for making stone tools. Few people can master it, even after reading the instructions or even being taught by a modern stone knapping expert. Look how complex it is.

Now comes all but certain proof that Neanderthals likely spoke as well as we do. Ever since the Neanderthal genome project came along, paleontology pundits have been predicting that the Neanderthals would not exhibit the two human mutations for the foxp2 gene, the gene most widely associated with speech. I knew they would find the modern gene, even though researchers appeared confident Neanderthals would not have it. 

The foxp2 gene in primates appears to be supremely important, such that it rarely mutates. Even in its prior form, it appeared to confer significant survival advantages. Only the changes' ability to enable human language appears to be behind why humans could have a different version of the gene.

And we now know the Neanderthals had the same version of the gene that we do.

http://www.canada.com/topics/technology/science/story.html?id=61d14715-25bb-4755-b96b-d0acd0cecb74

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,303282,00.html

Although researchers caution that this is only part of the story, I think it is time for much of that debate to pass now. There's always been strong evidence of Neanderthal speech, ever since the discovery of a Neanderthal hyoid, showing that Neanderthal throats were constructed much like ours. Even the ancestors of Neanderthals, Homo Heidelbergensis, show evidence of speech, in that their hearing was, like ours, adapted for the audio frequencies in which speech occurs.

There are many reasons the Neanderthals could have died out, without having to continue the old assertions about them being dumb and mute. Some of these reasons are so obvious, that I cannot figure out why they aren't taken more seriously than the now non-existent linguistic advantage argument.

Neanderthals were not, for instance, adapted to long distance travel the way we are. Even as out of shape as we are today, most of us are capable of walking 40 to 50 kilometers a day, with nothing more than a couple of bottles of water and a sandwich packed with us. Neanderthals could not do this - they were built for ambush, able to perform short feats of incredible strength. A tribe of Neanderthals could stab and wrestle an elk to the ground in close quarters, and the fact that they are commonly found with rodeo rider injuries suggests that this is exactly what they did. This made them great hunters; for large game, possibly even slightly better than we are. But it came at the cost of making them poor social networkers, due to their inability to go far.

We on the other hand developed physical abilities related to social networking. Long distance travel is important if you are more than going out and meeting your neighbours, but sending ambassadors to foreign lands. And there is significant evidence that this is just what we did - our ancestors are often found with stone tools quarried from rocks that are not native to their territory. This never happens with Neanderthals, because they just couldn't travel that far.

The ability to develop networks of far-flung friends who could help you survive a famine or drought was probably what set us apart, and allowed us to survive. When Neanderthals ran out of game, they had nowhere to go for help.

We did.

But it is time to put to rest the idea that Neanderthals died out because they were more inept than us. We now know that Neanderthals were large-brained people who could talk, probably as well as we do. We may like to think they died out because we are smart, and they were dumb, but the evidence increasingly disproves this.

I wrote last time about learning to love through those who do not feel the way you do. It is the people you love who do not love you back that teach you how to love most truly: because it then isn't about what you can get out of it. Loving people who do not feel the same way about me - it taught me how to love hard, love without fear, and has made me a better friend, husband, and father.

That is how love should be - "Love envies not, love wants not itself."

And the good book also says, "If you love only those who love you, what credit is that to you?" It isn't even love, if this is all you can feel. You must learn to be able to be profoundly affected by everyone you meet - even those who forget you.

Learning how to love selflessly

I have a friend who worries that he always directs conversations towards himself.... That it always ends up being about him.

I'm not sure I've ever said it aloud before, but I worry about the same thing. If not concious about it, I can easily get rambling about things that are important to me, and get so caught up in what I am talking about, that I lose sight of the fact that the person I am with may not even find my lecture all that interesting!

It helps to be surrounded by family. There is so much going on in a family that it just is not possible for my life to always be about me. But being interested in family does not quite qualify as selflessness. They are family, and it is not an exceptional shift of focus to take my mind off myself and switch it to my family. We can be quite selfish with family without seeming to be. Well, I can be at any rate.

I recently realized that the purest manifestation of selflessness I can muster is to love people who do not know it. I am not speaking here of romantic love or attraction, but rather the deep and profound well that empathy and compassion are drawn from: the love that is sitting, listening, and truly *grasping*.

To grasp someone's existence - to really begin to understand what it is to be that someone else, and to let your heart warm when you realize exactly how much they try to be their best selves - that is love.And they must not know you know, for it would seem like pity!

And as I come to realize it, I also realize that these are only baby steps... I have truly only just begun to learn how to love.

The Secret Admirer

I've written my wife a couple of songs she doesn't know about. I'm going to surprise her with them at the opportune time. This is one of them - a song I wrote, and which a few pals on the Internet helped me to create... it isn't quite finished, but it is getting there. :)

TIME: Christianity's Image Problem

An interesting poll is being reported on in the latest TIME - Christianity's image is waning - and is waning even among Christians!

http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1667639,00.html

So what is behind it? I have some theories, of course. For instance, Christianity is not as focused on developing the interior life as it has historically been. There are some Christians focused on this, such as Max Lucado, and there is a resurgence of interest in Henri Nouwen. But there is a lot more politics from the pulpit these days, isn't there?

horse business

I am waiting at the riding stable where my daughter takes riding lessons. Out in the field is a little baby horse, less than a week old.... Just a foal. It is all black and a moment ago it was frolicking. Very cute.

The sun is going down and the sky is red. And I am taking my daughter to dinner. Life is good.

Falling US dollar

The falling American dollar is like getting a huge raise. In past years when we have visited south, turning Canadian dollars into US dollars meant getting far fewer of them.

By the next time we go down, we may get more of them! For the first time in many decades, the Canadian dollar will soon be worth more.... Meaning there will be some pretty cheap shopping down there!

Running Linux Tonight

Here I am, surfing away in IceWeasel, running in Linux's KDE desktop environment. I have installed no new operating system on the computer, however.

It used to be that running an operating system meant committing all your computer hardware to that operating system. Once you spent those hours installing Windows, OS/2, or Linux, that was that... this was now what your computer ran.But there are a number of ways, now, to get the benefit of more than one operating system.

The way I'm doing it is Knoppix. If KDE is not your flavour, then there is Gnoppix. These are CD images that, when plopped in your CD drive, boot an entire working installation of Linux without touching your hard drive.

You can also install operating systems into "virtual machines." On one computer, I have Windows 2000 Server running inside Vista, using Microsoft's Virtual PC. There are a number of VMWare images of operating systems, that can be installed virtually. And there's also Qemu.

At least with operating systems, you can now have your cake and eat it too!

Happiness

Happiness, for me, comes with moments of peace - those times when you realize things are exactly what they are supposed to be: beautiful.

My faith makes me happy for it is the source, for me, of many such moments. My family makes me happy, because happiness is magnified when you have someone to share it with. And the fragility of happiness makes me happy, because it causes me to realize that each joy is rare enough to be precious.

Enduring happiness comes from realizing, ironically, that happiness itself is fleeting. Moments - including moments of happiness - do pass. But united to God, who is timeless and ageless, we will be able to be bound permanently to every happy moment there has been.

