Chris Hansen’s blog

Christmas shopping always brings out the worst in shoppers and in shops. Why am I always in the slowest line? Let Bill Hammack explain it all to you. Thanks to the Journal of Improbable Research for the reference.

Thanks to the Rev. Ann Fontaine for referring me to this.

The Washington Post’s Mensa Invitational once again invited readers to take any word from the dictionary, alter it by adding, subtracting, or changing one letter, and supply a new definition.

Here are the winners:

• Cashtration (n.): The act of buying a house, which renders the subject financially impotent for an indefinite period of time.
• Ignoranus : A person who’s both stupid and an asshole.
• Intaxicaton : Euphoria at getting a tax refund, which lasts until you realize it was your money to start with.
• Reintarnation : Coming back to life as a hillbilly.
• Bozone ( n.): The substance surrounding stupid people that stops bright ideas from penetrating. The bozone layer, unfortunately, shows little sign of breaking down in the near future.
• Foreploy : Any misrepresentation about yourself for the purpose of getting laid.
• Giraffiti : Vandalism spray-painted very, very high.
• Sarchasm : The gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and the person who doesn’t get it.
• Inoculatte : To take coffee intravenously when you are running late.
• Osteopornosis : A degenerate disease. (This one got extra credit.)
• Karmageddon : It’s like, when everybody is sending off all these really bad vibes, right? And then, like, the Earth explodes and it’s like, a serious bummer.
• Decafalon (n.): The grueling event of getting through the day consuming only things that are good for you.
• Glibido : All talk and no action.
• Dopeler Effect: The tendency of stupid ideas to seem smarter when they come at you rapidly.
• Arachnoleptic Fit (n.): The frantic dance performed just after you’ve accidentally walked through a spider web.
• Beelzebug (n.): Satan in the form of a mosquito, that gets into your bedroom at three in the morning and cannot be cast out.
• Caterpallor ( n.): The color you turn after finding half a worm in the fruit you’re eating.

The Washington Post has also published the winning submissions to its yearly contest, in which readers are asked to supply alternate meanings for common words.

And the winners are:

• Coffee, n.. The person upon whom one coughs.
• Flabbergasted, adj. Appalled by discovering how much weight one has gained.
• Abdicate, v. To give up all hope of ever having a flat stomach.
• Esplanade, v. To attempt an explanation while drunk.
• Willy-nilly, adj. Impotent.
• Negligent, adj. Absentmindedly answering the door when wearing only a nightgown.
• Lymph, v.. To walk with a lisp.
• Gargoyle, n. Olive-flavored mouthwash.
• Flatulence, n. Emergency vehicle that picks up someone who has been run over by a steamroller.
• Balderdash, n. A rapidly receding hairline.
• Testicle, n. A humorous question on an exam.
• Rectitude, n. The formal, dignified bearing adopted by proctologists.
• Pokemon, n. A Rastafarian proctologist.
• Oyster, n. A person who sprinkles his conversation with Yiddishisms.
• Frisbeetarianism, n. The belief that, after death, the soul flies up onto the roof and gets stuck there.
• Circumvent, n. An opening in the front of boxer shorts worn by Jewish men

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Prioritise your Pies! Zombies first, then pies!

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As many of you will be aware, Britain (and Europe generally) has been hit with a large (for us) amount of snow coupled with rather low temperatures in the last week. This has resulted in the closure and then tight flight restriction of Heathrow Airport, the cancellation of a number of Eurostar services, and a great amount of disruption on the East Coast Main Line from London to Scotland. On the roads and the sidewalks (pavements), clearing of snow and ice has only taken place on the main roads, while most pavements are still mired in ice and are skating rinks for the unwary.

For the last three years, Britain has lumbered under severe snowfalls at least once each year. This was not the case in the previous 14 years I have lived here—snow was rare and mostly consisted of flurries which did not stick, and temperatures stayed above 0° C most of the time. Every year for the last three, after the snow has fallen and the country is faced with paralysis, the scream goes up from the citizenry: “Why?”

