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chuckle to myself uncomfortably
Friday, April 17 2009
I took the dogs to Onteora on the expedition I make every several months to pick up coffee (such expeditions have been cut in half by the fact that I've doubled my orders from three to six pounds of unground Zanzibar, a bag of which costs somewhat more than forty dollars).
The entrance to Onteora Lake is adjacent to the Catskill Mountain Coffee parking lot. Recently whatever authority administers the lake had gone in and cut down a bunch of dead White Pines, large pieces of which lay all over the place. Had they been a slightly better kind of wood I would have gathered the pieces up and taken them home. But I don't want to start loading an inferior firewood like pine into my woodshed just yet.
Onteora is a fairly underutilized place at this time of year. The lake itself is no longer covered in ice, so the ice fishers are gone. But it's still too cold for the family picnics of the summer crowd. Today there was only one vehicle in the parking lot, the transportation mode (so it seemed) of the one tent several hundred feet away. Despite the limited human impact, Sally and Eleanor fanned out to explore the olfactosphere, and neither seemed disappointed with their many discoveries.
While I was out, I picked up a gallon of expensive acrylic paint suitable for painting a galvanized roof. The other day the male half of the neighbors from across the street ("the Fussies," named for the immaculate state of their Hispanically-tended lawn) had come over while Gretchen was alone sunning herself in the driveway. He'd lodged a low-key complaint about the reflectivity of the greenhouse roof, which (at least in this season) throws a powerful beam of sunlight into their windows at around noon. The conversation had gone on for another hour and had been entirely pleasant. As for hte neighbor's complaint, it seemed reasonable (indeed, we complained to them once when one of their outdoor lights was pointed directly at our house). Sometime you just don't know the effect you're having on your neighbors unless they tell you.
Later today I climbed up on the greenhouse and painted it entirely olive drab green. Unfortunately, the only paint recommended by the guy at Herzog's for galvanized steel was a semi-gloss, which meant it would continue to be reflective. But I'd picked the darkest grey-green in the available color wheel hoping to mute as much of the metallic sheen as I could.
Meanwhile out in Los Angeles, my colleague Mike had driven out to the residence of Marc, the producer guy who's been testing a website I've been developing and repeatedly finding a vexing bug: the site required the user to login twice. Well, it required him to login twice. Mike and I never had to login more than once. We've both tried the site on dozens of computers and it always seemed to work perfectly, but Marc insisted that he and the client were always forced to login twice. I'd been trying to fix this bug for over a month, attempting a succession of increasingly ugly hacks, but nothing had worked. It was a good thing that Mike finally went to investigate conditions on the ground at the place where the bugs were being found; debugging by email hadn't been working. It took him all of five minutes to uncover the problem: Marc had been appending "www." to the beginning the URL as if it were still 1997, and somewhere in one of the shrinkwrapped web applications I'd integrated, the "www." was being stripped away, causing the cookie to vanish as well. The easiest fix turned out to be inserting in a brief script to the top of the homepage redirecting the user to url lacking the "www." I should be mourning the lost time I spent on this issue, but all I can do now is chuckle to myself uncomfortably.
Speaking of laughter, tonight Gretchen and I watched Religulous, Bill Maher's documentary about the infantile lunacy of religion and the risk its possibly self-fulfilling prophesies place us in. For atheists like us, Religulous was a hoot. How often, after all, do we get to see someone pointing out the goofiness of talking snakes and virgin births (and the reportage problems in the New Testament indicating that the whole Christ story is nothing but the repackaging of age-old Middle Eastern myths)? The only disappointment was that Maher didn't have the most perfectly logical comeback for the most common question Christians (particularly Blaise Pascal) have posed to skeptics, "What if you're wrong?" The implication of such a question is that there's no harm in being Christian even if it's wrong because it's the only alternative to agnosticism and atheism. Given the thousands of religions that have existed and the hundreds that exist, it's an easy question to refute with something like, "But what if the religion of ancient Greece, despite the extinction of all of its congregants, is the one true religion? Then both of us are going to (in this case Greek) hell, and you have the added insult of having practiced a thoroughly bogus religion throughout your life."
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