Pierre Trudeau owns a dragon!

Brian Mulroney, perhaps the most unpopular man in Canada even though he has not been Prime Minister for fourteen years, has a bone to pick with Pierre Trudeau, his almost predecessor (there was a forty seven day interval of John Turner.)

It is hard to say what Mulroney is so unpopular for. In his day, he was unpopular for the NAFTA free trade agreement, whose predecessor he brought about with Presidents Reagan and Bush. Nobody is upset about NAFTA today, but he remains unpopular for the GST, a Federal sales tax that replaced an earlier hidden value added tax.

Trudeau was himself deeply unpopular, but his reputation has been healed by time. Mulroney, on the other hand, remains very unpopular. I remember when Mulroney had an episode of ill health a few years ago; rather than hearing sympathy from people, I remember reading a snarky letter to the editor, "I hope they charge GST on his funeral!"

So I suppose it is not surprising to see one unpopular Prime Minister target another. I suspect he resents the fact that history is turning out to be kind to one and not the other.

(In case you are wondering about the topic title, that's a bit of insider Canadian humour.)

Ninety five million year death sentence

In the night sky, in the late Jurassic, no sleeping dinosaur awoke in order to see two asteroids collide. The event was probably not even visible from Earth. But for all the descendants of these dinosaurs (save the ones with wings), this collision was a literally Earth shattering event.

Fragments of this colossal interplanetary collision would slowly be pulled into our area of the solar system. A hundred million years ago, one of them probably struck the moon and made the Tycho crater. And then, sixty five million years ago, one would have struck the Yucatan peninsula in the gulf of Mexico, sending embers across the world and burning down nearly every forest on the planet, and coating the Earth in a thin layer of iridium, as the dust slowly settled from the resulting nuclear winter.

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,295842,00.html

The mustard seed

"With faith the size of a mustard seed," Jesus once said, "you can move mountains."

It is only when you examine your faith carefully that you realize that having a faith even that large takes a lot of work. How many times have you been put in situations that you did not feel had any hope of working out? And yet, did they?

This happens to me all the time. When my daughter wiped out my computer, I thought all my music projects, and all my other daughter's drawings and photographs had been wiped out. But plugging away at the problem every night, I figured out a way to use Knoppix to get at the damaged hard drive, and get all of our files off the computer.... although I ended up having to completely reinstall it.

Nothing will be the end of the world, except for the actual end of the world. I so often fail to realize it.

Back? Well, we'll see

Hello.

Funny that my last post should be a throwaway number about Harry Potter, and that my next post, many months later should be a dry science rebuttal. There have been a lot of things keeping me offline - an incredibly hectic work schedule; a long vacation we took out east to Quebec and the Maritimes; and then finally, an awful computer crash (my elder daughter came over to our house while we were away, attempted to install World of Warcraft, and completely ruined our Windows installation beyond all repair.)

But a simpler truth is that I simply ran out of things to say. The first year I blogged, there were a lot of changes in my life, particularly the loss of a family member. The next year, I turned forty. The year after that I became a grandfather. Those were fundamental shadows and light on the texture of my life, and I had to record what I was thinking about that somewhere.

Knock on wood, but there is just not that much new going on with us at the moment. I put a lot more effort into my music this year, but since music is itself a form of expression, it didn't inspire me to blog, but kind of drained what energy I have for it.

The result is, I did not blog. And I was fine with that, actually.

So I finally understand disappearing bloggers. I've seen a few sail off into the sunset, including some of my favourite reads. Now I get how easy it is to do - one day, you decide you just don't feel like posting any more, and so you don't. And you don't the next day... or the day after that.

The other day, for the first time, I actually felt moved to post something, a response to a science paper where I felt I knew enough about the subject matter to effectively rebut it. And I realized I really only had one outlet where I could just write an essay, and toss it online - my blog.

So... we will see. Will I feel like posting again this week? Maybe - and I hope so. I've certainly missed interacting with some of the people I've known online, I do know that much.

We'll see if I can get the posting bug back.

Last stand of the hairy, dumb Neanderthal

I read an award winning paper, recently, that I want to take issue with.

http://xchar.home.att.net/n2a/medhyp.htm

Judith Rich Harris makes the case that humans are hairless because stone age members of Homo Sapiens wanted hairless babies. It is an intriguing hypothesis, but sadly, she constructs it on the edifice of the once traditional view that Neanderthals were hairless savages.

I think it is not particularly difficult to falsify her claims about Neanderthals, in fact, without going to a whole lot of trouble.

She points out, using a passage of Robinson Crusoe, that man has to go to a lot of trouble with animal hides to replace a feature that he has lost. While this is true, what she does not point out is that a lot of this is trouble we know that Neanderthals themselves went to. Neanderthal tooth wear pattern strongly suggests they used their teeth to soften hides, because their tooth wear pattern is almost exactly the same as those of pre-twentieth century Inuit. We know from the Mousterian toolkit that certain forms of Levallois flakes (scrapers) were used to clean hides.

Leaving aside that unclothed people of the modern variety have lived in the cold, such as Tasmania and Tierra del Fuego, Harris speculates that Neanderthal hairiness was needed because of all the generations they faced in the ice age without using needles; she writes, “The evidence strongly suggests that Neanderthals did not invent or use the needle and that they could not sew.”

But you don't need needles to make clothes. Look at how a deerskin shirt laces up! No – what you do need is an awl. And Neanderthals did make those. And borers, which can also punch holes.

She writes, “If I am correct in proposing that hairlessness is a characteristic only of our species of primate, then it would have arisen no longer ago than 200,000 years.”

And yet how then to explain the fact that, from the neck down, the hominid line from Homo Ergaster on down is almost completely modern? I don't mean a little bit modern, but very near completely. Human hairlessness is not a casual adaptation – hairlessness enables the most efficient heat dissipation system heretofore seen among mammals. We have more ability to sweat than any other mammal, and sweat dries fast enough due to hairlessness in such a way as to grant us a tremendous ability to dissipate heat. (Zihlman and Cohn, 1988)

It defies imagination to accept that Homo Ergaster seems to have adapted our 'built for endurance' physiology, and yet – simply so this author can get her paper right – lacks this one critical adaptation necessary for the well known prowess man has for endurance! And indeed, the evidence shows that the early Homo line did not lack the sweat wicking benefits hairlessness provides. Rogers, Iltis, and Wooding show that consistent dark pigmentation in modern African populations can be traced, at minimum, to about 1.2 million years ago – strong selection forces kept this gene uniform.

And yet in hairy chimpanzees, no similar pressures appear to have ever existed. This is not a coincidence. The pressure on humans to stay dark came from the fact that their skin was exposed to the sun.

