Long time no post.

Nearly two weeks in fact. I admire bloggers like Jenny who blog with such dedication and consistency. I'm just a fair weather blogger. Perhaps I need discipline. Maybe positive reinforcement will help. Every week I'll put seven quarters in a jar and for every day that I don't post a blog entry I'll take one of the quarters out. At the end of the week I'll take the remaining quarters and go out and buy something nice with them, like a stick of gum or a new suit.

Speaking of suits, two mormons paid me a visit today. I'm not a big fan of the LDS church, but I thought it would only be fair to listen to them a little since I criticize them quite a bit. And they caught me by surprise, had I know they were coming I might have answered the door butt naked or claimed I was a satanist or demanded to see their magic underwear. Instead I let them in and had them sit on my floor while they gave their "5 minute talk" which takes approximately 30 minutes. My overall impression was that they are less creepy than the mormon missionaries I ran into in Bulgaria, but creepy nonetheless. And it still cracks me up that they are younger than me but refer to each other as Elder So-and-so. Elder Little was the taller one and did most of the talking. He had a calm, friendly voice and spoke in a smooth, relaxing manner. He probed at my religious beliefs a little then made a set of rather vague statements which it was obvious I would agree with. He then evaded or gave vague answers to questions like who is Jesus, what happened to the tablets Joseph Smith found, what does the book of mormon add to the bible. But, they were so calm and friendly I didn't even feel like arguing with them, which is rare for me. I even forgot to ask about the magic undies. They summed up by portraying mormonism as Christianity with a few clarifications. Somehow they left out the parts about having babies in heaven, baptism for the dead and Joseph Smith being a low-down, womanizing con artist. Though I did get to hear about the early Israelites getting on ships and sailing to America thousands of years before Columbus did. I think it would be really funny to dress up, go around door-to-door, and tell people that Cthulhu wants to devour their soul. Anyway, in case the two mormons from today will come back again to check up on me, anyone have ideas as to how I could make them go away or mess with their heads?

So, what have I been up to recently? Last Friday I went to three bars with Shane. First, we visited the Short Stop which was pretty quiet at 9:30. Next we went to an OC bar called Bananas. Never go there. I don't remember the name of the last bar but it was way too expensive. Saturday Shane, Nate and I went to Laura and Megan's birthday party (two of the girls from the band we know. The party was at a bar called Barbara's at the Brewery. If you know what the Brewery is you know the kind of crowd you'll find at Barbara's. The place is awesome, but sadly it may be forced to shut down soon. At the party we met cool new people of all types. Artsy types, musicians, suave geeks, young drunk girls, "old" wise folks who felt the need to give us advice. We even met a fellow Techer who makes movies now. The following day I received an email from Laura informing me that Shane's credit card was in her possession. I proceeded to arrange with Laura to pick up the card from Megan's place. Shane and I tried to navigate our way there based on directions like "well, I think it's the only apartment building on the street. it's the door on the left. well, left when you're facing the street." After knocking on a wrong door and peering in a couple of windows we finally retrieved the precious piece of plastic. Monday night was men's group. But, there were only three of us so we went out to a bar instead. The Short Stop was literally empty except for us and the bartender during the entire hour we were there. The bartender told us he was an actor and sure enough he's on the imdb and has been in a few big movies.

I was quite sad to hear about the shuttle disaster. I had a hard time reading the live update, the moment of realization is devastating. The resources, talent and effort put into the shuttle program are tremendous. The bravery and ambition of the astronauts are inspiring. The achievement of travelling into space to conduct research and build a space station is immense. To see parts of the shuttle scattered accross Texas is disheartening to say the least. Now only three remain of the five shuttles built for NASA. As many are saying, it's probably time to move beyond the shuttle program. But, I still hope they don't hold up the shuttle activity for very long right now. Alternatives will serve the future but in the present we still need the shuttle. One thing I'm really tired of is these "experts" who warned about safety concerns but were ignored and or got fired. People seem to treat it like these guys informed NASA of the problem and NASA flew the shuttle anyway. No, the five fired commitee members only gave vague warnings about NASA's slack attitude toward safety (which maybe true, but it's not specific), and their solution was only to throw more money at the problem. Money isn't the problem. It's not lack of funding that caused a sloppy attitude toward safety. More money wouldn't have magically endowed the NASA engineers and managers with more insight. The Russians have a much better safety record and work on a much smaller budget. I believe that part of the problem is that NASA has grown large and bulky, has become difficult to manage. Details are lost. Perhaps NASA needs to be downsized. In the short term that would mean fewer missions and more concentration on the important ones. But, politics will inevitably get in the way because someone's pet project will be scrapped or someone's contract won't be renewed.

Another thing that has bothered me is the news coverage of Columbia's crew. They are refered to as heros because they died. People are heros because of the way they live, not the fact that they are dead. Weren't the Columbia crew heros before they died? Aren't other astronauts equally heroic? Why do we automatically call people heros when they die tragically? A man who died in the world trade center is a hero. His colleague who lived in LA or his friend who died of natural causes are commoners, even though they may have lived just as he did. We purify the memory of the fallen when we should be sharpening the lives of those who remain. We make heros of the dead when we should be forging heros out of the living.