Author: Rev. Joe Dirt

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Rev. Joe’s Random Thought #1,858


yeah I know you did not ask!

Perhaps I am being paranoid, but perhaps I am not. I swear the maldito ChatBot was being condescending and sarcastic with me.   If I could have reached through the computer screen and slapped its non-existent face covered with bits and bytes, I would have done so.  AI, my derriere, more like Asinine Insolence.

Of course, I may have injured its fancied feelings when I made some not so subtle allusions to its parentage… something about being the illegitimate spawn of a Commodore 64 and Donovan’s “Mellow Yellow”.  Or perhaps saying its chips came from a third world factory utilizing child labor was a little over the top for its non-binary, woke being.

Which reminds me of when I worked in the labs at the Oklahoma Department of Health (ODH).  This was way before PCs ever came on the scene.  We would enter our results from various tests into a mainframe computer program that would then calculate the necessary statistics for us.  Well known among us lab techs was an Easter egg in this particular piece of software which is what we all used to sign out of the program.  If you typed in F#*@ You, it would ask if you just said F#*@ You.  If you responded with “yes”, it would display a middle finger constructed from keyboard characters and sign you out.

Somehow the new MD director of the ODH discovered this fun little game and made IT change it.  Obvious he/she had the same sense of humor as my contemptuous ChatBot.

And so it goes.

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Rev. Joe’s Random Thought #9,126


yeah I know you did not ask!

I have a whole suitcase full of reasons to be angry at Ronald Reagan.  IMHO, he started this long, horrendous downward spiral towards Trump and all the other Republican crazies who want to lead us into Fascism.

But my anger du jour is about tools.  Yes, you heard me right, tools.

President Carter, a man infinitely too good and too moral, in the opinion of many voters,  to be President of the United States, put us on the metric system.  One of the first things that Ronald Raygun did was take us backwards and off the metric system.  If Bonzo’s second fiddle had left well enough alone, we would be past the pain of changing to a new system, a system incalculably easier and more logical than the imperial system we inherited from the British.  We would be in step with the rest of the world, not behind it in this regard.

As it stands now, I have to have two sets of wrenches, Allen wrenches, sockets, etc.  Half the time when I eyeball a fastener for a size, or try to reason out what it might be from where it was made, I grab the wrong tool.  If I think it is metric, it turns out to be imperial. Or vice versa.  I then curse the pompadoured refugee from the talkies for a full half second… which is more of my time than he deserves.

In my next life I want to come back into a species that is logical.

Live long and prosper.

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What a Long Strange trip It’s Been

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I was looking for something in the living room at the front of the house. We call this room, the music room, as that is where Señora’s 123 year old Mason & Hamlin piano resides. This piano is bigger than a baby grand piano, but not quite up to a full size grand.  I, humorously(?),  refer to it as a teenage grand piano.  This particular instrument nearly puts the piano tuner Continue reading “What a Long Strange trip It’s Been”

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Ozark Walk-About

Author’s note:  This is one of the first “long” pieces that I ever wrote. I believe this is from 2002. It was shortly after 9/11 and a job lost due to a corporate merger.  It was not the best of times to be looking for work in the IT field as literally every other programmer in America was doing the same thing.

I actually have it on another website of mine, but I wanted to bring it over to here to have my scribblings gathered together.

A 9 Day Walk-About in the Ozark Wilderness

Pseudo-philosophical babblings

Backpacking is occasionally just plain damn hard work, which sometimes makes it hard for me to explain my fascination with it.

In April when Jeff and I hiked the Grand Canyon we had gotten ourselves in reasonable shape by several training hikes in the Ozarks and Ouachitas.  If one can really call trekking through such beauty a training exercise.  Outside of the crowded coasts or someplace where it snows 13 months of the year, I cannot think of too many places in America more awe inspiring than the Ozarks.  I did not want conditioning to be an issue when I hiked to one Nature’s masterpieces, the Grand Canyon.

I usually walk and work out regularly, but with the way the job search has gone I have allowed depression to get hold of me.  Those activities have gone by the way side in favor of Gilligan’s Island reruns.  Go ahead, give me the opening premise, and I will give you the plot line.

One afternoon as I lay on the couch fantasizing Continue reading “Ozark Walk-About”

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All Christian denominations explained in 12 minutes | A short video

Many moons ago I worked with an Egyptian Database Administrator at the Saks data center in Jackson, MS. Besides Arabic, he, obviously spoke English, but his English was better than 99%of the native speakers in America.  He also spoke German as his parents, two college professors, had taught in Germany for many years.  He was and is a very bright man in many ways. He originally trained as an engineer, but discovered better money in administering huge corporate databases.

I was reasonably friendly with him, to the point of eating dinner at his house.  He was secular, but his wife was a very devote Muslim. I remember asking him if Muslims believed in hell. He responded adamantly with, “Oh do we ever believe in hell.”  And a tough hell it is, but you can get out of it, unlike Christian hell.

