Two items:

• Have you ever gotten to work and realized that your shoes don’t match? At least I have the excuse that yes, in fact, I did dress in the dark today.
• Helpful hint, formulated shortly after answering the door a few minutes ago: If you’re a male, and wish to sell me something, don’t give me a limp handshake and then compliment me on my eyes. I will most certainly not buy a magazine subscription from you under those circumstances.

Last Thursday, Kathy and I went to Wurstfest, an annual “Salute to Sausage” and German culture festival in nearby New Braunfels. We had a good time snarfing down schnitzel and potato pancakes, browsing the carnival rides, and watching the leiderhosen-clad septuagenarians dancing to old Teutonic favorites. Musical highlights: Kerry Christensen, an incandescent accordion-playing yodeler, Terry Cavanagh and Alpine Express, a really fun and diverse ensemble, and getting to hear The Chicken Dance three times (and do it twice) in the short hours we were there.

On Saturday, I met up with Ben and took the kids to the Austin Celtic Festival. Predictably, their favorite parts were the SCA combat demonstrations, though the “knights” didn’t let the children whack away at an armored adult as they had in years past. They did, however, have a shooting gallery, where for a dollar players could man a longbow or crossbow and shoot leather-tipped arrows at a line of combatants, who would fall down in Oscar-worthy death throes when hit. The candy-flinging trebuchet was also a big hit with the young ones, as was the reenactment of the Black Knight seen from Monty Python’s Holy Grail. There was a fair bit of good music here too — I have a soft spot for rock bands with bagpipes — but we heard most of it only incidentally as we tried to keep the four kids from wandering off in seven different directions.

As fall has walked in on little cat feet, and the weather in Texas has been cool enough to enjoy being outside without having a river immediately available to jump into, I’ve taken to walking to work when time permits. It takes a bit longer than biking, but is better exercise, and encourages contemplation more than does the same path astride my two-wheeled steed.

Now, because I have a knack for taking anything carefree, beautiful, and wholesome and spoiling it by overanalyzing, I decided to bring the GPS with me this morning to see what sort of distance I’m actually covering and what sort of time I made. Results:

• Time: 22 minutes, 38 seconds
• Average Speed: 3.8 miles/hour
• Distance: 1.42 miles

A little better speed than I expected, and when done twice a day, it’s a pretty nice addition to my nominal fitness regimen.

My brother Chris, who has been off in Augusta, Georgia for the last five years for his medical residency and fellowship, has been offered a job in San Antonio for next year which he has excitedly accepted. This particular job seems a really good fit for what he’s hoping to do as a doctor, both in terms of caring for patients and having a hand in instilling the next generation of doctors with a sense of ethics and responsibility. We are delighted that he’ll be returning to Texas and will once again be a mere hour’s drive away.

Congratulations, bro. We’re proud of and thrilled for you.

I’m starting to experiment with carrying a camera around with me more often, and will be posting some of the snaps that I like to flickr, an ambitious web-based photo sharing service. Aspects of this that you, dear reader, might find interesting:

• The five most recent snapshots will be visible in the sidebar of Ruminations. (Those of you reading via email won’t see them unless you visit the website.) Clicking on any of them will bring you to the flickr site, where you can view or download the full-sized image.
• If you’re using a news aggregator and want to keep an eye on the photos I’m posting, you can do so by subscribing to the RSS or Atom feeds.
• All of the snapshots are available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license. This basically means that you can legally use them for anything you want as long as you don’t make money off of said use and you give me credit for the photo.

I think this will be a fun experiment.

This year we decided to reprise a little Halloween prank from two years ago wherein a pumpkin sitting on our front porch screams loudly and frighteningly at visitors as they approach the door. This year, I was able to add video capture to the equation so that we could immortalize visitors’ reactions. You can see that, and much more detail on the rest of the mischief, at The Screaming Electric Pumpkin.

I just returned from casting my vote at the local elementary school. Remarkably, the line was already quite long at 7:50 when I arrived, though not nearly as gargantuan as it was each of the three times I tried to vote early on campus. It’s heartening to see the enthusiasm for the election this year, even in the midst of (because of?) the vitriol that’s taken root in political discussion. Many of my evangelical Christian friends clearly think that anyone who would consider voting for Kerry is not only mentally unbalanced, but also in danger of the fires of hell. Quite a number of my other friends believe Bush to be ignorant and/or malign in various degrees, and certainly not competent to hold the most powerful elected office in the free world.

All questions of past military service aside, I decided for the first time in my life to vote for a Democratic presidential candidate. (And, incidentally, for the first time in this weblog to delve into politics.) I wasn’t wildly enthusiastic about Kerry, but have grown increasingly unhappy with, and eventually rather alarmed about, Bush over the past four years. The pillars of my discontent are these:

• Foreign Policy: I was initially very pleased at Bush’s restraint after 9/11. I fully expected the government to go in guns blazing days after the attacks, as a knee-jerk reaction to an incredibly hard blow. In the heat of the moment, I couldn’t really have faulted him, nor could much of the rest of the world. But he and his cabinet exercised restraint, did their homework, and eventually went into Afghanistan to root out the terrorist influences there. Good job, W — thank you for your considered leadership during that hard time.

  However, things started to break down when Iraq came into the picture. The first time I heard Bush speaking of Iraq, there was already a strong “we’re going to invade” subtext. He offered various reasons for this, none of which seemed sufficient to justify a preemptive invasion of another country. The WMD issue was plagued by bad intelligence. One can’t, of course, lay the blame for bad intelligence entirely at the feet of the president, but I would argue that in undertaking such a significant step, one should demand much more comprehensive information than one normally relies on.

