Category: Blame it on the voices in my head–I do

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Is It Just Me?

Two things I dislike intensely: “gospel” used as a description of a style of pop music and “Christmas Carol” used to describe a song that has nothing whatsoever to do with the Advent of Christ.

It would take to long to explain, so as Inigo Montoya put it, let me sum up:

A gospel song is rightly (and only, as far as I am concerned) a song that relates the good news (euangelion, evengel, GOSPEL) of Christ. Period. A Christmas Carol is a song on the theme of Christ’s birth. Songs about “traditional” goings-on around the holiday of Christmas, as celebrated as a secular event, or songs that are about secular things surrounding traditions that are NOT about Christ’s birth, or simply “Winter songs” of some sort, are not Christmas carols, and in fact, most are only marginally about peripheral traditions that have come to be associated with the holiday, not the event the holiday supposedly celebrates.

Oh, and “Christmas magic” or “the magic of Christmas”? The terms are pure, unadulterated nonsense when used to refer to Christmas, which is ostensibly an observance of the LEAST MAGICAL but one of the two most miraculous events ever to occur. Magic =/= miraculous, and in fact, the two are in no way related.

But, maybe it’s just me. . .

Oh, and I find both real gospel music and real Xmas music appropriate any time of the year. Here:

Mitt hjerte alltid vanker
– English translation (my favorite of various translations)

My heart will always wander
To where our Lord was born,
My thoughts will always go there
And take on their true form.
My longing heart belongs there,
With the treasure of my faith;
I never shall forget you,
O blessed Christmas night!

I’ll willingly spread branches
Of palms around your bed.
For you and you alone
I will gladly live and die.
Come, let my soul find joy
In this moment of delight:
To see you born right here,
Inside my loving heart.

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I Ask These Questions, Because You Don’t Think To

Granted, rifles are used–willfully or accidentally–in a wee bit south of ~400 deaths per year in the US, and deer are only responsible for killing ~150 people per year, but why aren’t people who are concerned about deaths from abuse of AR-15s (a fraction of that less than 400 deaths) also clamoring for the elimination of deer and celebrating those heroes who go out into the deer woods to thin the numbers of these murderous beasts? Why? Because they just do not care, that’s why. *heh*

Of course, Leftoid morons would probably prefer to deal with the problem of Kamikaze Deer murdering innocent motorists by more effective signage telling the deer to cross at places where they are less likely to kill or maim humans (more than 10,000/year injured in less successful deer attacks), or cause the ~$1,000,000,00 of damages they do yearly.

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Do Your Homework

Consider reading the manual on a piece of equipment before blithely screwing things up in a confident burst of incompetence.

I once tossed a copy of a Haynes manual on a particular car to a mechanic who had screwed up work on that make/model and told him to do his homework before he touched another one. He did NOT like it. Don’t care. I didn’t like him. Heck, the Haynes manual was not nearly enough to cover all the intricacies of that car, but had he referred to even a Haynes, he would have had a really hard time screwing up as badly as he had. At the time, the manual was only $10, so I felt the snub was well worth it.

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Filed Under “Things I Do NOT Want to Do”

I don’t like to travel out of the county, much. Oh, if “out of the county” is no more than 30 miles or so (INCLUDING miles in-county), I can manage it, and have as chauffeur for Son&Heir’s recent back injury (compression fracture of T-12 vertebra), but I do not like it. I consider an arduous trek to WallyWorld (15 miles away from TWC Central) to be far enough, most times, now.

Some of the places I like to visit are as far away as the mid-20s in miles from TWC Central (A.K.A. “Ye Olde Homestead”), so there’s that. But. *profound sigh* My sisters are trying to promote a family get-together next fall in Branson for a “gospel music extravaganza” type thing. *sigh*

#1 I HUGELY dislike Branson, “The Vegas of the Ozarks.” Even w/o the gambling and the other “Sin City” activities (at least in the open; there’s plenty of sin anywhere one goes, even if it’s just to the kitchen and back *heh*), Branson is just. . . tacky, IMO.

