Harry's Ruminations

In sum, here's my problem:  I've joined a Baptist Church, but I'm no Baptist. In detail it goes like this: Baptists come from the Calvinist tradition.   You may have heard of "free will baptists."  These are not those. Calvinism is a very well reasoned Protestant doctrine based on Calvin's Institutes of the Christian Religion .  It further comes from the sole scrirptura  tradition of the Reformation, in that it solely derives from points in the canonical scriptures, especially the New Testament. There are 5 major points to Calvinism, encapsulated in the acronym TULIP . Total Depravity Unconditional Election Limited Atonement Irresistible Grace Persistence of the Saints When I queried the pastor, he reaffirmed he "believes in God's sovereignty," furthermore the sermon that same day had the theme that "God is the Author of History," leaning on the person of God as an omniscient and omnipotent active force in His creati...

"Kentucky makes great bourbon.  And apparently, good Software Engineers." Good stuff.

Things seem....bad. Offhand, enumerating the things that seem broken in my country right now: Our government isn't really functioning.  The Constitutional Republican Democracy of 1787 seems like a failure at scale. We're more tribal than we've been since segregation, a process that's accelerating. We're in unending, global guerrilla war against people willing to kill themselves for an idea incompatible with our existence as a nation. We have roughly one mass shooting per day.  Yesterday, there was one in Kentucky. We've lost our ability as a society to dream of something bigger: The moon, world peace, whatever.  That seems like a 1960's fever dream at this point. What can I do about any  of the above?   Nothing .   I mean, I guess I can argue with people on the internet about it, for all the good that does.   I could retain crushing anxiety about what might happen, much like when I was a kid having watched The...

So, 2017 is past. As luck would have it, we decided today would be a good day for midwinter cleaning, as I'm halfway through my 2 week stint off work.  I dug through a box I had from our move back in June, and within was my first Employee Evaluation from Amazon.  I got to look at what I thought would be my 2017 and got to compare it to what I actually accomplished. What an interesting idea.  So, let's do that for 2017. Here are some things I wanted to do in 2017.  These are not  New Year's Resolutions, but, meh. Get out of that Rental.   We were paying 2k / month for a rather crappy rental with little insulation.  It leaked air like a sieve, had a back yard full of fire ant mounds, and had a proprty management company with all the integrity of your average Nixon advisor.  Status:  Achieved . We were out by June 30th. Get out of Austin .  I like Austin.  Sort of.  I dislike the concrete and traffic, but it's a place wi...

After a brief spate of car fever, I did some research on (say) a Chevy Cruze Diesel or a Chevy Volt.  What with the recent flooding in Houston, I convinced myself that buying used might be a bad idea, so I decided to check out incentives and options out there. The short version: Math doesn't lie. Let's say you finance a $30,000 at 0% interest for 5 years.  That's 60 months, so the math's rather obvious: $30,000 / 60 == $500 / month. Ouch. The reality is, like a good Dave Ramsey acolyte, I'll likely be buying used again.  I haven't bought a new car since 2004, and one can generally save thousands / tens of thousands of dollars that way.

My friend Dannah (Russell) Jones died this past Friday morning , after collapsing following exercise the night before.  She was thirty-eight years old. I met Dannah when we were freshmen at Georgetown College in 1997.  She was a self-proclaimed "military brat" lately of Dayton, Ohio.  She had a spark of life, humor, and intelligence.  She made some friends, but she wasn't a "joiner."  If Dannah didn't like you, you'd know about it. That entire freshmen year, Dannah and her roommate Crystal hung out often with me and my roommate Charlie.  We'd knock around the greater Lexington, KY area in her Hyundai Accent 2-door hatchback, Charlie and I smashed into the back seat.  The first (and only) time I ever saw Titanic  we went in her car. As people do, we parted ways.  I decided to bury my heart in work, where it would stay for the next 15 years and Dannah apparently went to to a career at NASA and other concerns in Alabama. She loved her...

Much as it takes a symphony in multiple movements to fully exercise an orchestra, Edgar Wright's  Baby Driver  fully exercises film as a systemic input to your brainstem. I left exhausted, happy, and eager to see it again. Act I, Take Me Away! Act 1 is Wright's original concept writ large: "Baby" is a getaway driver, and we see a contender for the best getaway scene in film set perfectly to a soundtrack. This is the overture, the who, what, and where. There's almost no dialog--just searing "wow....Wow....WOW!!!!!" Then from that allegro, an adagio: A minutes-long scene shot as a SINGLE FOLLOWING SHOT with lyrics from a song visually embedded throughout.  Once my brain got it , it was this surreal joy, all from an unassuming kid going for coffee down a street. Per IMDB, this shot took 28 takes to get, and it seems a miracle it took that few. Act 1 closes with the divvying up of the money, the thieves going their separate ways, with John H...