From Terminator 2

JOHN CONNOR: So this other guy? He’s a terminator too,
right, like you?

TERMINATOR: Not like me. A T-1000. Advanced prototype. A mimetic polyalloy.

JOHN: What does that mean?

TERMINATOR: Liquid metal.

AP Photo:

Caption: “Michael Phelps prepares to surface during the backstroke leg in the men’s 200-meter individual medley at the U.S. World Championship Swimming Trials in Indianapolis, Monday, April 4, 2005. Phelps won the event. (AP Photo/Tom Strattman)”

Today, two male co-workers were discussing flowers as gifts.

“I just don’t get it. Flowers look good at first, but they just wither up and you throw them away,” said the one.

“I know what you mean,” replied the other. “I’ve never figured out how to plug them in.”

When I was deployed during Desert Shield/Desert Storm, I wrote a lot of letters and read a lot of books. But the modern military gets much better forms of entertainment.

The sprawling air base lies close to the border with Iran and life there is so slow that U.S. troops at times resort to “MiG tipping” — a game that involves standing on the tail of one of the many wrecked Soviet-era planes and tipping its nose up.

“It’s a pretty pointless and silly thing to do,” said one serviceman. “But there really isn’t that much to do around here.”

No one’s ever made their first jump.

AP Photo:

Caption: “Jumping over : A US Army sniper from the 1-5 Infantry jumps between roofs gaining a lookout position into a neighborhood in the town of Mosul, 400 kilometers north of Baghdad. (AFP/Cris Bouroncle)”

I have discovered one of the great dangers of owning a GPS. You can find out something you really don’t want to know.

I have discovered that the route I run is actually a quarter mile shorter than I thought it was. At my slow rate of running, that would add two minutes to every run. I thought I was regularly running 7.5 minute miles, but I’m really just at 8 minute miles. It also explains why my times at the track were always so surprisingly slow, since it was the full distance.

Sigh.

But on the bright side of GPS, tonight one of my sons and I found our first geocache. It was quite a climb up a rather steep hill, but we found it, and had a good time doing it.

Too bad that I had to find out I’m actually slower than I thought.

AP Photo:

Caption: “Two Union County police officers stand watch by emergency vehicles during Top Officials 3 (TOPOFF 3), a terrorism response exercise coordinated by the US Department of Homeland Security, at Kean College in Hillside, NJ. Participants responded to a simulated biological attack in New Jersey and chemical attack in Connecticut at the start of the week-long drill.(AFP/Stan Honda)”

Q.26. How is Christ a king?

A. As a king, Christ brings us under His power, rules and defends us, and restrains and conquers all His and all our enemies.

Isaiah 9:6-7

⁶ For to us a child is born,
to us a son is given;

and the government shall be upon his shoulder,
and his name shall be called
Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God,
Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.
⁷ Of the increase of his government and of peace

there will be no end,
on the throne of David and over his kingdom,
to establish it and to uphold it
with justice and with righteousness
from this time forth and forevermore.
The zeal of the LORD of hosts will do this.

Matthew 28:18

And Jesus came and said to them, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me.”

After installing Linux, I’m noticing it popping up everywhere.

AP Photo:

Caption: “Emperor penguins look up at a giant imposter at Tokyo’s Ueno Zoo, Japan. Zoo director Teruyuki Komiya dressed up for a stint in the penguin enclosure for the annual April Fool event to display a human being at the zoo(AFP/Yoshikazu Tsuno)”

What a day! Today, the Voice Over IP phone we ordered over 4 weeks ago finally arrived. What a breeze it was to set that up. Just connect it to the router, plug it in, connect the telephone to it, and we had a dial tone. It couldn’t have been simpler.

After several false starts, I finally installed Linux on our main desktop computer this morning. When we replaced the hard drive last year, I partitioned it with a dual boot drive, intending to put Linux on it. Finally I got it all in place. It was not the breeze of the VoIP. One thing I have learned: I don’t know much about Linux. I got it up and running, but not without a few struggles. Once it was up, the Internet connection just worked. I don’t know how, as I expected I’d have to do some configuring. But it just worked. Other things were like that. But some surprising things don’t work. It doesn’t recognize the second drive in the machine, or the other partitions on the same drive. Little things like that. I can figure them out over time, but I expected more trouble getting the Internet connection to work, and less on recognizing the internal hard drive.

Another big event was getting a GPS. It is the size of a small mobile phone, but it tells where you are and how fast you are going. It can navigate you to places and give an estimated time of arrival. You can walk around the perimeter of a place and have the unit calculate the area. It is amazing how much it can do.

We went to a local park and tried to find a geocache with the GPS. Unfortunately, once we were within the 27 foot accuracy of the unit, we couldn’t immediately find the cache, and we ran out of time. We had to get back home for some other commitments for the evening. But we will return sometime later to try again to find the cache.

Add to the mix four new DVDs, a new CD, a new running shirt, a 14 year old cross-stitch picture finally framed, and a bag of new bungie cords.

It has been quite a day.

I’ve heard it said that reading P.G. Wodehouse is the literary equivalent of eating cotton candy. It’s a great treat in small amounts, but if you try to subsist on it alone, you will quickly get sick of it.

I understand where this idea comes from, but I don’t subscribe to it myself. I think that if you have that attitude toward P.G. Wodehouse, you have missed the underlying drama in his stories.

Take for example the following scene where Madeline Bassett and Gussie Fink-Nottle irrevocably break their engagement. (Stick with me as this gets a little complicated.) Madeline has been forcing Gussie to become a vegetarian against his will, causing him to transfer his affection from Madeline to the cook, Emerald Stoker (daughter of J. Washburn Stoker, in case you were interested). After Madeline’s special friend, Roderick Spode has physically attacked Gussie, and Emerald saves Gussie by smashing a basin over Spode’s head, Madeline arrives and Emerald flees:

“What have you been doing to Roderick?” [Madeline] demanded.

“Eh?” said Gussie.

“I said, What have you done to Roderick?”

“Oh, that? I merely chastised him. The fellow had only himself to blame. He asked for it, and I had to teach him a lesson.”

“You brute!”

“Not at all. He had the option of withdrawing. He must have foreseen what would happen when he saw me remove my glasses. When I remove my glasses, those who know what’s good for them take to the hills.”

“I hate you, I hate you!” cried Madeline, a thing I didn’t know anyone ever said except in the second act of a musical comedy.

“You do?” said Gussie.

“Yes, I do. I loathe you.”

“Then in that case,” said Gussie, “I shall now eat a ham sandwich.”

And this he proceeded to do with a sort of wolfish gusto that sent cold shivers down my spine, and Madeline shrieked sharply.

“This is the end!” she said, another thing you don’t often hear.

– P.G. Wodehouse in Stiff Upper Lip, Jeeves

The emotional impact of the scene is intense, particularly when Gussie eats the ham sandwich. This, my friends, is no cotton candy.