Never a Dull Moment

The place where I work sits adjacent to a diner on a major highway. There’s about ten feet of grass sloping downward toward the diner between our parking lot and theirs with 20-foot high metal lamp posts spaced evenly along this stretch of land. Employees for my company park in our lot facing the diner.

Today I spent a half-hour in my car, in the rain, eating my sandwich and reading about a dozen pages of Prelude to Foundation. I enjoy the solitude and peace and quiet from my normally very frenetic work environment. Ten minutes after I got back from lunch, however, I get a page to report to the receptionist’s desk. It appears a delivery box truck for the diner somehow struck one of the lamp posts dead-on, knocking it over onto the hood of my Impala, where it rolled over off the driver’s side and slammed into the car parked next to mine.

Our customer relations manager happened to be walking in the parking lot and heard the loud bang. She rushed to my car and spotted the driver of the truck running into the diner, leaving his vehicle idling loudly. She had the receptionist called 911 and the police arrived about ten minutes later after I and the co-worker who owned the car next to mine inspected the debris field.

The damage was a little worse than first glance, because the Impala is black and it was raining. But there is a foot-long dent in the front hood, red scratches from the post along the front of the hood, scratches and dents on the driver's side door post and mirror, and numerous hairline cracks running from the sides of my front windshield inward. My car was covered in shattered glass from the light post, which had come to rest like a pinball on the grass in front of the cars. Electrical wiring still connected to its shattered body and the concrete base served as a warning to us all to keep away from it.

The police came and took our information and eventually hunted down the dude in the truck. Don’t know his story – yet, but I should have the police report either by Friday or Monday. Then comes the long, tiresome business of getting the car fixed. There’s a body shop next to my company which does business with us and gives our employees breaks.

Oh! I have the whole thing caught on camera – cameras that monitor what goes on in our parking lots. My IT guy is going to burn a copy of it for me, so when I call truck driver’s insurance company, they know for certain they’ll be paying for repairs. It’s a crazy video – he must’ve hit the gas instead of the brake, because the truck accelerates over a curb, up five feet of incline grass, and smashes straight into the concrete base of the lamp.

Man, am I glad this day only comes about once every quadrennial!

NEVER A DULL MOMENT!!!

Wuzzup

I’ve reached the halfway point of Prelude to Foundation and guess what – the ancient Book our hero finds is somehow related to events on the planet Aurora – a.k.a. Dawn – linking this novel with last Saturday’s acquisition, The Robots of Dawn. Synchronicity alert! Synchronicity alert! May I present you the sound of a thousand Keanu Reeveses simultaneously going whoa in an echo chamber the size of my skull ...

The Thing – the remake of the remake – excuse me, the prequel to the remake – is on my agenda tonight. Very excited, because at the very worst it will be me and my pal watching SF. Me and my pal watching SF – bad or good – is still better than most things I can think of (except me and the wife watching SF). Especially when you toss in a bag of pistachios and a couple of beers! Look for my vivisection of the film in coming days ...

Why am I reading all this Civil War stuff ... why am I reading all this Civil War stuff ... why am I reading all this Civil War stuff ... well, I finally figured it out, but it’s kinda complex to fit into a three-sentence paragraph. May do a post about it in the near-future. I think it will be a worthy one, regardless of whether you find fascination in the four-year conflagration our nation underwent ...

It’s been five days now since one of us has been in the Emergency Room. Good sign, knock on wood or otherwise nearest woodlike surface. Got the bill from the plastic surgeon though - $1,600! That’s like a $9,600-an-hour labor rate! Works out to a $160 a stitch. Yikes! The wife’s submitting it to the insurance company, but I’m certain we’ll be paying something for this (in addition to the $100 emergency room co-pay) ...

Been thinking about the phrase-slash-cliché the devil you know is better than the devil you don’t. Not sure if it’s true or not or is. Might be worth a skewed and highly weirdous post. Maybe in in the next few days …

All right, nuff of this. Gotta cook my famous slammin’ salmon …

Psalm 8:5

May I just remind everyone how I hate “gender inclusive language”? Not from a misogynistic perspective mind you; I think women are wonderful. I firmly believe the tenet of my religion that holds a certain woman named Mary the mother of Jesus to be the most perfect human being to walk the earth.

No, my main objection is the ugliness and artificiality of “gender inclusive language.”

Case in point:

This Lent I’m slowly working my way through the Psalms. The two Bibles I’m using are the New American Bible (1970), still in my possession from my high school religion days, and the New Revised Standard Version, Catholic Edition (1989), a Christmas gift from my parents.

Guess which version never heard of “gender inclusion”?

Now, the NRSV-CE is normally a good, faithful, problem-free translation. I never had any “problems” with it, until I stumbled across something a few nights ago that made me shake my head at the tin-eared ineptitude of man. “Man,” in this case, referring to translators of either gender.

Psalm 8:5, NAB

“What is man that you should be mindful of him,
or the son of man that you should care for him?”

Psalm 8:5, NRSV-CE

“What are humans that you are mindful of them,
mere mortals that you care for them?”

Blech.

What is God, a Vulcan?

We are sacrificing beauty at the altar of political correctness.


[Though I see in a bit of internet searching that the NAB has been infected with “rampant liberalism”, though “modernism” as it was understood in the late 19th century, may be more to blame: Too tired to read it now, but perhaps I’ll give it a go at lunch tomorrow. I offer it here with the caveat that I have not read it so I may or may not agree with it.]