I have shuffled some categories and category names, and brought several entries into a category called, for now, Religion. It ties to other parts of culture and ideas, but it stand up as way of grouping entries.
Religion is fact of social life and a set of ideas about truth, justice and reality.
Canadian Living Magazine just had a special issue of slow cooker recipes. Canadian Living is a regular monthly publication with recipes, and articles on cooking, decorating and the domestic arts. I usually ignore the regular issues, although I guess it would be ok for a middle-aged metrosexual to browse. Canadian Living also publishes several cookbook specials every year. The cover on this one advertised that it had 135 slow cooker recipes, and tips and tricks, and when I flipped through it, there were several interesting recipes.
Today I changed the names of many of my top level categories, shuffled and renamed some sub-categories and shuffled a few posts into different sub-categories. I didn't like some of the category titles, and I wasn't writing anything new in many categories, so I reindexed the material and changed the index.
The spam drought ended over the weekend. The gambling and pills people started sending comments - all blocked by MT Blacklist. The porn stars started sending trackback pings. A few got through but I have cleaned them up already, and updated the blacklist with their latest domain name and some other new strings. I installed an MT Plugin called DisguiseTrackbackURL which is supposed to make it impossible to identify the correct URL to ping for Trackbacks without actually opening the Entry in a browser. It sounds promising and it should work will work unless the spammers decide to read the default java script and train their bots to add the extra characters. If they still spam me I will have to think about customizing the Disguise script.
Getting back to Dave, and his latest stay in the hospital, here's the rest of the story of the days between the start of his breakdown and his discharge from the psychiatric unit.
I haven't finished the story of Dave's admission to the hospital last Friday, or the story of his time in the hospital. I will leave that for another day and just skip to the news today (Thursday January 27).
There hasn't been much spam on my blog for months, because MT-Blacklist was keeping it out.
Claire doesn't get a lot of space in my blog. She's succeeding in school, learning and growing. It isn't all rosy. She feels anxiety and stress, but I see her life flourishing.
She has been co-writing a play with her friends Caitlin and Jamie, and they applied to produce the play at the 2005 Winnipeg Fringe Festival. They call themselves the Angry at Apples Company. The play doesn't have a name yet. I don't understand the rules, and it involves a lottery. They were drawn yesterday, and they are in. Claire is planning to take credit as a co-writer, and to produce and stage-manage the play. As I understand it, she is not planning to act. I don't know much about the play, and Claire isn't talking. But she hasn't had the Spanish Inquisition yet. I don't know if she expects the Spanish Inquisition ...
Within a month of the last MT upgrade, another upgrade. This time, to fix a vulnerability in the program. The details are at MT's site, access through the "powered by Movable Type" link in the side column. Well, I'm getting my money's worth out of my FTP client. I like the program, I like the company's diligence at fixing problems. I do get bored sitting around while the FTP client uploads whole directories of unchanged files in upgrade packages.
Some European countries (England) have laws that curtail freedom of speech to protect religious groups from criticism. There is a BBC an article that a Polish Court convicted a prominent journalist of insulting a foreign head of state. He compared the Pope to Brezhnev. I haven't been able to get the offensive text. He may have meant that the Pope is isolated and dependent on the Vatican bureaucacy and a few personal assistants, and losing touch. That argument has some merit.
The head of State was the Pope who is the head of state of the Vatican City, which is a separate state under International Law. Poland doesn't seem to have laws that specifically protect the Catholic Church and other religious groups from hate speech or other lesser forms of criticism. However I am not sure how those laws might apply to criticism of the Pope or his performance in the Vatican.
Dave continued on the same course for another two weeks since I last wrote about him on January 9. The more drugs he did, the more things went wrong. The more things went wrong, the more drugs he did. He called me asked me to drive him to the hospital last Friday (January 21) and he was admitted to one of the Child and Adolescent Psychiatry wards. I don't think I can deal with everything in one post, and I will talk about what has happened after he left CFS care on January 6, through to noon on Thursday January 20 in this entry.