Harris never touches on the apparent evidence of Neanderthal self-decoration – they made necklaces, and used ocher and manganese dioxide – substances which, at that time, had no non-decorative purposes. We know they were not using these paints to paint on cave walls, which seems to be the exclusive preserve of our own species. This strongly suggests they were only painting themselves. "Black pigments, mostly manganese dioxides, and to a lesser extent fragments of ochre, come from at least seventy layers excavated at forty Neandertal sites in Europe." (D'Errico, 2003)

There's a very clear picture emerging – not only were Neanderthals probably hairless (since if they were decorating their skin, they had bare skin to decorate), but we can even infer something about skin colour: they were pale (since they were drawing on themselves with dark manganese.)

The Neanderthal genome project notes, “Approximately 99% of the Homo sapiens genome is identical to the chimpanzee genome, our closest living relative. It is estimated that the Neandertal shares 96% of the 1% difference with Homo Sapiens. The Neandertal shares the remaining 4% of the difference with the chimpanzee.” (454 Life Sciences, see http://www.imakenews.com/cure/e_article000649656.cfm?x=b11,0,w)

At 99.96% - and knowing some morphological features of a Neanderthal are chimp-like (prognathus mid-face, brow ridges, receding forehead), and that the rest are human like, I think it is fair to guess that if Neanderthals share 96% of the specific adaptations we have made, that the heat dissipation of modern humans is one of them – the evidence for clothing and self decorating are far too strong to ignore.

The author at one point makes the completely speculative, wild, and unsupported claim that Neanderthals disappeared as a result of Homo Sapiens eating them because they were hairy. No evidence from the Middle or Upper Paleolithic has ever surfaced that this is so – we know what both species ate; examining the hearths of each species tells us a great deal about diet, and the cave paintings of Cro-Magnon man tell us even more. Ibex, auroch, shellfish are associated with the “last stand” Neanderthals of Gibraltar. Modern humans ate just about anything – but never, never have Neanderthals shown up in their hearths or campsites, and the only butchered Neanderthal remains ever recovered are associated with Mousterian assemblages (meaning their own kind did it.)

So if modern man does not show any evidence of having butchered and processed Neanderthals at their campsites, the reason is fairly obvious - they never in fact did so.

Sadly, the author trots out the tired notions about Sapiens intellectual superiority, largely unsupported by the fossil record. She refers to “better brains and a better toolkit.” The alleged superiority of Sapiens tools is in many ways undemonstrated – Levallois blades no more than a micron thick at the blade can't actually be improved on, not even with surgical steel. Then there's the fact that at the same time Sapiens were developing the Aurignacian toolkit, Neanderthals were developing the nearly equal Chatelperronian toolkit. And there are technologies Neanderthals developed that moderns did not develop until the Neolithic, such as developing an anaerobically manufactured tar to haft spear points in the Harz mountains, 70,000 years ago. (Koller/Baumer/Mania, 2001)

While it is true there is an aesthetic superiority to Aurignacian tools – nobody should mistake this for a functional superiority. For other than the advent of needles, there wasn't one.

As for the superiority of modern brains, Neanderthals had larger ones, and there is some evidence that a modern gene for regulating brain size comes from them. (Lahn/Evans/Mekel-Bobrov/Vallender/Hudson, 2006)

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

On the news today, I heard that some hacker claimed he stole the book off of a computer at the publisher's. "Yeah right," I say about this attention seeker. There is a lot of interest in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows right now because JK Rowling apparently is killing off two characters.

Me? I deeply, deeply hope that one of these characters is Jar Jar Binks. Yes - I know Jar Jar is not part of the Potter canon, and is a creation of George Lucas. But couldn't she reveal that Dobby is actually Jar Jar and then kill him off in an unfortunate pod racing accident? Stand up Ms. Rowling, and dare to due what George should have done in the Phantom Menace.... can't Lord Voldemort do what Lord Vader ought to have done, and dispatch Jar Jar?

Where the bees are

 I found an interesting article on Colony Collape Syndrome - the disease that is wiping out the bees that pollenate our food supply. Perhaps this disorder is not as much of a mystery as we think it is. Maybe the problem with bees is the same problem we give ourselves - we feed them junk food, and drive them everywhere they go.

Link to Washington City Paper: Cover Story: Buzz Kill

Rivers of Tears

A new song I've written and recorded. I was up really late last night doing it, so I'm very tired today. :)

 

How far I've fallen, I'll never know
I've lived in the darkness that reigns below
The power of your mercy, the strength of your grace
Lifts me up to see your face

And so it is I've fallen down
To let all my sorrows drown

The rivers of tears I'll cry for your feet
I'll dry with my hair for the times I've been weak
Let me love much, Lord, let me love deep
Abundant forgiveness for the tears that I weep

How distant I've travelled to faraway lands
Squandered my riches, let got of your hands
And so I've returned, just call me your slave
But you've jewelled my finger, this son that you save

And so it is I've fallen down
To let all my sorrows drown

The rivers of tears I'll cry for your feet
I'll dry with my hair for the times I've been weak
Let me love much, Lord, let me love deep
Abundant forgiveness for the tears that I weep

Caught in betrayal, they bring me to you
They're asking to stone me, they turn to you
And down in the sand, you write my name
You say, “Who will condemn you?”
Breaking my shame

And so it is I've fallen down
To let all my sorrows drown

The rivers of tears I'll cry for your feet
I'll dry with my hair for the times I've been weak
Let me love much, Lord, let me love deep
Abundant forgiveness for the tears that I weep

On Reason, Again

Reason is necessarily silent on why existence exists. It can tell us something about the nature of the opening moments of existence, all the way back into the Big Bang's initial scalar field.

But reason cannot provide us with the answer to the question, "Why?"

Perhaps some are content to leave it a mystery, and not investigate with the other faculties we have, aside from reason. Many of us, however, are not willing to settle for that. We suspect there is more, and our spiritual quest is to find out what exactly that "more" is.

And that - ironically - is not all that unreasonable.

Bride
My Beloved, the mountains,
and lonely wooded valleys,
strange islands,
and resounding rivers,
the whistling of love-stirring breezes,
the tranquil night
at the time of the rising dawn,
silent music,
sounding solitude,
the supper that refreshes, and deepens love.

St. John of the Cross, the Spiritual Canticle

Driving back home

We're driving back home after a day at my folks down on the shores of Lake Ontario. I am proud to say I did my first swim of th year this morning in one of the coldest bodies of water there are around here.

I began by stepping slowly into the water an inch at a time. The sky was clear, the sun bright, and the air warm... But the water was not. When I got to my waste, a giant carp - must have been three feet long - swam by in front of me.

After about ten minutes, I managed to get up to my chest. I dove in, shouted some, got out, and then went in again.

I hope it is a little warmer next time!

Wireless Blogging

I've never blogged from something that wasn't a computer before. This is the first time I've done it.

Typing in super small keys isn't the easiest thing in the woeld to do. However, my daughter has the computer most of the time, and the ability to do this might inspire me back to blogging productivity, so to speak. :-)

Reason

Reason isn't everything.

When the sun shines orange from the horizon, and the sky is dappled in purple, and the seagulls are honking boisterously, there are two ways I can look at it. Both are valid.

