Shalom Notes from Greg's Notebook

Emanuel: Bright lights there is pain in the city, the city wails, crushing like a tidal wave of pain, but the lord takes the hit for us. Amen. (Disclaimer: Mom and Dad don't worry I am not in pain.)

Merry Christmas Everyone!

Chupacabra Dining: Spam Sushi

One of my favorite things to eat in Maui is the Spam Sushi. You could use Boar's Head Spiced Ham instead of Spam; if Spam turns you off. But I bet you would like it, give it a go! Also this is more Californian than Hawaiian. The Hawaiian rolls are bigger and leave out the cucumber sticks, Radish Sprouts, Takuwan strips (Japanese pickled radish), and the Wasabi. Spam sushi is popular for the working stiff who needs something cheap and something on the go. Great way to start the day!

Spam Sushi (Hand Roll) Epicurious | May 1997

The Argonne Elementary School PTA, San Francisco
Our Favorite Recipes

Spam strips, cooked Sato-Shayu style
Sushi rice
Nori (seaweed used to roll sushi)
Cucumber sticks
Radish sprouts
Takuwan strips (Japanese pickled radish)
Wasabi (Japanese horseradish)

SUSHI RICE:

Wash and cook 3 cups Calrose rice. While still hot, season with Vinegar Sauce, or use packaged sushi mix such as Sushi!-No-Ko.

VINEGAR SAUCE:

1/2 cup Japanese rice vinegar

1/2 cup sugar

1 teaspoon salt

Cook until sugar dissolves. Cool. Sprinkle half of vinegar sauce over hot rice; mix gently. Add more vinegar sauce to taste. Or follow instructions on package mix.

SATO-SHOYU STYLE:

Spam sliced or cubed.

SAUCE:

1/4 cup shoyu

1/4 cup sugar

1/4 cup mirin (Japanese sweet rice wine)

Bring sauce to a boil in a small pan. Add Spam, lower heat, and cook 2-3 minutes.

TO ASSEMBLE SUSHI:

Cut a sheet of nori in half. Place nori on your left hand; add a small amount of rice. Add Spam and all or some of the other ingredients. Wrap nori around the filling and toll from left to right.

Source Information
Our Favorite Recipes
The Argonne Elementary School PTA, San Francisco

GOD with Us

Gabriel comes down during the evening prayer as an incredible answer to the question, "God, are you there God?" The answer is incredible: "God! There you are God! Doubt a confirmation. Fear Not! Nothing more to say, God seals Zacharia's lips with a kiss, sealed until the birth of his son, John.

Forever War Notes

Hatching a Population

Triangulation

Science fiction important to know when book was written, 1974

New technology is only effective for a short window of time before the other knows how to defend itself.

Days to Contact .00001
11 .001514
15 .032164
20 .103287
25 .676324
30 .820584
35 .982685
40 .993576
45 .99369
50
Mediam
28.9554 .5000

Space presents problems for defense
Taurans primes and powers of 2

FOrever War by Joe Haldemann

B Words

My Virtual Birthday Cake

UFO's Saturday

Cluck/Chuck: The Prodgial God Recommended Reading

Cluck It Baby Big Time

Synopses & Reviews from Powells.com
(I will work on creating a review of this great work. But currently am digesting the overall meaning of it. It is quit daunting to write a review of such a fine piece of work.)
Publisher Comments:
The Prayer of Jabez used a little-known story of the Bible to redefine success for Christians. The Prodigal God uses a famous story of the Bible to redefine nothing less than the central Christian message for believers and skeptics alike.

Newsweek called renowned minister Timothy Keller aa C. S. Lewis for the twenty-first centurya in a feature on his first book, The Reason for God, In that book, he offered a rational explanation of why we should believe in God. Now, in The Prodigal God, he uses one of the best-known Christian parables to reveal an unexpected message of hope and salvation.

