Internet Chaff Relay: The short-lived predecessor to Twitter

2. He had the look of a man who was just told by his chiropractor that he caught a mind virus, a mind virus which disposed him to the intense perpetuation of pseudoscientific ignorance.

3. Spode appeared as if nature had intended to make a brain size has no connection with intelligence; that intelligence has nothing to do with the Drones Club; and that its members were probably nasty fascist things anyway.

4. “All is right in the world and the universe”, remarked Honoria Glossop with a deep, inner, convincing vigor. “On the other hand, I don’t intend to be callous, but even if I have no proposal, who cares? Because that still doesn’t mean that what anybody else has to offer therefore has to be true”.

5. Jeeves glanced sideways at him and cleared his throat with the sound of one of his bacterial ancestors, which indeed were still bacteria, perambulating in vast ignorance around its own dreadful colony of bacteria.

6. “We are all co-evolved blighters, though people seldom realize they are such”, pontificated Spode in a benevolent, subjective way. “Some of us just go one blight further”.

7. “No doubt, Jeeves, you are grindingly, creakingly, crashingly brilliant. Your brain hardware has co-evolved with the internal virtual worlds that it creates”. Jeeves said “Not at all sir. This can be called hardware-software co-evolution.”

Shudder. Uh, on second thought, I’ll take P.G. Wodehouse

“He felt like a man who, chasing rainbows, has had one of them suddenly turn and bite him in the leg.”

“He had the look of one who had drunk the cup of life, and found a dead beetle at the bottom.”

“His whole attitude recalled irresistibly to the mind that of some assiduous hound who will persist in laying a dead rat on the drawing-room carpet, though repeatedly apprised by word and gesture that the market for same is sluggish or even non-existent.”

“She could not have gazed at him with a more rapturous intensity if she had been a small child and he a saucer of ice cream.”

“He uttered a sound much like a bull dog swallowing a pork chop whose dimensions it has underestimated.”

“Jeeves lugged my purple socks out of the drawer as if he were a vegetarian fishing a caterpillar out of his salad.”

According to the news article, “According to an affidavit filed with the Sumner County General Sessions Court on Sept. 25, Shannon D. Jackson of Hendersonville, Tenn., allegedly violated a legal order of protection that had been previously filed against her when she sent a virtual “poke” to another woman on Facebook”.

A woman confronts the lead character (who is taking his delight in spreading and repeating the mantra of Jabez:

She looked directly at me and said, “Be human! You’re too ethereal and ghostly. You’re fingers aren’t even touching your briefcase, for Pete’s sake,’ she said. “Grow up. Doesn’t the Incarnation mean anything? Life is more than passing out Christian sentences. Pure religion is to visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction. Show me how to see the glory of God in the ordinary things of life, show me how to be faithful and find meaning in the quotidan; show me how to ‘eat my bread with joy and drink my wine with a merry heart’ like Solomon says. Show me how to raise children so that, from them, generations will rise up and count me blessed. Show me how to live life artfully. Show me….”

She kept shouting after me as I wandered off. There was no helping her. She just didn’t get it. Not only did those things require time and maturity and a future (and wine!), but they didn’t involve real ministry. They would require seeing the world and life poetically, as if the heavens declared the glory of God or “day unto day uttered speech.” But God isn’t concerned with little things: “He that is faithful in the big things of ministerial work, he shall be blessed” (Luke 16:10).

Housewives and office workers and engineers and children can’t really live the Christina life. They are too encumbered by earthly things. They actually touch stuff with their fingers. An exciting life means that you will find exhilaration in big, daily miracles. If we spent our time seeing the miraculous in ordinary things–in labor and cleaning and raising children and creating, then God would have by no means by which  to get out His sentences. If ordinary Christians were truly able to delight in the divine poetry of housework, flowers, clothes, oceans, car repair, and plumbing, if they were able to see the utter glory of god in every mundane thing, then who would buy this booklet? Who would think that ministry only equals evangelisitic sesrvice? No one would want my bungee mantra.

(The Mantra of Jabeez, Jones, p.48-49)

This sarcastic narrative is a true but sad commentary on much of Christianity today. The lead character exhibits a problem with the way many Christians view their life, and the woman who challenges him brings up a lot of good points.  We need to be more human. Less ethereal and ghostly. Less shallow. And take more delight in good things that God has given us and the good callings we are called to, even if they don’t seem very “spiritual” to others.  And as this book sacrastically illustrates us, we need to stop thinking mantras, catchy cod words, and thoughtless platitudes are what pleases God.

“Goldie”, as he was lovingly known, wore a rare blond afro and was only 5′10 and perhaps 170 pounds. He earned 1,132 penalty minutes in 194 games in the pros (assuming no overtime and assuming a high-end ice time of 20 minutes per game, your average player will be on the ice for less than 4,000 minutes in 194 games).

And certainly, he was a showboat: “In addition to everything else, Goldthorpe was a workout fanatic and a practitioner of martial arts. Before practices with the Saints, he would walk into the dressing room while the other players were putting their gear on, pull out a set of nunchaks, and perform a Bruce Lee routine in the centre of the room. Then he would put the nunchaks away and without a word begin to get dressed for practice.” (Willes, p.94)

“Goldie” is said to have never touched come-back star Gordie Howe, who played on a team with his sons Mark and Marty Home. However, he is said to have threatened the aging star: “You can’t play forever, old man, and when you retire, I’m going to get your kids.”

Those who roomed with “Goldie” certainly remembered him. “[I]t was like rooming with Kato, Inspector Clouseau’s combative manservant in the old Pink Panther movies. ‘He always wanted to wrestle. It didn’t matter where or when. He’d jump out from behind a door or a closet and I’d have to wrestle him.” (Rebel League by Ed Willes, p.93) The team’s goalie commented that “People think he didn’t exist, Oh, he was real alright. I mean, it was scary. People watch Slap Shot and they go, ‘That never happened.’ But it happened.” (Wiles, p.94).

The yellow month, the winterfylleth
leaves leaves leaves, a party of leaves
hockey begins and baseball ends

To humble us after July and August
God gave us October
To prepare us for November and December
God gave us October

To learn longsuffering, we got the October frost

First book-end
The 1st of October
274th day of the year
tumultous
Mammon begins trusting in God
and in Model T’s
International day of older persons
why did they pick October
Berkeley wants to be free to speak
Alexander the Great takes action
and defeats Darius

Second book-end
The 15th
rest easy
only 77 more days to go
listen
this day gave us
Tito Jackson
and took away Goering
not crazy about Jackson
but I still like the trade

Third book-end
The 31st of October, multifaceted day
John Candy and Vanilla Ice born
Ghandi assasinated
Reformation Day and Halloween
Stalin’s body removed from Lenin’s tomb

Enigmas wrapped in mysteries
like the Red October
which didn’t start ’til November
communism is so messed up
even its revolutions
aren’t named properly

October crisis
Canadian federalism’s zit
reversals, reversals
providence has some wit
for once the Canadiens subjegate a Brit!

Take these examples. Secretly, I wonder whether I should aspire to getting insulted in this way. I still don’t know whether they are compliments or insults.

[John Calvin] is ” the author of a religion of the table, the stomach, the fat, the flesh, the kitchen” (Jacques Desmay, vicar-general of the diocese of Rouen)

In [John Calvin], the whole reformation only tendeth to “establish the reign of wine, women and song” (Jacques Desmay, vicar-general of the diocese of Rouen)

Wine, women, and song. Hmm.. I’ve seen worse errors. Would to God that he raises another Docteur de la Kitchen.

Thus far
I’ve just collected
a bunch of books.