What I’m Blogging

I do get mistaken for a Canadian quite a lot… especially in Toronto eh?

It’s Alive!

Just when you thought they weren’t going to renew the contract, just when you got used to the idea of moving on; the worm turns.

At last we looked, the renewal was for a year an the same hours at the same rate. Now we are doing a 2 month extension for the money I was originally looking for. It’s a bridge until they find the “full-time” slave employee they want. So it’s back to building little frankenstien monsters of video broadcast technology… for a little while at least.

C.S. (Clive Staples) Lewis was born in Belfast, Ireland (1898). He said of his childhood, “I am a product …[of] books. There were books in the study, books in the drawing-room, books in the cloak room, books in a bedroom, books piled as high as my shoulder in the attic, books of all kinds reflecting every transient stage of my parents’ interests, books readable and unreadable, books suitable for a child and books most emphatically not. Nothing was forbidden me. In the seemingly endless rainy afternoons I took volume after volume from the shelves.”

…You can’t get a cup of tea big enough or a book long enough to suit me…

Lewis’s parents were Anglicans and took him to church as a boy, but he found religion cold and boring. He preferred pagan mythology: Irish, Norse, and Greek myths he read in storybooks. He created an imaginary country called “Boxen” and wrote stories about it. He said, “My early stories were an attempt to combine my two chief literary pleasures — ‘dressed animals’ and ‘knights in armour.’ As a result, I wrote about chivalrous mice and rabbits who rode out in complete mail to kill not giants but cats.”

He began teaching philosophy at Oxford, where he met J.R.R. Tolkien. Tolkien was a devout Christian and Lewis was an atheist, but they shared a love for mythology. They took a long walks around the Oxford grounds, debating the existence of God. Tolkien tried to persuade Lewis that the story of Jesus was a myth but that it had also actually happened.

The morning after one of those walks, Lewis went with his brother to the zoo. He said, “When we set out [for the zoo] I did not believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, and when we reached the zoo I did. Yet I had not exactly spent the journey in thought. Nor in great emotion.” He became the most prominent Christian apologist in the world. He recorded a series of lectures for radio, which were broadcast in England during World War II, and many people gathered around their radios to take comfort from his ideas in the midst of bombing raids. The lectures were collected into his book Mere Christianity (1952).

But he is best remembered for the seven books in the Chronicles of Narnia, which he started publishing in 1950. Lewis decided to write for children, even though he never had any children himself and had never had any strong relationships with children. He wanted to give children what he had gotten himself from fairytales when he was a child.

C.S. Lewis said, “You can’t get a cup of tea big enough or a book long enough to suit me.”

Remote Control Buddha

500 Channels, and still no enlightenment…

Riding Shotgun

When it comes to driving, I’m a driver. I’m pretty much the worst passenger You can imagine. I fidget, I fuss, I am generally a more curmudgeonly person than normal. Pain in the arse levels run high when I don’t have a steering wheel in front of me. Now couple this with a long car trip to my Father-in-Law’s house for diner, in my wife’s new car and her love of driving (not to mention skill) which far exceeds my own.

So a passenger I became. It wasn’t as bad as I thought. The tunes were good. I got to fiddle with the camera along the way, and by convincing myself that I was actually riding on a train, the fact that I wasn’t driving was OK… and I got to drive home.

On this day in 8 B.C., the Roman poet Horace died. He hated the chaos of Rome, and when his patron gave him a farm in the Italian countryside, he wrote,

“I prayed for this: a modest swatch of land
where I could garden, an ever-flowing spring
close by, and a small patch of woods above
the house. The gods gave all I asked and more.
I pray for nothing more, but
that these blessings last my life’s full term.””

It’s the birthday of cartoonist Charles Schulz, born in St. Paul, Minnesota (1922). He was the only son of a St. Paul barber, and the family was extremely poor. Schulz said, “We used to eat pancakes all the time because it’s all we could afford.”

…who never gets to kick the football…

He learned to love newspaper comics from his father, who’d only had a third-grade education but who bought six different newspapers every weekend and read all the comics with his son. Charles went on to create his own comic strip, Peanuts, which appeared for the first time on October 2, 1950, and went on to feature characters including Charlie Brown, his dog Snoopy, and his friends Lucy, Schroeder, Linus, and Sally.

What made Peanuts revolutionary was that instead of making the children cutesy pranksters, like most children in cartoons at the time, Schulz drew upon on his own childhood difficulties for material. Charlie Brown became the chronically depressed and unlucky child who never gets to kick the football, who always gets his kite stuck in the tree, and who never wins the love of The Little Red Haired Girl. Charlie Brown was the first character in an American comic strip to suffer anxiety and insecurity.

Holiday Baking

It’s surprising what you can do with a little butter, flour, sugar and a few chocolate chips. We are deep in the process of Christmas basket creation. Like Keebler Elves, we are rushing around the kitchen baking up a whirlwind of shortbreads and oatmeal.

The only thing left to chance, is exactly how many of the wee things actually make it into the tins… excuse me, I can’t keep typing with my mouth full.

Who Wakes You Up in the Morning?

The bond between humans and dogs goes back tens of thousands of years (assuming that your religion doesn’t tell you that 10,000 years of human existance is reight out too lunch, but humour me). Dogs are our companions, they are are helpers in the hunt and in the collection of stray farm animals such as sheep. They guard us. They Love us unconditionally.

In modern times, Humans have discovered a new use for the canine wonder. Dogs are extremely regimented in their day, and this can be harnassed to replace the need for an alarm clock. Clocks have to be set, the mechanical kind have to be wound up. A Dog on the other hand will be in your face each and every day at the same time, regardless of whether or not daylight savings is in effect with one thing on their brilliantly focused canine mind… “Get up. I have to pee and where’s my biscuit?”

It was on this day in 1889 that the jukebox made its debut at the Palais Royale Saloon in San Francisco. It consisted of an Edison Class M Electric Phonograph inside a freestanding oak cabinet to which were attached four stethoscope-like tubes. Each tube could be activated by depositing a coin so that four people could listen to a single recording at one time.

…made all that music available…

Eventually jukeboxes changed the music business. Many early radio programs refused to play country, blues, or jazz, so it was jukeboxes that made all that music available in taverns, restaurants, diners, and army bases.