Month: December 2009

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The Nativity

A note from C.S. Lewis:

THE NATIVITY

Among the oxen (like an ox I’m slow)
I see a glory in the stable grow
Which, with the ox’s dullness might at length
Give me an ox’s strength.

Among the asses (stubborn I as they)
I see my Savior where I looked for hay;
So may my beastlike folly learn at least
The patience of a beast.

Among the sheep (I like a sheep have strayed)
I watch the manger where my Lord is laid;
Oh that my baa-ing nature would win thence
Some woolly innocence.

— C. S. Lewis, from POEMS, edited by Walter Hooper, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977

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Announcing: Carnival of Christmas, 2009

Folks, get your Christmas posts ready for the Carnival of Christmas, hosted by Cathouse Chat, again this year.

Note the specifications:

A Carnival for anything Christmas related. You can share Christmas stories, Christmas poems, Christmas podcasts, Christmas parodies, Christmas pictures, etc. The only requirement is that the post be respectful of the Holiday and in the Spirit of Christmas cheer and kindness.

Kat adds these clarifications:

…first of all, absolutely no political or advertising posts. I want to make sure the Carnival remains focused on the season and that it celebrates the joy, solemnity and unity that the season ought to bring. Secondly, I earnestly request that all submitted posts be dated from November and December of this year, 2009.

*sigh* And here I was going to simply submit pastiches of past Christmas posts… Oh, well. 🙂

Getcher fingers tappin’ folks.

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Back From The Dead

David has kindly told me numerous times that I am welcome to post on his blog and I hope he meant it because here I am, posting without warning. It’s a miracle I remembered my login. This is a fairly self serving post- I know that most of you who come here to read are uber intelligent and often interested mainly in politics but you have to have some fun now and again and with that thought in mind I’ve written here today to say that I’m bringing Dead Guy On The Sidebar back, and seeing as how I’ve been away from blogging quite a bit in the past year because of a highly successful fight with cancer and need to get my blog roll back up to par, I decided to see if anyone that visits here might like to play. If you guess the “Dead Guy” you get massive linkage. LOL So if you’re interested check it out at The Trouble With Angels. I’ve just put a new “Dead Guy” game up. The rules are on the left top of the blog.

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I Like It When My Directions Are Followed to the Letter…

Saw this at “etsy” (off a reference from Lovely Daughter’s blog, A Dash of Nutmeg),

Obey-Gravity

It attracted my eye because of a lil schtick I pull from time to time: shopping in a store, set something down (perhaps in a cart or basket or even at the checkout), point at it and glare sternly saying, “Stay!” It almost invariably gets a decent reaction from whatever audience I have.

“Tis a small thing but my own.

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A Reminder

As crass commercialism and political correctness collide to create “The Contemporary (Generic) Holiday Season” once again this year, may I–once again–offer a modest proposal not to just defend a traditional “Merry Christmas” greeting but to stop and consider the season?

The Gift

Trees and lights and bells and carols,
Bright-wrapped packages piled high.
Winter’s sharp blow joins the heralds:
“Christmastime is nigh.”

Mailmen hurry; shoppers scurry;
Time is fleeing–Oh! so fast.
Parties gather, loud and merry,
Grander than in Christmas’ past.

Pause a moment to remember
That a Savior’s simple birth
Still stirs angel wings in susur’–
“Peace to men; goodwill on earth.”

Now the Father’s hands that molded
The first Adam in the clay,
Gently ’round a manger folded,
Cradle a Baby in the hay.

So, the Greatest Gift extended–
Gift of love and peace to all;
God’s great love to man descended
Calls us to a stable stall.

Tiny Babe, Eternal Son;
First step to Calv’ry, vict’ry won.

©1990-1991 David W Needham

Continue reading “A Reminder”

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I Want It!

Nice enough, but I want to hook it up into home automation hardware/software. Heck, I want to hook it up into some robotics… send a robot on down to the PO to pick up my mail, to the grocery to buy some munchies, to the kitchen to cook up dinner (and then serve it), to a client’s to work on some hardware. Now, that’d really let me sit n veg out, lard on the fat, whatever.

This isn’t nearly to that point yet–not even within an order of magnitude “near”–but it is cool enough for what it can do. Hmmm, with voice recognition software integrated, it could enable a lot more “hands free” computing. Too bad it’s just for gaming at this point, since I have just about zero interest in that.

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Clean As the Driven Snow

I’ve grown to appreciate the new Win7 toolbar enough that when I have Windows “on top”. Aside: Linux Mint runs in a VM, now, so I no longer have to dual boot with Ubuntu, save in those rare instances when I attach an old peripheral and need hardware compatibility. Eh? Linux for hardware compatibility?!? Yes, like today when I discovered I’d misfiled the power supply to our nice scanner and had to plug in an “old” Canoscan LIDE 20. Apparently, Canon isn’t all that interested in making an older, $50 (retail, if you can even find it retail anymore) scanner compatible w/Win7. Yeh, Canon offers a driver it says works, but Canon lies. *heh* Anywho–Ubuntu is much better at having drivers for some older hardware, I’ve found, than Win7.

But back on point. Clean desktop.

Win7Desktop-December-09

Yes, I edited my location out of the weather widget. Anyone with two active brain cells can locate me, if they’ve read here long, but no sense giving trolls an easier time of it.

The point is simply that, since the Win7 toolbar is more useful than in previous iterations, and the “Start Orb” includes some very nice ease of use functionality, although I do have a bunch of icons on my desktop, I can hide ’em and not really miss out on getting things rolling whenever I need to.

Very nice.

Ubuntu (and Mint and most other Linux distros, as well as desktop BSD distros) includes other kinds of usability tweaks and features that allow me to keep clean a desktop when I run it, too–just differently.

No clutter. Quite a contrast to my RW desktop. *heh*

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“…ambition is more predictable than principle…”

That’s from “In Enemy Hands” by David Weber. And no, that’s not the novel I referred to in an earlier post this week. (What?!? There are folks who read fewer than 6-10 books/week? ;-))

Sad that the micro-excerpt quoted as this post’s title really is true. Sad because principle ought to be completely predictable but is not because so many people compromise what they falsely call their “principles”. So, what that really means is that when someone takes a “principled stand” there’s a very good chance (about 99% in politics, I’d say) that person is lying through their teeth about their “principles” and is merely acting as though some high ethic were driving his ambition.

One will not often go far wrong when estimating the venality of politicians as overriding any “principled” stand–unless one were to rightly divine a politician’s prime motivator, his principles, as being grounded in ONLY “What’s in it for me.”