18January2010
Posted by Brent under: common sense politics.
Good morning all! Happy Martin Luther King Jr.’s Birthday (observed). I claim that a generation hence, our children won’t be celebrating MLK Day. Why? Look at history. Our parents celebrated Armistice Day on the 11th day of the 11th month. This is when the treaty ending World War I was signed. We celebrated Veterens’ Day. I remember Washington’s Birthday and Lincoln’s Birthday. Now it’s President’s Day. Humanity’s collective memory blurs and generalizes. The specifics of the above celebrations turn into generalizations over the years. So I claim that a generation hence MLK day will be renamed “Civil Rights Day”. You can hear the rationale now: The Civil Rights movement was bigger than just one man, we need to celebrate all its leaders; it’s really the movement, not the man we should be remembering, etc. Time will tell if I’m right or not, but if the past is a gauge of the future I think it’s just a question of ‘when’ not ‘if’.
On a side note: On his birth certificate, Martin Luther King Jr.’s first name as listed as ‘Michael’. Clearly a typo, because then he wouldn’t have been a ‘Jr’, would he?
16January2010
Posted by Brent under: Nothing Special.
In talking around the dinner table the other night friends were describing a church service they attended, where the drum solo was a takeoff on some well-known pop band and the drummer and lighting were in the style of another. Something seemed out of kilter for me. The absolute first thing we learn in the Bible is ‘In the beginning, God created….’ God is a creative God. An ancient principle says that Satan cannot create, only imitate. James Blish used this effectively in the novel A Case of Conscience.
So what is the role of imitation in Christianity? Paul says in I Cor. 4:16 for us to imitate him, and in Ephesians 5:1 for us to imitate God. There’s the Christian classic devotional The Imitation of Christ by Thomas à Kempis. (proud of myself for actually finding the acute-a in this thing!) On a more contemporary note, the all-pervasive WWJD: “What Would Jesus Do?” based on imitating Him. The major problem with that is: I can’t. As a friend pointed out, if you read the Gospels with a fresh eye, as if you don’t know how the story’s going to come out, you have absolutely no concept what Jesus is going to do. Even if I did, he’s healing or working miracles. So I’m afraid imitating Him is rather unrealistic. So it looks like the WWJD and imitating Him just boil down to ‘be-good Christianity.” This is where we obey the golden rule and treat everyone nice and call it Christianity. I’m not sure this is the Real Thing.
Beyond the role of imitating Christ or the Apostle Paul, or some other saintly believer, what’s the role of imitating other churches? I remember one church whose planning seemed to be: “See what church X is doing, and let’s do it, too!” Today, small local churches seem to look to the megachurches and imitate what they’re doing. Is God’s creativity so limited that it only is given to the few, with the rest left to copy them?
Then what about churches or believers imitating the world, as the church stage show in the first paragraph? If God is the author of all creativity, and the world copies His creation, and the church copies the world, haven’t we just made a copy-of-a-copy and starting to blur the original image?
26July2009
Posted by Brent under: Nothing Special.
Since before the fall, men and women have yearned for things they cannot have. In the garden, Eve wanted the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. In contemporary Christendom, we hunger for a Chick-Fil-A sandwich on Sunday: the Forbidden Sandwich. All Chick-Fil-As are closed every Sunday, to honor the Sabbath. My idea is to open a Chick-Fil-A location and staff it entirely with Jews and Seventh-Day Adventists. That way, we could be closed on Saturday for the Sabbath, and open on Sunday. We’d clean up on the Baptist and Methodist traffic, not to mention NFL tailgate parties. Superbowl Sunday? We’d make enough to carry us through the rest of the year.
There’s something that bothers me about the otherwise wonderful experience of eating at Chick-Fil-A. It’s that quote from Turett Cathy on the back wall: “Food is essential to life. Therefore, make it good.” I guess it just reminds me of the moivie Animal House where the statue of the college’s founder, Emil Faber, bears his most famous quote on its pedistal: “Knowledge is Good”. Mr. Cathy’s quote is, I’m afraid, about as banal, but without the humor. ‘..make it good’ what kind of good? Good for you? Tastes good? Good for the environment? A good value? I think Mr. Cathy needs a better ghostwriter to come up with a snappier line that could go on the back wall. How about “Chicken sandwiches aren’t really essential to life, therefore we can fry ‘em up and make them taste real good without killing you”? Probably too honest. How about “In your eye, Colonel Sanders”? Too confrontational. Maybe “You kids better not open these things on Sundays after I’m dead and gone!” Probably the most remembered, but not a public saying. Help me out here, what would be a better Truett Cathy quote?
