I am safely back home



I am safely back home from my business trip to the Pacific Northwest. Even though the business portion of my trip was a shining success I am thoroughly annoyed, dissapointed, and discouraged that I did not die in some outlandish natural disaster as predicted by a number of reputable persons. Here, now, I find myself on terra firma, whole and sound, with nary a scratch or buise on my body or soul; what a let down.

I leftthis morning at 4:45am local time and arrived here in Saint Louis at 4pm. It took me an hour just to retrieve my luggage and my car and, yet another hour just to get home. I then rushed off to a DeMolay meeting and made plans for tomorrow's trip to State Conclave. I will spend the next three days with 11 members of our youth group at this statewide event. I expect the young men to have a great time that will help them grow as both individuals and brothers.

On Monday I will return for my annual Memorial Day BBQ which is always a great deal of fun. On Tuesday I am taking a day off of work simply to recuperate.

On the way back today I tried to read 'The Name of a Rose' by Umberto Eco, and I did make some progress; I got all of the way to page 80 or so. However, it is quite a challenge. There were several pages of raw verbiage just to describe a statue; it is indeed a lot to digest. Whenever the novel finds itself on more solid narrative footing I am able to hold on with greater ease. I spent a lot of the airplane flight just dozing, or reading bits and pieces of other material. I'm sure I will finish it, though since it comes highly recommended by my friend John Miles. Then again, my friend John Miles needs to, in turn, read the copy of 'The Widow's Son' I left with him.

I'm sure my next post on Tuesday, after this long weekened, will be filled with photographs of the festivities. Look forward to it then.

Comments

Grouchogandhi said…
Check around wikipedia for different medieval denominations. It helps to have an idea of the context of the different orders involved in the storyline and backstory of the question of Christ's poverty as well as with certain plot points.

For example, Waldensians
11:34 PM
Anonymous said…
My recommendation is to keep reading. Eco says that he makes the first chapters of his books more verbose to "select his readers", and this shows off in The Name of the Rose.

I personally enjoyed the descriptions of the Abbey, after that I never looked at romanic art in the same way, but I recognize that at some places it was hard to digest.

Anyway, the other two thirds of the book are faster paced, I'm sure you will enjoy it!
8:54 PM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Planetside Screenshots

Image
I realize that this post is going to cause some Web-Wiplash, but I think that is ok. For years I have held onto some old Planetside screenshots that I wanted to post online some day. After scouring an old hard drive yesterday these are the ones I came up with. Still, I know I am missing many of the screenshots I really wanted to keep. Especially ones from when the game was very early in development. I designed the entire client side game engine myself and I had a lot of fun during the development process. One of my regrets is that, in many respects, the final game did not look nearly as visually impressive as it did at certain points during development. There were a number of reasons for this. One was from a technology stand point. Most developers of an MMO game engine might assume it would be reasonable to stream data in as a player moved around the environment. That was certainly my original design. However, once the game got into heavy beta testing there was a strong push to get eve...
Read more

Just now who's crazy?

Image
Just a follow-up to yesterday's post about Dr. Steven Greer and his paranoid fantasies. One of Greer's most popular paranoid fantasies is that there is a secret cabal, comprising members of government, industry, and religious leaders, who suffer from eschatological delusions and are co-ordinating a massive world-wide effort to bring about the 'end-times'. Sound's pretty nuts doesn't it? I think so to. I don't buy into paranoid conspiracy theories because they are based, not on evidence but, rather, the *lack* of evidence. Dr. Greer's theories include the idea that 9-11 was actually executed by this secret cabal and that a missile, not an airplane, struck the Pentagon (I guess I should go tell the families of those poor folks who were on the plane that hit the Pentagon about that..) In fact, I find these kinds of bizarre paranoid conspiracy theories dangerous, destructive, and borderline treasonous. The Internet may be a powerful tool to spread truth...
Read more