My Life: September 2007 Archives

This is your quasi-monthly non-faith-related rant...

With due respect to all you ladies out there, I have had my fill with the breast cancer awareness campaign. I see that stupid pink ribbon freakin' everywhere. I saw it today on a canister of salt, of all things! I saw that and thought, y'know, I'd like to start a blue ribbon campaign for prostate cancer, which, like breast cancer among women, is second-leading cancer among men and second-leading cause of cancer deaths. It is also the fifth-leading cause of death among men over 45. So why is it so important to promote breast cancer awareness and totally ignore prostate cancer? Better yet, why not promote lung cancer awareness, which bests both of them?

I'm waiting for the pink ribbon to appear on quarts of milk.

One of my 8th grade catechism charges cracked me up today. I asked a question, which he got wrong, to which he replied, "It's those guys from the 60s who tricked us." I was ROTFL!

I was listening to, yes, you guessed it, Catholic Answers Live with Jimmy Akin, when he used language that startled me. He referred to someone "overclocking the text". What he meant was that these people were, in his opinion, investing more significance into the language of the Biblical text than he thought was warranted; in other words, he interpreted this language loosely and rather fluidly, rather than taking a rigorous, strict, and narrow interpretation, and that to take a strict interpretation would be pushing more out of the language than was in it.

Most of you are probably looking at your monitors quizzically saying, "Overclocking?" Precisely the reason his language startled me. This is an obscure techie term. It refers to hacking a computer's processor to work faster than it is rated to go. It's a bit like putting your computer on amphetamines or steroids. [Detailed, optional explanation follows in next paragraph.]

A computer does its work in what are called clock cycles, which are like measures in a piece of music. If you speed up the tempo of a piece of music, you can get the same notes played in a shorter amount of time, and if you speed up all your music, you can save a lot of time. Similarly, by increasing the clock rate of a computer, you can get more work out of in per unit of time, and it works faster. But just as an orchestra can only play so fast, the processor can only work so fast. Pushing a processor beyond its (conservative) manufacturer-guaranteed limits is called overclocking. Just as you can exceed the speed limit with varying degrees of risk (with virtually no risk on the low end and a lot of risk on the high end), you can overclock at a low level without a problem but can also face some challenges at higher speeds.

Ok, you may or may not have been interested in my lengthy explication of overclocking, but at least you can understand both what Jimmy meant (they are pushing the text too far) and why it's so surprising he would choose to use this language which so few of his listeners would understand. But as a geek, I had to rejoice.

Another five minutes or so off my fifteen minutes of fame: I finally got on the "Who Wants To Be An Apologist?" gameshow on Catholic Answers Live. I've had a lot of problems getting on this game show in the past, but the secret, as with all the shows, is to call several minutes before it begins.

The show can be tricky. They have a "Box of Easiness" (three questions) and a "Hat of Difficulty" (two questions) and even the easy ones can be hard. One that was asked of someone before me was which son of Adam was Jesus descended from. I guessed "Shem". Shows you how much I know (Shem was son of Noah). Then there are the tricky true-false questions.

I got easy easy questions, and aced them all. This won me $50 (plus the mug that all participants get). To win another $50 I had to answer two difficult questions.

The first difficult question was, who was the last Catholic monarch of England? At first I thought it was the king before Henry VIII, but then I reasoned that even Henry VIII had been Catholic. Maybe it was a trick question. I neglected to consider though that Henry did not put a total end to Catholicism on the throne of England. I should have remembered Bloody Mary, but even she wasn't the last one. The last one was someone I never would have guessed in a million years, James II.

But hey, I was thankful to have placed. My big fear was getting a tricky easy question and failing there. I was the first one on the program to move to the Hat of Difficulty.

The ironic thing is that I had just placed an order the day before. Fortunately I was able to get them to retroactively apply my $50 winnings to the order.

Warning: This entry is rated XC for Extreme Catholic content. If get the heebie-jeebies from the thumbnail do not proceed to photos!

So I was praying the Divine Office this evening, that is, the evening prayer of the church from the Psalms, which by the grace of God I remembered in time to do, which, sadly, happens only every few months or so. When I pray the Office, I like to go all out and set the mood. I like to light candles with the lights off, sometimes incense (both grain and stick), cross myself with rose water, and so forth. I love the ambiance. I admit it's also sometimes fun and distracting. Maybe the following inspiration was a distraction too, but I thought, this is really cool, I should try to get a photo of this; I've never tried to do this before. I thought the photos came out pretty darn good, especially for the low light. (Naturally I had to go get my tripod.)

This doesn't show all of my icon wall, and many holy cards have fallen, but it shows part. Here is a catalog which I believe to be complete of all of the icons from Holy Transfiguration Monastery that I own (which is 90% of them).

Someday I want to get oil lamps, and maybe a censer. But I am not sure what I'd do with the censer; maybe play altar boy. I'd probably just put a burnt hole in my carpet. Granular incense is so hard to burn anyway, especially if you have smoke detectors.

I am a few days behind ... I went camping here this past weekend and had a great time, then had to attend to my final peach harvest (shown). As you can see there are a lot of peaches to harvest. Tonight I went to an event celebrating the reunion of two churches: The Russian Orthodox Church and the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia (ROCOR, also known as the Russian Church Abroad, RCA). On display was the miracle-working Derzhavnaya Icon and performing was the respected Moscow Sretensky Monastery Choir. The church where it was held, where I have been once, is a beautiful church. It has icons on nearly every square inch of its interior.

The interesting thing about this icon of Madonna and child is that it was interpreted as "a witness that the ultimate authority over and care for Russia had passed to the Heavenly Queen Herself." Strangely enough, this is just three months before Mary appeared (so they say) at Fatima, in which she said that people must pray for the "conversion of Russia" or she would "spread her errors throughout the world". It is also the very same day of the year that visionary Sister Lucia died. Food for thought.