Eclectic Amateur

Went with the whole family last Sunday to the open-air service and picnic afterwards at our old parish, St. Martha’s on Joy Road in Detroit.

While it was good to see the old place again, and to catch up with family and friends, it was a bit unsettling at the same time. On the grounds of St. Martha’s, everything is mostly the same. The signs of physical decay are subtle — a large tree fallen from some storm, and obviously not dealt with for some time. Grass starting to grow in the cracks of the sidewalks and parking lot. The cement chips from the crumbling in the east entrance that nobody ever uses any more (and that have been there for years now anyway). The furniture on the sidewalk from the tenant they had to evict from the old rectory, and knowlege that the deadbeat S.O.B. has left the church with a remodelling bill they can’t possibly afford to pay.

Nothing much, really. Certainly not compared to the blight that is the surrounding neighborhood. That’s pretty much the same as it was, too. Oh, a couple of the storefront churches have new paint jobs, some more buildings are empty, a few have changed hands, the usual. The sign by the open field at Southfield and Joy is by now a cruel joke — this is where the Herman Gardens housing project used to be. Now, there’s grass, and the tall trees that used to line the streets are still standing. That, and the “Herman Gardens Revitalization Project — Coming Soon” sign behind the fence that’s been there since the demolishion back in 1996 or so. (See this Freep article for some of the story behind the housing project delay. Meanwhile, I wonder what happened to the people living there when they decided to tear it down and (not) start over.)

I found an image of the old project apartments titled Row Houses at Herman Gardens. This is pretty much how I remember them:

The other signs were not encouraging, either. Some of the old regulars are still there (but so few, so few!). Some of the little kids I remember are now unrecognizable teenagers. The numbers are still depressingly low; there are not nearly enough in this parish to support such a facility, especially given the age of many. The most hopeful sign was to see that there had been Vacation Bible School that week, and to learn that the Sunday School was still operating.

There was mention of the current controvery which is fully expected to consume the General
Convention starting tomorrow, other than a generic prayer for wisdom and unity which studiously avoiding any appearance of taking sides. Whatever. I could not help but wonder how St. Martha’s could possibly survive if there is a general implosion of the Anglican
Communion in general, and the Episcopal Church in particular, this year if the advice
of the Archbishop of Canterbury is not heeded and the General Convention insists on triggering full-scale schism in the church. (So much for “dialog”. Or respecting the opinions of the Africans.)

Remember that tree I mentioned? Its fall has left a gap in the windbreak on the east side of the church grounds. Now that it’s gone, the minaret of the next-door Islamic Center of America
is clearly visible, looming over the parking lot:

It was not a hopeful omen.

(Images of St. Martha’s and the Islamic Center are from DetroitYES – The Fabulous Ruins of
Detroit, a wonderful and heartbreaking site.)

Don’t try to FUD IBM, they probably have the patent

Don Marti has an excellent idea:

for the current SCO vs. IBM dispute over Linux, make sure every

link to SCO actually references <a

href=”http://sco.iwethey.org/”>http://sco.iwethey.org/, which

contains a metric slew of information on Unix, SCO, IBM, and the

assorted cast of characters.

This should help bump up the Googlejuice of some actual data on the

whole SNAFU, rather than just the SCO corporate spin.

My tiny resume of free software contributions improves by one mote:

http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-announce-list/2003-June/msg00031.html

Victor Lams, Twisted Genius

I decided to take Victor

Lams up on his offer to create a customized “<a

href=”http://www.victorlams.com/blogtones”>BlogTone” for

Eclectic Amateur.

Here’s what I got:

“Eclectic Amateur ‘BlogTone in .rm format”

Victor, I don’t get it. I like it, but I don’t get it.

A Dilemma for the Politically Correct

Same-sex marriage ‘alien to us,’ Inuit tell Commons committee.

They oppose same-sex marriage, so they must be troglodytes.

Oh, but they’re Inuit, opposing the imposition of white society’s

values on their traditional ways, so they must be heroes.

Heh.

Sadly, the people who should be bothered by this are experts

at maintaining contradictions inside their heads without their brains

exploding, so I don’t expect any light bulbs to come on.

(Story via MCJ.)

Answer: “No, David, that’s what a tornado looks like.” Followed by

“Kids! To the basement, now!“

Happily, it was a not-quite-a-tornado. We got a very nice closeup
(does a mile count as “close” for this? I think so) of a funnel cloud
just hanging down toward the ground. But it wasn’t spinning,
so I guess it doesn’t count as a tornado. I think. I’ll see if the
National Weather Service agrees with me.

Update: According to the paper, it was a “wall cloud”, not a tornado.
It was still impressive.

Light Blogging

Real Life™ is just too frantic to support much blogging these

days.

Rest assured, I’m still opinionated.

Just tired.

Business Saavy

Business 2.0 has again come out

with their list of the year’s

101 Dumbest Moments in Business. Read it if you want to either

• Have a great laugh.
  

• Weep at the state of American business “smarts”.
  

