…this bummed me out more than anything else today.

I opened up a yogurt. Underneath the lid it said, “Please try again,” because they were having a contest that I was not aware of. I thought maybe I had opened the yogurt wrong. Or maybe Yoplait was trying to inspire me. “Come on Mitchell, don’t give up!” An inspirational message from your friends at Yoplait. Fruit on the bottom, hope on top.

Alcoholism is the only disease you can get yelled at for having.

The first time I saw Mitch Hedberg was on some late night Comedy Central thing and he completely caught me off guard with his absurdity. He was like Stephen Wright’s twisted cousin.

More over at MTV. The official site has a message from his family. Those two links from Goldstein.

Late March, April and May are, with all votes counted, the hands-down winner for loveliest time of year in South Texas and the Hill Country: the temperatures are mild and temperate and the rains are frequent enough to turn everything green… or all of that which is not in multi-colored and glorious bloom. The redbud trees are covered with blossoms that are actually not really red, but more of a very dark fuchsia-pink, and there is an ornamental pear or almond tree in the front yard of a house at the top of the street which has been veiled in pure white blooms for the last two weeks. The weeping willows were the first to put on new, delicate green leaves, followed by the ubiquitous Arizona “trash” trees.

In my garden, the new leaves on the mulberry tree have grown to the size of a small child’s hand in the last three or four days, while the wisteria has put forth mightily during the same time. I neglected pruning the wisteria this fall, so it there are not as many bunches of pale violet blooms this year as last, but the Spanish jasmine vine on the back porch is covered with little star-white clusters. In the morning and the late afternoon the scent of the jasmine hangs thick and sweet, mingled with that of the almond verbena’s almost invisible bracts. The bees bustle around waxy clusters of blossom on the dwarf Meyer lemon and lime trees, while Bubba-from-down-the-road lounges on the sun-warmed stones of the path after having eaten his fill. The most recent cat, who for my purposes is nick-named Parfait, is more interested in the flutter of birds around the feeders hanging from a branch of the mulberry tree, and crouches alertly in the untrimmed winter-ryegrass. Parfait, alas, has no hope of ever catching a bird, since he cannot keep his tail from twitching…. And they are well out of his reach anyway.

(Wisteria in bloom, in my garden)

There is a mad rustle of wings, and much excited twittering in the vicinity of three hanging feeders, around sunrise and sunset, but the birdsong is accompanied these days by the constant tap of hammers driving nails into wood, coming from the roof of a house just down the street. I think of the sudden hailstorm three weeks ago as the “Spring Creek Roofing & General Contracting Full Employment Act of 2005”, for every house in the development needs a new roof; if not now, within six months or a year when the damaged asphalt tiles being to leak water into the house. Lawn signs for seven or eight local companies are sprouting in lawns, three or four in a row sometimes.

Three or four houses already have their new roofs complete, the same number are in progress. It is a hazard in the morning sometimes, dodging a small dump truck, or a pickup truck towing a trailer full of new roofing felt and shingles, or carrying away the ruined waste of the old. The nearest roof-in-progress is five doors away from mine, next to the home of the roofing contractor himself; his own roof is as damaged as anyone else’s, but he figures have his crew do his neighbors’ first. I am waiting for his estimate on mine, and will probably accept it. He has been a fairly good neighbor— although Judy, who is a soft touch for animals— thinks he leaves his dog alone too long during the day. Of the houses along my block, two-thirds of them are the homes of single women, or single parents, but Texas is one of the places where chivalry is not yet on life-support. For a woman to develop sudden car trouble, or house trouble, or even be wrestling with an outsized burden in a public place is to suddenly have any number of rescuers, striding forth with a confident manly swagger, and a John Wayne-ish growl of “Hey, little lady, let me take care of that for you!” The roofing-contractor neighbor is just that sort— he’ll do us right, I am sure. And in the meantime, the garden is in bloom.

