I admit, I do like the Victorian era. At least, I like the books that come from that period. Tha ladies with their fabulous dresses and parties and entrigues.

Mr Darcy is a nearly endlessly fascinating man. How many movies, exactly, have been made of Pride and Prejudice? and how many more will be made?

Of course, it would not be so fun to actually live in the Victorian era. The not being able to vote thing, and the obsession with propriety would wear thin in about five minutes.

But one thing about those Victorian ladies I do admire and would like to emulate in my current modern life is their ability to ‘correspond.’ Writing letters and responding to gift and invitations seemed to be a weekly, if not daily, activity for these women.

I guess I write emails at least that frequently. But letters? with STAMPS? Those are harder to achieve.

Christmas just happened, and that is the time of year when a lot of people make the effort to send a physical card and/or letter to their wide aquaintance. I think that’s a beautiful thing. It’s really wonderful to send and recieve these missives. Perhaps it is one of the old-fashioned traditions that make Christmas so special.

Getting all the envelopes and cards ready reminded me of the efforts made last year for my wedding invitations. Checking and double-checking to make sure I have all the pertinent addresses for everyone is tedious, but it is pleasant to think of all these people who have been a joy to my life.

Because of my restricted abilities right now, I am triple-checking the address list. I know I just sent out the Christmas letter, but I intend to send out a birth announcement with little Daley Daughter picture to everyone.

Since I can’t reorganize the garage (a task needing doing, but not something I can do right now), I can at least pre-adress the envelopes for the next mailing.

The combination of being so dis- abled and preparing correspondence makes me feel rather Victorian. Also, I’m drinking copious amounts of tea. Very very victorian.

Maybe I could go rent Pride and Prejudice.

So some guys from work are going to see Steely Dan in concert tonight. This is fine, a cool thing to do and I’m happy for them. They are happy for them.

But the mention of Steely Dan inevitably brings up the origin of the name. Is there always the one guy that has to bring up thing that everyone knows, a fact that was vaguely interesting the first time it was learned and immediately tedious after absorbing?

I would like to reference the esteemed BOFH at this point, who puts it so well:

I’m really bored. You know how bored you get when work’s going on and on and on, and nothing interesting is happening, and you’re listening to a radio that picks up ONE station on FM, and it’s always the station with the least records in the city, about 5, and one of them is “You’re so Vain” which wasn’t too bad a song until you hear it about 3 times a day for a year, and *EVERY* time it plays, the announcer tells you it’s about Warren Beaty and who he’s currently poking, someone you’ll never sniff the toe-jam of, let alone meet, let alone get amourous with. And EVERY time someone mentions Warren Beaty, someone says that he used to go out with Madonna too, and have you seen “In Bed With..”

AND THEN, someone ELSE will say “It wasn’t really about Warren Beaty, it was James Taylor” and the first person will say “What, `In bed with Madonna?'”, and they laugh and everyone else laughs, and I slip out the Magnum from under the desk where I keep it in case someone laughs at a joke that’s so dry it’s got a built in water-fountain, and blow the lot of them away as a community Service. I figure that I’ll get time off my sentence if I ever kill someone by accident who’s got a life.

Just in case you are confused, I’m talking about the seemingly required discussion surrounding the “You’re so vain” song’s intended referent.

It’s a trigger for inane conversation. A tired joke/titillation that was maybe funny once. Maybe half funny once.

I reference the Heinlein “Funny Once” theory of Humor. In the excellent book “Moon is a Harsh Mistress” a large computer comes to life, and the hero of the story has to explain that some jokes are “funny once”, but should not be repeated.

That was one smart computer.

I wish that sort of smart could spread.

And NO, i’m not going to tell you what Steely Dan is named after. Look it up, if you really don’t know. Or don’t because it’s barely Worth knowing.

So yesterday I posted about dumb stuff.

But it was kinda fun. I am full of thoughts about all kinds of things, and why not just dump a few on my website? It’s not the LOUVRE, for goodness sakes!

it’s supposed to rain hard today. Maybe later, it hasn’t yet. I wore a good coat, though. Today, for the first time this year, I rode the bus.

My new car has been fun to drive, but I really shouldn’t commute to work if it is possible to ride the bus. The bus is morally superior, and superior in other ways.

But the bus requires taking the air. The air is nippy, and it might be wet. Therefore: coat.

My coat of choice is not a fashionable one. I wore it yesterday too, even though I was not bussing it. It’s an air force desert camoflage coat, with excellent pockets.

I like camoflage. I grew up with camoflage everywhere. All the boys wore camoflage. In fact, since the school started during moose hunting season, the school pretty much started with all the boys wearing as much camo as they owned. It was a badge of honor, to have all camo. It was a great advantage when we played capture the flag in the woods. it’s hard to capture what you can’t see.

Eventually, the school banned it, because it was too casual. We were not allowed to wear jeans either.

Anyway, when I grew up and could buy my own clothes, I liked to have some camo in my closet for certain types of tasks. It’s very durable and comfortable, especially the really old worn stuff.

When I went out to visit Telissa, whose husband was in the air force, I tried to find some camo in the thrift stores aroudn the base. In california, i hadn’ t found any good camo. It was everywhere in alaska, but not so much here. We couldn’t find any.