I can say, "the light of the nearest star is being scattered in the ionosphere and lower atmosphere, causing unusual layers in the appearance of the air mass I am peering through, resulting in unusual bands of the colour spectrum. I also note that the charadriforme aviformes are retiring to their island location for the night, as their evolution has led them to be highly diurnal life forms, due to such factors as strong vision and poor sense of smell."

Or (and also), I can say, "Thank you God, for another beautiful day."

When you fall off the horse

I arrived by bike at the stable where my daughter takes her riding lessons about ten after six. Her horse walked by the fence a couple of times, and she smiled at me. My daughter likes it when I come to watch her ride; I'm not entirely sure why, really, but it is important to her.

In all her past lessons, they rode indoors. But she's in a more experienced group, so now they are using an outdoor meadow. I told her on one of her swings past me that I'll have to bring my camera. The indoor arena, you see, is poorly lit, and I've never been able to get a good shot. But now that they're outside, no problem!

Not too long after I got there, nature called rather insistently. When I returned from the building, I saw my daughter going by the fence at a cantor. She was sloping off the side of the horse, and then fell right off. "Oh!" I explained and began to run over. But she got up quite quickly, and dusted herself off. She walked over to where the horse had stopped, and got right back on.

So do like the old proverb says. If you fall off the horse, get right back on. If for no other reason than that it is a great comfort to those who had to see you fall off the horse!

Nearly given up on blogging

I've hardly blogged this year. I don't even know why it is important to, to tell you the truth.

It is not my primary means of expression. I do that through music. I haven't got any great thoughts to share, either. Most of my existentialist musing took place the first year or two I blogged.

There should be things to blog about. I'm a grandfather now. But you'd be surprised how slowly that develops. It is not a comparable situation to becoming a new parent, much to my surprise. I see her only about once a week or two. I don't have to wrestle with figuring out what to do with her when she's around - I guess I'm an old hand now with babies and young ones. I know how to change a diaper, how to mix formula, how to dress them, how to entertain them.

But I don't see her everyday, so I am deprived of the newness; I'm not there when she says her first words, or takes her first steps. I find out about it, and then get to see it later.

In fact, that is the larger issue behind my lack of blogging. Things in general have lost their newness. I am tired all the time, and I can't remember the last time I felt real wonder and awe.
I'm sure I have no one but myself to blame for this, but it is true.

Things are not new anymore. And so I have very little to write about.

News flash: terrorists find Google useful.

So says the Sydney Morning Herald. That this actually rates as news shocks the heck out of me. Who doesn't find Google useful?

But it made me think of the perfect solution to the terrorist problem. If someone would just send them the link to World of Warcraft, we would never hear from the terrorists again! (Their guild would be too busy on Jihad in some dungeon.)

If the medium is the message, then what is this message?

The BC premier's office was trashed yesterday by a bunch of rowdies opposed to... um, something (I guess) related to homeless people in Vancouver being kicked to the curb by Olympic athletes, millionaire hockey players, or... you know... other "Bread not circuses" type stuff or whatever.

Have these people given any thought to how much money they are costing? With all the security expenses needed to keep these professional troublemakers at bay, you could feed and house a few dozen families, I'm sure. I have no doubt that Habitat for Humanity could surely benefit from all the extra energy and passion these people seem to have.

Things are not in my hands

Nothing is in my hands
That you have not put there.
There is no gift I bring
You did not give me first.

What I will be, what I become,
These are the choices you have put before me;
What I need to be as a  branch grafted to your vine,
All this you have given me.
What I do with it,
You leave up to me.

As you ascended, Lord
So let me ascend
From the many graves I have dug for myself.
Give me the grace so that someday I might follow
Where I may not follow;
To the place of your Father's many rooms.

Nothing is in my hands, Lord
Except this one thing:

Your hand in mine.

In the Kitchen at Midnight

That's the name of a little music piece I've been working on tonight. I've been composing little ditties like this randomly a lot lately. I like this one, because the violin does a round at the end.

Jerry Fallwell has passed away

The Rev. Jerry Falwell passed away in his office today. He was 73 years old.

A minister who once eschewed mixing of faith and politics, he became perhaps one of the first and best known examples of it. Falwell founded a lobby organization called the Moral Majority in the seventies, which set the template for all faith lobbies that followed. He was at times influential, and at times controversial. One of the most memorable incidents was his altercation with the Teletubbies television show.

Want to lose weight instantly? Go to Hudson's Bay

Canada was once covered with giant ice sheets so large that when they melted, sea levels went up 60 metres. And they were so large that when they melted, they left a large portion of Canada with a gravitational anomaly. If you were to get on a scale in Moose Factory, Ontario, you would weigh less than you do somewhere else.

Nerds with guitars

Fundamentalists need fundamentalists

An interesting comment discussion I've been having with Lane (who I think is my only surviving reader) has brought me back to the premise behind the new 'evangelical atheism' movement, pitched not just by Christopher Hitchens in "God is not Great," but also by Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, and Bobby Henderson (via his Flying Spaghetti Monster.)

These folks will occasionally take on the more serious and profound theologians (although I haven't read it, Hitchens reportedly takes on Aquinas during the course of "God is not Great.") But usually they don't.

Take Dawkins; I am always astounded this man has a following. He is to atheism what Chomsky is to liberal politics; where Chomsky is a linguist who is mistaken for an expert on politics, Dawkins is an ethologist and biologist who is mistaken for an expert on religion, anthropology, and cosmology.

One of his noted quotes:

"Nevertheless, it is a telling fact that, the world over, the vast majority of children follow the religion of their parents rather than any of the other available religions. Instructions to genuflect, to bow towards Mecca, to nod one's head rhythmically towards the wall, to shake like a maniac, to 'speak in tongues' - the list of such arbitrary and pointless motor patterns offered by religion alone is extensive --- are obeyed, if not slavishly, at least with some reasonably high statistical probability."

This is a typical line of thought for Dawkins. As a biologist, he sees religion not through real understanding, but through the eyes of a behaviourist. He is all about the exhibited symptoms, the patterns: Christians who raise Christian children, Jews who stay Jews through the generations, and the continuity of practice from generation to generation. It was Dawkins who coined the term 'meme' to deal with what he calls cultural transmission (which a cynic might dismiss as simply an update of social darwinism.)

Nowhere in Dawkins work does he ever examine the import of these behaviours - what the experience of it actually is. Dawkins is likely quite familiar with the practice of Catholics fingering rosary beads. He would have no problem of following the formula, I'm sure... ten Haily Marys, one Our Father for each decade.

But could he understand contemplative prayer itself? The speaking of the ninety nine names of God by a Sufi? I doubt it, personally. All he is able to see in that is the release of seratonin, memes, trained behaviour. Experiential religion is alien, and the thing not understood, the thing feared, must become the thing abolished.

Someone like Dawkins needs fundamentalists - in his documentary, "The Root of All Evil", who does he take on? Not the Pope, the Dalai Lama, Aga Khan or any religious intellectual and peer. He takes on Ted Haggard. Haggard he can understand because, in many respects, he is a kindred soul.