At 9:05 AM, ET, this morning, Terri Schiavo stepped into eternity, ending a long and heart-rending struggle by her parents to keep her alive. Her father, brother, and sister were in the room with her until about ten minutes before she died, when they were told to leave. It is not known where her husband was, no one has reported seeing him today, so it is possible that she died alone.

Schiavo’s case touched off a national debate when Judge George Greer ordered her feeding tube removed two weeks ago. People, from the President and the Florida governor, to the congress and the Florida legislature, got involved, and controversy has been strong on all sides. Whether or not one agrees with the decision of congress and the president, it is somewhat comforting to know that they were moved by the sadness of the situation, and that they cared enough about this one person to attempt lifesaving measures. It makes me believe that they would have cared had it been me, all legal arguments aside.

We have to be careful at this juncture, that we as a nation do not become a culture that places no value on disable persons, and that we make the proper moves to protect the lives of innocent people. After all, it is chilling to remember that the Nazi culture in Germany started out with killing the disabled and less-valued members of their society. I plead that we not start down that road! We must review our laws, and changes must be made to protect the lives of those who cannot speak for themselves. The strongest among us must dedicate ourselves to speaking for the weakest, for the preservation of precious life that only God can give.

Whatever our individual views, we must join the bereaved family in mourning the loss of Terri, and pray for their peace and strength.

Remember the old joke about the definition of the phrase “split second” being the time between the light turning green and the guy in back of you beeping his horn?
Well, the new definition is me, reading this in a e-mail

“I am the chairman of the contract award committee of the petroluem and
natural resources ministry here in Nigeria…”

And hitting the “delete” key.

(Actually, just seeing the word “Nigeria” triggers the delete reflex for most people.)

Springsteen’s new album and single are titled Devils & Dust. You can hear the track over AOL Music or if you’ve got iTunes you can download it for 99 cents. I did that because I’m trying to get a feel for it to see if I’m going to buy the album/DVD combination.

Once upon a time it would have gone without question that I’d buy a new Bruce album. I still remember almost falling asleep one night just after I’d turned 14 and “Born to Run” came blasting through the earplug connected to the AM/FM radio I had “hidden” under my pillow. For a city kid…it was as if someone had reached inside and grabbed all the longing, all the alienation, all the music of the street and piped it into my head all at once.

I can’t find anything about the rest of the album, but if it’s like the title track, think “Ghost of Tom Joad” vs “Born etc..” I don’t like Bruce when he’s trying to be artsy, trying to be Woody Guthrie, trying to teach me something…especially when there’s a lot of harmonica involved. That’s on me…when I was in high school I worked a sound board for a folk coffee house on Saturday nights. I heard too much of that. I start to convulse when a harmonica solo starts…no matter how good it is.

And from all indications the DVD was shot in black and white…and it’s grainy.

Sigh.

I didn’t buy “Nebraska,” didn’t buy “Ghost,” and I probably won’t buy “Devils & Dust.” I’m guessing the critics will love it. It will be called powerful and deep. Bruce will be hailed once again as the minstrel of our generation. I’ll miss it because that’s not the Bruce I need. You see, I’m still waiting for the next power chord. I want to hear him on his big blocks of wood that he uses for guitars, I want Clarence backing him up with the saxophone and Max on drums. I want Nils, Stephen and him to have an electric guitar free for all. I want a rock’n'roll revival not a folksey sermon. Guess it’s just not my turn.

This from USA Today:

WASHINGTON — The U.S. military’s Abrams tank, designed during the Cold War to withstand the fiercest blows from the best Soviet tanks, is getting knocked out at surprising rates by the low-tech bombs and rocket-propelled grenades of Iraqi insurgents.

In the all-out battles of the 1991 Gulf War, only 18 Abrams tanks were lost and no soldiers in them killed. But since the March 2003 invasion of Iraq, with tanks in daily combat against the unexpectedly fierce insurgency, the Army says 80 of the 69-ton behemoths have been damaged so badly they had to be shipped back to the United States. (Related graphic: Upgrading the Abrams tank)

[…]

Commanders say the damage is not surprising because the Abrams is used so heavily, and insurgents are determined to destroy it.