  Many people assumed that we were invading Iraq because it was tied to 9/11 in some way. I don’t believe that Bush made that claim, and have never seen it fleshed out beyond the idea that the country is terrorist-friendly.

  The last justification is the humanitarian one: aren’t the people of Iraq better off without a despotic dictator than with one? It’s a good question, though not one I remember Bush invoking very much before the war. It is, however, one I can’t answer as well as I’d like. Certainly the mass graves are an indication that life under Saddam was often horrible beyond belief. However, one can’t discount the people who have died as a result of the war either. We most often hear about the 1,000+ Americans, but estimates of Iraqi civilian deaths as a result of the war range from 15,000 to a staggering 100,000. (I think the latter figure is wildly inflated, but of course have no way of knowing directly.)

  One can recite endless anecdotes of people who are much better off than before the war started, and of those whose lives have been ruined (even without Michael Moore’s facile editing). The daily accounts of bombings, hostage-taking, and various other atrocities, however, seem to indicate that the people of that country have yet to be freed of the threat of violence. Once the rule of law is established there, the humanitarian case will be easier to make — in the meantime, it’s difficult to say conclusively that Iraqis are better off than they were. Certainly, if humanitarian motives are our prime movers, there are other places our army could go and help more people with less resistance.

  A final note on foreign policy: one of the reasons America is viewed with disfavor in many parts of the world in our perceived national arrogance. Make no mistake — it is possible to be strong, and yet avoid bluster. Roosevelt is famously quoted as saying “Speak softly and carry a big stick.” Bush’s invitation to terrorists who feel they can attack us here — “Bring ‘em on!” — made me cringe, for it doesn’t speak of a nation seeking safety and peace for its people, but of a blustering bully of a nation itching for a fight.

• Fiscal Policy: In the last four years, we’ve moved from a national budget surplus to a massive deficit. Obviously, dealing with the aftermath of 9/11 has put strains on our budget that wouldn’t have been there otherwise; one can’t place the blame for increased spending entirely on the President. However, the tax cuts were something he drove through of his own initiative. When one is spending more, but taking in less, a deficit is bound to ensue.

  I’m generally in favor of keeping us much of our money as possible in the hands of the people who earn it, and therefore love tax cuts in principle. However, I’m also an adult, and recognize that if we as a nation determine that something is worth spending money on, we have to pony up the cash. When Bush leads us to war, and at the same time reduces the government’s income and charges the war on the national VISA, it strikes me as tremendously irresponsible, an attempt to both have his cake and eat it. He is not, of course, the only President to do this, but I expect more care with money from the party that derides its opposition as “tax and spend.” It’s far better for the nation’s health to tax and spend than to not tax, and spend anyway!

Enough of that for the moment. As I mentioned, I’m not wild about Kerry, and I have little doubt that, in Texas’ electoral college, my vote will make no difference. I hope that the next four years will bring us a diplomatic, thoughtful, responsible presidency, regardless of who occupies that seat.

And if you’re an American, get out there and vote!

Our inimitable Emily, a long time Homestar Runner fan, decided to make a birdhouse for her aunt for Christmas. At the risk of ruining the surprise, I thought the fruits of her labor wonderful enough to post here.

I’m so proud! (Sniff.)

While setting up the new iMac, I’ve been able to establish dynamically-assigned network addresses on an 802.11 wireless network, integrate its networking with both the Macs and Windows machines at our home, install specialized drivers to integrate with a third-party outboard USB audio interface, and use a third-party USB/Serial adapter to provide backward-compatibility with my old GPS unit.

One question remained, however, which Apple has now thoughtfully answered for me. Thanks, Apple!

Last weekend Dad McMains spent a couple of days with us while Lana was off at a church retreat. He and I and the kids spent five or six hours playing Lazer Tag, running all around the yard, through (and on) the house, waging epic, sweaty battle. The new gear is fully as much fun as I’d hoped, and the time with Dad was great — hopefully we’ll be able to do that a bit more often, now that both of our schedules are a bit less demanding than they had been.

I’ve nearly wrapped up my first DVD project with Final Cut Express and the new iMac, and am generally pretty happy with the way things are coming out. I’ve got a little more tweaking to do, but it was exciting to be able to pop a near-finished product into the DVD player last night and see it on the big screen. (The project is a pseudo-documentary of the recent trip to Santa Fe. It came out, once edited, to about 13.5 minutes — a little longer than last year’s Chicago video, which surprised me, as I didn’t think I had as much material to work with this time around.)

I stumbled across another article about Christians Making Videogames this morning. (See What Would Jesus Play? for some earlier thoughts on the subject.) It’s especially interesting to me that most of us Christians who make videogames, or indeed most forms of art, insist on very explicit communication of an unambiguous message. One game mentioned explores the Egyptian plagues, another encourages you to bring the Bible to a cultural group which has lost access to it; in another the player battles demons and searches for a missing pastor.

Contrast this with the way Jesus taught: in parables, often opaque even to his disciples. It seems, however, that we’re uncomfortable with ambiguity, with letting those hear who have ears to do so. Certainly some of this is borne of a sincere desire to have people understand the good news of the Gospel. However, I suspect that if Jesus had a marketing department, they wouldn’t have let him get away with parables. Videogames tend to entertain less when one tries to saddle them with a message; so also is the gospel made weaker when it’s recast as a diversion, especially one that tries to be a commercial success. And Jesus, whom we purport to serve, had a thing or two to say about serving two masters.