Well, I’ll tell you why. The United Kingdom does not believe that buying snowplows, antifreeze, sand, and salt in the amounts necessary to cope with the kind of winters we’ve had lately is economical. This is belied by the pictures on the evening news of acres of hopeful passengers camping out at Heathrow Airport waiting to get on an airplane, and the queue to get on a Eurostar train, which queue stretches out the doors of St. Pancras International Railway Station down the Euston Road, ending somewhere in front of the British Library.

Heads will, of course, roll. Probably not the Transport Secretary’s; the government has no appetite for sacking yet another Cabinet minister (see below). Something may be done with the people at the airports and the railways responsible for deicing runways and running rails and overhead catenary wires. But sacking the personnel involved will not help the situation unless the country is willing to bite the bullet and plan out exactly what will take place when a snowfall occurs here.

Airports like that of Stockholm are still running; the only services curtailed are those to Heathrow and Frankfurt. Why doesn’t BAA (the owners of Heathrow) tempt Stockholm-Arlanda’s Director of Preparedness (or whatever they call the post) with a huge salary to come here and sort this out for us? If something like this does not happen, then next year, or the year after, when a paralysing snowfall dumps itself on the United Kingdom, I do not want to hear ANYone complaining about it. Either we decide to take our lumps and wait until the weather and the snow clears, or we plan for this occurrence and commit the money required to keep transport running through it.

In political news, we were greeted this morning with the news that the Business Secretary, Vince Cable MP (a Liberal Democrat), had been caught speaking indiscreetly to two people who he thought were constituents but who were actually reporters for the Daily Telegraph, which is the main Tory broadsheet newspaper here in the United Kingdom. Among the tidbits were:

• Being in the coalition government is like being at war.
• However, if the Tories push him too far, there is always the nuclear option of resigning.
• He compared the Coalition Government’s policies and reforms to ‘a kind of Maoist revolution’ and thought that the Liberal Democrats should be a kind of brake on them.
• He “declared war” on Rupert Murdoch (owner of News International, Sky, and lots of other stuff here, in the US, and in Australia) and thought that he himself would win.

Now the first three should not be news to anyone who follows British politics. However, the last one is one nuclear option that perhaps Mr. Cable wanted to avoid. His department is considering whether Murdoch should be able to buy the portion of BSkyB that he does not now own. For the Cabinet minister who would make the decision as to whether this purchase should go ahead to express such bold anti-Murdoch sentiments to people whom he did not know is unwise, to say the least. While many were calling for Cable’s head, the news has just broken that he will continue as a Cabinet minister while losing control over the BSkyB sale to Jeremy Hunt, the Culture, Media, and Sport Secretary. For the Liberal Democrats to lose two Cabinet ministers (David Laws being the first to resign from his post as Chief Secretary to the Treasury because he fiddled his expenses to conceal the fact that his landlord was actually his same-sex partner.) would be extremely unfortunate. (Declaration of interest: I am a registered Liberal Democrat.)

An additional bumble is this: the Daily Telegraph did not break the news about Cable’s attitude toward Murdoch. A leaker within the Daily Telegraph passed that information to Robert Peston, the famously hesitant-voiced economics editor of BBC News. The reason that the Telegraph chose not to publish these remarks is probably because it agrees with them and did not want to expose Cable’s indiscretion on this subject to public view. Sauce, goose; sauce, gander!