“It’s a thinking enemy, and they know weak points on the tank, where to hit us,” says Col. Russ Gold, who commanded an armored brigade in Iraq and now is chief of staff at the Armor Center.

Because it was designed to fight other tanks, the Abrams’ heavy armor is up front. In Iraq’s cities, however, insurgents sneak up from behind, fire from rooftops above and set off mines below.

A favorite tactic: detonating a roadside bomb in hopes of blowing the tread off the tank. The insurgents follow with rocket-propelled grenades, mortars and gunfire aimed at the less-armored areas, especially the vulnerable rear engine compartment.

Perhaps we should buy some Merkavas.

First, lets get the formalities out of the way:

This is a chain interviewing game for blogs. Here are its rules:

1. Leave me a comment saying “interview me.” The first five commenters will be the participants.

2. I will respond by asking you five questions.

3. You will update your blog/site with the answers to the questions.

4. You will include this explanation and an offer to interview someone else in the same post.

5. When others comment asking to be interviewed, you will ask them five questions. (Write your own questions or borrow some.)

Here are Stryker’s Questions and my answers:

Were you a “4 and Out” guy who stayed in or have you always planned to make a career of it?
I was very much a “4 and out” guy. No one was more suprised than me that the AF and I got along so well.

What was your best assignment (or shop) and why?
Three years as part of the Commander’s 24-hour Watch at USPACOM. It was a feast or famine job. Either there was nothing going on and we watched a lot of TV and built boring briefs or we were slammin’ and jammin’ for our 12 hour shift while trying to build informative briefs. Extremely tiring, sometimes extremely stressfull, but very rewarding. Also…Oahu is a great place to have downtime.

What’s the best single piece of advice you would give an Airman?
Take care of your family. That includes the people you work with, that work for you, that you work for. Take care of each other. Be aware of each other. Become a positive part of the lives of the people you interact with everyday. The root word of Sergeant means “to serve.” Be of service to those around you and you won’t go home at night wondering what the hell you’re doing. It’s not easy and I haven’t always done a great job of it, but when I keep that in mind, I have better days. There is no shame and certainly a great deal of satisfaction in being of service to those around you.

What is the single worst thing to happen in the AF during your career?
That’s hard. At the risk of mugging it up for the audience I’d have to say that we’re still recovering from Gen McPeak and I don’t know if we’ll ever get out of that tailspin. There’s an entire generation of folks that believe that their goal is to get enough training and experience to become a contractor.

What major talent do you possess that has nothing to do with the AF?
I’m a competent character actor.

The Shield on FX has always been one of the best dramas on television. This season, it is so far above-and-beyond as to set a new high-water mark.

My high school had a football team, and a senior prom, a (suspected) gay drama teacher, and the usual dramatic mix of brains, stoners, soshes, gangsters and outcasts amongst the students, but everyone gave each other lots of elbow room. The boys in the drama class gave their teacher an especially wide margin when it came to those after-school workshops, taking care to always be in groups of three or more. The coterie of brains— a loose alliance of juniors and seniors taking Honors and AE (Academically Enriched) courses— met at the third table over in the lunch room at noon, and in Herr Goulding’s third-year German class, and had nothing but lofty derision and scorn for such things as school spirit, the football team, student government, and the “soshes”— the school social set.

