Stanley Kurtz Is Dead

I'll miss Stanley. Oh, he wasn't a close friend, or anything like that, but I'll miss him, nevertheless, much as God misses any of His Creation. I mean, I don't have to know his intimate life (although I do) to appreciate the fact that Stanley, well, Stanley was quite a piece of work, and a hard worker, too.

I've got to keep better track of things. I didn't see it coming, and I should have, because that's my job. I suppose I could have prevented his death, it was untimely. According to my charts, Stanley was supposed to clock in another twenty-two years, four months, and eighteen days. I did not anticipate that flying lunch box. Normally, air resistance would have slowed it down so that it would have dented Stanley's head, but it wouldn't have been fatal. Alas, it contained one too many cans of sardines, and it fell, unimpeded down those eighty-seven stories.

No, I don't take the blame for Stanley's passing. I don't engineer events. I just let them happen. I'm not a personal God, because that would make me a personal servant. I don't make coffee for anyone else. And Stanley was walking when the lunch box impacted his cranium. He was one of my best thinkers: clear sighted, energetic, calling out Obama and the homosexual agenda, defending my values. I adored what he did, although I thought he was a bit stuffy and overly combative.

Stanley was right about one thing. Homosexuals getting married is really going to upset the applecart. It's so sad that he stepped in front of that bus trying to avoid that gay skateboarder bearing down on him. I mean, I knew that the skateboarder was packing fudge, but Stanley only knew that theoretically. Stanley was plastered up against the windshield like a giant locust from Utah. His colleagues at the Hudson Institute (of which Dr. Kurtz was an associate fellow) will miss him terribly. The skateboarder was unhurt, but ticketed for feckless behavior.

If I had hands, I would wring them. I once had hands, and I did wring them, and it caused lots of problems. To put it simply, the unexpected expansion of the universe shortly after The Big Bang was caused by a lot of my hand wringing. Or maybe it was the blink of an eye. I forget. Fifteen billion years doesn't seem like a lot of time, but there is so much to remember, and frankly my memory is not that good. I would wring my hands over the demise of Stanley Kurtz. He was that good.

Yes, he was walking his dog, Swoosie (that was his little joke for being saddled with his last name: he really didn't like it that much), when the dachshund leaped after a squirrel, and Stanley slipped on a banana peel. How life mimics art! His left leg came up over his chest and wrenched his buttocks into an airborne state. The cheery whistle on his lips morphed into a rictus grin of prescient doom. Clearly, Stanley knew that his number was up. Felled by a banana peel. This is an end of Biblical proportions. I didn't plan it this way at all. Stanley crumpled on the street, only to be run over by a charging garbage truck. Because I'm God, I don't believe in luck. Fate is another, different thing, though.

Like Stanley, I don't particularly like homosexuals mocking me. They pretend that when they marry each other, it's all going to settle the matter. I sent them Fred Phelps. I sent them Pat Robertson. I sent them Stanley Kurtz. I even sent them Jesus Christ and Joseph Smith, Jr. I stripped them of their dignity. I had thugs beat and murder them. I turned my back on them, even the ones I loved (Caravaggio's angels come to mind). And what do they do? They want to get married. Can you imagine that? They want to get married!

Stanley would have none of it. He was a great statistician, which is to say, he was no statistician at all. He knew how to make numbers lie so that hateful pols and smarmy media commentators could make blood libel (truly, those Americans really do like to kill homosexuals) about part of my imperfect creation, something that I was a little disturbed about, too. Stanley knew, and I fully agree, because I am God, that homosexuals threaten marriage. I'm not sure why they threaten marriage, that was up to Stanley to figure out. So he lied about it.

My creation started out better than this, and the six thousand years or so (yeah, I know I cooked the fossil record, too) turned out pretty well. The earth had a certain bloody order (if not the universe). But it's gotten out of whack. The Madonna isn't a virgin anymore. Jesus is a Mexican baseball player. And Modern Family is the most popular television show in America. I gave them Sarah Palin, but they are watching Glee. And now, Stanley is gone. I weep, but enough of that. You don't want to see me weep. It messes up the atmosphere.

So Stanley died at his desk. He was reading M.V. Lee Badgett's book, When Gay People Get Married. His hippocampus suffered a proto-molecular quantum wave collapse. He never recovered. Dead as a door nail. Stanley Kurtz is dead.

