Harry's Ruminations

Happy Father's day to all the men out there. As I sat in Church today, I was taken back to February 10th , to a particular moment I'd like to share. * * * The operation was over. Maria was fine--pink, healthy, and squalling. Whitney was holding up well; I hated to leave her, but I wanted to stay with the baby in her first minutes of life. I gazed upon her as she got her first examinations; the pediatrician said she was fine, with a nice twinkle in her eyes. I guess they could ID the noobies (never had a baby before) dads. My relief was like another person in the room...I wish I'd had a mirror to look into so I could say, "She's gonna be okay." This was the moment I came back to in church today, this moment of relief, of the battle being over. That day, the feeling broke over me like a wave, and I excused myself. I went back to the room, snuck into the bathroom and sobbed like a baby. I've never felt smaller, more powerless in my life. Good when God...

Blue People Yes, this is an article in Pravda (the former Soviet newspaper) about the blue Fugates from Troublesome Creek, on the border between Breathitt and Perry counties. Fun times.

Gary Sinise's 1992 remake of the John Steinbeck novel Of Mice and Men was long and boring, but strangely compeling. Sinise plays George, a migrant worker in Californa during the Great Depression. George is joined at the hip to a giant named Lennie Smalls, played by John Malkovich. As the movie opens, we see Lennie and George fleeing from a posse, George has done some very bad thing, and they had to get away, hiding among the reeds in a creek to throw off the bloodhounds. From there, the story revolves around them as they seek work at a Barley farm, doing hard manual labor as they desperately try to stay out of trouble. Like many Steinbeck pieces, and like the Robert Burns poem "To A Mouse" on which the story is based, at its center this is a universal story told through simple (almost parable-like themes). For instance, an old man has a very old dog that that the bunkhouse agrees should be put out of its misery. The dog suffers through each day, but its the old man...

From my pal Chris Cool (yes, that is his real name...). His band EYESUPONUS is playing Icthus this weekend Thanks to all your support and all your votes, we will be playing the Ichthus Festival in Wilmore, KY this weekend! The festival is Thursday 14th - Saturday 16th. There are three stages: the main stage, the Deep End stage, and the Edge stage. We are scheduled to play Saturday at 3:40 pm on The Edge stage. If you are at the festival, please come and hang out with us for our 25-minute set. We wouldn't be here if it weren't for you all, and EYESUPONUS truly appreciates the love and support we have gotten throughout this entire process. I hope to see as many of you there as possible. Props to a man who's known adversity, given it all up to the Lord, and praises him through his extreme talent for music.

Just downloaded the public Windows beta of Safari from here , and I must say I'm impressed... It's really fast, and it automatically imported my Firefox bookmarks. Guess this is apple's plan, eat Windows from the inside out :-)

My daughter is now 14 lbs, 10 oz, and 25 inches long, and 4 months old. Back to your regularly scheduled ranting.

Our church Wednesday night group is reading Making Room for Life . The book extols simple living , but not in the systematic, hair-shirted way others have. Instead, it takes some biblical principles as axioms and wraps modern problems around them. The main axiom is the "Hebrew Day", which you could also rename the "Agrarian Day". That is, a daily schedule defined, as its name implies, by daylight and darkness--daylight is for productive work, darkness is for rest and individual/communal recuperation. Frazee treats his subject matter like most self-help books do: He analyzes the problems of modern life, then proposes a cure, then proceeds to show how that cure can fit many problems. Frazee's problem is the death of community, which he postulates people need to survive. He does a very poor job of proving his postulation, but I'll let that slide--it's almost self-evident that people need other people. We're social creatures, even if you won...