They were the glamorous, attractive, and popular kids who rated not only pictures of their chic selves in singles and couples in the pages of the school annual, but appeared multiple times in the various group photos of various clubs. We brains derived sardonic amusement out of noting that if there were twenty brains and one sosh in a club, invariably the sosh would be the president of it. We derived even more amusement from the suspicion that for a lot of soshes, high school would be the peak of their whole lives. Like the stoners, gangsters and the outcasts, we were only putting up with it, as long as our parents, teachers and truant authorities all variously insisted we had to be there. We could hardly wait for the day that we could pack up our high GPAs and our outstanding SATs and swap the Depression-era Spanish Colonial precincts of Verdugo Hills High for college! For real academic challenges! For a bigger library than the single long, book-lined room, where I had already read every bit of fiction and most of the interesting non-fiction. Not for us all that pseudo Ken-and-Barbie stuff; we had plans! Real plans, beyond this conformist sports-letter and student-council sucking up to the oppressors in this soulless teen-aged concentration camp, moving like automatons from class to class every 55 minutes… oh, yeah, by the calendar, the 1960ies were official over, but the aftereffects still lingered.

And there was a bigger problem for us, with that whole prom mind-set. It was a couples kind of thing… you know, for people who were going steady or dating. The brains who were my friends, the coterie around the lunchroom third-table-over were overwhelmingly male, three our four girls to a dozen or twenty boys… and boys who were, to be fair, not at the peak of their physical attractiveness, or social assurance. (The male of our species is NOT at his best at the age of 14-18. Trust me on this. Or look at your own high school annual.) And besides that, we were all friends; it would be icky to pair off with one of them— like dating your brother.

It really never occurred to any of the rest of us to go stag, or with a mixed circle of friends. Tradition still had enough of a hold that we didn’t even consider it. And it was a sosh kind of party; all rented tuxedos for the boys, and for the girls, shiny sateen prom dresses, towering architectural hair, stiff with hairspray, and a spackling of Maybelline over an acne outbreak, raccoon eyes shadowed and mascaraed to a farethewell. It didn’t really look like all that much fun, and the costs— dress, tux, tickets, even in those fairly undeveloped days— were something to consider. We were above it, anyway. And grad night, which cost only half as much as a prom ticket… no contest as far as the chance of having fun and not looking like a dork went.

Grad Night at Disneyland had only been started a few years before, so it was still being held on one single night, usually the evening after commencement exercises. Graduating seniors converged on Disneyland from all over California for Grad Night, from San Diego, from the string of towns along the Central Valley— there was even a graduating class that flew in from Honolulu. The parking lot in Anaheim became a shoal of yellow school busses, bringing in more and more grads, all neatly and formally dressed; the theory is that if you are dressed in your best, you will tend to behave. I wound up sharing a seat in the grad night bus with John W., whom I had known since 5th grade, when he was plump and pallid and looked like he had been carved out of a potato. He didn’t talk much then (or ever) but he had built a whole model of a frontier fort out of wooden matchsticks, everything beautifully detailed, with tiny trees and little hills and a gravel road, and after that everyone knew he was super-intelligent, but since he never talked much… well, no one had any idea of exactly how intelligent. In junior high, a good friend of mine who had ambitions to be the Dolly Levi of the 8th grade, had tried to match us up, on the grounds that we were both so brainy, we must have lots in common… but yeesh! She was talking inarticulate, potato-boy here, not Shawn N. (on whom I had an enduring crush, from about the 7th grade on, until well after high school graduation). My friend’s clever matchmaking scheme didn’t work— until the bus ride to Disneyland, and we had to share a seat because we were the only two not paired with a friend, already.

It actually turned out to be quite pleasant; John actually warmed up and made intelligent conversation, now that we were both sprung from constraints of high school— nothing like what anyone had ever expected from him. They herded us unto Disneyland, and locked the gates in mid-evening, and after that the whole place belonged to the seniors, until sunrise the next morning; all the rides were free, there were shows and music, and fairy lights glittering in the trees, the arcades and restaurants were open all night. Although most of the kids started to drag, along about four in the morning, and recumbent bodies strewn everywhere— sleeping on the benches, or on the soft grass, under the stars and the lights—Oh, it was wonderful, and fun, and a great way to celebrate leaving high school behind. I don’t have any pictures, and I never saw John again, as he was off to study nuclear engineering at a state university somewhere, but I’ll hold that there is no possible way that any prom, anywhere in the world, could ever beat Grad Night, 1972.

