April 2005

Letter from Thomas Jefferson to Peter Carr; Paris, Aug. 10, 1787:

Your reason is now mature enough to examine this object. In the first place divest yourself of all bias in favour of novelty & singularity of opinion. Indulge them in any other subject rather than that of religion. It is too important, & the consequences of error may be too serious. On the other hand shake off all the fears & servile prejudices under which weak minds are servilely crouched. Fix reason firmly in her seat, and call to her tribunal every fact, every opinion. Question with boldness even the existence of a god; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, than that of blindfolded fear. You will naturally examine first the religion of your own country. Read the bible then, as you would read Livy or Tacitus. The facts which are within the ordinary course of nature you will believe on the authority of the writer, as you do those of the same kind in Livy & Tacitus. The testimony of the writer weighs in their favor in one scale, and their not being against the laws of nature does not weigh against them. But those facts in the bible which contradict the laws of nature, must be examined with more care, and under a variety of faces. Here you must recur to the pretensions of the writer to inspiration from god. Examine upon what evidence his pretensions are founded, and whether that evidence is so strong as that its falsehood would be more improbable than a change in the laws of nature in the case he relates.

The source I cite does not capitalize “god,” but those who cite this quote often capitalize the “G,” as in “God”—despite the subject matter of the quote, whose unflinching rationalism is considering the question of even the existence of a capital-G “God.”

Thomas Jefferson remains a hero of mine.

So tomorrow, Bas and I will be seeing a vet here in Simi about a “Health Certificate” as he will be egressing Simi Valley and be bound for the climes of Virginia within the week.

He’s flying off to live with my parents, who are sans-pet at the moment with the loss of Ferris, a cat documented in this charcoal drawing of mine from 1988. Ferris was a she, and was extremely long-lived.

Another aspect of having all my stuff back is that the Comics For Sale are actually available for Sale. Including some excellent copies of Frank Miller’s Sin City work, currently the vogue because of the film of the same name.

In the past 2 months I’ve had to put some people off for a while because the comics were all in storage. They’re all for sale again!

Fun diversion! Sightseeing San Diego with Google Maps

(Yeah, sometimes I still post to San Diego Blog).

Whew.

Good weekend, tiring though.

My feet hurt. Right pinkie toe was stubbed and had a chunk rip out on the murphy bed in the apartment which we are completely out of now.

This morning I pulled the last items out of the storage where our stuff was.

This house is nice. Big. We have a lawn.

Made toast for Leah this morning. Shelled some hard boiled eggs too. We shared.

Bas (our cat) is here for a week while we make arrangements for his transport to Virginia. He loves having a house to run around in. A little too much. At 3am he was running up and down the stairs and waking up Leah. He’ll chill out.

Our landlord has Koi, so even though he’s against pets for us, he’s cutting us some slack for a week. We like him more and more with every interaction.

Kitchen half contact-papered. Still messy, but cleaner messy.

The kids have rooms! They have two homes now. For real. That’s awesome.

Leah commuted to work this morning. Got there not too slow from the email I just recieved. Leah is a wonderful partner and I hope to be as much a partner to her as she is to me. I love her so much.

Did I mention I love having my music back? Yesterday it was Mazzy Star and Beck. Nice.

8:30am. I start working at 9am.

I even did some programming over the weekend on a client of Leah’s and mine. Old school ASP/MS Access work. Dude: Server.HTMLEncode() does not work on a null returned in a RecordSet object. Check for a null using isNull() first.

We have a lot of paintings and pictures. We need to put some up, and soon. These walls are way to bare right now.

The cat is walking on me now.

Just changed the title of this entry. Web405 is talking about culture, and Cole Porter. American culture is a vast sky and has some pretty bright stars in it.

Okay, I’m gonna do some kitchen stuff before work. Later taters.

on-word!

This page (via bb): Science Fiction/Fantasy Authors of Various Faiths is intriguing to me. Sort of… something I had never considered before, you know?

Sadly, it does not list my favorites: Neal Stephenson, Bruce Sterling, or William Gibson.

Correction from Preston Hunter:

Science Fiction Writers of Various Faiths is the SECOND page, like the overflow page.

http://www.adherents.com/lit/sf_other.html

It links to this page:

http://www.adherents.com/adh_sf.html

which does indeed include at least one of your favorites: William Gibson.

Thanks for the correction, Preston!

Oh man. It’s so nice to get my “mothership” computer—the G4 Mac, back into the mix. So, so, so nice.

Perhaps the nicest perk is that I get to play my music collection. I’ve missed listening to: They Might Be Giants (271 songs, 9:57:48 total time); Frank Zappa (955 Songs, 2:22:45:15 total time)*; and Stew/The Negro Problem (112 Songs, 8:04:29 total time).

* That’s two full days, 22 hours, 45 minutes, and 15 seconds playing time if I wanted to listen to all my Zappa at one time.

A pal-o-mine on IM was telling me about new stringent management at his work. It reminded me of a favorite Empire Strikes Back moment:

[Darth Vader has just learned that Admiral Ozzel’s big blunder, and activates a viewscreen]
Admiral Ozzel: [appearing onscreen with Captain Piett] Lord Vader, the fleet has moved out of lightspeed and we’re preparing to – [Ozzel stops, and suddenly begins to choke, clutching at his throat]
Darth Vader: You have failed me for the last time, Admiral. Captain Piett?
Piett: Yes, my lord?
Darth Vader: Make ready to land our troops beyond their energy field, and deploy the fleet, so that nothing gets off the system.
[beside Piett, Admiral Ozzel utters one last strangled gasp, and falls over dead]
Darth Vader: You are in command now, Admiral Piett.
Piett: Thank you, Lord Vader.

I have Star Wars on the brain lately.

I am posting this from the newly-installed wireless connection linked to the Adelphia cable modem here at the new home in Simi Valley. Worked from here all day, oddly enough, as this is a pretty nice neighborhood and there is WiFi about.

Nice to be letter-of-the-law legal though. :-)

Tonight Bruce Sterling is speaking at Art Center and I may go. But there’s so much else to do.

We’ll see…

Joe

We have a new address, very nearly. It’s in Simi Valley.

I am sore and hurting from moving.

The storage space we have we are nearly out of. We just have a few books, some paintings with glass, and a cat tree in there now. radness.

The new house is nearly ready for us. We’ll be staying there regular when we do some more cleaning and the previous tenant is 100% out of the house (he still has some crap in the garage and a closet).

We have a yard! Nice one too.

Area is good for walking. Very scenic.

Good space for office, for kids, for books, for parties.

It’s on a cul-de-sac. Bonus!

It’s a few minutes from the Reagan Presidential Library. Come visit and enjoy the Gipper too!

We still need a fridge. Next week. We are budgeting ourselves, and coolers work for a while.

Dev, my stepson, can play Tetris with boxes in a moving like nobody’s business. He earned the TI-82 Plus calculator which was the prize he’s been looking for.

My boys enjoyed watching the old TV version of Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy very much. They were hypnotized by it, despite the BBC erudite feel of the thing.

It was a good but hard weekend. More to come too.

That’s the update.

Did I mention that I’m sore? I still am.