Late Night Haiku
IV.
Why do I doubt it?
Crickets at night do not worry.
God takes care of things.
V.
Snow falls gently down,
The roads like frozen slick ponds.
A night to stay in.
VI.
Joy comes to me now,
Like the soft snow to the ground.
God leads if you wait.
Dad Update
I'm off to bed and I haven't even read the comments here yet, but I wanted to mention that Dad had his gallbladder surgery today and it went very well. There were a number of potential major issues, so it is really a blessing that everything went so well.
I'll be back tomorrow.
Sunday Brunch: Singing in the Shower
Here is this week's brunch. Have yours in the comments.
1) Do you take baths or showers?
Baths with a quick rinse off afterwards.
2) Do you like the water super hot or just tepid?
Tepid is probably best, or if it is really chilly out side, perhaps a bit of a warm tepid. Super hot bath water just makes me feel like I'm being roasted rather than cleansed.
3) Do you use bath gel, bath crystals, bubble bath, or other scented stuff?
No.
4) What do you like to do when you take a bath shower?
Like Christopher, “lather, rinse, repeat.” Unlike Christopher, I don't “occasionally […] take a nap.” How does one take a nap in the shower?
5) What is your one item essential to a great bath?
Warm water.
CYOA I: Part 2.2: The Dakmoore Connection
Harrison County Detective Benjamin Herrick fiddled with his badge as FBI Special Agent Mark Stevenson briefed the department on the case. It had been one very long day, and it looked like it was only going to get longer. The patronizing attitude of the FBI only made it worse – just because he was a local detective didn’t mean he was less capable than Stevenson. He had worked on the Federal level but had resigned his post for a quiet job in a small town after being nearly killed by a bomb planted by the shadowy crime syndicate Variant Alliance.
“Jon Turner’s job at the IAEA gave him access to a lot of technology that many hostile nations would love to get their hands on,” Stevenson declared, while bringing up a PowerPoint of Turner’s job description. “By examining call logs over the last few months, we believe the temptation to sell knowledge of that technology overwhelmed Turner. We found that he had made calls to numerous embassies in Washington and to various foreign nationals scattered around the U.S. and Canada, some of whom we found in our database. We believe he was dealing primarily with Syria, but indirectly through third parties.”
“And you think his ‘clients’ then decided to take him and his family out?” Herrick was a bit skeptical. “If he was providing information to them, wouldn’t they want to keep him around?”
“It seems Mr. Turner started to get cold feet. We were able to crack several encrypted messages that had been caught by our surveillance systems over the past few weeks. Turner had initially insisted on only providing information about countries under IAEA surveillance, but apparently that was not what they really wanted; they wanted the technology.
“When they confronted Turner with their real desire, he started stalling. Apparently he didn’t mind hooking them up with our diplomatic enemies, but he did have some qualms about being directly involved in the transfer of several key schematics of advanced fission devices.
“This morning,” Stevenson continued, waving his hand in the air, “Turner received an e-mail telling him incentive for cooperation would occur today. It was two hours later —”
“When Mrs. Turner called dispatch,” Herrick questioned.
“Exactly. Once the Mid-County Fire Protection crew was able to extinguish the remnants of the house that were still burning, I did some investigation and found a wire tap on the phone line, just a few hundred feet from the house. When they intercepted her call and realized their effort might be found out, they activated a remote explosive device to silence her.”
“So where’s Jon Turner?”
“He’s missing, although we believe he has been kidnapped by the organization he was dealing with. Jon was in New York preparing a briefing at the UN for the secretary general at the time, and a camera outside of a Manhattan coffee shop shows someone with his likeness being charged at by two men in black and carried away.”
“Have you heard anything from Parkway Med’s ER concerning Mrs. Turner’s condition? Maybe she would know something more…” Herrick was interrupted by the secretary’s voice coming in over the intercom.
“There’s a Mr. Adams on the line that wants to talk to you, sir. Line one. He says it is urgent and concerns the Turner case.”
“Thanks, Maria,” Herrick replied. Herrick punched the blinking button on the phone as he glanced over at Stevenson and the agent gave him a knowing look. As soon as any crime like this one hits the media, everyone thinks they have an urgent scoop. “Herrick,” he said into the receiver in an annoyed tone.
“Mr. Herrick. Well, it is finally time for us to talk again. The pleasure, of course, is mine. We have Turner and his son and plan to use whatever means we can to get every bit of information we want from him. I think this is going to be a treat,” the voice that had talked to Riley responded.
“Dakmoore – if only I can see the day I never hear your filthy voice again.”
“Glad to see you still have your exquisite sense of pleasantries, Benny. Let me cut to the point. We want one hundred million dollars by noon tomorrow – no make that euros, you know, with the exchange rate and all.” Dakmoore chuckled for a moment. “Remember the good old Alliance days? Good days, Ben, good days – you almost had us before you resigned from the Bureau, not that you ever would have actually been able to put the remaining pieces together.” Dakmoore sounded amused.
“Get to your point,” Herrick interjected.
“I see you aren’t the reminiscing type, Ben. You need to quit being so rushed all the time. Well, as I was saying, one hundred million Euros by noon tomorrow or we will use the technology we’ve acquired in a big way. No tricks this time, Benjamin; you amuse me, but I won’t spare you if you get in the way.”
“Aren’t you being a little presumptuous in assuming that Turner will speak that soon?”
“Oh, tsk, tsk. You don’t really think we depend on only one contact, do you? I’m hurt that you would underestimate me, detective. We want Turner’s information for future ‘use,’ sure, but we’ve already obtained everything we need. Turner was too dumb to realize that the information he was left out might be filled in by a more cooperative underling.” The phone went dead.
