Another refrigerator-cold night. Frost is sure to reach us soon. It's sticking in my mind that I owe somebody a book review other than the one I scheduled. Which book is that, do I have it, and where?
Christians
Found at the Mirror...No, I don't think this means every real Christian has to walk instead of driving, or walk in sandals, a long skirt, and a shawl and carry a mostly onamental stick. I do, but that's incidental to the Christian life, like Jesus' being a carpenter rather than, say, a bricklayer. But in a more general way, yes. Real Christians don't coast on "once saved, always saved" while behaving like the unsaved, as do some Baptists, nor do they place their hope of Heaven in emotional feelings into which they hypnotize themselves in meetings, as do some Pentecostals. Real Christians do not become "perfect" overnight, but they come to Jesus seeking a spiritual "walk," a discipline, that over the years transforms them into the image of Christ.
The Ten Commandments are a good place to start. It is possible to interpret them in a spiritual sense according to which we may still be tempted to break them, even after a long Christian life, but it is fairly easy to obey them in their plain literal sense. Real Christians do that much. If you place other "gods" before the Holy One, mistreat your parents, murder,steal, commit adultery and perjury, and so on, people can reasonably say that you are not a real Christian.
There is a church not far from me in which a man who has abundant incomes from many sources a few of which are even honest, whose god is Mammon, who certainly shortened the lives of his parents (and his brother, his sister, his wife, and their child, and other people), who habitually steals, who was married in a church that does not marry divorcees but is now said to have a son who was clearly bonrn before that marriage, who tells more lies than truth, and whose whole life seems to be defined by covetousness--where this evildoer gives money to the church, participates in self-hypnotic rituals, and may delude himself that he is finding forgiveness and drawing near to God. It is too much to be expected of the ministers in that kind of church--the small ones where ministers depend directly on donations to pay their bills--that they woud disllusion this evildoer; but someone certainly ought to do it.
Halloween
Some people believe they can communicate with their departed friends during this month-end (the last day of October and/or first day or first two days of November). This web site's not going to go there. Some people don't believe it's possible to communicate with the dead, but think Halloween is for childish fun and games. Others ask why so much of the fun and games has such an occult quality, why childish fun should involve "Devil's Night" instead of, say, "Bullies Night" or "Starving Feral Dog Pack Night" if the idea is to laugh at childish fears.
This web site proposes that people who don't want to take the occult themes seriously use this month to think about the virtue of courage, and what makes us feel the greatest need of it. This month's book reviews are about things that scare some people, including some things that are solidly in and of this world, though not to the extent of including politicians.
Music
Ludovico Einaudi.
Adrian von Ziegler.
Metallica. (Mad mix yet? Things get onto the to-listen-to list more or less as they come in...multiple links to the same musician/s get grouped together here.)
Sina Bathaie.
Hermanos Gutierrez.
The Kiffness with one of those cats whose "meow" has extra sounds in it....
Evanescence.
Black Angels.
Camel.
Patrick Watson.
Msddy Prior.
Tom Petty.
Disney.
Najee.
Neon Indian.
Nero.
New Order.
Next.
Nice & Wild.
Nina Simone.
Noel.
Nu Shooz.
The Animals.
Moon Alley.
Genesis.
ZZ Top.
J.J. Johansen.
Poems
Just plain silly. Sometimes I like that.
Technology
I've been waiting for three minutes for Windows 10 to display my file directory so I can find a document that's not open in Libre. (This is why I leave so many documents open in Libre.) I have a lot of documents stored on this laptop. Funnily enough, I have a lot of documents stored on the desktop computer beside it, which still has Windows ME, and that file directory opens in the time it takes my fingers to leave the CTRL and O keys. What are some of the ways you've noticed "the cloud" making routine processes take much longer on your computers, Gentle Readers?
Six minutes. It took me about three minutes to choose and type the words in the paragraph above.Six minutes and Windows 10 does not look much closer to finding that document than it was when I started.
Microsoft wants us to think "Oh, it's the hard drive making the laptop run slowly. Hard drives are 'old'. Must run out and buy a new tablet." Well, if we're writers we're not going to think that; those tablets do not support writing. They're for passive participants in the hivemind who want to receive constant messages from school friends and become so numbed by overstimulation that they won't even notice when Microsoft suppresses messages from their actual friends and substitutes a constant stream of commercial messages from the highest bidder. (To extroverts a body is a body; they don't really know their "friends" below the surface.) In any case, the lie we need to unpick is "The hard drive is making the laptop run slowly." Hard drives ran much faster than anything infested with Windows 10 before 2015. If you've kept a computer free from Windows 10, you've undoubtedly noticed that they still do. The cloud is making your newer computer run slowly. Microsoft trying to run your existing programs through the cloud is making them run slowly. We all need, if we've not already done it, to give Microsoft the boot.
If I hadn't been at the socially inconvenient stage of a glyphosate reaction, I would've been in the shop to get Linux today.
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