Category: Random Thoughts

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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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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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Rev. Joe’s Random Thought #6,923


yeah I know you did not ask!

Ever feel like life is one big ad lib performance, and somehow you missed the set up line and went off on an unrelated tangent? Ever?

 

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Rev. Joe’s Random Thought #5,081

Sometimes all it takes to be nice, to be kind, to be gracious, to be compassionate, is to maintain your silence.  A small effort in this maelstrom of slings and arrows of outrageousness we call life.

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Rev. Joe’s Random Thought #7,420

There is one word in Spanish that I should never had had to learn, tiroteo.  The literal translation is shooting, but they seem to use in the sense of mass shootings.

Obviously with the situation with guns here in the United States, with mass shootings seemingly happening every week, sometimes multiple times, if you are discussing the news with someone in another country, the subject of mass shootings is going to come up.

It is one word/concept that I wish I had never heard of… or learned in another language.

And so it should not go.

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Rev. Joe’s Random Thought #899

yeah I know you did not ask!

I posted a random thought yesterday that read, “Sometimes when I am listening to really good music that moves me, I think, if life has any meaning at all, it is music.”

To which one of my muchísimo subscribers responded, “For me, it’s the music of nature. Sitting on the deck this morning, no one is mowing and all I hear all the birds and the rustle of leaves.”

For me the sound of suburbia has always been the drone of gas engines on lawn mowers, and the 2-cycle engines of  weed eaters and leaf blowers.  Of course, that is getting a bit better as more and more folks are adopting electric lawn mowers and other electric yard tools… at least around here.

The latest “sound of suburbia” for me is the all too many delivery trucks driving much too fast on the shady, tree lined streets of our neighborhood full of children and old folks.

During the pandemic the sound of this neighborhood actually reminded me a bit of my youth as I could hear children playing outside.  Apparently, now they have all gone back inside with their video games.  Oh well.

But when it is quiet, I love sitting on our patio listening to the chirping of the birds, watching the antics of the squirrels and chipmunks and marveling at the acrobatic aeronautics of the humming birds and bumble bees.  And let’s not forget Princess Lily keeping us safe from those same squirrels and chipmunks.  It is good to have a purpose in life.

Occasionally, life really is good.

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Rev. Joe’s Random Thought #7,169

yeah I know you did not ask!

Sometimes when I am listening to really good music that moves me, I think, if life has any meaning at all, it is music.

Yeah, I know…

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Rev. Joe’s Random Thought #9,809

yeah I know you did not ask!

Way, way back in the day, but not quite Mr. Peabody way back, I used to have a t-shirt that had written large upon on it, “Nuke a Gay Whale for Christ.”

I loved it because it satirized multiple  tropes current at that period of time. I always wondered, though, why they did not get the ubiquitous milk of this time period in there somehow…Got Milk?

What brought this up is that I saw a bumper sticker today that I have seen a few times before.  It reads in large letters, “JESUS LOVES YOU“, and below that in a smaller font is “But I am his favorite.”

I have never quite figured out if the folks displaying these bumper stickers are evangelizing, satirizing or both. Or perhaps, given the epidemic of narcissism in this country, they really believe they are the favorite of one branch of the Christian trilogy.  Going even further afield, perchance, the bumper sticker is referring to that well known playboy, the Mexican Mac Daddy, the gardener named Jesus.

On so it goes upon the highways and byways of the metropolis known as St. Louis.