Steve and I drove to Bird's Hill Park on Sunday (January 23). We had a good long ski - my longest this winter and Steve's longest ski in 20 years. It was a good workout, probably the same as cycling 40 or 50k and the best workout I've had since November.
There has been more blog maintenance over the last month, and today I attempted to install the MT-Approval plugin.
It didn't seem to work. After I installed it, I couldn't comment at all. There is a tag missing or in the wrong place in my individual entry template. I have removed the plug in and will live without it until I can get it set up properly. When I get it installed - if I do - it will change the comment procedure. Commenters will have to preview the comment before being able to post a comment. At that stage the plugin adds some extra hashes to the comment. These steps will foil spamming spider programs. I don't know if this will reduce the flow of comments that MT-Blacklist has to filter - that's my hope.
The BBC Web site has a sports page with a cycling section, which has links to a cyber-area that they call the BBC Academy, which has more pages about cycling (and pages about other sports).
The lead news today is that the French judicial system has started to look at a doping allegations against Lance Armstrong. This should keep the sporting world's eye on cycling and it may ensure that the 2005 Tour gets televised in North America. It's a great event and TV has learned how to cover it well, but without a strong American presence like Armstrong (or Lemond before him) in the race, it doesn't seem to be a marketable event in America.
Meanwhile Steve has come to the attention of Mike Magnuson, professor of literature, cyclist, author and redneck as he writes in the Glort blog. Magnuson, like other people we know, began to cycle a lot, almost obsessively, with positive results for his physical health and mental health. He lost weight and invested his energy in cycling and writing about it. Steve liked the book about cycling, but none of us have read any of his other books.
My niece Carly, Frank and Jan's daughter, has delivered her son, Benjamin David, born January 17, 2005. Carly was my parents' first grandchild and Benjamin is my parents's first great-grandchild. Congratulations to Carly and her partner Dave. Congratulations to Frank and Jan, the first grandparents in our generations of our respective families, and to mom and dad - great-grandparents. Photo courtesy of great-aunt Teresa, my sister. The proud grandfather is hoping to take grandson on his first deer hunt at about age 4. Or perhaps just skiing in Beaudry Park, hoping to see a deer.
Reuben Warner was my roommate in the St. Boniface Hospital during my first hospital stay in January 2001. He had arrived a day and half before me. He had been blocked for a few weeks, he was bloated, he was diagnosed with a circumferential tumour high on his descending colon. If memory serves, he had his colostomy earlier than I did. I don't think his surgeon resected his tumour when she did his colostomy, but I believe he had his major surgery much sooner than I did. He had some complications and was still in the hospital when I came back in February 2001.
This was an experiment. I called it Krakatau because I had been reading Simon Winchester's book about the eruption and explosion of Krakatoa a few days before I made this. I used the Dutch spelling. In spite of volcanic connotations, it is mildly spiced. I used red kidney beans, corn, beef chuck. I used dried beans which calls for extra preparation. I did not use a prepared chili powder. This recipe filled the pot, and will make enough for 8-10 people.
Taking a break from my medical reminiscences, more recipes. Last Saturday, I made a gumbo with chicken, sausage and shrimp in my crockpot, which cooked while I skied. That's one of the advantages of a crockpot for the way I live. I can spend some time on the food processing early in the day, turn on the pot, and have dinner ready after several hours away skiing or cycling.
This is the second entry on the period in early 2001 when I had surgery for a bowel obstruction. I spent a few weeks at home after my colostomy. Before I went home, the teaching nurses from the Enterostomal Therapy Program made sure I knew how to empty and rinse the bag, and to how to manage the the process of changing the bag which was removing the adhesive seal, rinsing the stoma, measuring and cutting a new seal and applying a new bag and seal. I still have the prescription form for an Activelife Drainable pouch #28209. The seals are very good but taking one off a hairy belly is a delicate adventure. Sometimes the seals would peel away from skin cleanly but they tended to find any hair and take hair out by the roots - and hair kept growing in under the seal. I got some scissors to clip the hairs, if I could get at them, instead of ripping them out. It was also important to try to pick a quiet time for the procedure to avoid making a mess.