The third bumble was committed on the Radio 4 breakfast news and comment show, Today. I listen every day and get my main daily diet of news from it. Last week, one of the subjects of discussion was the aforementioned Culture, Media and Sport Secretary, Jeremy Hunt. In announcing the segment, James Naughtie, one of the main presenters, said that he was going to be interviewing “Jeremy C*nt”. He followed this with a long interval of coughing and sputtering. This mistake captured the smiles of millions at their breakfast tables. While that particular word is considered fairly taboo here, it is not absolutely proscribed in print or on TV or radio. Any usage of it has to be justified. In the US, of course, anyone who made that particular mistake would be banned from the airwaves and the station or channel that carried it would be fined. Naughtie apologised later on during the show, and disappeared for a few days while the country was digesting the news that he’d slipped up. Later on another BBC presenter, in reporting Naughtie’s mistake, made the exact same mistake. Another apology. The nation chortled.

Thus, I live in a country where gaffes are made almost continuously. I love the frisson of danger this adds to listening to, watching, or reading the news. Others think that the country is going to the dogs. If it is, then I say, “Woof!”

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November 28, 2010 Fourth Sunday of Advant

Sermon delivered at St. John the Evangelist, 10 AM.

First Reading: Isaiah 7:10-14; Ps. 23; Epistle: Romans 1:1-7; Gospel: Matthew 1:18-24

In the name of God, the one, the Undivided Trinity. AMEN.

I hesitate to say this, but among my interests is public transport and railways. In America such people are called railfans, and here they are sometimes referred to as trainspotters. I state here and now that I do not own an anorak and I do not sit on cold railway platforms writing down locomotive numbers. I do have an interest in the many and varied ways that people all over the world use to travel around their cities and their countries.

One of the email transport lists I look at had a story about a crime on the Underground system in Boston, which is called the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority, or the “T”, for short.

A woman leaving a train took her iPhone out of her bag. While she was using it, a robber snatched it from her hands and ran down the platform, intending to leave the station with it.

I don’t know about you, but in those circumstances I would do what this lady did: I’d have screamed “THIEF!”, and started to chase him. Often such chases end in the thief being faster than the victim, and we see in the last picture of the situation the victim standing on the street, watching the thief escape.

This story, on the other hand, had a happier ending for the victim. Two intrepid employees of the “T” gave chase and cornered the robber. He tried to leave the station through a ceiling-high gate and was caught there.

The two men were braver than might first appear. When the police arrived and arrested the robber, they discovered that he was armed with a rather large knife. Thankfully, he didn’t use it and was thus spared the horror of injuring someone physically and being punished for that crime rather than simply for the crime of robbery.

His name is Christopher, which, as most of you will realise, means “Bearer of Christ”. He is only 18 years old. He is a heroin user and a drug dealer, judging from the drug paraphernalia found on him when he was arrested. Now I am not an apologist for youth crime and young criminals; blaming distressed circumstances for one’s criminal behaviour is just not on. But here’s where the story intrigued me, and I hope it’ll intrigue you as well.

One of the men who captured Christopher asked him, “Why did you do it? Christopher said that he was just down on his luck and that he needed the money. The worker replied, “You could have at least asked people for money.” and Christopher looked at him and said, “Would anybody give me money?”

We’ve all encountered people panhandling—it’s almost the norm in the subways under the Elephant and Castle. Some look relatively neat, some have a pet (Tan always insists on giving them money when they have a dog with them.), and some look very much the worse for wear. The question we might ask is, “Would anyone give _them_ money?”

Whether of money, or of toys for the kids, or warm socks and mittens, or of a great Christmas meal, ended only by switching on the telly to watch the Queen’s Christmas message, gifts are on all our minds during this season. We try to think of the best gifts to give each of our family and friends. We brave the Arctic conditions outside to purchase them or order them online and wait by the mailbox to ensure that they don’t fall into the hands of the recipient before the 25th. When we’re children, we speculate on what Father Christmas has in store for us, and when we’re adults, we shake gaily-wrapped boxes to see if we can figure out what Aunt Barbara has given us just from the sound it makes.

We believe that we deserve presents, and we “Oooo!” and “Ahhhh!” as each box is unwrapped and its contents are displayed. Even the box from Aunt Jane, revealed to contain an ancient fruitcake, drilled full of holes which are in turn filled with brandy, is welcomed with the same enthusiasm as we greet some object we’ve longed for and which is now ours, through the grace of the giver.

