What I've Been Doing Vol 725 & 726

.  If I click above the margin (just to check) it throws in a header and a dotted line.  I canceled that.  Meanwhile back at the ranch today is Friday July 27, 2018 and this has been a strange week with on the whole more negatives than positives.  I did fix the bank balance crisis on Tuesday.  But the other problem with the phone company accusing me of upgrading my speed, that problem has not been settled.  It cropped up again the next day.  I’ll go into that more later.  Of course yesterday was the day it seems Augustine took that black kitten to the pound or else as Bill said in the late morning “Augustine took it and killed it”.   Of course the cat HAS an owner, so you can’t compare it to Patches three years ago.  I still have dental work hanging over my head for the foreseeable future.  That’s why last February’s exam was such a blow.  Some things you want to say are “in the past” when they are not.  But the major problem of yesterday was for the third time this calendar year I have bed bugs.  Augustine keeps giving me mattresses with bugs in them and it happens regularly now about every three months.

I never got a pillow last night and neither did Bill.  I used two folded over pairs of blue jeans for a pillow.  I went to bed at ten thirty and got up at four thirty.  I didn’t shower but went right out looking for cigarettes.  Bill had given me matches and now they’ve all been used up.  I came back up just before five and lay down for a few minutes.  Then I went back down looking for  cigarettes.  Finally I ran into Glen at the west tables.  He gave me a cigarette and then Mario shows up as if by RADAR and I was pressured into giving him at least a third of it.  (less than half)  Glen gives me another butt and says “That’s for being a good Samaritan”.  It was starting to get light.  Like yesterday there was initial cloudiness that dissipated quickly.   I went in and burned on Bill Press on computer and after this it was Stephanie Miller.  I listened to John Fugelsang at six thirty.  Right now I have Stephanie in hour delay.  (during breakfast)  Bill gave me a bunch of clothes I can’t identify and threw away the bag they were in.  I’l like to put them back in that bag.

For the second day in a row we had oatmeal.  I received four sweet & low when I normally use two packs of white sugar.  That pleasant old lady is back at our table now.  I’ve been telling her about my bug problems.  For our main plate we had a hard boiled egg and a bagel with cream cheese to spread on it.  Aren’t those items Jewish people eat when there is a funers.  (Something about them being round)  The first cup of coffee I had was cold but I saved the creamer for the second cup of coffee I got from the kitchen, and that coffee was hot.  I borrowed cigarette number seventeen from Ron after breakfast. 

We get to see if the margin skips properly coming up now.  Yesterday morning Icontinued the usual pattern of later bed times and later rising.  I don’t remember what time I got up but I went outside and it was getting lighter and I remarked to Bill that it looked like it might be a cloudy day.  Bill said “I doubt it”.  It was starting to take longer to get light  now. Ihad Bill Press and then Stephanie Miller on.  I didn’t knotice the blackand white kitty around this morning.  I got my medication about a quarter after six.  For about the third day in a row Dorthy was in the hospital or something.  She wasn’t here.  Also Michelle would be gone all day till about a quarter to four.  It made for a quiet day.  We had oatmeal for breakfast followed by scrambled eggs and two pieces of French toast and butter.  I got a small cup of coffee and I went back and they didn’t have seconds.  I had been feeling tired this morning.  I began tidying up the room in anticipation of Emma coming around to clean.  It was around nine Bill wanted me to check the menus and change both to a triple decker roast beef and cheese sandwich with mayo.  I didn’t change my menu.  I guess Emma came by about 9:25.   It was after nine thirty when I went into the TV room and watched a good chunk of “Rawhide” in black and white.

