It’s been a while

I’ve not posted for a while, perhaps because life has been, for the first length of time in years, not bad. Many good things have happened. Job – only part-time, but still better than the dole – friends, family, and I’ve been working on promoting the book of a friend .

I’ve had much to think, and ipso facto post, about but when I’ve just not gotten around to it. Too much else to do, or was done, instead. All of which makes for a boring post but, as Tolkien noted, pleasant days don’t make much of a story, while dark and unpleasant tales are better to tell, and to listen to. Therefore, I would say I’m sorry to bore you with a bland post, but my medication removes much of my natural (?) anxiety, so I really don’t care.

 

A week of cyclothymia.

Since Monday I have experienced emotions between mild euphoria and despair. On Monday the books arrived, and since then I have been working on promoting it and giving copies to family and friends.

And then today I went to a bookstore, one of those that is going to have it on the shelves, and I saw that there were almost half-a-dozen others on the same topic. Books that weren’t there when I checked last time. Dismay arrived, and gloom followed when I recalled what someone told me recently, that only about 3% of writers can make a living from the profits from their books.

 

Just buy the book and no one gets hurt.

http://www.zeus-publications.com/called_to_hope.htm

AND

http://called2hope.wordpress.com

 

Of stress, friends and fried ice-cream

Over the last couple of weeks, this one especially, I have felt worn down and under stress.

Still no job and the funds are getting lower – no stimulus package from Mr Rudd yet, although I’m due – and the flatmate gets on my nerves; thankfully he’s not around much. Then yesterday I learned that my father, who is fighting inoperable liver cancer (his second batch; the last one was in the bowel) has been diagnosed with glaucoma and cataracts, and possibly diabetes, although that could be due to a faulty tester.

 

God and Suffering

Possibly the most common argument against the existence of the Judaeo-Christian God is the existence of suffering [1]. It’s expressed in this syllogism:

Premise 1. The Bible claims that God is good (loving) and all-powerful.
Premise 2. Evil exists.
Conclusion. Therefore, God is either not completely good (loving), or not all-powerful.

Either conclusion denies what the Bible tells us about God. Does this mean we are caught in an antinomy, that the Bible is therefore invalid, and we have to choose between the Bible and the truth; between faith and reason? No, the syllogism is invalid [2] because there are several incorrect assumptions bound up in the premises, such as:

 

My hidden life.

“A giant cockroach with unlimited strength, a massive inferiority complex and a real short temper.” That’s a good description of me except for the unlimited strength bit, which can be substituted by “knowledge of various martial arts and firearms”.

Last weekend I was at a bachelor party, and caught a cold, so this four-day Easter weekend I put myself in seclusion. It wasn’t long before the loneliness struck, and I took a quick synopsis of my life, and it hasn’t changed much:

 

Review: “Jesus – the hidden story.”

I usually feel righteously irritated when I see how emotional people become when they watch a sports game; especially when they consider there has been a poor umpiring decision. Their advice to the referees can’t be heard, so why bother to get upset? For spectators it is only a game. But now I understand their intensity a little better after watching Sunday night’s “Compass” program.

I watched the entire show although, as soon as the presenter said it was going to be “a fresh look” at Jesus, it was clearly going to be abysmal. Unhappily I was correct: it was reprehensibly shallow.

 

Live organ transplants

This isn’t a reference to the Monty Python skit.

Kevin Rudd recently met with Li Changchun, the Chinese Minister for Propaganda (the name of the portfolio tells you something isn’t right). Big deal; except that it was supposed to be a secret from the Australian public. Why is that, we wonder? Could it be anything to do with China’s egregious record of human rights violations?

Sure, Chinese people were killed by their own countrymen in Tiananmin Square in 1989 and as a result of Mao’s Great Leap Forward – from agriculture to industry – in the 1950s, 20 million people were reported as having died from malnutrition. And of course, there is the fact that Chinese people who are practitioners of Falun Gong (or Falun Dafa) are being arrested and their organs harvested. When someone, Chinese or foreign, wants an organ transplant, the Chinese medical institution claims it can usually have a compatible organ in one week!

 

In front or behind? The mystery solved.

Everyone knows how they like their toilet paper to hang yet no one seems sure of how it is meant to be hung: with the end in front of the roll or behind it. Having spent a good deal of my life on the porcelain throne – or with my life tropologically in it – I have thought of the solution.

The contact point of the paper is the outside. If you’re given to buying loo rolls with line drawings on it, that’s the side you want facing out. Obvious enough; however, the key tissue issue is how (that is, if) you fold it. Hold a piece withe picture facing up. If you fold the outside edges backward, away from you (a ‘mountain fold’ is the origami term), the picture is on the outside and you’re right to go. If you fold the outside edges forward, toward you (a ‘valley fold’), the picture is in the middle and you have the rough end of the deal, as it were.

So if you’re a mountain folder then, generally speaking, it will be simpler to place the free end in front of the roll but if you prefer a valley fold, the free end hangs behind it.

It’s these little victories that make me so smug.

 

It’s called ‘wit’.

A new page: see the top of this one.