-
-
Search
Archives for June 2002
For John
He’s come to a sticky end Don’t think he will ever mend Never more will he crawl ’round He’s embedded in the ground
Boris the spider Boris the spider
Her Omnipresence
It’s gotten to the point where you can’t walk into an independently owned retail shop here in DC without hearing a particular album being played.
I guess posthumous recognition is better than no recognition.
Our New Car
Erin and I bought a new car yesterday. It’s a 2002 VW Golf GLS. We pick it up on Saturday. Any suggestions for a name?
Inside the Belly of the Beast
Monday was my wife’s first day of grad school classes and I needed to find something to do after work. I figured I could go for a walk into Dupont and take a tour of the Fraser Mansion, a beautiful old brick building from the 1890’s which has now become the “Founding Church of Scientology.”
There is always a sign leaned up against the front of the “church” advertising guided tours, so I walked right in and up a short staircase flanked by numerous pictures of L. Ron Hubbard. Oddly, the place reminded of the Haunted Mansion at Disneyland.
As I reached the lobby I was greeted by several well-dressed young women who appeared to be of college-age. I inquired about a tour and a receptionist gave me a form to fill out while I waited for my own personal tour guide. My first instinct was to lie and give false contact information. However, it occurred to me that they might check the information while I was on the tour. My innate fear of being held in an underground dungeon and tortured kicked in and I reluctantly provided some minimal amount of accurate information. I figured the direct mail alone should be good for a couple laughs when it starts to hit.
The back of the form was a questionaire regarding my state of personal happiness. As far as the Scientologists are concerned, I’m totally elated in every way. I wasn’t about to give them any excuses to try to “help” me.
My tour guide greeted me as I finished filling out the form. She was an extremely soft-spoken black woman with short hair named Sonia (sp?). The first stop on my tour was L. Ron Hubbard’s office (Quicktime). Sonia told me it was where he worked before he “dropped his body.”
Two things struck me immediately upon hearing this:
- The phrase “dropped his body” was perhaps one of the worst euphemisms for death I had ever heard. I could just imagine someone saying, “Oops, I dropped my body” as if it were a set of car keys or something.
- Hubbard died in 1986 and the Fraser Mansion wasn’t even bought by the Church until well after that.
Oddly, it seems that all Scientology “Churches” have an office for Hubbard, even if they were built after his death. Are his followers awaiting his second coming, where Hubbard will return to his offices in all of their splendor and glory?
Sonia then provided a brief biographical sketch of Hubbard. She even said he “finished up” his education at The George Washington University, my alma mater. For the record, Hubbard flunked out of GWU. They probably didn’t tell Sonia that in her tour-guide training.
I was then brought before a tall glass cabinet filled with different pictures of Hubbard. Sonia said she liked to call this part of the tour “the many faces of Ron.” I nearly gagged when she told me he was a brilliant poet and lyricist.
Actually, the tour only consisted of a few rooms on the first level. I asked Sonia what they did with the upper floors of the building. She said they were used for classes and auditing.
“What’s auditing?” I asked. I already knew the answer, but I just wanted to hear someone try to describe it with a straight face. She stumbled for a moment and I think a part of her might have realized how stupid it sounded. Then she had an idea and rushed to a bookshelf where she flipped a volume open to an important passage.
“I couldn’t do it justice,” she said, as she handed me the book. “Read Hubbard’s description.”
And as I read of quackery, a smile came upon my face.
Big River
I was in an emotional frenzy on Wednesday night and I almost bought a boat as a result.
My dad called aroud 9:00 PM and asked me to help him do a little online research to figure out how much my Grandpa’s 1968 Thompson motorboat is worth. Apparently my Grandpa wants to sell it.
I proceeded to flip out like an absolute idiot.
“He can’t sell that boat. We took that boat out on the Mississippi nearly every time we went to visit Bellevue during the summers when I was growing up.”
I had always assumed I would be able to take my children out on the Mississippi on that boat.
After hanging up the phone, it dawned on me. I could buy the boat. I relayed the brilliant plan to my wife.