My regular readers know that I think Southern California’s own Chris Pierce may just be the hottest unsigned act in America. Our European readers may be interested in the fact that he will be touring there with Seal this summer.

The Colorado Supreme Court has just thrown out the death sentence imposed on a man convicted of rape, murder, and kidnapping. Reason was that the jurors referred to Bibles during the sentencing phase. I posted the entire story HERE, so please slide on over there and read it. This site is the new BNN, started by Robert Hayes at UCCS, a friend of mine. Leave comments there if you will! Thanks, it’s 0240, I’m outta here!

Joe

That is the way of it, when a great question falls into the public debate, or at least, that’s how it will look to the outsider. The extremes on either side bash away energetically at each other, the op-eds and the commentaries are reeled out like so many furiously unfurled rolls of toilet paper, until either the issue is resolved definitively, or everyone is quite tired of it… or some great event crashes in unexpectedly and renders the whole thing absolutely moot.

In the meanwhile, the consensus one way or the other on the great matter tends to come from the great, conflicted, indecisive middle ground. It comes slowly, little by little; and those great heroic leaps forward beloved of the op-ed pages and the history books have usually had the way cleared for them by decades of discussion, as the great undecided middle thrashes out the matter, goaded by the needle-pricks of activists, cranks and the iconoclasts.

For you see, the thing is that most humans— like most animals— are wary of change. We are innately small-c conservative. Most of us prefer the known, the predictable, the well-established, because that is what we feel best-equipped to handle in our daily lives. Not that we are against change of any sort— it’s just that we prefer to have thought about it for a while, before leaping in. We would like to have considered all the foreseeable angles and alternatives, to have mapped out some of the possible divergences; in other words, to have some sort of idea on what we can expect to come out of these changes, and what course we might have to take, depending.

This advance thought-work takes time, however impatient those activists and visionaries may be; and it simply has to be accomplished if success is to attend on their great cause. There can be no shortcuts, no imposition by judicial or political fiat; unless a great majority of the center is at least tentatively convinced of the utility of it (or that no great and lasting harm will come).

Consider two historic quests in America— for powered flight, and for female suffrage. By the time the Wright brothers and their successors made the airplane a reality, there had been more than a century of experimentation, dreaming, fantasies and discussion about being able to fly. Once the Montgolfier brothers proved it could be done with balloons in 1783, the idea that men could fly like birds was in play as a future reality, and the tinkerers and fantasist went to town, and the rest of the common lump of humanity began to get used to the notion. Not quite a decade after the Montgolfiers’s flight over Paris, Mary Wollstonecraft’s “A Vindication of the Rights of Women” sets the groundwork for considering a wider degree of political, economic and social freedom for women.

As shocked and horrified as the traditionalists were by the whole notion of women being able to vote, control their own income and their own bodies… the ideas were in play for the next hundred and thirty years. Just as the possibilities of flight were chewed over and digested, so was the advancement of rights and protections for women; in little incremental steps, so most thoughtful people could see that yes, that one little change didn’t mean the end of the world, it worked pretty well, and most everyone was happy with it, or at least not terribly unhappy.

I have often thought that the popularity of science— or speculative— fiction is our way of doing that think-work, in advance of the possibility; of getting ourselves used to the many entrancing possibilities: how would we cope, for example, should we encounter a telepathic race, or one that has three sexes (or only one), or even the vast dark and empty stretches of space between the stars. We need to think about the great matters of our time, and to talk about them reasonably, even when the debate is heated, even angry on the fringes.

In the center, we must still be— as my favorite news commentary site has it—engaged in “civil, well-reasoned discourse”. The radical fringes start the conversation, spur it on, frame the opposing sides, but eventually consensus comes out of the middle. Out of that ongoing discussion is a final resolution arrived at, eventually— here, and other websites and round-tables, over dinner tables and around the water coolers, as messy and indecisive and incremental as it usually seems to be on those days when we are all pounding away. It will be a bit, but good work can never be hurried. And it never hurts to be civil and reasoned.