Fundamentalism - be it religious fundamentalism or areligious fundamentalism - is not open to the transcendant.

A 'fundamentalist' Christianity can accept language that includes a transfigured Christ, because the word 'transfigured' can be found in Matthew 17. But a fundamentalist Christianity cannot really embrace the Cosmic Christ implied by Matthew 17, or John 1:1... the word of God through which creation is spoken into existence, and sustained (as Augustine says.) The words hint at it, but they don't come out and say it - they tease, "Who do you say that I am?"

The fundamentalist and aggressively evangelical form of atheism proposed by Dawkins needs that kind of Christianity: that kind of Christianity is contained entirely and completely in the texts of the bible. It is easy to take apart a text, point out its apparent logical inconsistencies. A transcendant, mystical Christianity is an ephemeral and difficult target to hit. But the kind of faith contained entirely in a book in the Hotel room dresser? That makes a much better target.

I've often thought - fundamentalists are all a lot more like one another than they are like any of the rest of us. "What is truth?" Pilate asked.

We weren't meant to find the answer to that question easy.... (unless the answer is 42.)

Ponderings on a Faith Journey: Faith Without Understanding

Pastor Bob at Ponderings on a Faith Journey writes about an odd paradox - Faith Without Understanding. We here on this side of the water (I count Canada as well) have faith, but often not enough knowledge about our faith. In Europe, people may have knowledge about faith (from religion classes in school), but no faith!

It isn't a particularly new phenomenon, either. Just think of the days before the printing press - everyone was dutifully religious, but nobody had a bible; and the bible was usually only written in Latin.

But if the truth will set us free, it is incumbent for us to ask, as Pilate did (but not rhetorically like Pilate did):

What is truth?

Look Beyond

In his latest screed, God is not Great, Christopher Hitchens writes about religion that, "it is a babyish attempt to meet our inescapable demand for knowledge as well as comfort, reassurance and other infantile needs. Today, the least educated of my children knows much much more about the natural order than any of the founders of religion."

Leaving aside the infantile and petulant language, he's just plain wrong about our ancestors abilities, relative to our childrens'. The hunter gatherers of the early age of our species may not have known anything about Special Relativity. But they undoubtedly forgot, in their lifetimes, more than Hitchens himself will ever know about the rhythms of the seasons, the behaviours of every animal and plant they encountered, and the cycles of the weather. It is these people people who first gave us religion; people so much closer to the Earth as it really is than we in our abstracted world are.

What arrogance we have today to believe we know so much. Sure many of us can say, "electron", and have some vague idea that this abstract thing we will never see circles, in a Quantum-mechanical way, the nucleus of an atom.

But how many of us know how to flake an axehead out of stone? How many of us know how to get antibiotics from a plant, and what growth state that plant has to be in for it to be effective?

Similarly, when those of us today in our smug knowingness assert "there is no God" (without a shred of evidence more for the assertion today than was the case 30,000 years ago) , we do it out of abstract ignorance. We read in some rabies-drenched Richard Dawkins essay that there was no God, right? So it must be true, right?

My grandfather had a saying, which my Dad often repeated to me, whenever I began to pontificate about some topic I knew only in the abstract. He'd say, "Wuz you there, Charlie?"

"Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth? Tell me, if you have understanding." (Job 38:4)

Though I have faith, I'm not so arrogant as to tell an atheist that the strong anthropic principle ensures us through science that there is a God, because ultimately, I wasn't there to witness the moment of creation, when a scalar field kicked off the Big Bang. And I'll thank them to remember that neither were they.

Science is about the natural world, and though it tells us about much, is competent to tell us only of the natural world. If I look to the tongues of angels to tell me about the reality beyond, I need a guide that takes me beyond nature. I do not apologize for seeking out the transcendant, for it is there. I've seen it with my other sight, after all.

Fourth annual flight suit day!

It was four years ago today that President Bush arrived on the USS Abraham Lincoln, decked out in a Navy flight suit, to announce that "major combat operations" had ended.

As much as my post may be titled sarcastically and facetiously, I actually do wish he had been right about that. Tempting as it might be to indulge in schadenfreude over the political misfortunes of the man who vaingloriously made this pronouncement, too many people have suffered to take even a dark delight in how wrong that statement was.

Today, the world is a much more dangerous place. The Taliban are resurgent in Afghanistan, Iraq may soon have to be abandoned to a Somalia-like fate, and Iran has used the influence and power it has gained from this conflict, along with the weakened international position of the United States, to commence its sinister ascendence.

The one hope that remains - the one hope that always remains - is that life does go on mostly in little vignettes... the small stories matter more than the big ones. Somewhere, someplace, someone has decided to forgive someone else. Someone somewhere has decided that Muslims/Jews/Christians/Atheists/Hindus/Kurds/Sunnis/Shiites/Falun Gongers aren't so bad after all. Someone has given someone else a second chance. Someone has quit drinking, has given up selfishness and anger, and somebody else has let them.

The world beyond us could be cause for despair. Hopefully the world around us is not.

Guitarblogging

More guitar work... hope I'm not boring you all. :-)

This is called Slowdown Blues. 

The threat to women bloggers

The Washington Post has an article about the threat to women bloggers - as the blogosphere grows, it grows nastier. I've always been a little circumspect about what I say, because I remember how nasty Usenet was. But for the women profiled in this article, it is a whole lot worse. A lot worse.

Why are there so many sociopathic trolls on the Internet, anyway? Underneath the veneer of civilized day to day life, are there really that many people who are totally unhinged?

Where have the bees gone?

I have never been afraid of bees. I am careful in the woods, of course; stepping on a hive would bring them out to sting, and who could blame them? But a bee in the grass or in the garden is a symbol of the joy God took in creation. For there are his very workers, busily buzzing about, helping flowers, carrots, and cucumbers to bring forth. Every brilliantly coloured flower you see is not bringing forth its beauty for you - this beauty is meant for them, and they work away in this beauty to bring forth all the colour on the ground, and much of the food on our plates.

But, according to scientists, something is going wrong. The bees are beginning to vanish. And we'd better find out why, or the world will be a lot less pretty, and we, along with many other creatures, will have a lot less to eat.

"Touched by Sheryl Crow"

From this article, I got a good laugh:

Laurie David and Sheryl Crow: Karl Rove Gets Thrown Under the Stop Global Warming Bus | The Huffington Post 

Laurie David and Sheryl Crow recount their confrontation with deputy White House chief of staff Karl Rove (they wanted to talk with him about climate change policy.) After she describes Rove asking Crow to let go of him, Laurie David asks how far from reality a person would need to be not to want to be "touched by Sheryl Crow."

I have been a fan for years, love her bass playing and lyrics. But I think I can answer this question - there is a very good reason why a person might not want to be touched by Sheryl Crow. In her own words...

http://www.sherylcrow.com/news.aspx?nid=7786

I hope she washes her hands with soap and warm water after that one square gets used.

