A carnival of technology

Pope Benedict XVI’s recent visit to los EEUU got me thinking about few things. Even though Joseph Ratzinger has been the head of the Holy See for over three years now, I, and I suspect many other Catholics, have a hard time really getting a feel for just who this guy is as a person and a pope. I think that timing had a lot to do with it; everyone loved JP2, who managed to come across as a rock star despite being pretty conservative, so this former prefect of the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith, the man who was in effect in control of the nuts and bolts of Catholic doctrine during much of the reign of John Paul II, will always be overshadowed by his predecessor. With JP2 people were all like aw damn, who is that fine pontiff, and Pope Benny16 just can’t ever hope to hit that level of popularity. It’s a shame, but that’s how it goes.

The pope’s US visit showed us a man more academic than punk rock, a dude with a German accent who wears red shoes and carefully grounds his views in the tradition and theology of the church. He seems like an okay guy; he had a tough situation to dive into, with the child abuse scandal weighing heavily on everyone’s minds and ecumenicism always being a concern, but from what I’ve seen of the things he said he seemed to do pretty alright. And maybe he’s what the Church really needs. As Pope John Paul II once said, “It’s a mistake to apply American democratic procedures to the faith and truth.” So we’ll just have to see how this papacy goes and history will be the judge.

And it’s history that brings me here. Another of the things brought back to the forefront by the pope’s visit was the number after his name. There hasn’t been an original pope name in about 900 years. Even John Paul was a combination of the names of the two previous popes. There has been fifteen other popes named Benedict. What did they do? When did they reign? I dunno. Pope Benedict XVI is the 265th head of the Roman Catholic Church by the official reckoning, and I only know anything about a tiny handful of them. I’d like to change this. I’m going to try to research the lives of the 265 popes.

One of the basic tenets of the Catholic Church is the concept of Apostolic Succession, the idea that the authority of the Church is derived from a continuous line beginning with Jesus’s appointment of Saint Peter as the leader of the new faith. From the Catechism of the Catholic Church:

Just as the office which the Lord confided to Peter alone, as first of the apostles, destined to be transmitted to his successors, is a permanent one, so also endures the office, which the apostles received, of shepherding the Church, a charge destined to be exercised without interruption by the sacred order of bishops.

So each one of those 265 bishops of Rome are members of an unbroken succession from Jesus himself. This doctrine can be somewhat problematic when viewed through the lens of history—there have been good popes, but there have also been some very bad popes along with some antipopes during times when the Church was broken by schism or messy politics, and there’s some serious question as to whether some popes, like the second, Pope Linus, even existed. Of course questions like these present no real challenge to a church that has two thousand years of tradition, regardless of its ultimate base, to stand upon, but they do create interesting areas of study, and it’s those questions that I’d like to explore.

The first pope is, of course, Saint Peter, and, being a key figure in the formation of the Christian church, about the only historical record available for him is the New Testament: the Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles. So I figure I’ll start there. I’m going to break out my copy of the New American Bible, the modern translation commissioned by the Dei Verbum issued by pope Paul VI, and try to make some sense of the history of Saint Peter. Keep your eye on this space for my findings. I expect that Pope Linus will be a lot easier since there’s only three surviving sentences establishing him as a pope. Hazy as some of this historical exploration may be, I at least hope it’ll be interesting.

“It is expressly understood and agreed that this Release is a settlement of all claims for which the parties released hereby deny all liability and that by this Release, the parties released hereby intend merely to avoid litigation and buy their peace.”

To recap: way back in August I picked a fight with an SUV and lost in the first round by TKO; sonofabitch ran me over and broke my right heel. After several long months of casts and crutches and boots and therapy, I can walk again, the only lingering side effects being that I have a bit more bone down there now than the Good Lord intended, and sometimes I can predict when it’s going to rain. I am pleased with the care I received and thank all of the doctors and nurses and therapists and other medical professionals involved, especially Dr. Funk, the emergency room doctor who either cared enough or was bored enough to call me the next morning with some more information about my foot, mostly because that is such a damn awesome name. I also thank the lawyer who gave me some helpful free advice while waiting in line at the police station, and an extra special thank you goes out to my mom and dad for spending a weekend in the A making sure I didn’t starve to death or drown in a pile of filth. I probably would have tried something extra stupid and broken my foot even worse if it weren’t for you two. To everyone, muchas gracias; I couldn’t have done it without all of you.