Then I went back up to the room and noticed my bed had not been changed.  I looked around and noticed all of the bugs on the mattress.  This is the light bar this line.  I didn’t get agood feeling.  I told Emma about it in the next room and she says “Augustine has to look at that”.  Then I went back down for snacks and I had vanilla wafers in a cup and iced tea.   After this I went back up and had the Gary and Shannon show on.  We had macaroni and cheese for lunch.  I don’t remember the - - - I guess it was orange sherbet.  The plump lady had returned after an absence of a few days.  Then when Purlita came with the coffee she told me all of my clothes would be washed.  They didn’t waste time.  She was up there and putting stuff in bags and I hope it was all properly labeled.  She saved the  suits and stuff that can’t be washed but sprayed only.  Then Judy called wanting to know my AT&T account number.  I had to fish it out from the papers I was shuffling around trying to find a safe place for them.  That’s when I learned that the phone company still was accusing me of ordering an upgrade for twenty dollars more.   Rene came in and told me not to sit on my now bare mattress any more that he and Augustine would be giving me a new mattress and cleaning the room for the next couple of hours.  I still had Gary and Shannon on the radio.  I had just started watching Days of our Lives (on Bill’s bed without a pillow) and Augustine and Rene showed up to get about their work.

I spent time talking and smoking with Bill out front, where you’re not supposed to smoke but we were.  I also remember buying Phyllis a pack of strawberry cigarettes for two cigarettes.  My lighter was getting flakier and flakier.   I wore out my thumb trying to light a butt I found.  I went out for snacks at two but don’t remember what I had.  I spent a lot of time out back.  I needed to use the restroom but nobody would give me the key.  Eventually I ventured back to this room at maybe ten to three.  The room smelled like poop or something.  I said to Rene, “That must have been some strange bug spray you used” and he said “yes.  That’s why you would be out of the room”.  I noticed the place was basically in order.  One thing I noticed was that Rene or Augustine had taken the extension cord to the radio and so the radio cord was hanging in suspension over to the outlet behind the bed.  Also the bookcase had been moved over farther.  The lamp was unplugged but that’s because that plug is getting really loose.  I turned on the TV and I guess we watched Eye Witness news.  A care-giver named Julie came in and I said we needed towels  wash clothes and pillows.  Eventually she came back with one towel for each of us.  But there were no pillows and she said that the main storage room was locked and she lost the key, or maybe I have these events out of order.  Meanwhile Bill found that bag of clothes hewanted too dump on me.   We are nearing the bottom of page two.

About a quarter to four the van with Michelle pulled up.  Michelle got out and she wanted me to fill her water bottle with ice cold water from the cooler.  I did that. I also carried her heavy bag for her.  As a reward she said I could have a spoon of instant coffee and she even had that with her.  I went to my room and got the cup and spoon and got it and went back.  In the process I missed that new medication line they have now.  For dinner we had a chili cheese hot dog and coleslaw.  I went back for seconds in a long line and she gave me two hot dogs with chili and cheese but no bun.  I remember the after snack now and we had peaches “because it was so hot”.   We had a chocolate brownie for one of yesterday’s meals.   I fixed myself a cup of instant coffee, which I was happy to have.  Then Michelle went on a rant ab out a lot of things.  She and Lawerence got into a major argument where Laurance did an excellent job of cataloging her many faults.

The evening progressed and we still didn’t have pillows and she saw Bill and promised him she would get the pillows right away but nothing happened.  I had the ABC network news on and then it was Jeopardy and most of Wheel of Fortune.  I went down at five to eight and there was no line for once and I got my medication.  Earlier in the afternoon I had asked for a bandage because my left elbow was suddenly bleeding.  In the evening we watched some show on vaccines on KTLA about a legal suit to stop the human papaloma vaccine.  At nine initially I had “Black Lightning” on but then changed it to Law and Order and I watched that till ten.  Then it was the start of Seinfeld and I switched to the KTLA news.  I was outside actually enjoying the cool late night air. 

