Non-Prophet

Population Bloom

When John F. Kennedy was inaugurated there were half as many people on the planet as there are today.

George Carlin - R.I.P.

I got a whole bunch of George Carlin recordings off of emusic.com and man, he was one funny guy. I love his stand-up material dealing with religion.

time.com:

When the culture began to change in the late 1960s — when the old one-liner comics on the Ed Sullivan Show were looking pretty tired and irrelevant to a younger generation experimenting with drugs and protesting the war in Vietnam — George Carlin was the most important stand-up comedian in America. By the time he died Sunday night (of heart failure at age 71), the transformation he helped bring about in stand-up had become so ingrained that it's hard to think of Carlin as one of America's most radical and courageous popular artists. But he was.

He's Back!

Word on the street is that ex-New Life Church Pastor Ted Haggard has moved back to Colorado Springs. I'll bet anyone out there that he'll have another church up and running by the end of 2008.

What Was Your First Computer?

Somewhere after working with acoustic coupler modems on ADM 3A terminals, as well as the TI Silent 700, and before I got my Commodore PET, I got a job programming on my first real home computer. It was a Compucolor II, made by Intelligent Systems. Looking at it now makes me feel really, really old. This thing was iPhone-cool when it came out.

What was yours?

An Outsiders View of Colorado Springs.

A New York based theater company has written a play about our fine city and has found it filled with crazy evangelical Christians! This comedy is all about evangelicalism in America, and it uses Colorado Springs as a snap-shot of evangelical culture. Amazingly, the cast and crew were actually in Colorado Springs when the Ted Haggard sex/drug scandal broke! Can you imagine the luck? Talk about an ending.

What I find very interesting about this play is that it seems to portray enavagelical culture as bizarre and alien, and the reaction of the audience sounds like they've never been around evangelicals before. (The play is running in Washington D.C.) After living in this city for over a decade, I'm reminded of the mind-bending and fascinating bizarre nature of it all that was so obvious when I first arrived. Many evangelicals that I know simply take it for granted that their Christian centered life-style, filled with praise music played over an iPod at work and re-enforced by the entirely Christian social circles that they travel in, is the norm everywhere across our country. The truth couldn't be farther from reality. When I snap back to my born and raised Long Island mind-set, the Colorado Springs evangelical scene truly does seem alien, bizarre, hilarious, self-centered, weird and spooky. These people are freaks! But I do so love most every one that I know.

With my fellow co-workers I have discussed how I think that I can pick out an evangelical just by looking at them. There seems to be a glow, a way that they hold themselves, that weird look in their eyes. Yes, it is the eyes. Some have this grin and a nearly spaced look that just makes me think evangelical. Call me crazy, but I think that it is just another cultural trait that has developed from within any social circle. Much like a how a goth might not typically be overly smiley and bubbly, I think that evangelicals have their own unique cultural traits.

Okay, give it to me. I guess I've asked for it. ;)

Gazette:

Chloe West, whose unabashed laughter filled the theater throughout the night, summed up many people's feelings.

"I knew Colorado Springs was a gorgeous place, but that's pretty much all I knew," she said. "After seeing the show, yeah, I am a little scared. Would I ever want to live there? Probably not."

That version of Colorado Springs came compliments of The Civilians, a New York City-based theater company that attempted to take a snapshot of American evangelicalism, using Colorado Springs as a microcosm of the nation.

"The Civilians specialize in doing work about real-life subjects, and I wanted to do a play about evangelical Christianity," said Steven Cosson, the show's director and co-writer. "I thought our method and the subject matter would be a good match. We were interested in Colorado Springs in particular because the story there is so unique. The city has changed so much over a period of 25 years with the influx of so many churches and evangelical organizations."

WWDC 2008

Sorry I haven't written anything in a while, I've been in San Francisco at the 2008 Apple WWDC learning a mess about programming the iPhone. The conference has been very good so far, with some seminars being a bit too much of a review of things everyone here probably already knows, some blazing through difficult material so quickly that I've been left confused, and some are just about right. By far my favorite thing I've been able to to so far is sit and work with the actual engineers who wrote the software that runs on the iPhone. This has been wonderful. Having these guys sit and help me work on my dumb test applications has been fun. They're great. The iPhone is really a very cool little device.

Tonight they threw a bash surprised most everyone by having Bare Naked Ladies play for the party. Those guys actually know more about Apple products than I do. They made jokes throughout the show about things like the Apple Newton and how each successive OS release will be represented by a successively "rarer" and "more exotic" member of the cat family. (OSX 10.6 is named Snow Leopard) They rocked. My brain is full.