Her response was, to put it mildly, less than enthusiastic. She laid out a reasonable argument against the purchase of a 34 year-old wooden boat that would cost, at minimum, $2000 a year to service and store.
I really didn’t care.
So I called my older sister who lives in Paris. It was 4:00 AM there. In retrospect, I may have woken her up but that really wasn’t an issue at the time.
She didn’t want to but the boat either. In her defense, she consoled me and talked me down from the boat-buying ledge on which I was perched.
I’ve calmed down a bit in the last two days. The whole situation still bothers me and I would like to find a reasonable way to keep the boat in the family. It’s amazing how difficult it can be to separate memories from the physical objects bound to them.
Didn’t Coke Learn Its Lesson?
I would have thought that the Coca-Cola Company would have learned its lesson when they tried to switch us all over to “New Coke” almost seventeen years ago. Now, with the introduction of Pibb Xtra, they’ve decided to let Texans decide what my Pibb should taste like.
Why did it take this long for someone to finally go ahead and compile a [comprehensive archive of screenshots][1] demonstrating the difference in CSS font-size rendering between common browsers and platforms? [1]: http://www.thenoodleincident.com/tutorials/box_lesson/font/
Who Was Your Favorite Green Lantern Corps Member?
I went to the blogger get-together last night at Rendezvous in Adams Morgan. All in all, there was a pretty good turn out. It will be interesting to get the count from the sign-in sheet Radley passed around.
I finally had the pleasure of meeting Julian Sanchez, who, interestingly enough, was one of the last people to interview Robert Nozick.
By about 10:30 I was prepared to eat my own arm for sustenance so Erin, Will, Julian and I went to Lauriol Plaza to grab a bite. Topics of discussion ranged from functionalism to Ch’p.
It’s amazing what a little alcohol can do.
One of These Things Is Not Like the Others
Oddly enough, Bob Barr was one of the featured speakers yesterday at a reception I attended in honor of the opening of the Washington, DC office of The Objectivist Center.
During his rambling and irrelevant remarks, which seemed completely improvised, he managed to mangle the name of the organization inviting him to speak, referring to them as “The Objectivist Society.” He also managed to mispronounce Ayn Rand’s name twice.
The theme of Barr’s speech was “Privacy.” I am guessing he selected the topic the exact moment Ed Hudgins introduced him and lauded his stance on, you guessed it, privacy.
It would have been infinitely more amusing had he chosen “The Importance of the Drug War” as a theme. Then I could have stood back and watched as a roomful of libertarians took turns kicking his teeth in.
Make Me Chaste and Continent, But Not Yet!
I came across a fascinating quote by Saint Augustine today. It’s from De Doctrina Christiana which was written over 1600 years ago. It’s especially enlightening and relevent in regard to the intellectual property debate.
“For if a thing is not diminished by being shared with others, it is not rightly owned if it is only owned and not shared.”
Lenny Bruce Is Not Afraid
It seems my new Dell Dimension 4400 is all set up and chugging away. He’s named Lenny (after Lenny Bruce) and he’s running Redhat 7.3. I ended up plopping a Turtle Beach Santa Cruz soundcard in. I had some problems getting it to work, but the OSS drivers now work beautifully. The Samba client is now recognizing all the shares on my workgroup. Once I get the server running I’ll be able to access files from other machines on the network.
Yesterday’s grail quest was fulfilled when I finally managed to import all my existing Outlook 2000 mail archives (1.8 GB) to Ximian Evolution. This was no small feat indeed. It took me forever just to find a nifty Macro called Devout that made the job relatively painless.
Now I can finally get some work done.
Next Time I’ll Go To Burger King
I went to Hamburger Mary’s with Erin, CJ and Stacy tonight. As usual, I ordered the bacon cheeseburger without cheese. When Stacy ordered “the same thing he’s having” the twink of a waiter replied, “Would you like it the way he ordered it, or the way it’s supposed to come?”
It’s supposed to come however I order it, asshole!
Random Fact
Amos’s son invented frequent flier miles.
