Momentus Times

I haven't blogged in a while. May 24th. is the anniversary of a number of events. It's Bob Dylan's birthday in 1941. On 1976 on this date I was living at the Palm St. house and some fortune tellers wanted to take over our house. They wanted us to let them have that house and we would move to some house further back in the tract. In those days my brother and a friend of his (we aren't using names) were very spiritual and were looking for any "leading of the Lord" even if it was a bogus one. I always thought the idea was unreasonable and stupid and rationality won out. This date is mentioned in the some Vera Gemini by Blue Oyster Cult, and it's also mentioned in "Lakeside Park" by Rush about watching the fireworks display on the 24th. of May.

It was on this day in 1967, a Wednesday that relations with a girl, Kathy, of Italian extraction, took a turn for the better. I had known her for at least two months because I remember we and this couple she knew, talking about whether we saw the total eclipse of the Moon, which took place the morning after Easter. (That's not supposed to occur) It was also on this week in 1967 that I heard my first Sgt. Pepper songs. First I heard "She's Leaving Home" and I remember thinking for some reason it sounded like the Beach Boys. Then I heard "Lucy in the Sky". It was the following Monday afternoon May 29th. 1967 that the radio waves were awash with songs from the album. It was that Monday night that I wrote down all my guesses of who would win the Presidency for every year on out to but not including 2008. I've been thinking about that recently. I predicted Nixon and Reagan would be elected President and Vice President in 1868. This is an odd prediction since I was a flaming liberal at the time. Then I predicted Bobby Kennedy would be elected in 1976 and serve one term. My brother this evening was busily recording new Beatles songs from the album. The weather during all of this period was overcast. As you may know Andy Granitelli had his gas turbine engine out and Parnelli Jones raced in the Incy 500 and lost to A J Foyt because his engine conked out.

This is Wednesday May 24, 2006 and for the second day in a row the sun actually is shining this morning. When good news is rare it gets reported. You know there’s that lyric from a Ringo song, “I looked in the mirror; I saw my wife and kids- and you know what they tell me- I’m great”. You hear these songs where people look back and see their teenage years as negative and awkward and now that they’re older and more successful they look back on all the concerns they had when they were younger of “Am I attractive enough” and all that as “Silly”. Well- all the negative concerns I had thirty five or forty years are all real. It’s only the positive stuff that seems “Silly”. Things like “growth in the Lord” and “maturing” and being a father or perhaps a grandfather by now- -and establishing who the Lord wants me to be in life. That seems “Silly” because it never happened- - along with other things like the Rapture, which never happened. There was always this idea when I was in my twenties that “the good would become more manifest” kind of like the parable of the wheat and the tares. It would be obvious who was a Christian because they would be the ones that were blessed. Well, none of that ever happened for me. Even as little as ten years ago I held out more hope for myself than I do now. Things were more hopeful even then. What you learn to do now is the art of living with inevitable death. That’s where we’re all going to end up. I was just looking in the mirror last night and my right eye was facing out. It used to face in when I was a child. Either way it shows something abnormal in my neurological constitution.

Well it’s official. Oil companies are gauging us. They are doing it in two days. The oil companies are setting up mandentory price zones for gasoline distribution where any dealer is forbidden to charge a price below a certain amount in a given neighborhood. Also in places like Chicago oil companies are deliberately not delivering gasoline to certain places so that prices will be jacked up. Nobody said whether either of these two practices are illegal. Also oil inventories are at an eight year high. There is no gasoline shortage. Perhaps oil companies could take their windfall oil profits and build new refineries with them, but I guess that would be self-defeating. They’d have to spend money and when they got done they wouldn’t be able to charge as much for the gasoline because there would be more of it. They said the national price average was $2.88 but I heard it was actually more like $3.35 per gallon of regular & higher for premium.

Osama Bin Laden has sent a new tape to the media. In it he says Zechariahs Masaui had nothing to do with 9 – 11. You kind of get the idea that capturing Bin Laden is about as unlikely as finding Jimmy Hoffa’s body on that horse farm near Detroit. It’s one of those bar room conversations people have- of things that will never happen.

They may have come across the first human to human transmission of bird flu in a family in Indonesia where the whole family came down with the disease. Of course the whole family has been around live poultry, still authorities are worried. The question is could we ever have a scenario like in that TV movie. To me it seems entirely possible that we could- given the severity of the threat. People say future scenarios never happen but sometimes they do. We should be prepaired.

This is Katie Kuric’s last week doing the Today show before she moves to CBS and that Millionaire lady- - Marideth (?) – fills the void on the today show.

We need to pay a tribute to Mike Wallace. He’s been a media professional since 1941 but his parents wanted him to be a lawyer and he played the violin as a child. He of course bounced all around the radio and early TV media before finding his nitch in the 1960’s, he says after his nineteen year old son died. He is noted for using phrases such as “Come on!” and “Look- - - “ and “Forgive me for asking but- - - “ The thing last night almost spoke of him as if he were dead. I had on Randy Rhodes this afternoon and she spoke of how the federal governments to legislate against free news reporting, and she reminded her viewers of the Pentagon Papers case in 1971. At noon I had Ed Shultz on but I’m afraid I slept through that. I didn’t take my vitamins today.

This last paragraph was typed Monday. I was going to talk a little about Christian myrters. Well let's just say that people like Ignatius aren't very comon today. He wrote letters just before he died in about AD 110 filled with every plattitude and Bible NT reference in the book. He made wanting to be martyred seems like the most normal thing in the world. He obviously seemed fermiliar with all of St. Paul's letters treating them as if they were scripture. Of course some people like in that Stephen King movie get killed and they don't have a choice, they're just victims. What I'm kind of thinking is that St. Paul believed the Lord was coming back in his life time and people were content to "wait for the Kingdom" then. But after the first generation of apostles died people grew impatient and somehow wanted to speed the process along. It's also a fact that a "general persecution" of Christian martyrs didn't take place till 204 AD or something instituted by Emperor Decius (?) Those people were willing to give their lives for their Faith but today moderns Christians won't cross the street to help somebody.