What will you do? Tell Agent Stevenson the whole story and then go with him to fill Washington in about your knowledge of Dakmoore. (3.1) David continues the story with this option. Explain to Stevenson that it was really nothing, because you know that no one knows Dakmoore like you do and you can pursue this much better by yourself. (3.2) Christopher takes the story in this direction.
How to Continue CYOA
The first two people to comment here requesting to do so will get to continue the story on their blogs. Just pick which story direction suits you and run with it. Why not give it a try?
As Christopher explains on his blog entry about this, you will probably want to link backward to the previous part (or perhaps both previous parts) so that someone new can read the whole story. Also, it will be helpful if you title your piece with your option number, and likewise provide numbers to correspond with the options at the end of your segment of the story so that things continue in an easy to follow fashion.
Christopher has given permission for participants to “steal” his CYOA graphic (featured at the beginning of this piece), so you may want to include that in your entry for easy identification. Have fun!
Quote du Jour
— Jonathan Edwards, Narrative of Surprising Conversions
Turmoil
I feel like I've been in between decisions for months now. This week, I've started to try to clean things up and push toward tying up loose ends, but I still have way too many things up in the air. I know God is leading me somewhere, but I am just too dense to know where. Part of me thinks I just need to sit back and enjoy the ride for awhile, part of me think that His leading is to start being more proactive. What I fear is that I am too comfortable with the status quo and maybe that is part of the problem.
Edging Toward the Ninety/Ten
Over at OFB I've posted a new commentary that follows up a previous one on the need for desktop simplicity. The point, in short, is that Mac OS X fulfills the needs of the 90% of users who use only 10% of the features without alienating prosumers. This is done by wise interface choices. GNOME is trying to copy this and Firefox has already essentially copied this as well.
This time I tried to take a more conciliatory tone so that hopefully readers will focus on the need to accommodate the average user rather than my philosophical disagreements with the GUI design of KDE and OpenOffice.org. I do not believe KDE ought to be changed, but rather the community should see the need to throw support behind projects that do aim for the “90/10” feature set if it wishes to mainstream GNU/Linux desktops. So far response has been good; hopefully it will encourage more thinking on this topic. The article does not apply to just GNU/Linux, so give it a read if you want to hear my thoughts on UI design.
Challenge Set #7
Scoreboard
Kevin: 180 (up from 160 on January 28)
Christopher: 65
Flip: 60 (up from 45 on January 28)
Jason: 35
Josiah: 30
Eduardo: 20
Ed: 10
Chris (answering vicariously for his wife): 10
Christopher is losing ground to Flip again… this does not look good for the owner to the title of first recipient of asisaid points.
New Challenge Questions
1.) Who is saying this, in what and (if applicable) by whom? What's the irony to it? (5 pts.)
Give every man thy ear, but few thy voice; Take each man's censure, but reserve thy judgement.2.) Who is saying this, in what and (if applicable) by whom? (5 pts.)
Costly thy habit as thy purse can buy,
But not express'd in fancy; rich, not gaudy;
For the apparel oft proclaims the man;
And they in France of the best rank and station
Are of a most select and generous chief in that.
We have known times of sorrow, and hours of uncertainty, and days of victory. In all this history, even when we have disagreed, we have seen threads of purpose that unite us.
3.) Something in the last week gives Rick Warren, Chuck Colson and Dr. James Dobson something new in common. What is it? (5 pts.)
4.) Who was the one clergyman to sign the U.S. Constitution? What was his affiliation? (5 pts.)
5.) What are the two parts of AT&T, other than Baby Bells, that will be reunited if the SBC-AT&T merger is approved by regulatory agencies? What makes this merger such an interesting contrast to AT&T's 1998 acquisition of Tele-Communications Inc. (TCI)? (10 pts.)
A Statement on the State (of the Union)
I'm not feeling energetic enough to give Dubya a full review this year, but I'll just say he did an excellent job. Every year he gets better at presenting the State of the Union. I just wish I could have been there.
Our president laid out a confident, clear plan of what needs to happen in Iraq before we leave, the need to modernize social security, the need to vote on judges in the Senate and much more. Of course, he also threw in another nod toward lowering dependence on foreign oil, a push for the Marriage Protection (Constitutional) Amendment and acknowledgment of the need to protect life at every stage.
There was not anything surprising but it was good. It was much more of a nuts-and-bolts domestic issue kind of speech rather than the philosophical champion of freedom style of speech that we had two weeks ago at the Inauguration. That's not to say that Iraq did not get significant attention (or that there weren't some not so veiled threats went out to Syria and Iran), but that international issues were not the main focus of the speech. I expect the big discussion point in the coming days to be Social Security Privatization rather than the “Axis of Evil” or Iraqi Interim government plans, as the discussion went the last two years.
What did you think?
And By a Sleep to Say We End
Tonight has been rough. My one cat, a calico of just under thirteen years, died. She was struggling to breath this evening, and after being examined at the emergency animal clinic it was clear that something was pushing into the space of her lungs (perhaps fluids from congestive heart failure) and her one kidney was massively oversized. There was nothing to do other than to have her put to sleep (other than have her slowly suffocate over the next few hours).
She was never a real “people cat,” but after such a long time it is still odd to think that she won't be around any longer. Never running across the floor to the food bowl or laying peacefully under the table. While odd for me, I am sure it will be even more difficult for my other cat (just under 5 y/o), who will have to get use to spending his days alone without his “sister.” I'm not sure how he'll take it.
It isn't the worst tragedy in the world, but it still was painful. Cats quietly share a lot of one's life with a person. Now thirteen years worth of sharing is gone.
As a side note, I noticed that y'all responded to my Topics and Evanescence posts, but I haven't had a chance to look at the comments yet and I'm exhausted at the moment, but felt the need to post an entry before heading off to bed. I'll read and respond tomorrow.