House full of babies

We're babysitting my granddaughter tonight. And my grandniece is visiting with my niece at the same time. The two tots are only two weeks apart, birthday-wise. It has been a comedy festival, let me tell you. There's nothing that can make you laugh more than a pair of comical babies. :-)

An M Class Planet

For the first time, a planet capable of supporting life has been identified outside of our solar system. One of the things that the news accounts are noting is that the planet is in the habitable zone of a red dwarf star.

What they are not noting however, is the life span of a red dwarf. Our sun will be extinguished in five billion years, when it runs out of fuel. This system's red dwarf, on the other hand, will still be radiating evenly a hundred billion years from now.

This place is a potential future home for us. A long term home.

More musical experimentation

You can find all kinds of music software plugins that mimic real amplifiers and foot pedals. This morning, I managed to find two plug ins for equipment I actually own - a Fender twin and a tube screamer. So using this software, I tried to reproduce the sound I get on this equipment, and I got pretty close!

This is a blues swing number I've called "Mellow Swing," although it is using one of the backing tracks from the Guitar Center's King of the Blues contest called "Jazzy swing" or something like that.

Leaving in an era when everyone is online

The Globe and Mail has a heart-breaking article describing the facebook and Myspace profiles for Virginia Tech students that have gone silent. This is a phenomenon that occurs outside the scope of this tragedy: bloggers that leave a mute ghost of themselves when they leave this Earth.

Sometimes, the blogs do vanish over time. Some that I've read have disappeared (Cancer Baby springs to mind.) And sometimes, they linger, frozen in time. There is one I know and read at the time that chronicled a teenager's fight with cancer, and it is still there; and as a sad reminder, it is still designed the way early blogs looked back then, a vintage website of the era.

But perhaps there is some comfort in knowing that YOU, Time's person of the year, can now be remembered in words and thought, just like famous people. What you have to say may still be there, may still matter to people, even when you cannot say it anymore.

Damage

In Iraq today, sixty six people died in four car bombs. That's exactly twice the toll of the Virginia Tech shooting. And that happens there every day. In Darfur, 200,000 people have likely been killed in the trouble stirred up by the Janjaweed.

There is so much ongoing violence in the world, I think the only way we have to cope with it is to be desensitized to it, to ignore or forget that it even happens. Only something much closer to home shocks us out of our reverie.

Remember

Emily Hilscher loved horses, and used to ride them. She wanted to be a vet.

This is a far more important thing to remember than anything about the deranged and disgruntled man who did this evil. She lived. Like you and me, she had hobbies, friends, quirks and quarks. Remember her, and his evil act is diminished - not much, of course. But the less attention he gets, and the more she and the other victims get, then perhaps a little something of them lives on in our world, and a little more of his hate dies with him.

Here are some of the others we must remember:

http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/04/17/vtech.shooting.victims/index.html

Canada's charter - 25 today

I was there, twenty five years ago, on that day when Canada got its own constitution - not the British version from 1867, the BNA act, but one of our own making... the one whose centrepiece was the new Charter of Rights.

It was a rainy, rainy day, and there were a few tens of thousands of people on Parliament hill. CBC had at least one tower erected with cameras pointed at the main stand. I could kind of sort of make out the central figures of this drama, the Queen, Trudeau and a handful of other luminaries.

It was a grey and grim day. Speakers chimed out with the words of the luminaries, whose voices echoed like Parliament hill was a canyon (it always sounds like this, which anyone who has attended the sound and lights show can tell you.) The Queen spoke in both English and French, with a palpable sense of the history she was involving herself in.

They signed it. And then a squadron of F-18s did a roaring flyby. I pointed my camera up, up and got a picture of the metal birds soaring by. I tried to take a picture of the signing itself, but all I got were pictures of the crowd.

I still have these photos. I will cherish them and pass them down.... I stood at the presence of history, a silent witness to it. I think it will be good for my ancestors to know that when history happens, and you get the chance, go and see it unfold.

Saint Nicholas - a 9/11 missing person

I only just learned this. Among the remains they are still hoping to find, six years after Sept. 11? Those of St. Nicholas according to Feiler Faster. An Orthodox church destroyed in the attack had two of his bones, and they have not, to date, been recovered.

Back into the world

I was the musician at a retreat this weekend, one that lasted from Thursday night until yesterday afternoon. I was on this retreat myself about four years ago, and was a team member this time (I've done that once before too.) This is a very joy filled retreat that likes to say that it takes you up the mountain to the very moment of transfiguration. And it really does - as much as St. Peter can tell you this, I believe I can tell you what a shining Christ looks like.

But they are very careful to tell you that nobody lives up on this mountain. Life is lived in the world, and whenever you experience transfiguration, you have to come down into a world that did not share that experience. Anything that changes your life does not also change the world.

I learned that well enough today when I heard that a rampaging gunman killed 32 people, not more than a day after I was basking in the divine light I spoke of. But I did change. And even if the world did not, I did.

Change starts with me. And it starts with you. Not only can evil be defeated, it already has been. Every time any heart feels and acts in genuine love, evil suffers a mortal blow.

Yesterday is gone, and tomorrow is not yet come. We have only today. Let us  begin. (Mother Theresa)

Guess who's coming to dinner?

They've extracted a small amount of DNA from the collagen of a Tyrannosaurus Rex, found in 2003. And guess what living animal is the closest match for what they managed to get?

A chicken.

So the next time you see a chicken be nice to it. It could eat you.

Doh!

For three months, I've been preparing with a group of men to conduct a retreat this weekend. We had our send-off at a parish last night where there was a lot of singing and introductions. It all went really well until I got home.

"Where's my songbook?" I asked myself, wondering where I'd left all the music for the entire weekend retreat. I went downstairs where my music gear was. Nope. Went out to the car. Double nope. My wife soon joined in my panic, phoning friends to see if they picked it up by mistake. Strike three.

I phoned the parish office this morning. They have it... I left it in a pew. Doh!!

A friend of mine is on her way to fetch it for me. And I feel like a kid who needs strings on his mittens.

A twilight vigil

In the dark, I await you my Lord
You are never far from me,
but I have been far from you.
Bring me near, Lord
As I wait with a candle;
kindle in me a flame
That I might go out into the world
With a heart of flesh
And a love renewed.

I wait for the ancient rhythms, Lord
The candles are lit, the sanctuary is quiet
I wait for the light to blind me,
Not only the light of this dark church
But the light of your presence,
The light of your very word,
For it is written that the darkness
Has never put it out...

So leave the light on for me,
My Lord, My God.

Go Rest High on That Mountain

I know your life
On earth was troubled
And only you could know the pain
You weren't afraid to face the devil
You were no stranger to the rain

Go rest high on that mountain
Son, your work on earth is done
Go to heaven a shoutin'
Love for the Father and the Son

(Vince Gill)

I've virtually become a non-blogger

Truth to tell, I hardly have time anymore.

Last night was only one of many things I've been working on. Once a year, our parish puts on a big production for Holy Thursday, a reenactment of the Last Supper. I'm the electric guitar player in the choir's backing group, and this gave me the opportunity to try my new guitar a little bit on some of the songs. I say a little bit because it turns out my new Telecaster is quite noisy in certain circumstances. My Stratocaster is wired such that my out of phase positions are hum canceling. Not so the new guitar. I might have to get noiseless pickups for it, or somehow figure out a way to better shield the instrument.

