After playing with my new test version of the mini iPhone, I use the embedded phone in my ear canal and my new iGlasses to talk with my friends while using gesture control to play hike-n-seek chase games with my friends across a series of apps — how long will it take you to tag me when I’m online as one of my avatars?
Catch me if you can!
Therefore, by conclusion, violence is positively good for us!
On what you focus is who you are:
Welcome to 2013, U.S. citizens — my wife and I have figured out the government’s taking an additional $100 per week from our takehome pay this year compared to 2012.
Our best wishes for recovery to former U.S. President George H. W. Bush, the only winning person I cast a vote for chief executive because a former CIA director calling for a kinder, gentler America sounds appealing in perspective.
Leave it to my neighbours to make Friday nights exciting.
Just over the hill from my house, a man died in front of his house, presumably shot gang-style while trying to drive away in his car.
At least, we think, Tiger Woods was luckier — a golf club is potentially a lot less deadly at long range than a gun!!!
A good storyteller gives readers what they want, but not always in the order they expect.
For instance, I walked up to the microwave oven just now and saw a little credit-card sized pocketable inspirational note that has sat there for I don’t know how long and I never really paid much attention to it until today.
What did it say? Basically, this:
Jeremiah 29:11-13 [New International Version (NIV)]
11 For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the Lord, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future. 12 Then you will call on me and come and pray to me, and I will listen to you. 13 You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart.
My wife and I don’t keep a household where Bible verses are stamped onto various forms and shapes, hung on the walls, in hallways and nailed onto doors.
However, we have received a few and given/regifted a few as presents to friends and family through the years.
I am one of those people who don’t read the Bible every minute of the day but I do have access to electronic copies, physical books and enough tomes like “Social Aspects of Early Christianity” to keep me as occupied on the subject of religious writing as I desire.
We even have a copy or two of church hymnals containing the song, “Onward, Christian Soldiers.”
In this parallel storyline, I contemplate two storylines, one in which our species goes to war with itself on a massive scale, using weapons that have never seen battle, millions wiped out in wave after wave of clashes, turning peaceful boroughs all over the planet into scarred battlefields, no place safe; the second in which we continue the merging of multiple subcultures, every situation a win-win one, where we as a species, though in constant disagreement about the details, work out the general outline for thousands of years of thriving, prospering, voluntarily sharing our wealth with each other, reaching out beyond the solar system as our technology progresses sufficiently for low-risk exploration of the cosmos.
Always, always, always, taking into account the benefits and positive contributions of every language, every person, every subculture, no matter what is going on, good or bad, in global socioeconomic headlines.
I am tired of monitoring drug wars, billionaire backyard brawls and political detente for profittaking’s sake.
I am a man in the latter decades of his life who wants to see us, as a species, specific subculture(s) less important, establishing colonies of living beings on nonEarth celestial bodies.
If I end up in one of those colonies, I would feel most comfortable with aspects of my subcultural upbringing brought along.
If someone else ends up in one of the colonies instead of me, I know that person would feel most comfortable with aspects of familiar subcultural upbringing(s) brought along, too.
No matter where the colonies are built and who occupies them, it’s a success for our species and for Earth, especially for those subcultures that look past petty quarrels and set their sights far into the future.
Thirteen point six three five 1,000-day increments to go until we complete one of the major steps.
Over the past couple of years, I have met with people who’ve asked me to reconsider the subcultural training of my youth in what I see as an attempt to keep me in the fold or bring me back in, depending on their views.
I met my wife at a summer church camp when we were 12, we married in her hometown church when we were 24 and, 26+ years later, we’re still married so I haven’t cut ties from my childhood subculture in any hard, abrupt, total sense.
Over the New Year’s Day extended holiday weekend, a good friend, medical doctor by trade, who with colleagues bought a primary school for a church congregation that has expanded from a few people to over 2000 since 2009, loaned me the following books to read:
Before I read them, I shall provide for myself and the reader a snippet of a review of each book.
For recent Christmas gifts, I received two other books:
I contemplate my individual future, compare it to our species’ future, determine where we share goals and plot a true course that benefits us both.
Two data points for the day:
treetrunkdings 