By the Hearing of Faith

“How hast thou merited—
Of all man’s clotted clay the dingiest clot?
Alack, thou knowest not
How little worthy of any love thou art!
Whom wilt thou find to love ignoble thee,
Save Me, save only Me?
All which I took from thee I did but take,
Not for thy harms,
But just that thou might’st seek it in My arms.
All which thy child’s mistake
Fancies as lost, I have stored for thee at home:
Rise, clasp My hand, and come!”

http://www.bartleby.com/236/239.html

Audie didn’t want his hair washed at tub time because he hadn’t “rubbed salad dressing in it,” which is actually normal (both that he doesn’t use food as a hair-care product, unlike his little sister, and that he doesn’t want his hair washed). So I promised that he could put some soap in my hair … if he let me wash his hair.

Long story short: My head is wetter than a submarine’s license plate. One of my ears is plugged up, and I can hear ocean sounds in the other.

One of us is wiser now ….

“The whole notion of sin only comes when you look into the mirror, and you no longer believe in yourself …. I can’t persuade you you’re a sinner. You get uncomfortable about the complex reality of your own inner morality, and you ask me what that discomfort means, and I’ll then explain about it. However, sin is not only a Christian concept. You do secular sin. ‘No,’ he said, ‘We don’t do secular sin.’ I said, okay, let’s go to the Golden Globes awards (https://usat.ly/2kQC5H1). Let’s go to all those people pointing the finger at these dreadful sinners who have broken the rules. The only difference between secular sin and Christian sin is [that] we forgive, and you don’t. We have Jesus, and Jesus died so that I could be forgiven. You’ve got a problem, because you have just as much sin, and for you there’s NO WAY BACK.”

Rev. Gavin Ashenden explains the problem of sin to greater London: http://bit.ly/2ERAZQk

1. Shark milk
2. Pizza salad
3. Rock bread
4. Watermelon squeezy juice
5. Circle cheese
6. Stick cheese
7. Cake balls

Nurse: Sir, you don’t have to disrobe.
Patient: Oh, I thought that was necessary.
Nurse: Well, it is ….
Patient: Okay …?
Nurse: … but this is the lobby.
Patient: Oh, right.
Nurse: You really should go to the exam room first.
Patient: Yeah, okay. Have you seen my pants?

(Positive note: My The patient’s vitals were PERFECT.)

(Related anatomical thoughts: The patient knows, technically, that he has a thorax. He just thinks it sounds weird to say so. Like he’s a crustacean or something.)

“I don’t have time for these clowns. I don’t have time for their judgement and their stupidity. They lay down with their ugly wives in front of their ugly children and just look at their loser lives and then look at me and they say ‘I can’t process it’. Well no, and you never will. Stop trying, just sit back and enjoy the show.” (Charlie Sheen, 24 February 2011)

Decades ago, my father learned that one of his employees was about to have an extramarital affair. Dad tried to dissuade the man by telling him that not only would he lose his marriage and two sons, he’d also lose the integrity necessary to do business. “If you can’t be faithful in your marriage, why would your clients trust you to be faithful with their investment portfolios?” The man ignored my father’s advice and ultimately lost everything, even his self-respect. He became a loser in every sense of the word.

I don’t know why he didn’t listen to reason. Maybe he felt entitled to betray his wife and kids and throw his life away as though no one else had any stake in the matter. Charlie Sheen certainly seems to have felt that way: He has five children and three ex-wives. Shortly after uttering the quote above, Sheen lost his job and acquired the HIV virus. His life is an absolute dumpster fire, and he has no one to blame but himself–although judging by recent retrospective quotes, he’s even now unwilling to take any responsibility for his actions.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this lately as a new hashtag is trending on Twitter: #pervnado. Urban Dictionary defines “pervnado” as “The seemingly endless number of sexual harassment allegations against politicians and media personalities.” Since a lot of these personalities have in the recent past assumed an unwarranted posture of moral superiority and self-aggrandizement, I’m sorely tempted to savor the poetic justice of their lives blowing away like dust. But that would be wrong because it’s not just their lives, but also the lives of their spouses and children and close friends, that are being affected as well. And it’s also dishonest for me to pretend that we all don’t struggle with some form of lust. Maybe it’s not sexual lust; it could be lust for financial security or knowledge or the perfect job, or even something as mundane as another piece of pumpkin pie. The bad news is that we’re all flawed and can’t justifiably point the finger of condemnation, no matter how much we’d like to.

The good news is that there is an antidote to lust: gratitude. When we learn to be thankful for what we have and stop focusing on what we don’t have, we can actually find satisfaction because our lustful hearts can find rest. This is why Thanksgiving is an essential holiday, especially now. Instead of obsessing over what we want, we can hold on to something we need, which is a grateful heart. As Michael Ramsden says in the following video, “In life, we’re not made happy by what we acquire, but by what we appreciate …. But if you ask me, the problem we have today is not that we have nothing to be grateful for; rather we feel there is no one to be grateful to.”

http://bit.ly/2A3t2cj

SysAdmin: So then the proxy server passes that request on to the Web servers …
Me: Uh-huh, okay.
MyBrain: HEY! HEY, BROHEIM!
SysAdmin: And those are load-balanced, so the user could get any of those machines …
Me: Right, yeah.
MyBrain: WHAT DID THE ROUTER SAY TO HIS UROLOGIST?
SysAdmin: And the payloads are replicated to the other machines …
Me: Uh-huh ….
MyBrain: “IT HURTS WHEN IP!” GET IT?!?
SysAdmin: Normally that’s the case, but we disabled replication, so …
Me: Yeah.
MyBrain: GET IT?!? IP SOUNDS LIKE “I PEE.” GET IT?
Me: YES, I GET IT! I GOT IT! I UNDERSTAND! OKAY?!?
SysAdmin: Oh … sorry. Was I rambling?
Me: Oh, no! Not you! I’m sorry, I’m … My brain ….
SysAdmin: No worries. I’ll come back later.
MyBrain: HEY, WHAT’S YOUR FAVORITE KIND OF TATER SALAD?
Me: *sigh* ….
MyBrain: I LIKE AMERICAN-STYLE TATER SALAD, BUT CAESAR IS MY FAVORITE DICTATOR SALAD! GET IT?!?