Fast forward to the future is now, and I’ve finally got all the co-pays settled and all the forms filled out and State Farm is ready to send me a settlement. I won’t share the math unless you really care for me to—I’m never sure how rude it is to bring in money numbers—but basically State Farm is prepared to write me a check to cover this nebulous remainder of medical expenses, lost wages and whatever else may arise, and after I’ve paid my medical insurer their chunk, I’ll have a couple few grand of peace buyin’ money left over. The law says that this is compensation for things I’ve already paid or still owe, so it doesn’t count as taxable income, relieving my fears that I’d have to start thinking about 2008 taxes right after paying for 2007. So what should I spend it on? One idea I had is to get a new computer; I’d like to just throw out my rickety old workstation and ricketier old server and replace them with one of those OpenWrt routers for the internets link and maybe a laptop for everything else. Maybe I should replace my 90’s TV with one of them new-fangled high def things. Or maybe I could do something boring like make an extra big car payment or give it to charity. What do you think?

I got a new job. I’m now working for Telchemy, a company that does VoIP and other kinds of real time network stream monitoring, and it’s been pretty neat so far for the week that I’ve been there. But I’m not about to start blogging about big important things; who cares about the big important things in life? What about the stupid minutae?

Telchemy is in Duluth, and that’s been taking some getting used to. Autovin’s office was also, by my elitist city reckoning, way out in the ass end of suburbia, but Duluth has a different feel to it than Roswell. The drive is only about five miles longer, and I’m still going opposite of the trafficy direction the whole way, but crossing those county lines while I go up 85 seems like a big deal. Most obviously there’s no MARTA service in Gwinnett. There’s the GCT and some GRTA buses that go up that way, but I haven’t yet figured out the maze of transfers or the schedules it would take to use them, so for now I’m off the bike. This is going to be difficult, both because I don’t like to spend money on gas and because I know from the broken foot what sedentary time does to my waistline. Unless I figure out the bus routes I’m going to need to figure out another way to exericse. Maybe I’ll get that Wii step-up-on-the-white-thing game.

Another obstacle I’ve met has been the problem of where to eat. I suppose I should probably be making lunches at home that are healthier and cheaper than eating out, but that seems like a lot of work, so I’ve so far continued my old habits of depending on whatever eateries are in the area. The problem is that I just don’t have a good feel for Duluth quite yet. In Roswell I was able to rotate among a series of small, locally owned shops where people knew my name and often what I wanted to eat, but in Duluth so far all I see is a bunch of strip malls along Sugarloaf and the levaithan of Discover Mills. I tried eating at Discover Mills, but all they have is just pretty much what you’d expect for mall food, and the Popeye’s meal I settled on was about two bucks more expensive than it should have been. The strip malls have all of the usual depressing sandwich and burrito chains that strip malls have, but today’s lunch gave me some hope. As usual I was undecisive but hungry, and I decided to turn the other way, to drive away from Sugarloaf and see where the road would take me. After maybe a quarter mile the road took me to a Korean enclave that I never knew existed. I felt like I was driving down Buford Highway and it was right next the office; it was so awesome. I have no idea what I ate for lunch today—the waitress made a big deal about me trying the bizarre array of side dishes that came with the soup, and one of them, a sort of spicy gelatin, she didn’t know the English to describe, though it seemed to involve acorns. They had SBS on sattelite playing a show with some kind of swordfighting love story, and I’m pretty sure those English subtitles weren’t there until after I’d sat down for a couple of minutes, which made me feel like I was doing right. I have no idea why a bunch of Korean people decided to settle in Duluth, but I’m certainly glad for it. Maybe this place is a little better than the highway would have you think.

I’m not sure how my address ended up on all of these mailing lists. I suspect Borders had some hand in it; I think I gave them my address as part of signing up for that customer loyalty card that gives me $5 off books once in a while by some algorithm that I’ve never bothered to look up. Whoever’s fault it is, I get some strange mail sometimes. I got issues of Complex for a while, and Car & Driver still shows up once a month and goes straight to the trash. I do own a car and some Outkast CDs, so maybe I do have some connection to these magazines’ audiences, but I don’t have a shortage of bathroom reading material. More recently, I got something from Axe, the deodorant people. They sent me a DVD.