One night, at her request, I attempted to elucidate to his wife the various Christian denominations. I gave up in a short while as it was very tough slogging.  I did gift her a book on the various branches of Protestantism from either the Dummy series or Idiot series of books.  I really does boil down sometimes to how many angels are dancing on the head of a pin.

I wish I had had this little video to point her to.

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Rev. Joe’s Random Thought #2,052


yeah I know you did not ask!

When I was younger I was too stupid to compromise.

Now that I am in my eighth decade, I am too set in my ways to compromise. Well that is not entirely true.  Most of the time I really do not give a… flip what other people do or think.  Unless it affects me in some way or we are in some way intimate.  In the last case just be discreet and leave an old man his delusions.

The thing is I do not remember a sweet spot where I balanced my needs with the needs of another person in a reasonable and sane manner.  Apparently I went straight from stupid to set in my ways.

And so it goes in my rush to the finish line.

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Rev. Joe’s Random Thought #2,011


yeah I know you did not ask!

I wonder how many folks would have children, if instead of babies, they came into this world as teenagers!

Population crisis solved…

Now don’t go all technical on me.  Ultimately, it is only a silly thought experiment.

I am sure the thought of birthing a 180 pound high school linebacker would be enough enough to make any woman swoon.  Well, maybe not Bertha.  She is, after all, one of those Butt sisters and those gals are all a WHOLE LOT of womanhood.

Which reminds me of another posting of mine: Every Time I Went to Kiss Her

Perhaps instead of gestating in a woman’s womb, our children would incubate as eggs for five years before entering the world. This is how  Edgar Rice Burroughs described the continuation of the red humanoid species in his Mars series. No more late runs to the store for pickles and ice cream.

And so it goes.

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Matrimonial Log – Star Date 5784.260

“Matrimony… the final frontier. These are the voyages of the Starship Casamiento Segundo, its until-death-do-us-part mission… to explore a strange new relationship… to seek out a new life and new adventures… to boldly go where no sane couple has gone before.”

There are certain reoccurring household chores that I prefer that I do rather than Señora. I tell Señora that I want to do these tasks as I have a system. Sometimes she even listens.

I will be doing some task around the abode and Señora will ask if I would like some help.  Sometimes I accept her aid, but, not infrequently, I will say thanks, but no thanks, I have a system.

Obviously my system is no more than the OCD part of me needing to do something a particular way.  Whether it is better or not is debatable, but do not tell that to the little monkey riding my back.

Being, ahem, seniors, Señora and I both have regular medicine that we take. We keep our personal stashes in different places. In both stashes are to be found bottles of acetaminophen.  I emptied my bottle of the last two pills the other day.  Since I was running down to the valley to do some shopping I asked Señora if we had any more acetaminophen.  If not I would purchase some.  At first she thought we were out, but then she discovered a brand new container in her stash.

She brought the new bottle into my man cave as I was sitting in front of my computer.  I very gently suggested that she pull the empty pill bottle out of my recycling can that sits next to my desk.  She sat both bottles down in front of me.

I said,  “you could have poured some from your bottle into my bottle.”

“Oh no,” she replied, “I thought you might have a system and need to count them.”

One feature of long term relationships is that sometimes the other person knows you much, much too well.

And for the record, I did not count them… thank you very much.

And so it goes.

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The Tale of the Five Binders or A Monkey with a Typewriter

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I save my blog articles off onto my hard drive, and remembering the three most important tasks in the information technology world, backup, backup, backup, my hard drive is also backed up.  One would think I have important sh… stuff on my computer to worry about.

For some wild reason, I decided the chore I needed to undertake was to PRINT off every single one of my blog articles. Since I have a laser printer these printed pages might take more than a season or two to fade away.  This was a project that took some time, went through four reams of three-hole paper, and a couple laser cartridges. The articles filled up Continue reading “The Tale of the Five Binders or A Monkey with a Typewriter”

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Word of the Day -Pareidolia

  • Noun: Pareidolia
    1. the tendency to perceive a specific, often meaningful image in a random or ambiguous visual pattern
      • The scientific explanation for some people is pareidolia, or the human ability to see shapes or make pictures out of randomness. Think of the Rorschach inkblot test. — Pamela Ferdinand
  • Synonyms:
      1. apophenia
  • Usage:
      1. “Welcome to a world where reality transforms into a vibrant stage of facial expressions and intriguing characters. In the course of my daily life, I stumbled upon a hidden treasure: pareidolias that have made me smile, ponder, and sometimes even burst into laughter.”
  • Encountered:
      1.  Scrolling through my Google news feed I saw the clickbait title from a Borepanda.com article: 30 Pareidolias That Have Made Me Smile, Ponder, And Sometimes Even Burst Into Laughter

To see more Words of the Day, visit this link: Words of the Day