I just noticed this monitor is warm.  It wasn’t in the sun.  “Let’s Make a Deal” is on now and I turned the TV down.  I checked the lunch and dinner menus.  Bill is still waiting with Nancy nearby to see Dr Saran at his office to get an EKG.   Yesterday just after I was done with the writing I got a call from Paul about ten thirty and how he was ready to pick me up to take me to his house and bring that phone bill.  I did that.  Benji is the bird’s name and it sure had ear piercing squawks.  I noticed the lack of air conditioning at his house.  I was too much in a hurry tothink of swim trunks.  Paul made the phone call to the phone company using that special number that Judy had.  Judy was well equipped with the necessary passwords and numbers and Paul had the answer to the security question of “Who is your childhood hero?”  We got a cooperative sales rep named Richard.  Not only was he willing to make the adjustment and get rid of the alleged higher rate, but he was also willing to issue a credit for this month’s higher bill.  I only had a dollar five left over and it could have been curtains had the withdrawal been any higher.  So next month my bill will be only forty.  But after that was handled, they made another phone call to AT&T to change the billing on the calls so that they draw from my “Charlie” debit card rather than my checking account.  That was accomplished and will take four to six weeks.  SoI have one more bill billed to my Chase account and then they bill the trust fund.  That’s such good news it’s hard to believe.  I was worried though thinking that Rene was cleaning my bedroom and I hadn’t tied up the room first and things would be misplaced or lost.  Elizabeth was there was no cleaning.  That was on the other side of the hall.  Elizabeth made sandwiches for us and also gave us water and corn chips.  Then Paul gave me a banana and milk.  Paul had to be at work by one and he’s taking the kids to the beach and he has to tone up on all the lotions and sun blocks.  He took me home.

Do We Know Why and How Gnosticism Failed?

  Whoever came up with the idea of being Born Again as a life changing experiance was a genious.  I don't know whether Christianity or Gnosticism thought of it first.  The concencus seems to be that all of "Gnosticism" is a cheap knock-off copy of Christianity only in heritical and perverted form.  As you know I have been highly skeptical of this view believing it to be ass backwards.  The first three gospels in the Bible don't talk about a "born again" experiance.  And when John talks about it with Nicodemus we aren't sure whether or not he was referring to death and a spiritual resurrection, or a life altering experiance in this life.  I looked up Gnosticism in the Wikipedia and I didn’t recognize the information in it.  Did they revamp the article?  There was some Jewish figure named Belbo that was the embodiment of “knowledge”.   They talked him being of the Jewish priestly tradition.  I have been looking for a connection between the Jewish Sanhedredrin and the priests- - - as somehow being a forerunner of Jewish Christianity at least.  I'm still perplexed why they say James and the Apostles hung around the Jewish Temple.  I thought they hated each other but that's just what we have been led (or taught) to believe.  The important thing is that ignorance and not sin holds you captive and knowledge is the cure.  It seems almost ANY religion other than Christianity gets tagged as Gnostic by the Wikipedia.  Before I thought that no human effort would bring you “salvation” but it was only a lucky fluke that people came to have that Born Again experience. I'm not entirely sure where I got this idea.  It was sort of a Bhddahisc "awakening of the soul" or something.   It speaks of "Life and life more abondantly" but I'm told it isn't "Zoa" for biological life, but more of a life of the spirit.  At any rate this type of Salvation from the decaption of the Demiurge or whatever is the heart and core of most Gnosticism.  Since Gnosticism didn't get going till after 90 or 95 AD it's natural to assume by many that it imitated Christianity.  It saw the train leaving the station and wanted to get on board and cash in.  It's a wonder Christianity was "the survivor" out of all of this.  In the book of Acts this knowledge of being the sole survivor was on the minds of people who said "Other messiah's come and go but ours is the lasting one.  Christianity in other words stood the test of time.  My socialogical side asks "Just what kind of POWER did the Christian Church have over people that all the other faiths didn't have.  (Selah)  Is it all Darwin and "survival of the fittest"?  Are the heartist forms of biological form always the mot moral?  The Holy Roman Empire lasted hundreds of years.  Where is it now?  China has been communist for seventy years and has never been more prosperous.  It would seem that repression pays.  Pellican Bay prison in California has been around for decades and it's one of the systematic venues for isolation and torture known to man.  Sometimes cults put a lock on the brain itself and cam pose a crippling form of isolation.  And personally I think "knowledge" is a good thing and not a bad thing and I think more of Christianity needs to be cerebral.  But as we see from our president, being either cerebral or logical or morally consistent isn't always necessary.  Just chew on that one a while.  But people have this knee reflex of "Gnosticism - - - Baad!"  