Snow Daze

Ron and I are sitting in Mom's kitchen with Ron's Mom. It's an exasperating experience. She is experiencing memory loss, and it's getting worse. Right now she is quite lucid, but it's not going to last. Ron is far more patient than I, but I'm pretty sure that it makes him a little nuts, too: the endless questions, the crying, the paranoia, and the frustration. She's often angry and sullen. Yesferday she was certain that we were going to poison her.

Of course, the situation changes minute by minute. It takes nothing to set her off. She lives in a very looking glass world. Life inside these walls is not always what it seems.

Oh, the snow. Because of the weather in DC, our flight was cancelled. We are rebooked for day after tomorrow. The next 48 hours will be extremely time dilated. I had to change the hotel and car reservation. While changing the car contract, I realized that my driver's license was missing. My license wasn't in my wallet, my jacket, the hotel room. I eventually found it in the car underneath the beverage holder. Maybe I'm the one with memory loss. I also called the snow guy to clear our steps and walk. We're getting back to DC about 10 p.m. Sunday evening, and I didn't want two and a half feet of snow outside our front door looking for a shovel. We've made our arrangements. Let it snow (brave words, here).

Groundhog Day

If that little, fierce, furry creature had popped its head out of its hole yesterday, we'd have six more weeks of winter. Today, however, the sky is overcast, and depending on when that awful rodent makes its appearance, we may just have six more weeks of winter.

I'm pretty sure that Ms. Groundhog doesn't affect the weather at all, and what happens if it doesn't see its shadow? Is the temperature suddenly going to rise, and we're going to have the warmest February on record? It would also ruin my Caribbean trip, if I were to fly to the sunny South, only to have it be all comfy up North.

No, I don't like winter, just like the next guy, but when I go on my winter vacation, it better be cold back home. And that little furry beast better show up, and it better see its shadow, too. I wonder if ground hogs taste good?

My Lame Life

Life really is lame. Honest! Early Christmas morning, Ron and I went for a walk, and ever since, life has been lame. Sort of. I went to my doctor, who referred me to an Orthopedist, who ordered an MRI of my knee, and I have some torn cartilage in there. Isn't that lame?

It doesn't hurt that much, but square dancing is a challenge. The pain is mainly caused when I pivot, and a lot of that goes on in square dancing. I've been wearing smooth-soled shoes (cowboy boots or bowling shoes) and a knee brace and they help a lot, too. Just plain walking can also be painful after 20 minutes or so of slogging. I haven't had enough nerve to try the gym.

Of course, the added lameness in my life comes from my PHP programming. I'm not the world's greatest coder, but I'm working on some civic software that includes a database backend. I'm learning more about SQL than I ever wanted to learn. You can teach an old dog new tricks, it's just not very pretty.

Winter on Bucknell Terrace

I suppose you could call our winter lame, as well. We had our first storm of the season last Thursday. This is how it looked a couple of days later. Our storms, here, are not like you would experience in Minneapolis or Chicago, but our storms have a peculiar twist: they often end up as freezing rain or ice storms. These really can lead to lameness. I fell on the ice Thursday night and poked a hole in my hand. There is no dignified way to walk across the ice. On the other hand, I do enjoy getting some winter. I enjoyed the snow shoveling, and I filled up the condo's sand buckets.

Happy's Mandoline

In the not-so-lame department is my new mandoline. I've been slicing up just about every vegetable in the refrigerator. This is one nifty invention. I haven't cut myself yet, either. That contraption on the right is the vegetable hold. You skewer the item to be sliced, and the Bionic Shield keeps all private parts from being sliced or julienned. So far, I've sliced or julienned potatoes, cabbage, onions, cucumbers, pepperoni (didn't work so well), carrots (didn't use the bionic shield for carrots), and I'm sure I've sliced other things, too, I just can't remember. Every time I use this little wonder, I wonder how I lived such a long and full life without a mandoline in my kitchen.

Hanna Visits DC

We're in for a wet day here. The rain started a couple of hours ago, and promises to go on all day. We're under a flash flood watch until 2 p.m., and heavy rain late morning and early afternoon (3 - 5 inches). Sunday should be okay, though. What am I going to have for dinner? Cabbage?

Suddenly, this has become quite the hurricane season. I'm thankful I don't live in Haiti, which has had three major storms so far this year; such misery there. A hope, though, is that these storms will break the drought that has plagued the Southeast for the last couple of years.