#2. Crowds. For me a crowd is more than somewhere between 2-5 people (and my sisters and their spouses, let alone brother and his spouse, not to mention children and grandchildren) exceed my capacity by themselves, and that’s before Branson-level crowds. (Didn’t use to be like this; being in/performing for large crowds used to be enjoyable. Touchy old bear, now.)

#3. The activities they are touting are NOT my cuppa, not in any way, shape, fashion, or form. I like real gospel music well enough, but done for a performance? No. Just no.

#4. And then there’s all that travel to get there. Must be 80 miles or more! *heh* (Yeh, yeh: all of them would be coming from out of state, but they LIKE travel and do it a lot.)

*shrugs* Happy to offer a cookout for ’em on their way through, though. Limited crowd exposure (time and numbers); no glitz and faux “gospel” singing. If they wanna see me, they can look at my profile pic. Visit? Sure. Drop on by, one (or two)-on-one, or use email or phone. Mass get-togethers? Please, no. Last one was Mother’s funeral, and while the funeral service itself was a blessing (apart from being forced to lead the congregational singing–multiple reasons that was a bad idea at the time), the travel and “family meal” afterwards was not. I took my fellow travelers and di-di-maued as expeditiously as possible.

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Squishy!

An informal lesson in reading “squishy science” papers touting “associations” and “correlations” would include looking at data sources and the means of obtaining them. For example, this sentence, in a posting of a paper’s abstract (followed by the paper itself) touting some rather scary statements is a red flag:

“Extensive dietary information was collected approximately every 4 years with a semiquantitative food frequency questionnaire.”

1. Self-reporting. 2. “Squishy” term: “semiquantitative.” Those two things alone, quite apart from the simple fact that no mechanism for the squishy report “results” was even suggested by the questionable data means that the paper might be interesting, but not all that interesting. It might give someone a place to start making guesses, but there’s nothing that would be as firm as a hypothesis lurking anywhere in this or other “squishy” papers.

There are tons and tons and tons of squishy “peer reviewed” papers out there, hiding the facts of poor data and little real information in statistical manipulation and other squish.

No, I’ll not link the paper. Heck, you can probably find it by searching on the one sentence I quoted, so maybe that’s just petty of me. 😉

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Just a Wee FYI

Just an FYI: you probably (almost certainly) do not know everything you think you know. (I know I do not, which, perhaps, makes learning new things daily much easier for me in a way.)

No one’s knowledge is exhaustive, even in areas of professional specialization. KNOWING that there is always more “out there, somewhere” to learn about every topic one is aware of (there are many topics that you and I aren’t even aware are areas of knowledge–think on that one, eh? 😉 ) can, if one lets it, encourage one to just keep on learning.

A day w/o learning something new–even, or perhaps especially, when it is something new about something “old,” old knowledge to us–IMO, is a day wasted.

Just sayin’.

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“Pro” Tip

If you live in a jurisdiction where “one party” recording rules apply, whenever interacting with any “authority figure,” record the interaction. If the interaction is with a LEO, record it no matter what (1st Amendment and due process protections should apply, at least according to some recent federal court decisions). Just in case, ya know.

Oh, and having one’s own dash cam? Great idea. I got lucky once, about 30 years ago, and had a judge who was very familiar with a particular stop sign (it was in his neighborhood and he stopped at it all the time) and KNEW the LEO could NOT have seen what he testified he saw.

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Sometimes, it’s the little things, ya know?

*smh* at an otherwise quite competent writer who committed two wrongs in a recent work: consistently misusing “surly” when meaning “surEly” and failing to hire a competent proofreader (or editor). Apart from that consistent error, this particular piece is actually pretty good. Still. . . it’s little things like this that irk–sometimes more than major gaffs.