Anyway, the choir sounds in top form, even though we're missing one of our main singers. He's a soulful guy who made certain songs sound amazing, and this year, we can't do them. However, a delightful treat is that we're getting to do a country gospel hymn Vince Gill wrote called "Go Rest High on That Mountain." Its such a soulful song, and I have great guitar and harmony parts on it.

Last night when I got home I put on the Gospel of John film, and watched the scene with Jesus washing the feet of his disciples, which is the hallmark of Holy Thursday. We are called to live a life of service. As I prepare for a men's retreat the week after Easter for which I am a team member - something we've spent months preparing - I have to remember I need to be above all  a washer of feet.

The pursuit of dirtiness

Apparently, dirt can make you happy. Well it did for some lab mice, anyway.

Maybe that's why I'm always happy when we're camping. :-)

Faith in the shadow of Wal-Mart

Here is an interesting story about a Jesuit community in Guelph, Ontario that fought the arrival of a new Wal-Mart next door -- and lost.

Sometimes when you go out to "fight the good fight," you lose. And then, slowly, you win again.

The Secret

A friend of mine encouraged me to read a book called The Secret - knowing that I am interested in spiritual topics, she thought I might be interested. From the cover and introduction, I could see that this book was packaged together with all the brand awareness of a Chanel campaign, but a lot of self-help and spiritual books are written that way these days. There might still be an interesting point or two.

So that morning, with not much to do other than to sit by the fire with a good book, I cracked it open and started out. It did not take me long to be terribly offended by this narcissistic and offensive book. The book takes a good idea - the power of positive thinking - and combines it with a lot of the pop-cosmology ideas of other spiritually-themed books and films (such as What the Bleep do We Know? ) to create something truly monstrous.

The book starts out by hyping a faulty scientific premise - the notion that the greatest force in creation is something called 'the law of attraction.' Of course, scientists would find this premise ridiculous, since in physics, cosmology, and quantum mechanics, there are many different attractive and repulsive forces acting, from gravity and electromagnetism to dark energy and strong interaction. There's no single guiding principle that is thematically behind all of it, tying your wish for a camera phone to the nuclear bond inside a proton. But I am nitpicking. It is the philosophy of this book that is offensive, not the quaint pseudo-science.

The premise of the book, I began to realize in horror, is not just that positive thinking leads to positive results. The idea, it turns out, is that you are somehow cosmologically creating reality by thinking it. By really focusing on that colour camera phone, you are beginning to make it happen. We create our reality, we are Gods, actualizing the universe with our mental accessorizing.

First of all, there's plenty of plain evidence that this just is not true. Think about the implications - juvenile leukemia? Parents must have been thinking bad thoughts. Terrorists attacked your city? You must have wanted 'em to.

But the idea's wrongness is still not what makes it offensive. The absolute arrogance of it, the pride and ego it takes to concoct such a silly fantasy, belie the very humble place we actually occupy in the cosmos.

The character Job from the Book of Job gets it right. He tries to understand how he has come to his desperate situation, as he discusses with acquaintances whether it somehow was his fault in some way, or some cruelty of God's. God then goes on a long discourse pointing out to Job, in great detail, that in fact he knows quite little about the universe, what it is made of, or about any of its creatures (such as the Leviathan.) God, in short, does not have to explain anything to anyone. Far from being a 'creator of his reality', Job is made quite clear on the point that he cannot even expect to understand his reality!

He responds to God, "I know that you can do all things, and that no purpose of yours can be hindered. I have dealt with great things that I do not understand; things too wonderful for me, which I cannot know. I had heard of you by word of mouth, but now my eye has seen you. Therefore I disown what I have said, and repent in dust and ashes."

Fortunately, I was able to pick up another book to clear my head of this noxious stuff; Dick Staub's "Christian Wisdom of the Jedi Masters," in which he uses Star Wars as a catechism with which to explain Christianity. He has a chapter entitled, "The Lord of the Force You are Not."

And I think that sums it up succinctly.

Think positive? Yes! Absolutely. But do not mistake yourself for God. For that, you are not. Nor am I.

A second or two

When I was a boy I devoured science books. One of them (I still have it on my shelf) describes the timeline of the Earth as it would appear if the Earth were a year old.

I don't remember the exact time frames, but the Cambrian explosion of life - the appearance of trilobites, primitive relatives of squids and fishes, and early scorpion-like athropods - doesn't begin until the end of October. (The previous months feature only archobacteria, and then finally protozoans and simple worms, sponges, jellyfish, and other soft-bodied creatures.)

The dinosaurs and early dicynodonts (the early hairy ancestors of mammals) don't show up until mid-December. On December 26th, they die out, grass spreads across the fields, and cat-sized horses called Eohippus take their first trot.

On the eve of December 31st, strange upright creatures start exploring the open wooded areas of Africa, and soon become us. 10 minutes to midnight, the Neanderthals are the masters of Europe. Four minutes later, Homo Sapiens Sapiens takes the first steps towards civilization by inventing Agriculture. Twenty to ten seconds ago, the Bible narrative happened - in its entirety, from Abraham's wandering in Genesis to John seeing scrolls at Patmos in Revelation. And in the last second, the entire modern history of our continent took place.

How short a time we get to witness. Don't waste it. :-)

Out into the woods

So today, even though I was coughing and wheezing, my brother in law and I went out into the woods to fetch wood for the first time in about six weeks. As usual, half the dead trees we took hung up. One he pushed out of the limbs it was caught up in, the other I pulled right out of the tree it was caught in. (This sort of business is something we got carried away with last time - we hung up three huge oaks in the same pine, and cut the pine out from under them - we're lucky we didn't get killed!)

But despite all of our foolhardy bravado, it was good to get out into the woods again - fresh air, the sound of nothing but a woodpecker tapping away at a trunk, good hard work... it is a simple thing, but a "fully alive" moment I always look forward to.

And I also look forward to the hot sauna when we get back. And the lasagna my wife made. :-)

Fast Eddie Greenspan vs. Patrick "Scooter shooter" Fitzgerald

One of Canada's most important trials is now taking place in the United States. Conrad Black, former head of the Hollinger empire, is fighting for his freedom in a Chicago courtroom, facing numerous securities related charges that could, if convicted, see him spending the rest of his life in jail.

His lawyer? "Fast Eddie" Greenspan, a Canadian lawyer who is so well known that he is nearly as much a household name up here as Lord Conrad is. He's taken on a lot of pro bono work and defended the poor and powerless - but is also the lawyer of choice of the well-connected and powerful. He's everybody's lawyer! His selection as part of Black's defense team is highly unusual, since he is a Canadian lawyer not formally certified for US practice. The judge made Black agree in fact, that Black cannot appeal on grounds of poor representation, should he lose.