Gone To The Dogs

… or, why I oppose genetic engineering:

I’m a big fan of the German Shepherd. It’s not my all-time favorite

breed, but it’s a good one. My wife’s aunt has a beautiful

silver-black female born the same day as my oldest son, on my father’s

farm. You just can’t beat karma like that.

Now, the German Shepherd has always been, to my mind, a

practical breed. From its name, it has a honorable

history of working the fields, and of course in modern times it has

done fine duty in police work.

So, now I learn that the lords of the AKC have decided that

“practical” is out and “abstract geometric styling” is in. Never mind

that man and animals might actually work together. Never mind that

the new show lines cause the animals to have their hips fail, causing

them great pain in later life. No, it’s all about The Look™.

For real German Shepherds (the classic dog), look <a

href=”http://www.olderhill.co.za/main.html”>here.

For the crippled look, see <a

href=”http://www.gsdhelpline.com/anneb.htm”>here and <a

href=”http://www.classypets.com/breeds/breed-info-german-shepherd.html”>

here.

Now, if we can screw up this badly just with dogs and traditional

breeding techniques, do you really think we should trust the

cloners and genetic engineers not to help us muck things up even more

radically?

Over on Mark’s blog a few weeks ago, there was some fun when a fundamentalist atheist troll by the name of “Jon Peters” came flaming along.   (Conversation rescued from Haloscan)

The physical resurrection of Jesus Christ, if it were true, would violate numerous scientific laws and principles.
— Jon Peters

Jon,

Reality trumps “numerous scientific laws and principles.” If it happened, it happened — regardless of whether there’s a scientific model for it. Data precedes theory, at least in good (and rational) science.

Mark is entirely correct — the ancients did not have to have derived relativity and be versed in double-blind experiments to know fundamentally that dead men do not walk again. (Any more than they needed knowledge of microbiology to know that virgins do not, in the general course of events, conceive — at least while remaining virgins.)

G. K. Chesterton says it better than I would:

But my belief that miracles have happened in human history is not a mystical belief at all; I believe in them upon human evidences as I do in the discovery of America. Upon this point there is a simple logical fact that only requires to be stated and cleared up. Somehow or other an extraordinary idea has arisen that the disbelievers in miracles consider them coldly and fairly, while believers in miracles accept them only in connection with some dogma. The fact is quite the other way. The believers in miracles accept them (rightly or wrongly) because they have evidence for them. The disbelievers in miracles deny them (rightly or wrongly) because they have a doctrine against them. The open, obvious, democratic thing is to believe an old apple-woman when she bears testimony to a miracle, just as you believe an old apple-woman when she bears testimony to a murder. The plain, popular course is to trust the peasant’s word about the ghost exactly as far as you trust the peasant’s word about the landlord. Being a peasant he will probably have a great deal of healthy agnosticism about both. Still you could fill the British Museum with evidence uttered by the peasant, and given in favour of the ghost. If it comes to human testimony there is a choking cataract of human testimony in favour of the supernatural. If you reject it, you can only mean one of two things. You reject the peasant’s story about the ghost either because the man is a peasant or because the story is a ghost story. That is, you either deny the main principle of democracy, or you affirm the main principle of materialism — the abstract impossibility of miracle. You have a perfect right to do so; but in that case you are the dogmatist. It is we Christians who accept all actual evidence — it is you rationalists who refuse actual evidence being constrained to do so by your creed. But I am not constrained by any creed in the matter, and looking impartially into certain miracles of mediaeval and modern times, I have come to the conclusion that they occurred. All argument against these plain facts is always argument in a circle. If I say, “Mediaeval documents attest certain miracles as much as they attest certain battles,” they answer, “But mediaevals were superstitious”; if I want to know in what they were superstitious, the only ultimate answer is that they believed in the miracles. If I say “a peasant saw a ghost,” I am told, “But peasants are so credulous.” If I ask, “Why credulous?” the only answer is — that they see ghosts. Iceland is impossible because only stupid sailors have seen it; and the sailors are only stupid because they say they have seen Iceland.

— G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

Jon, undaunted, continued on, ignoring my wit (and worse, GKC’s) but lecturing one and all on rationality and science. This counted as a bad move, especially because a number of readers actually are familiar with the findings of modern science — unlike Jon himself, who let loose with this howler:

Thomas:

Prove that there is a privileged frame of reference using modern science,

I just did. The masses of the two bodies are not equal. Thus, their relative motion is not equal. Thus, the earth orbits the sun. The sun does not orbit the earth.

Jon Peters

And my amused (and probably less than charitable) reply:

I am stunned.

I was already amazed to see such a prime specimen of 19th-century Scientific Triumphalism™ in full plumage here at the beginning of the post-post-modern 21st century.

But now, I find that Jon actually believes in ether!

A rare find! Someone call H. G. Wells, his time machine has been stolen!

Hint: Try googling for Michelson Morley. It’s pretty cutting edge stuff, the data was only collected in 1887. Kind of fringe too, it only got Michelson the first Nobel in science to be awarded to an American.

For extra credit, try reading up on “photoelectic effect” and “special relativity” — especially the part about “no priviledged frame of reference.”

(I always knew freshman chemistry would be good for something. I just didn’t it would be this …)

Sheesh.