(Later: Sean, the moderator at the discussion website www.volconvo.com, very much wants to promote the sort of civil and reasoned dialogue that I am encouraging here, as well as a more even balance of his existing community of contributors. Check it out.)

…And you are too stupid to call you cable company and have them block FNC…

…Then you need to pay this idiot $8.95 for the Fox Blocker.

Kimery’s motives go deeper than preventing people from watching the channel, which he acknowledges can be done without the Blocker. But he likens his device to burning a draft card, a tangible example of disagreement.

And he’s taking this message to the network’s advertisers. After buying the $8.95 device online, would-be blockers are shown a letter that they can send to advertisers via the Fox Blocker site.

“The point is not to block the channel or block free speech but to raise awareness,” said Kimery, who works in the tech industry.

Remember that old,OLD song, I think from the ’70’s? “Pave paradise and put up a parking lot,” dadada…..

Well, I had just about forgotten how wonderful DSL is, even to the point of sometimes grumbling about it being so slow. Then: disaster! Right in the middle of my work, I had three rather long blogs I had to complete last night, and had just got started when my DSL signal suddenly disappeared, and my internet connections went tango/uniform. Troubleshooting is the same whether it’s an aircraft, a radar, or a computer. First, I tried the other computer - remember, Nurse Jenny has the desktop now and it’s mostly off limits to me. No, it didn’t work either. I was really scratching my head by now. The wi-fi system was telling me that I had a signal but not an internet connection. Down I went, into the cabinet, and ripped out the modem. It looked like it was working, lights on and so forth, but nothing. Connected the laptop directly to the modem. Nothing. Connected the phone line directly to the laptop, did the dialup thing, and bingo, dialup, at 56K, worked. Well, as well as dialup works. You have to wait forever on it, but it gets there.

At this point I was pretty sure that all my equipment was working, I had checked the phone and it was working, and it was looking more like something wrong up the line from me. So I got on the phone with Bellsouth, and after the really frustrating obligatory period of talking to dumb - I mean dumb - computers, I finally got a live person on line. Don’t faint! I know it’s almost miraculous, but you really CAN get humans to talk to from the phone company at very extraordinary times, and this was one!

The phone company human did his thing and came back on the line, telling me what I did not need to hear. The dsl is down, and they can’t get it back on until Monday. I went ballistic! Monday!!?? Good God, man, I pay through the nose for this service, I have work to do, and you can’t get me back on till Monday?? “Supervisor!” I had a go at him, no help, he can’t get at it either. No one can help, the phone company cannot fix it until Monday. OK, then I’ll have to do dialup.

I spent until 0330 getting out what should have been done by 10 PM. I was fried, fritzed, and really tight-jawed. This stuff is so ancient, and so slow, I have to be more thankful for a good dsl signal when I get one back! All weekend I have been lurching forward at a snail’s pace, and having to get offline when someone needs to use the phone - I’d forgotten about that, too. GRRR….

OK, now it’s Sunday night. Guess who’s gonna get a cancellation call tomorrow AM? Bellsouth ring a bell??

I’m signing up for cable internet in the morning, they’re local,I know the techs, and I can find them if something goes down on the weekend. Now, if they could just get that satellite back up that crashed in the thunderstorm this afternoon……..

This from NYTimes’ Tina Rosenberg:

Federal prosecutors in Virginia want Dr. William Hurwitz, recently convicted on 50 counts of distributing narcotics, to go to prison for life without parole when he is sentenced in mid-April.

For the 50 million or so Americans who suffer from chronic pain, the fate of Dr. Hurwitz should be of some interest. He is a prominent doctor committed to aggressive treatment of pain. His behavior in some cases was inexcusable. Patients for whom he freely provided large prescriptions should, at the very minimum, have been given more close supervision. But malpractice should be cause for loss of license.