We then discard the wrappings, and for the rest of its useful life appreciate the item we’ve received. Christmas recedes into far memory; soon Easter looms. And don’t think that Easter is that far away; Tesco’s puts out a shelf of Easter eggs the week after New Year’s, every year. Count on it.

The point of gifts at Christmas is that they are always deserved. Your family and friends love and treasure you, and the gifts you receive are recompense, in some small way, for your presence in their lives and in their histories. A child may have been a longed-for addition to a family where the parents had long since given up hope for children. The child’s gift to her parents is in some small way a thank offering for the supreme gift of birth and continuing life and nurturing in their family. Even the dog who gets a bone wrapped in silver paper and tied with a red ribbon deserves the gift after offering his devoted unconditional love to the family of which he is a part.

As Christians, there is one gift that we receive around this time each year, every year. Preachers preach about it, carollers sing about it, the Scriptures tell us about it, The first time we received this gift, it wasn’t under a decorated tree, and it probably wasn’t around the Winter Solstice when it was given. Joseph and Mary were the first to know about the gift, and Joseph considered rejecting it at first.

Joseph seems to be relatively embarrassed about it all. He considers discreetly getting rid of Mary and her unborn child, even though they were engaged to be married. Something wasn’t right, and he wanted no part of it. The angel persuaded him otherwise, and he accepted the gift.

Jesus was that gift, God-with us.

The robber, Christopher, looked at his captor and asked, “Would anybody give me money?” We are in the same boat when it comes to Christmas and God-with-us. Would anybody give us the gift of God-with-us? Do we deserve it?

AMEN.

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All you Linux-heads and Mac-heads, you may go to the next post now. Nothing to see here, move right along…

For all you who remain, I’ve got a nagging problem that is driving me rather around the bend. Background: I have a Dell server (which I use for a workstation), with a RAID array (I believe it’s RAID 0), running Windows Vista, patched up to date. What is bothering me is this: I keep the computer on 24/7, but of course it occasionally hangs or needs rebooting for various other reasons such as updating. When I reboot, most often than not the machine wants to run CHKDSK before starting up again. When it does, it invariably says that there is a problem with the file gameuxmig.dll. It fixes the problem, then reboots, and service goes on normally until the next reboot.

I have AVG Anti-Virus Free, latest version, and XoftSpy XE, also latest version, both with malware files up to date. Neither of them has caught any viruses on my machine.

I thus decided to Google “gameuxmig.dll” to see whether there was any information on what kind of file it was. There are a shedload of references, but most of them seem to trace back to anti-virus sites that may or may not be legit (as I don’t recognise them), so I refrain from following the links.

I also tried to google CHKDSK to see whether there were any online pages I could visit to learn about how it works and what the various error messages it throws mean. No luck there, either. I got lots of Q&A sites, where if you pay for guidance, or trawl through hundreds of questions from the clueless, you might find what you need to know. I did not get any useful sites.

My question to you, dear techie friends (or friends of dear techie friends) is this: What is gameuxmig.dll? Where does it come from (I think it’s part of Windows, but can’t be sure)? What does it do? And why does it always go wrong on the disk and have to be corrected by CHKDSK?

I may try Bing, or Yahoo!, or some other search engine to see whether they give any further useful information. And, as for CHKDSK, I went into the Windows technical pages and looked for technical information about what CHKDSK does and what the messages it turns up mean. No dice there either.

Wit’s end, here…any references, steer to references, or suggestions for more useful search terms gratefully received.

The vicar may be camp, and not attired in the proper vestments for preaching, but the message, surprisingly, is valid no matter how camp he is.

This Christmas think about not what you want, but what you need. And chillax.

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Today’s joke:

It’s late Fall, and the Indians on a remote reservation in South Dakota asked their new chief if the coming winter was going to be cold or mild.