The Prodigal Son is the most well-known parable in the Bible. Incredibly, it is also almost universally misunderstood. Taking his trademark intellectual approach to understanding Christianity, Keller uncovers the essential message of Jesus, hidden in plain sight for centuries. Within this parable is the lost message of Jesusawhere he outlines just how his followers are supposed to love and accept one another so they can join him in Heaven. With this book, both the devout and skeptics will see Christianity in a whole new way.
Synopsis:
In "The Reason for God," Keller offered a rational explanation of why people should believe in God. In his latest work, he uses one of the best-known Christian parables to reveal an unexpected message of hope and salvation.
Synopsis:
Newsweek called renowned minister Timothy Keller aa C. S. Lewis for the twenty-first centurya in a feature on his first book, The Reason for God. In that book, he offered a rational explanation of why we should believe in God. Now, in The Prodigal God, he uses one of the best-known Christian parables to reveal an unexpected message of hope and salvation.

Taking his trademark intellectual approach to understanding Christianity, Keller uncovers the essential message of Jesus, locked inside his most familiar parable. Within that parable Jesus reveals God's prodigal grace toward both the irreligious and the moralistic. This book will challenge both the devout and skeptics to see Christianity in a whole new way.

Birds in Flight

Rockin the year away...

Greg's Journal of Found Things I

Brave New World Notes from my Journal

(Written exactly as it was on the page. I hope to one day get my scanner up and running so that I can present a visual of my notebook on Mondays. Until then I will type up my page. Enjoy.)

Ideas/Themes
Modernism towards Utopia
Pavlovian Training against books and flowers.
Context
Games are used as tools of consumption.
History is bunk, "Henry Ford" (Context)
Ford is God
Forbidden Books: Bibles, Poetry
"Science and technology may discipline even the most irreducible of human projects."
Good of Society
Monogomy not part of their world?
Family vs. the Mechanics of Industry.
Henry Ford said,

History is more or less bunk. It's tradition. We don't want tradition. We want to live in the present and the only history that is worth a tinker's dam is the history we made today.

Henry Ford, Interview in Chicago Tribune, May 25th, 1916 US automobile industrialist (1863 - 1947)

You can't build a reputation on what your going to do.

Henry Ford

Ending is better than mending (ethics of under consumption).
Socialism in the Nth degree
Has to be big enough for Gravity to pull into a perfect sphere.
Electromagnets hold smaller objects.

Sunday Sunshine: Gardening Thoughts

Weeds are growing on my Facebook Farm... Ugggh...... moral responsibility for computer simulations.

Cluck it Or Chuck It: Obstacles Welcome by Ralph de la Vega

Cuban Refugee to President & CEO of AT&T Mobility, what were the steps that got him there? How did a man who faced many obstacles not get mired down in the muck? How do you stop living your life trapped in a lazy chair jell cell; so that you can live a life you dreamed of?

This book will help those looking to improve their success journey in the following ways: (a) how to manage calculated risks (b) finding opportunities in your life being blended at high speed (c) and how to enable others to help you through effective communication.

De la Vega did not show how Christ empowered his success journey enough. He would have improved the book had he found scriptural truth to back up his opinions. The book tended to be very humanistic and treads on the mythic axiom, of lacing up your bootstraps and make it happen (very Horatio Alger of him). There was a lack of notes and research, or even works that had influenced De la Vega's point of view mentioned in the Appendix.

Summary: Not the book I was looking for and it took me a long time to finish it.

Counter view point: Embarking
Buy Obstacles Welcome at Powell's Books

Disclosure of Material Connection: I received this book free from Thomas Nelson Publishers as part of their BookSneeze.com book review bloggers program. I was not required to write a positive review. The opinions I have expressed are my own. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255: “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.”

UFO's Saturday

Great Cartoon:

Christmas in Florida

Yard Snow has been ordered and laid onto your green yard. Snow has not fallen from the sky in thirteen years, although Floridians have been hoping for a White Christmas since 1996.
The weather has not changed much since September, it still is 85 degrees. But there are Convertible Sun Beams, decorated with fir wreaths in their front grills.
There are a collection of classic cars resting in front of the Baptist Church.
Lights. Lights. Lots of pretty, sparkly incandescent light.
"Parades! What would Christmas Season be without them?", says Bartow, Lakeland, Winter Haven members of the Chamber of Commerce.* Florida's decorative spirit is in high swing.

