Author: Vince

Justice / Spiritual Journey

Next to Tinseltown

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When I was five or six, we lived in a rent house. I can recall two things about the house: one of the windows had a very long hose coming out of it from the washing maching down to the lawn, and our next-door-neighbor liked to work on his cars and I liked to sit on the engine and “help” him. (This is the closest I’ve ever been to working on a car.)

When I was thirteen, we lived in a different rent house, in a different state. I remember two things about the house: my bedroom was in the basement (which I loved) and the big open room next to my bedroom seemed big enough to play racquetball in.

Bible Study

Comings and Goings

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The ball is going to bounce around a bit today, so buckle your seatbelts and return your tray to its upright, locked position.1

A couple of weeks ago, my wife and I were watching a lightweight heist TV show when suddenly the lead character starts talking about chicken sexing. (Don’t leave off the suffix, that would have been an entirely different show.) We were rather dubious about what he was spouting, but in the wonderful age in which we live, we can Duck2 that kind of nonsense while the character is still talking. It turns out chicken sexing really is a thing3, and reading a bit further led me to a book.

Spiritual Journey

The New Guy

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A new hire at Apple was announced today.

Given that Apple has over a hundred thousand employees, a new hire there usually doesn’t qualify as news. However, this one did. It wasn’t, of course, Apple who did the announcing, but the various media outlets who make a living from following Apple. Unlike most Apple “news,” which is typically a wild rumor in a very thin “it might be true!” wrapper, this news came straight from the horses mouth, i.e. from the new hire himself.

His name is Jonathan Zdziarski, and, although you can be forgiven for not recognizing (or being able to pronounce) his name, he is justifiably famous in the Apple universe, as he is perhaps the best and most well-known expert in iOS digital forensics and security.

Random

Kiss This Guy

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Long ago1 but still in this galaxy and not very far away at all, I read a humorous article in the Reader’s Digest.2 As our brains are sometimes wont to do, it stuck this article in the “permanent, never forget” section, along with the theme from Gilligan’s Island and the lyrics to all the Beatles songs. In the article, the author had occasional hearing issues which caused him to sometimes interject odd things (“And there’s no ketchup in Australia!”) into a conversation about John Donne’s poetry.

Many of us have a completely different kind of hearing problem. For example, we had a speaker at our church a few month ago.

Spiritual Journey

Losing Weight

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When my wife and I saw Arrival, she thought it was “ok” and I loved it.1 As we were discussing our respective views on the way home, she asked me why I loved it. Now, ordinarily, asking a man why he feels something is an exercise in futility. I, however, am very in touch with my feelings2 and had no trouble coming up with the answer.

Because it was a beautiful story, beautifully filmed, but most importantly, it had weight. Is love worth the pain? Would we make the same decisions if we knew those decisions would lead to tragedy?

Current Events / Spiritual Journey

Perspective

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As you may remember, our daughter and family live in Cambodia. She teaches in a Christian school there, and she recently had occasion to need some rice for a class project. She asked her teaching assistant, a native Khmer woman, to go buy her some rice. “Get the cheapest rice you can, I’m not going to cook it, just use it for class,” she said, as she gave the TA some money to buy it with.

The TA came back with the rice, but almost fell over herself apologizing. “I am so sorry, Mrs. Phifer, I could not get the cheap rice, I looked everywhere, I had to spend 1800 riel to get a kilogram1 of rice.” She was unhappy with having to spend that much of Ashley’s money, and she was expecting Ashley to be unhappy, too.