Instead, Dr. Hurwitz has been prosecuted as a drug kingpin because some patients sold their pills, although prosecutors never claimed he made a penny from it. That sends a chilling message to doctors who treat people with extreme pain.

[…]

Dozens of doctors have been charged with drug trafficking because the D.E.A. felt they were prescribing too many pills. The Association of American Physicians and Surgeons warns doctors to think twice before treating pain. “Discuss the risks with your family,” it says.

One California doctor who prescribed opioids, Frank Fisher, was charged with five counts of murder - including that of a patient who died as a passenger in a car accident. All charges were dropped. A doctor in Florida, James Graves, is serving 63 years for four counts of manslaughter involving overdoses by people who either abused their prescriptions or mixed their prescribed medicines with other drugs.

Your doctor could be next.

Hat Tip: The Agitator, where you’ll also find this.

Some of you might recall that I was quite impressed by Paige Hemmis, after her guest apperance on Discovery’s Monster House. Well, it seems she worked that into a regular position on ABC’s Extreme Makeover: Home Edition.

(Sanctuary of the pilgrim church of Santo Domingo de Silos, Spain, 1991)

I know that my Redeemer liveth, and that he shall stand at the latter day
upon the earth. And though worms destroy this body, yet in my flesh shall
I see God.
For now is Christ risen from the dead, the first fruits of them that
sleep.

(45, Air for Soprano, from Handel’s Messiah)

While the question is all over the internet, I never asked it myself. I mean, how can one match up an implanted figment of Baltar’s imagination - who, in physical form, could withstand an atomic blast - with a flesh-and-blood human?

But, no matter. According to TV Guide, the two mix it up in next Friday’s (the season finale) episode. And, of course, there will be a big cliffhanger, to keep everyone anxious for next season - the first ten episodes of which are supposed to air in the summer.

And, of course knowing Ron Moore, there will have to be some sex. Who knows - perhaps Starbuck and Six get turned-on by their catfight and…

It never fails that just when things are going great, I manage to get humbled. Tonight as I was preparing to write my three Easter posts, for this site, and for Patriot Flyer and BNN, my DSL signal went bumping off into the night, taking a holiday. Panicky, I swapped modems, swapped computers, strung wires all over the place, nothing. I got on my dialup - backup, and that worked fine. Calling Bellsouth, I found out that there was a problem, that it couldn’t be fixed tonight, and I will have to suffer the ignominious dragging slowness of dialup until Monday! Check the temper, Joe old boy, you can’t do anything about it, so thank the Lord for dialup, spend a weekend working in a medium that you’ve already forgotten about, and come Monday you’ll be much more thankful for your speedy little dsl signal! OK, Thank the Lord, pass the asdfgqwerty’s and let’s see what is in store for Easter 2005! God bless you every one!

Easter, though some things like the easter bunny crop up to muddy the waters, is a particularly Christian holy day; not a holiday in our secular sense, but truly a very holy day, the very pinnacle of the Christian faith. It is not replicated in any other religion, it was not borrowed from any other culture, it is unique, just as what we celebrate is unique. Let me digress for a moment. I posted on Patriot Flyer yesterday a sort of terse sentence, wherein I said that anyone who is offended by Christianity should just take a hike while we celebrate Easter. I say it again. I promise I won’t get offended by your religion or whatever, if you will just leave the Christians to their celebration without a lot of whining. You might even learn something, if you’re not a Christian and wish to read on, and we most cordially invite you to do so.