* (My wife is responsible for her school's float, appearing the Bartow Parade tonight.)

The Punt

Yin and Yang played football. Yang served as the football.

Tuesday-Moonpies and Good Reads

Angel Time: Anne Rice
Where most Christian Writers stumble in their writing, Ann Rice moves them gracefully and deals expertly with: church, church history, Jews, Mission Art, Consumer Culture, Catholicism,
prayer, alienation, alcoholism, and broken homes. She shows how God redeems all who come to him with repentant hearts; even an assassin with many kills can be Redeemed and saved from sinful living.


Can a "Christian Book" be written well? Can new light be shined from a 2,009 year old gospel? Rice answers, YES!.
"In keeping with my commitment to do Christian fiction in a variety of forms, I am developing a new series called Songs of the Seraphim. I'm hoping for a long life for the series..
I continue to work on Christ the Lord, the Kingdom of Heaven, the third book in the Christ the Lord series."

Can a pulp vampire chronicler tell the gospel accurately? Some Catholic ideas bleed into her fiction but for the most part as a Reformed Christian I did not see a stained gospel.

She makes us look again at division between the Jews and Christians, and the scripture cited in Matthew 28:11-15. She asks us to not tell tales but live in the light of truth.

This book begins in Riverside California.

Yin and Yang Contemplate

Greg's Journal of Found Things I

Tuesday last, I was asked, if I had ever read any Annie Dillard. I said no, feeling regretful. Tuesday afternoon, I went online and requested "for the Time Being by Annie Dillard" from the Lake Whales Public Library. Here are a few notes from my reading so far:

"I am on the field."

"The hospital like every other, is a hole in a universe, through which holiness issues in blasts."

Repetition is powerless before ecstasy." pg. 91.

"Suddenly there is a point where religion becomes laughable then you decide that are nevertheless religious."

I found the book to be unfocused and not really worth my time reading.

Greg's Journal of Found Things I

Greg's Journal of Found Things II

War Pigs by Black Sabbath...

Curmudgeon Bookstore Cedar Key Florida

It's 12:01 pm. It's a dreary day full of gray clouds and damp palms, a day to be reading a favorite book, a day that is not often felt around these parts.

Housed on the corner of Main Street in Cedar Key Florida, next to the pizza shop, and across from the Heron Fish-House, lies the Curmudgeon Bookstore. The owner, Dick Martens is a pure curmudgeon. A curmudgeon defined by the American Heritage Dictionary, is an ill-tempered person full of resentment and stubborn notions.
Dick Martens is a conservative and has a point of view; loaded, and ready to be fired.
There will be pleasantries shared as long as you don't speak off the cuff and try to weasel in some liberal remarks. Then by duty called, he must debate with you, and you may leave offended. But don't get your feathers up, for he is well read, and even if you are liberally viewed, he will sharpen your wits. He loves sharing his favorite books with customers on little yellow sticky-notes. When Customers buy a book from Mr Martens, they know that the book is worth their time in reading.
Also check out his blog Curmudgeonalia.

Anonymous said...

I appreciate the positive commentary, but my preferred definition of a curmudgeon is that offered by Jon Winoker:
CURMUDGEON: (noun)
one who abhors disingenuity and hypocrisy, and has the temerity to say so, often recasting unpleasant facts in a droll manner.
Dick Martens
Curmudgeon in residence
Curmudgeonalia(book store,Cedar Key)

---

How can you be neutral on the point of a bullet?

Book Sandwiched In: December Reading.


All Things, All At Once: New and Selected Stories by Lee K. Abbott

How can you be neutral on the point of a moving bullet????