This is autobiographical, referring to my life in the time starting a couple of weeks before Christmas 2000, until April or May 2001. I had three operations. For 7 or 8 weeks in January and February 2001, I believed that I had cancer.
Nevada Barr's book "Seeking Enlightenment, Hat by Hat" has a few interesting turns. I mentioned it in a review a few weeks ago.
When I last wrote about Dave, (Dec. 15) he had gone from trying to show me that he could live at home, back to living on the street, and then back into a hotel placement with CFS. He was able to continue with the TRY program, but it wound up for Christmas. The successful students finished the classroom work December 22 and are moving into job assignments in January. Dave is supposed to go back for a remedial week starting January 10, and hopefully into a job placement the week after that. But he is homeless again, chosing not to stay in a new placement that CFS gave him after serious misbehaviour towards the workers supervising him in the hotel placement.
Yesterday (Saturday January 8) was a good day for skiing, and I seized the day. I had a great ski at Bird's Hill Park. It was almost impossible not to get a good long glide.
It's back to work this morning. We had decided, before Christmas, to close the office Monday December 27, Friday December 31, Monday January 3. The first stage of the blizzard arrived on December 30 and the city was largely shut down. The city kept major streets and bus routes plowed but there wasn't much happening on December 31. Stores opened and retail employees seemed to show up for work. The liquor stores did a brisk trade and people were stocking up on groceries, shovels and snowblowers.
This started as a post about shovelling snow and skiing, and turned into a rant about the quality of data available on the Web. I wanted to check the amount of snow that fell during the two storms of December 30 - December 31, and January 1 - January 2. The correct answer according to news stories published in the Winnipeg Free Press was 26 cm and 15 cm respectively. They seemed to have a reliable source - perhaps a meteorologist. The Free Press also prints a daily weather feature, and the snowfall information wasn't there. Not for the last day, or the last week, or the last calendar month. I couldn't get the information on the Internet either.
Richard Dawkins, the grand ayatollah of English atheism, has written a couple of letters to the Guardian which interpret the Indian ocean tsunami disaster around his personal value system. While he is a more presentable salesman of values than the homophobic pastor of the Westboro Baptist Church of Topeka, Kansas, he is emotionally vested in his own beliefs, illogical about the lessons of the disaster, and ruthlessly determined to build his story on the bodies of the dead.
My previous post, devoted to the Westboro Baptist Church's bizarre interpretation of the Indian ocean disaster, refers to a case in Sweden in which a Pentecostal Minister was charged with the criminal offence of hate speech against gays and lesbians for a sermon preached in his own church. I had trouble getting a clear factual story on the Web, because most of the Web sites that mention it are either devoted to the interests of religious groups, or devoted to gay pride issues. Each side has its own stories and both contain mistakes and legal inaccuracies. The coverage in the online edition of Christianity Today was clear and informative. It also played a minor part in a story about the cultural war between religion and liberalism in Europe in Time Magazine.
Some misguided people are finding bizarre messages from God in the Aceh earthquake and the Indian Ocean tsunamis. Their perspective is offensive, morally and religiously.
The Behzti story has been in the news from England for the last few weeks. It evokes one of the themes of the movie Bend it Like Beckham, as second generation Sikhs come into conflict with their families as they make their own way in British society, but there are no happy endings here. Behzti is a play by Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti, a younger Sikh woman, which was being staged at the Birmingham Repertory Theater. The play is set in a gurdwara (temple) and has a scene of sexual abuse by a Sikh priest - a rape scene. Conservative religious Sikhs protested. At first the protests were small but they escalated to protests by hundreds, with protesters storming the theater on December 18. By December 21, the play had closed and the playwright had gone into hiding after receiving death threats. Some Sikh leaders condemned the death threats.