Since he was a chief in a modern society, he had never been taught the old secrets. When he looked at the sky, he couldn’t tell what the winter was going to be like.

Nevertheless, to be on the safe side, he told his tribe that the winter was indeed going to be cold and that the members of the village should collect firewood to be prepared.

But, being a practical leader, after several days, he got an idea.

He went to the phone booth, called the National Weather Service and asked, ‘Is the coming winter going to be cold?’

‘It looks like this winter is going to be quite cold,’ the meteorologist at the weather service responded.

So the chief went back to his people and told them to collect even more firewood in order to be prepared.

A week later, he called the National Weather Service again. ‘Does it still look like it is going to be a very cold winter?’

‘Yes,’ the man at National Weather Service again replied, ‘it’s going to be a very cold winter.’

The chief again went back to his people and ordered them to collect every scrap of firewood they could find.

Two weeks later, the chief called the National Weather Service again. ‘Are you absolutely sure that the winter is going to be very cold?’

‘Absolutely,’ the man replied. ‘It’s looking more and more like it is going to be one of the coldest winters we’ve ever seen.’

‘How can you be so sure?’ the chief asked.

The weatherman replied, ‘The Indians are collecting a shitload of firewood.’

I resisted the urge to put “I Told You So, Part 1” as the subject of this blog post.

Downing Street has just announced, and Bishop Nick has confirmed on his blog, that he has been nominated by the Queen to serve as Bishop of Bradford, in Yorkshire. The story is also on the Diocese of Bradford’s website.

You may recall that a while back I predicted that Bishop Nick would be the next Archbishop of Canterbury, predicating that on his translation to a Diocese within the next few years. This is the first part of that prediction, which has now come true.

To repeat what I said about him, in summary, I believe that the deficiencies of one bishop/archbishop/incumbent of a parish are then compensated for in the appointment of his or her successor. One major deficiency of the current Archbishop of Canterbury is that he is a piss-poor communicator. ++Rowan was appointed as a compensation for the shortcomings of the previous Archbishop, who was thought to be somewhat deficient in the thought department. The next Archbishop of Canterbury will have to be someone who is not only intelligent and pastoral, but also a great communicator. Bishop Nick GETS Twitter and the blogosphere better than any other occupant of a seat on the Bench of Bishops in England. He is a good blogger, a good writer, a Tweeter of note, a broadcaster on the populist BBC Radio 2’s God-slot, and (to my mind) a good bishop. He is also relatively broad-Church leaning toward Evangelical, which is where Buggins’s Turn would place the next Archbishop.

As for the Diocese of Southwark, this will place our new Bishop, Christopher Chessun, in the position of appointing two Suffragan Bishops and the Dean of Southwark in the first few months of his tenure. I expect that the third suffragan, Bishop Richard Cheetham of Kingston, will be translated sometime in the new year, which will give Bishop Christopher a clean slate of new suffragans to work with. I also expect that some of the six Archdeacons will retire or take new posts or be en-mitred within the next two years or so.

So, watch this space, folks.

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…and many happy returns of the day.

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…and many happy returns of the day!

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I know that there are hundreds or thousands of families where their gay or lesbian child is accepted and loved for who s/he is. There are many more thousands of families where the child is disowned, kicked out of the house, or abused mentally and physically.

This particular video is of a normal Hispanic-American family whose son came out, and what happened afterward. The father, an ex-Marine, is built like a brick sh*thouse, but the father and mother are so loving and gracious toward their son, that this video is amazingly good. A better set of poster-people for acceptance of lesbian and gay children you could not get anywhere. Their son is cute as well (he reminds me of Justin on Ugly Betty).

It’s 15 minutes long, but worth watching.

If only all parents and adults were as rational as well as loving, lots of trauma in the world would be avoided. I don’t know about you, but I’m tired of trauma. During Advent, when Christians are preparing ourselves and our homes for the coming of the Christchild, let’s think about what kind of home we’re welcoming Him to. I’m certain that the Christchild would be absolutely delighted to go to EJ’s family home—would He be as happy to come to mine, I wonder.