Lee K. Abbot's collection of short stories provides a gateway to the dusty roads in the rural south-west. Abbot's writing covers a wide range of themes including: violence inside a man, lawn mowing, Methodists, UFOs, dreams, choices, shadows of reality, Zodiacs, Wars, Envy, Lust, Friendship, Father and Sons, Golf, New Mexico, Lands of Enchantments, Deserted Byways, wives, and the lost Art of Conversation.

The book may stretch your rigid cultural lines. The characters in the stories are not the type we would necessarily want to hang out with. They are all rebels who may seem at first morally irresponsible. But the characters redemption lies in telling their tales honestly. One of my favorite lines in the stories is "All of this happened years ago when I was the son of a bitch I am not now." (92)
He shows the dark closets full of secrets hanging on clothes hangers ready to be worn.

He forces us to look at our relationships with others and shows how these relationships may not be true to our pretenses.

You can't hate Abbot for his bold strokes, for his bold strokes are his alone.



View all my reviews

Next Month BSI Reviews- The Conjurer's Bird by Martin Davies

Going Deeper

And the aliens landed on Via Del Rosa, ready to pray to our LORD R6 (as Scientology called the supreme LORD).

Cheap Date Nite: Walk Amongst Your Town

Do you have to be rich to go to places of beauty? Nope. Every city has a place, usually free, that highlights the city.

Walk with your wife or girlfriend, bring a book of poetry, an umbrella, something sweet to eat. You can even bring a thermos full of hot chocolate, or cool lemonade. Smile a lot; point at beautiful flowers or exquisite buildings. Then find a place that is private in a public space; lay out a blanket, pour your date a drink, give her some chocolate; open the book of Poetry to a poem that is romantic, and enjoy the moment together.

On the poetry First Thought:
Warning: A saccharoidal poem is hazardous to remaining cool and you may become too cheesy.

On the poetry Two:
Pablo Neruda is a good choice much better than something by Bukowski. Bukowski is great, but it is more private literature... not something I would read to get my wife feeling that warm feeling.

Here is one Poem to read together:

from The Book of Questions User Rating: 8.2 /10 (51 votes) - vote - 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Print friendly version E-mail this poem to e friend Send this poem as eCard Add this poem to MyPoemList III. Tell me, is the rose naked or is that her only dress? Why do trees conceal the splendor of their roots? Who hears the regrets of the thieving automobile ? Is there anything in the world sadder than a train standing in the rain?

Greg's Journal of Found Things III

I could not resist posting this... thanks to Boing Boing for being the resource for Greg's Journal of Found Things today, Monday the 30th of November. Tomorrow is the first day of December.

Greg's Journal of Found Things II

Honda's New Concept Car... Cool!!! Like nothing else I have seen. I would love to drive one of these....

Greg's Journal of Found Things I

Demo Reel from Alex Chechik on Vimeo.

Flip Wilson Show with Geraldine and Muhammad Ali

Don't hurt him because he's one of us... I've got the champ with me.

I thought I could talk but I met my match.

Geraldine Jones Meets Joe Namath

Wanda Wanda Wanda Message Therapest

Punt Bama Punt

1972; a year before I was born. The score of the Iron Bowl was 16-3. Bama undefeated. Auburn hungry for a victory. Bama punts. Auburn blocks the point and runs it back for a touchdown. Score 16-10. Then the incredible happened, Bama punts again, again the same guy blocks the punt, and the same Auburn Tiger scores; the score now was 16-17. Auburn won. Punt 'bama punt; a rivalry had become even more fierce.

Zombies Attack Charlies in Denver

And they attacked Denver arising out of the dusty earth. They came into Charlies bringing their bloodied teeth to a gun fight, they laughed a laugh so mean and cruel it felt like a Zephyr blowing hard against the prairie mounded earth collected at Rocky Flats. The Cold wind was a chill I never forget.

Goin Deeper Wednesday

A worn out army will be like a car on blocks revving to go a 1,000 miles;
it wont get there no matter how many miles role by on the odometer.

Monday: Greg's Notebook

Due South: Football is More Here!