The prosecution team? Apparently some actors from hollywood, if their picture is anything to go by. Actually, the four attorneys are from Patrick Fitzgerald's office, he of the Libby trial fame.

As for me, without knowing much yet about the facts of the case - I am rooting for Conrad. He is by far one of Canada's most colourful figures - a man who had a cantankerous relationship with Prime Minister Chretien, such that he ended up renouncing his Canadian citizenship and storming off to England for a while. Conrad also took our once terrible local newspaper - the Ottawa Citizen - and turned it into the flagship paper of his newspaper chain, a high quality paper with excellent writers and interesting living and recreational sections. Of course, Conrad is also known for using eight syllables when one would do. But that just makes him even more lovable. Canada would be a much poorer place if Conrad Black were locked up in a US jail... so here's hoping that Conrad is not actually guilty of what he's been accused of, and that 'Fast Eddie' can pull it off!

The weird stuff on TV

At the other end of the room, they're watching a reindeer attacking Santa Claus. I guess they'll do anything for an audience these days. I find that I don't watch much television anymore. There's so little that's interesting. Even the much hyped shows that are well regarded don't do it for me - the CSI shows, with their computer graphic gimmicks, don't have a loveable oddball like Quincy.

I'd rather watch Chad Vader on Youtube, I guess.

Getting old hurts

I think I've mentioned I've recently fulfilled a longtime dream, and gotten ahold of a Fender Telecaster. A telecaster is a type of electric guitar, and was one of the very first fully electric guitars to be manufactured, debuting in 1949. Telecasters had an important part in the birth of rock and roll and the electric blues, and were featured in the recordings of Elvis and B.B. King among others. The telecaster is also the de facto guitar used in country music - few country guitarists play anything else.

Now, for the last week, I've spent every moment I can down in the basement, playing this new beauty, trying to get sounds out of it that I've dreamed about getting. Last night, I went down shortly after dinner, plugged it in, and started playing. After five minutes or so, my index finger ached so badly I had to stop. This old man gave up and went back upstairs.

I guess I'm old enough now that playing in the basement for hours every night isn't something I can do indefinitely anymore. :-)

Make that difference - it might be why you are here

A friend of mine passed away yesterday, after years of a wasting illness. The last few months, I watched a group of singers come to his house and sing him songs of praise and worship. He really enjoyed that, as he had been a talented musician himself.

This group will never be famous, will never appear on the cover of a music magazine - they're all ordinary people who took on a great responsibility. In God's eyes, what they gave was as great an offering as the greatest, grandest thing by the biggest rock stars. They strengthened a good man for his longest journey; if you think about it, what greater thing has ever been done in this world?

Don't hold yourself back from anything; even if you think it will not help you make your mark in the world, rest assured it will. All good things that there have ever been are made of little kindnesses - and God saw them, and it was good.

He looked up and saw rich people putting their gifts into the treasury; he also saw a poor widow put in two small copper coins.

He said, ‘Truly I tell you, this poor widow has put in more than all of them; for all of them have contributed out of their abundance, but she out of her poverty has put in all she had to live on.’ (Luke 21:1-4)

Now if only we didn't club baby seals...

Apparently Canada is, along with Japan, the most favourably viewed country in the world. Now if only those countries didn't hunt whales and club seals, we'd be even more popular.

Conservapedia

I read today about an alternative to Wikipedia called Conservapedia. This site was supposed to be an alternative reading of Wikipedia meant to - I guess - evade heavy handed editorial bias on the part of those users who regularly review scientific and political articles.

Though a bit sceptical about this project, I was prepared to look at this with an open mind. After all, there are certain forms of political correctness that do seem prevalent on Wikipedia - the constant insertion of "Citation Needed" for perfectly well known facts I find irritating, for instance.

So hoping to keep an open mind, I opened what was sure to be the litmus test page.

http://www.conservapedia.com/Evolution

All I can say is... wow. This is hard stuff to take seriously.

I expected to see criticism of evolution, of course. But that's all the article in question contains: only criticism. There is no description of the thing being criticized, no outlining of the theory's tenets, or the evidentiary case for it. The thing reads like a grade school rebuttal, and not anything you'd expect to find in an encyclopedia, even a conservative one. When I think of some of the scholarly criticisms I've seen of evolution, including Cardinal Schonborn's article in which he lambastes the development of multiverse cosmologies specifically designed to get around the God problem... well surely Conservapedia really could have done better than this.

I think even Conservatives would do well to stay away from this. It reads like an Onion or Uncyclopedia parody.

Swiss accidentally invade Liechtenstein

Some of history's famous military campaigns have been described as blunders. None probably qualifies quite like this one though. :-)

Swiss accidentally invade Liechtenstein - Boston.com

A baptism song

My granddaughter was baptized last month, and I wrote a song for the service. I finally recorded it, so she remembers me. :-)

Rock and roll

I did something last night that I haven't done... in about twenty five years.

I played in a rock band.

I've been a blues musician all of my adult life, and all of the musical groups that I have been in have either been gospel, Stax-style R&B, or Texas-style blues. Rock music is something I like to listen to on the radio, but not something I've spent a lot of time on musically, although I've recorded some things that are rock-like. But a month or so ago, a friend invited me to take part in a Tech Rocks project, because they needed a singer.

So my friend helped me get my gear, and then I went with him way out to the bass player's house. As soon as he hopped on the drums and hit the snare with a huge "crack", I knew I was in for it - volume! My blues groups did not tend to play at very loud stage volumes - we relied on a PA system to provide any needed volume for the audience; we kept it quiet.

When the keyboard player and other guitar player got there, we launched right into one of the songs that had been selected for us, an eighties synth-pop hit that we were planning to rock up. The other guitar player rolled out sustained power chords, and I locked into the bass player and crunched out rhythmic chunky chords in the same phrasing as his bass line. The keyboard player is an accomplished musician who hasn't done a whole lot of time in rock bands either - she got those perfect eighties samples on her keys, and it gave us a cool blend of hard-edged alternative and eighties synth-pop.

I can't say I didn't enjoy myself, because I did. But it certainly was not as much fun as doing the blues groups. The other guitar player was a little dominant, but that's fine... I get to sing, and he's the group's sponsor anyway. I don't think that was my problem.

I think my problem with rock music is that generally it has no dynamics... there are some exceptions, like Dire Straits, but rock bands just tend to play all out the whole song, which these guys did. I had to sing at the top of my lungs the whole time, even though I could hardly hear myself. I had to play as loud as possible the entire time, without subtlety. There were very few moments of subtlety, actually. Even the one semi-quiet song we have got played without quieting down as much as a blues-based group might for the softer parts.

But this is a temporary project, and it is still fun to do. People will have a lot of fun with what we did to that eighties number.

The other project I'm involved in is a little folk quartet, which is also a little off the beaten trail. That's a little more fun, since the group is heavily focused on harmony singing. We all have found our natural spots in the quartet, and the harmonies usually sound good.

But I miss the blues. I miss being dynamic, and soulful, and tender one minute, and dramatic and pointed the next. I doubt I will be truly happy, musically, until I am playing the blues again.