23July2009
Posted by Brent under: Nothing Special.
Ok, this is a real geeky post.
In the evolution of computer operating systems, there has been a trend toward smaller pieces working together, rather than larger pieces. The old operating systems like OS/360 were monolithic: everything was in one piece. UNIX decoupled utilities and the user interface from the OS. Linux has a plug-in structure that allows kernel modules to be added as needed. More radical microkernel architectures have the OS only doing inter-process communication and some scheduling. Everything else is done by separate processes.
I’m starting to see the same sort of progress in other software systems. The Apache web server is very similar to a microkernel operating system. Everything (including handling http requests) is done by plug-ins. The Eclipse IDE is very much based on a plug-in system.
My idea is for a microkernel type Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system. Older systems like ACT or Goldmine were pretty much monolithic: they weren’t easy to extend. The current generation of CRM systems like Salesforce or SugarCRM have a plug-in architecture to extend the base system with new functionality as needed. The problem is that the base functionality can’t be replaced. When I use a modern CRM system it’s fairly painful. They have email clients built in, but they’re nowhere as nice as GMail. They have mailing list managers, but nowhere as nice as MailChimp. They have time tracking, but nowhere as comprehensive (note I didn’t say ‘nice’) as Quickbooks. What we need is a CRM system that has no inherent functionality: all the functionality is provided via plugins. That way I could plug GMail, MailChimp, Quickbooks, Basecamp, whatever I like into the microkernel of the CRM system and come away with best-of-breed everything. The limiting factors are, of course, the APIs of the constitutent parts (Quickbooks is notably lacking here). Perhaps the base system would be in the cloud, talking to a Firefox chrome application on the desktop? I don’t know. But I do know that almost all the pieces are there to make this happen. Should it be open-source? Probably. Would this attract VC money? Perhaps. Tell me what you think.
21July2009
Posted by Brent under: Nothing Special.
There was an English editor named Thomas Bowdler who, in the early 1800s, published the Family Shakespeare. This was a work that removed all the passages in Shakespeare that could possible give offense. “Out, out damn spot” became “Out crimson spot”, etc. The overall sense was maintained, but the poetry and grittiness of Shakespeare removed. The man has become a verb, to bowdlerize is to “expurgate (a written work) by removing or modifying passages considered vulgar or objectionable.” (thanks dictionary.com)
We as Christians do the same thing. I remember reading bedtime Bible stories to my sons when they were young. The stories were indeed Bowdlerized. Perhaps the supreme example of this was the old VeggieTales esisode of King George and the Ducky. Let’s face it, this version of David and Bathsheeba is so cleaned up that almost nothing of the original remains. This always sorta bothered me about VeggieTales. Overall, I found them to be very creative and well-executed. But I somehow always thought that they were on surer ground when they were doing original stories, rather than bowdlerizing Bible stories.
There’s a good book Phil Vischer wrote about the rise and fall of Big Ideas productions: Me, Myself and Bob. It was interesting enough. Phil didn’t deal directly with many criticisms of their work, like Bowdlerizing.
I always thought that a good way to counter the criticism of playing fast and loose with the Biblical text would be to take a text ultra literally. Computer animation or CGI would be a perfect medium to present some of the stranger prophetic passages. A good warm-up could be the vally of dry bones from Ezekiel 37. The one I’d really like to see would be the rebuilt temple and kingdom from Ezekiel 40 and following. Imagine the voice-over simply reading the passage and the corresponding visual building up everything that’s described. It could all be white rectangular solids, then when the narrator says that they were made of wood or had carvings on them like palm trees, the texture map gets applied to the white solids. Maybe someday somebody will take a run at it.
4July2009
Posted by Brent under: Nothing Special.
Have fun with a great musical take-off. This is for those in a narrow age-range: old enough to remember West Side Story and young enough to get the internet jokes.