Going Westside: Space Needle

Review of: Eli Golds From Peanuts to Press Box

Life's roads are sinewy slippery slopes. Eli Gold illustrates the way he navigated these twisting roads. Eli had a dream of one day being the radio voice he heard when listing to his favorite New York Teams.
Eli always knew what he wanted to do and he found his way to it by learning along the way. He shows how to turn no-where to now here, by his relentless open-heart ready for exploration.

His drive is tremendous, I can not picture myself calling in scores from a pay phone in order to have my voice on radio. Or the desire to cover anything related to sports.
I was comforted by this book, especially his honesty.
Eli's viewpoints on the southern landscape were great because he was honest in saying it took him more than ten years to be deemed worthy to cover the tide. We sit at home and think these people are so lucky to be in the booth,but rarely do we see the road they took to get there.
My one critique is I wish he would have told less stories but have each story with more depth. I was wanting to travel more and see more with Eli, but maybe he will write another book.

Thanks to Thomas Nelson Company for letting me preview this book.

FROM PEANUTS TO THE PRESSBOX

INSIDER SPORTS STORIES FROM A LIFE BEHIND THE MIC

Eli Gold, with M. B. Roberts

Forward by Vern Linquist

ISBN 978-1-4016-0436-3

Thomas Nelson Publishers, 2009

Hdbk, 255 pp.

Disclosure of Material Connection: I received this book free from Thomas Nelson Publishers as part of their BookSneeze.com book review bloggers program. I was not required to write a positive review. The opinions I have expressed are my own. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255: “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.”

Happy Sunday:
Check out Philosophy Bits, a place where you can get that Sunday Deeper Thought Moments.

Due South Fridays: Holidays in Florida

Halloween in Central Florida is a big deal.

Winter holidays in Florida are a big deal. Why is this?For one reason; the weather does not change, it still is hot outside. For another; trees do not change color and loose their leaves.
So how do we make up for the weather's indifference to time?

We decorate. We create fake snow. We hold haunted houses.

Jessica my wife, and I went to the Bedlam Haunted house last night.
The house was mental. The theme of the house is an insane asylum.
Everyone there will drive you insane, for you can check in anytime you want to but you can never find the door knob to exit; for I had become one of them and did not want to leave and face the cold cold cold world.

The house is a fundraiser for the Winter Haven based ridge art foundation.
Check it out-
Oct 29th, 30 Nov. 1st 7:30-10:30
Oct 31 6:00-12:0

Location: Downtown Winter Haven243 W. Central Avenue

Phone: 863-291-566

Tickets can be had at
Hand Picked of Winter Haven 1503 6th St. SE
or The Ridge Art Gallery 210 Cypress Gardens Blvd
$7 in advance
$8 in advance

West Coast-California Basketball

a. lakers fast break makers
kinds of the court shake and bake all takers
back to back is a bad ass fact a claim that remains in tact
m-a-g-i-c see you on the court
buck has come to play his way and his way is to thwart
m-a-g-i-c magic of the buck
other teams pray for dreams
but he don't give a [fuck]
penetrating the lane like a bullet train
comes the magic blood a telepathic brain
knucklehead suckers better duck
when the buck comes through like a truck
scott stops pops and drops it in
on his way back gets a little skin
from the hand of a man named a. c. green
slam so hard break your t.v. screen
worthy's hot with his tomahawk
take it to the hole make your mamma talk
i hate to burst your bubble but triple double trouble
is coming to your town and he's going to make rubble
l. a. lakers fast break makers
kings of the court shake and bake all takers
back to back is a bad ass fact a claim that remains in tact
lakers are the team that i watch on the telly
cause they got more moves
that a bowl full of jelly
the buck stops here - pops - then cheers
a roar through the forum
that deafens my ears
the one and only know if his kind
sits in a throne
not for the records that he holds
but for being bald and bold
kareem abdul jabbar
all time great super super star
i hate to burst your bubble but triple double trouble
is coming to your town and he's going to make rubble
does anybody want some magic johnson
l. a. lakers fast break makers
kings of the court shake and bake all takers
back to back is a bad ass fact a claim that remains in tact