Central to the message of the Bible is the life, death, and resurrection of Christ. I do understand that our Jewish brothers do not accept Him as Lord, but we do share the Old Testament Scriptures, and counter to the stories of hatred on the part of many Christians in earlier centuries, we Evangelical Christians today closely embrace the Jews, and we are indeed the best friends Israel has in the world. Continuing with my message today, Jesus is central to Christianity, and central to all of that is the resurrection. My views are somewhat narrow here, by design. I believe, supported by scripture, that Jesus did arise from the dead, that he ascended to the Father, and that He is coming again. If we do not accept those truths, there is no Christianity. The Apostle Paul stated in First Corinthians 15, that it is a fact that Jesus arose from the dead. He went on to say(v.20) that Jesus is only the first of a great harvest of those to follow who will be raised from the dead! “So you see,” he continues, “just as death came into the world by one man, Adam, now the resurrection from the dead has begun through another man, Christ Jesus.” In a nutshell, by the disobedience of Adam and Eve, death came to us, God having given his son Jesus to die on the cross as propitiation for our sins, has provided for us life, resurrection from our state of death, to live in eternity with God. Redemption. That is the subject of the Bible from Genesis to Revelation. Not a “religion that someone wants to ram down anyone’s throat,” but a genuine message of God’s love for us all, love that transcends even death. Christianity is an invitation for us to bask in the love and forgiveness of God.

Further down in the I Corinthians passage, Paul writes of how our bodies will be transformed into everlasting spiritual bodies when Jesus comes back for us, and calls to mind a passage from Hosea in the Old Testament, regarding the victory that death seems right now to have over us. He says, that when this time comes, we will see fulfillment of that scripture, that death is swallowed up in victory. “O Death, he says, “where is your victory? O death, where is your sting?” (15:55)

I really do anticipate with joy the day when I can join the throng of millions of believers from across the centuries, bought from death with the blood of Jesus Christ, as we march into the holy city, the New Jerusalem, as described in Revelation 21 -22. That day is coming as surely as I write this tonight, and I look forward to meeting you there.

And it’s all because Jesus loved us, died for us, and rose again on the first Easter!

God bless you, and may you have a blessed, holy, and happy easter!

Joe Comer

(all scripture quotations from the New Living Translationof the Bible)

I have long been critical of our Navy’s Cold War vintage deployment strategy; our warships spend entirely too much time in port. It seems that now the Navy has realized that as well:

In 2005, one-third of the U.S. Navy is forward-deployed. Its leadership’s fundamental mission remains to maintain, train and equip combat-ready naval forces capable of deterring aggression, winning wars and defending the freedom of the seas.

Developing upon the lessons learned during Operation Iraqi Freedom and the global war on terrorism, the Navy has enacted substantial revisions of its force structure. One of those revisions includes Chief of Naval Operations (CNO) Adm. Vern Clark’s Fleet Response Plan (FRP), a new way of planning and organizing fleet assets for deployment.

The FRP provides the nation six aircraft carrier strike groups deployed or ready to deploy within 30 days and another two aircraft carrier strike groups ready to deploy within 90 days. Commander Fleet Forces Command, based at Norfolk, Va., is leading the implementation of FRP across the Navy.

U.S. Fleet Forces Command leads the implementation of the FRP, which has replaced the Cold War-era 18-month interdeployment training cycle and deployment schedule with a flexible training and deployment schedule lashed to “real world” events and requirements.

[…]

As the Navy evolves to adapt to the demands of the global war on terrorism, Secretary of the Navy Gordon R. England has called upon the service to maintain its relevance by providing more immediate, persistent combat power, “to seize the initiative rapidly in joint operations as we will not have the luxury of time to prepare in advance.”

England is committed to leading the service in alignment with a National Defense Strategy that measures success based on the “10-30-30” metric. That measurement defines the goal for closing forces within 10 days, defeating an adversary within 30 days and resetting the force for additional action within another 30 days.

The Navy department includes two uniformed services: the Navy and the Marine Corps, and England told Seapower his goals, as well as those of the CNO and Marine Corps Commandant Gen. Michael W. Hagee, are built on team efforts. A key objective for the years ahead is to take advantage of the current administration’s and Congress’ support for defense requirements, “to get everything done we can to leave a solid foundation for the Navy and Marine Corps team going into the future.”