You may be familiar with Axe’s commercials, the Hai Karate of my generation. Their message is that if I use their deodorant spray, women everywhere will throw themselves at me and my life will become a non-stop orgy. It’s all quite crude and seems like a parody of beer commercial stereotypes, and there’s probably a thesis or two in there about the male chauvinist backlash against feminism, but I don’t really care about any of that. Axe sent me a cardboard mailing containing a DVD and a picture of a fake movie poster for A Diary which depicts a sepia-toned couple embracing on a park bench in the rain with a bicycle in the background. It all looks very sappy and sort of French. The DVD itself contains a twenty-two minute movie; the first two minutes or so is a compilation of footage probably taken from educational and industrial films built into an absurd sexual montage. There are bees pollinating flowers, screws being driven in boards, pumping oil rigs and finally explosions and popping wine corks and then the last twenty minutes of the DVD, which is filled with a shot of wood burning in a fireplace. There’s some kind of sweepstakes involving text messages associated with the DVD. I didn’t read very far.

Starting in 1966 WPIX, New York, would broadcast several hours of a fireplace on Christmas Eve. Most New Yorkers don’t have fireplaces, so this yule log program provided the tradition and comfort of the sound and image of a burning wood fire through the magic of television. Our bond with fire is a powerful one, separating man from beast as we barely control this natural fury, fascinating scientists and poets alike. I do have a fireplace, but I never use it. Between Georgia’s weather and the heat radiated up from my neighbors it’s rarely cold enough, and I haven’t figured out a way to arrange my furniture without blocking the fireplace with the TV. I can see the attraction of sitting on the couch on a winter night, huddled in blankets and sipping hot cider while a fire roars away on a television screen. It’s too bad this stupid DVD is so short and has all that bullshit at the beginning.

One of the recurring elements in Once Upon a Time in the West is one of the sort-of outlaw characters asking the heroine to make coffee. He mentions that his mother made good coffee, which seems like an odd thing to say to modern ears, but there was something of an art to coffee in the time before our fancy machines that control the water temperature and the amount of time the grounds spend exposed to the water, or even before simple devices like percolators. About the simplest way to make coffee, though one fraught with the danger of inconsistency, is to just boil the grounds in a pot. This cowboy coffee produces a thick, strong brew, full of little solid bits of coffee like a pulpy orange juice, and requires a deft hand and careful attention lest the brew be too weak or too bitter, but it can be made anywhere there’s coffee and a fire, whether you can find a place to plug in your Mr. Coffee or not.

After my Braun drip machine, a trusty friend that I appropriated from my parents, a solid machine that helped me through many long nights in college and even followed me into the desert on the In-n-Out trip, finally gave out after probably close to two decades of service, I used a Bodum cafetière, a simple device originally made in a clarinet factory in Normandy, as my coffee machine. The idea is basically to steep the coffee grounds in hot water much like tea and then push all of the grounds out of the way through a metal filter, creating a strong and mostly filtered brew, capturing that power and charm of the coffees of the Old West without having to watch quite so carefully not to drink to the bottom of the cup. I like the way coffee tastes from a French press, and it and my gas range have worked quite well during a couple of recent power outages. But stupid me, I went and broke it. I had the glass beaker in the dishwasher, and for some reason I decided to rummage around in the cabinets before starting the dishes. A jar fell out, hit the coffee press right on the corner and put a neat little hole in my morning routine. I’ve since ordered a new beaker from my favorite coffee merchant (I have no idea how much they charged me, but they sell the whole deal for $10 under the MSRP, so I figure it can’t be too bad), but in the meantime I’ve had to find some other ways to make my coffee.

I haven’t gone all out yet and made the coffee of the old West and, according to Internet, parts of Scandinavia. Though similar in theory to making coffee in a French press, boiling it in a pot usually takes a fine grind, like Turkish coffee, so that the grounds do their thing and settle into a mud in the bottom of the pot, while the French press uses a more coarse grind, mostly to ensure the grounds are caught by the filter when the plunger is pressed. I haven’t yet felt adventurous enough to deviate from my usual coffee, so I’ve just been doing about the same thing I did with the press: I mix the grounds and water in a mug instead of a big glass thing, and after a few minutes I pour that mixture through a sieve into another mug. It works pretty ok, but it’s a little more chunky than I’m used to, and, since I don’t care to go through all of that more than once in a given morning, I’m now only drinking one mug of coffee a day. I hope my new glass thing shows up soon.