ROCK AND ROLL REWIND

Do You Want to Dance? (Bobby Freeman)

Dem Bones (Classic version)

Good Rocking at Midnight (1949 artist)

Such a Night (Clyde Mc Phatter)

Loop de Loop Mambo (The Robins)

White Port & Lemon Juice (late 1955 artist)

Smoke Gets In Your Eyes (Platters)

Summertime Blues (Eddie Cochran)

Claudette (Everly Brothers)

Leave My Kitten Alone (artist?)

I Want to Be a Private Eye (Olympics) (?)

Take Our Some Insurance On Me, Baby (Jim Reeves)

Along Comes Jones (Coasters)

Living in the USA  (Chuck Berry)

I Want to Walk You Home (Fats Domino)

You’ll Be Mine (tape of Silver Beatles)

Down the Mississippi Down To New Orleans (US Bonds)

You Beat Me To the Punch (Mary Wells)

The Night Time is the Right Time (Ray Charles)

Get On My Pony and Ride (Dee Dee Sharp)

Push-over (Etta James) (?)

Ko Ko Joe (Righteous Brothers)

It’s In His Kiss (Betty Everett)

Bits and Pieces (Dave Clark Five)

La, La, La, La, La (summer 1964)

We don’t have an album cover for you yet.  Maybe a cartoon of somebody at a desk pushing the rewind button and showing with arrows the action of the tape.  Most of these songs have been heard in Rhapsody in Black.  1959 was a banner year yesterday that had a lot of songs that were actually hits, as opposed to his usual.  This is the summer that John Lennon must have most remembered when it came to influencing his picks for the Beatles.  In late summer of that year the four of them including Stu Sutcliffe and Ken Brown formed a band in Pete Best’s mother’s basement. OK Stu hadn't learned to play guitar yet.   It’s what you might call the “true beginnings” of the Beatles.  Lennon used to say that they didn’t need a drummer because we were so naturally tight and rhymithical without one.  “You’ll be Mine” has plenty of chances to get kicked off this album but I decided to keep it as a souveneer of what an early “Silver Beatle” recording was like.  Then we have “Take Out Some Insurance on me Baby” by Jim Reeves and “Leave My Kitten Alone”.  

Putin is Invited to the White House soon

Well, we've had countless snafoos with President Trump.  First there is the problem of what the word "would" meant.  Trump says he meant to say "wouldn't".  The only problem is the word "wouldn't" doesn't fit in with the context with the rest of what Trump was saying.  But I made a mistake in the previous blog below this one.  I talked about "From the end of WW II to 1980" and it looked like I was saying the economy was languishing during this time.  What I meant to say was that this is the base mark to measure from before Reagan's economic policies took effect.  I can now see how my mind was working but it came out rather awkwardly.  But I'l leaving it as it was.  But then there is the problem of whether "no" rally mean "No".   The reporter who asked him the question about whether Trump is going to address the election meddling problem maintains that the President meant "No' in response to her question and she says Trump repeated that "No'" to her looking right at her.  And then Trump moved on to another question.  But there is wiggle room as to what the President meant.  Maybe he did mean "I won't answer any more questions on that topic", which in his own way is just as bad.  Then yesterday there was another Presidential misstatement.   Everyone was surprised by Trump's twitter announcement that he's invited Vladimir Putin to the White House.  Maybe we should paint the White House a bright canary yellow just for the occasion.  One lady I talked to this morning says if she were in the White House she'd paint it a baby pink.  Maybe I'd paint it lavender.  Anyhow- - -Trump is definitely "as yellow as a summer squash" as the saying goes, when it comes to Putin.  As far as I know Congress hasn't taken action on the Doug Cavana hearings yet.  They are skipping their summer recess, you know.  Mc Connell wants to have the Justice sworn on by the beginning of the new Court term on the first of October.  I think it would be an excellent idea to go ahead and take their vacation and get a take on what the people actually feel on issues.

I have no problems on an employer asking you what you earned on your previous job.  But I at the same time would say I have every right to talk with fellow employees about what my salary is as opposed to theirs.  Comparing notes is one of the primal drives of self preservation.  This is why I'm against the "No competetion" rule in schools.  Comparing your grades to so and so is one of the fundamental ways in which you gauge your place in society.  It's like comparing genitals in the shower.  People do it as a matter of course to see how they measure up.