I have just read the text of the Wikileaked cable from the US Ambassador to the Vatican, where the British Ambassador to the Vatican seems to cast doubt on the Anglican Ordinariate and predicts some violent backlashes from enraged Protestants in England and a chilly reception from the Royal Family of the Pope during his recent visit to the UK. It made the morning news on Radio 4’s Today program this morning, and all I could think of was, “It must be a slow news day.”

First, the cable displays a profound ignorance of the facts on the ground and the back story to the Ordinariate. As I have posited previously, the Ordinariate is not a vehicle for the Vatican to welcome disaffected Anglicans with open arms into the bosom of Holy Mother the Church. It is, in fact, a quarantine camp or, more bluntly, a leper colony into which those disaffected Anglicans can be placed so as to cause minimum damage to the Roman Catholic Church. The cable does admit that the number of Anglicans going over is likely to be a trickle rather than a flood, but there are no startling insights available from the text as given.

Second, the cable documents the dismay of Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams at not being consulted over the Ordinariate. This is undoubtedly true (as I have seen in other fora and heard from people who might actually know something of the subject), but was widely known beforehand. What the cable didn’t say, but what is undoubtedly the case, is that Williams is relieved that the malcontents are swimming the Tiber and only annoyed at the fact that more of them won’t be going. Rome’s centralised power structure means that they can control the Ordinariate more closely than Williams could ever control or even mildly influence the malcontents.

What concerns me is that our representative at the Vatican (and probably the US’s as well) is so uninformed about religious matters that they could write this stuff. “Tell us something we don’t know or can’t deduce from afar!” we cry. One would expect that the British Ambassador to the Vatican would be better informed about the state of Vatican-Anglican relations and more able to make predictions and sense trends in them.

This perhaps means that instead of posting Catholic laypeople to the Vatican as representatives, the UK ought to send people there who are clued in about Anglican affairs as well, regardless of the altar rail at which they receive Communion on a Sunday.

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Don’t blame me, blame spwebdesign, with whom HWMBO, I, and fj had dinner.

Q. How do we know that Jesus wasn’t a Rastafarian?

A. Because he was crucified, not stoned.

In the UK there has recently been a flurry of interest in the Rt Rev’d and Rt Hon. Lord Carey of Clifton, PC’s new initiative to combat the “bullying” of Christians at work and in society. The poster-person for this is a person who was forbidden to wear a neckchain with a cross on it at work (she’s a nurse). Another person who worked for British Airways was sacked for refusing to remove a neckchain with a cross when on duty. According to Carey (the former Archbishop of Canterbury), along with such usual suspects as the Rt Rev’d Michael Nazir-Ali, the former Bishop of Rochester and the Rt Rev’d Peter Forster, the Bishop of Chester, this amounts to bullying of Christians in the workplace. Some would go so far as to defend the registrar in Islington who was sacked for refusing to conduct civil partnerships and the marriage counselor for Relate who could not bring himself to counsel same-sex couples in need of relationship counseling. (I apologise for using links to the Daily Mail, in which I would normally not even wrap fish.)

Now the British examples are relatively benign, in that very British way where we are enormously polite to each other in public. The alleged bullying or persecution of Christians seems, to me, to be a last-ditch attempt by those who have traditionally run things in the United Kingdom to preserve their special status and keep the right to discriminate for themselves, while denying that right to everyone else. Imagine the outcry if a Wiccan registrar refused to register the wedding of a devout Christian couple because of their attitudes towards Wiccans.

In any case, were the Rt Rev’d Lord Carey to win out, I wonder if this news item would be the result, translated to England. Would HWMBO and I be the targets of radical and violent Evangelical proselytising at home after having solemnised our civil partnership at Southwark registry office?

Boy, those chemistry teachers have lots of fun!

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