You must admit, the Roman Empire was rather impressive. What with the roads, the aqueducts and running water, the bread and circuses, the heated baths, the toga parties. And those spiffy helmets with the shoe brush on top. All very classy. The Roman Empire also had some first-rate engineers, but I wonder what else they could have accomplished were they not impeded by Rome’s appallingly goofy numbering system.

“Goofy? My wristwatch uses Roman numerals!” you object, adjusting your toga indignantly before your VIII o’clock appointment.

Well, the Roman numbering system lacked two essential innovations that we take for granted: the Hindu-Arabic numerals and positional-decimal numbering. With Hindu-Arabic numerals, we’re able to represent ten digits–zero to nine–each with only one symbol and also to represent and perform computations on “nothing” (zero). And with positional-decimal numbering, we can perform computations directly on numbers without having to first represent them in an abacus, since every numeral in a number implicitly indicates something about a power of ten by virtue of its position (e.g., 32 = 2*10^0 + 3*10^1). Arithmetic with positional-decimal numbers is therefore, as one of my math teachers used to say, “Easy-peasy, lemon squeezy.”

Their user-unfriendliness notwithstanding, Roman numerals were still commonly used in Europe well into the Middle Ages. It wasn’t until 1202 that things started to improve. That year, a customs official from Pisa named Leonardo Fibonacci published a book that not only promoted Hindu-Arabic numerals and positional-decimal numbering but also provided handy instruction in how to effectively use these new tools for practical purposes (e.g., how to compute compounding interest, how much toilet paper to take on a long sea voyage, or the odds on the Rockies getting to the postseason). And with one story problem from his book, Fibonacci also inadvertently gave us a glimpse into how The First and Greatest Engineer built His universe.

That story problem involves a rabbit warren that begins with one pair of newborn rabbits, one female and one male. In its third month of life and in every month thereafter, a pair produces another pair of rabbits, always one female and one male. The problem asks how many pairs of rabbits there will be in the warren in twelve months, assuming there are no deaths. The answer is 144 pairs, but unless you’ve got some weird obsession with rabbit reproduction, what’s far more interesting is the number of pairs that occurs in each month: 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, and 144. In this sequence of numbers, every term (except for the first two terms) is the sum of the two terms that immediately precede it: 144 = 89 + 55; 89 = 55 + 34; 55 = 34 + 21; and so on. Starting with 1 + 1 = 2, you can compute this sequence into infinity, and the further on you go, the closer the ratio of a term and its preceding term is to what’s known as The Golden Ratio ([1+√5]/2 or roughly 1.618).

“What’s so great about this Golden Ratio thingy ?!?” you scoff, probably caressing your abacus defensively.

The Golden Ratio is everywhere in the natural world. It’s the growth factor for the same spiral seen in a chambered nautilus shell, hurricanes, the cochlea of the human ear, the Milky Way galaxy, and growing fern leaves. The ratio of the distance between a man’s feet and navel to the distance between his navel and the top of his head is the Golden Ratio; the same is true for the human face, using the bottom of the chin, nose, and pupils as reference points. The Golden Ratio is also found in the arrangement of branches along plant stems according to their circumference, in the veins of leaves, and in the distribution of seeds in a sunflower. The same ratio is found between the revolutions of planets in our solar system. And it’s found in the ratio of atoms in many chemical compounds.

The Golden Ratio also seems to be innately part of our common aesthetic sensibility. It’s found in musical intervals that are pleasing to our ears. It’s found in great works of visual art: Leonardo da Vinci, Albrecht Dürer, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and dozens of other artists knew about the Golden Ratio and applied it to their work. It’s found in the structure of the Parthenon and the Great Pyramid at Giza. It’s even found in the length-width ratio of 3×5 and 5×8 index cards, light-switch plates, credit cards, and baseball cards. I don’t remember any big meeting to reach consensus about beauty. So why do we find all these things so pleasing?

The Great Cosmic Engineer seems to have used certain numbers when He made His Universe. The Golden Ratio is one of those numbers. Pi, which is also a ratio, is another. Why do we find these ratios so beautiful when we see them exemplified in the geometry of creation? I suspect it’s because God created us in His image, and just as He looked on His creation “and saw that it was good” (Genesis 1), we can’t help but do the same.

Listen to author Lee Strobel speak about how God speaks to us through His creation: http://bit.ly/2vslRES

I get such a kick out of Peanut’s whimsical little outfits, like this wee octopus dress:

It’s also got some jellyfish. Freakin’ ADORABLE ….

Audie is naming all his toys. He’s dubbed his lawnmower Birdie, but his backhoe is named Rick. His big firetruck with the blinky lights is also named Rick. His monster truck, too, is Rick, as is his green dump truck. Tonight during tub time, he announced that his cement truck is … Rick. At bedtime, I made up a story about a poker-playing otter, whom Audie also named Rick. I’m pretty sure all his LEGO guys are named Rick (and possibly one of the LEGO gals). Next week it might be Kevin or Todd or Bill, but the hottest name right now, chez Audie, is Rick. His great uncle should be pleased ….