Now they are saying that all twelve boys on that Thai soccer team knew how to swim.  From what I heard they even thought about swimming out before the tide got too high.  I also heard that rather than fight for the first to leave the cave, they were afraid to go first for fear of what might happen to them and they looked around for a volenteer guinea pig to go first and see how they fare.

I wanted to talk about the Book of Acts in the new testament.  I have told you my biggest hurdle in belief in Christianity and the Church (the two seem to go hand in hand) is that I can accept people thought they saw Jesus after he died.  I'm sure this sort of thing occurs a lot where you see someone that looks like someone else and you convince yourself it was the person who died.  Or for that matter it could have been an angel.  Justin Martyr did not even believe in a physical resurrection, just like the Jehovah's Witnesses don't.  They believe it's all a spiritual thing.   In the first speech at Pentacost in the Book of Acts, Peter says "Look at our brother King David.  He died and his grave is with us to this day.  This can be for no other reason than to say that the general resurrection has not occurred yet or basically "Nothing has changed".  But I have a problem with the events occuring in the Book of Acts how and when the book claims they did.  It claims that the first martyr Stephan was martyred in AD 37 or after the church had been around seven years.  St Paul had his conversion in AD 41 and was "three years in Saudi Arabia being instructed by the Lord".  Then from AD 44 to Ad 58 or fourteen years later (according to Galations) St Paul has his main ministry.  I want you to focus on these year perameters.   Because in that time the Church "began in Jerusalem and spread to Samaria and then went eventually to Rome itself" where Paul had not yet visited.  I'll get to the rest of what I was going to say later but right now I feel like taking an extended break.

So what about all of these "faithless" people who want to late-date the book of Acts and the epistles of Paul?  One TV evangelist about twenty years ago remarked about the "tunnel"that the Church went into about 58 AD and it emerged about 120 AD.  I would say at least that and maybe 135 or so when Andonius Pious became Roman Emperor who was more tollarent of Christianity.  You hear a lot about Christianity after 135 AD, which is also the year of the second War of Jerusalem where the city was entirely taken over by the Romans.  I would note that the New Testament was written in Greek and not Latin, as one would suppose.  Also most of the "Churches" spoken of were either in Grece or Asia Minor known as Turkey.  The"Churches" center around the ministry of Apolonius of Tyanus who died either 100 AD or very soon afterward.  This is probably a coincidence but it's an interesting one.  St Paul speaks of visiting the school of Tyanus in his ministry about the time when there would have been a lot of action in that area but in 58 AD it's unlikely that "school of Tyanus" was established.   Also Acts gets the order of two false Messiahs mixed up.  It's almost as if he were looking "way back" in history when indeed the second of the two false messiahs hadn't even tried to revolt yet, Thudas of Galalee.  I would also say that since Justin Martyr wrote his Dialog to the Greeks or whatever apology of Christianity- - - he referred to "the memwires of the disciples of Jesus" without referring to the Gospels either by number or by who wrote them.  I find this interesting.  Paul spoke of "The gospel" in the singular and by Justin's time it was "the memuires of the disciples".  That's a little less vague but still not exact.  Interestingly,  Justin never seems to have written before AD 144 when Marcion was excommunicated because Justin is always anti Marcion.  It's nice to fill in the cracks in our Chronology.  Sixty or seventy years is a pretty big hole to fill
I would suggest that the book of Acts and the Epistle were written decades after it was claimed that they were. Of course as you may know Nero is never spoken of in a negative light inthe Bible but only as "Caesar".   We hear of "Christians in Caesar's household".   It's hard to imagine Christians in Nero's household.  It's almost as though these NT writers were not even conscious of the Burning of Rome or blaiming the Christians for it.  Indeed if the New Testiment WAS written inthe time of Domecian inthe eighties- - - it would be unusual.  Nobody dared utter a word about anything on religion at the time of Dometian.  It was in that sixty or seventy year "tunnel" period.