But later, her considerate husband gifted me with this nice coat. Awesome!

and I use it. It’s good for dog walking and bus stop waiting, and other warmth-requiring outdoor activities.

HOWEVER, people have opinions about it.

The react to the militariness of it.

how odd. It’s just a practical coat. but people ask me “Have you been in the military?”

And I explain how the coat was a gift from a thoughtful airforce friend.

But they assume things.

huh

And I realize that the only camo i see around here is ON people on active duty. Or little faux camo t-shirts or minis on size zero teenage girls. how weird.

I’ve long thought that clothing was a form of communication. Pairing harley davidson combat boots with a pale pink lace&cotton prom dress is a wardrobe pun, really.

But there are apparently regional dialects of wardrobe. The camo means one thing to me, and another to the soft and civilized californians.

I wear that coat and I am saying “Warm practical coat.”
The see me wear the coat and hear “Paramilitary nut job.”

Not the same language.

I am planning a trip to alaska. Chris needs to see it. I think I’m willing to go there for a QUICK trip to show him.

And i wonder….I remember camo being everywhere. But that was about 20 years ago. have things changed? Thank you, Walmart, clothing is plentiful and good quality. Maybe the era of using whatever is at hand is over, and specialization is upon us. Even in Alaska.

I hope not.

Northern Exposure was on TV on new years, and I made Chris watch some of it. I remember it was on TV, maybe reruns, when I first moved to California. That was what people knew as Alaska.

I thought Alaska was just life. I didn’t know. I watched the show a couple times to find out what people thought I was. I remember thinking it was pretty close, but somehow not quite.

So Chris and I watched the reruns, I with my more finely tuned perceptions.

OKAY, the fictional town was WAY too cute. It is obvious that the indoor scenes were not filmed in alaska. BECAUSE all the little house furnishings, the window handles and cupboards were too old.

They are similar to the hardware in my 50s house. And I remember the then I used to be, and how hungry I was for anything old. Something from the fifties was impossibly old.

There just wasn’t anything that old. If there was something from then…maybe a log cabin? Maybe a sled dog run? But those would not have had all the nice fixtures. or built-in cupboards of the ranch-style.

things were so new. and things were just so damn hard to get. I guess the military was really good at sending supplies, so it was easier for the poor folks (such as my family) to get the cast offs.

the richer folk literally FLEW TO SEATTLE TO GET HAIR CUTS. Unbelievable.

I think that my background is part of why I take the bus. I consider the bus a luxury. That view is not shared by most other Angelinos. But my town didn’t have a bus. I really wished i had a bus.

I wonder if they have a bus now. I know my street, Bull Moose Drive, is paved now, a development I am still surprised by.

I’m gonna take Chris to see it. And the lake, renamed Memory Lake. How ironic! Memories of what? Mosquitoes past? The place was virgin forest before they threw up a housing subdivision and named all the streets in two-word animal names–Bull Moose–Red Fox. The lake was called Swamp lake before the developers got there. But I spent many hours on the lake, swimming in the cold summers and iceskating in the freezing winters.

There are a lot of things I need to show Chris, and probably a lot of things I need to see again for myself.

Anyway. I thought I would post a little something.

One of the things I always knew when I was growing up was how special my church was. It was filled with the Holy Spirit.

Most other places were not filled with the Holy Spirit. In fact, other churches were so far away from God that they were even suspicious of people who were filled with the Holy Spirit. We knew that was silly, because the Bible talks about being filled with the Holy Spirit, right there in the beginning of Acts.

How could a Christian call themself a Christian and be suspicious of what was right there in the BIble?

I wanted to know how it had gotten lost. I was told that the Bible was written, and then the Church got all corrupted because of the sinfulness of the Catholic Church. It was amazing that there was a church at all, but it trucked along by the mercy of–the Holy Spirit!–until Martin Luther could hang his 95 theses on the wall and everyone could be Christians again.

But that didn’t answer my question about how Christians had lost the Holy Spirit. What had happened?

It was kinda the same thing. Just like Christianity itself had bumped along in the dark until Martin Luther cast off the evil catholics, the Holy Spirit had been ghosting around like a fog in the dark, just waiting to come back. He waited, until a lady in Los Angeles was suddenly filled with the Holy Spirit, started talking in tongues, and then everyone got filled with the Holy Spirit again.

A lady in Los Angeles? That means it couldn’t have been that long ago.

No, it was right before the great depression.They called it the Azusa street revival and that’s how our church got started. A lot of churches got started throught that movement.

———————-

I remember hearing about the Asuza street revival. What I didn’t know what how HUGE it was, and that the lady who was filled with the Holy Spirit was a world-wide phenomena knows as Sister Aimee Semple-McPherson.

I didn’t even know that my bus passed that very Asuza street church, known as Temple Angelus, every day when I used to work downtown.

She was a huge force, and magnetically powerful woman who had passed into obscure legend, a no-name entity, by the time my folks had jumped on the caboose of the train that had started out as her bandwagon.

She started in the midwest, and her first husband was a preacher. They went to China as missionaries, and he died. She miraculously made it backto america and eventually became an evangelist.

And how! She had a radio show during the heyday of radio. In fact, she was the one who came up with the “Place your hands on the radio to be healed” idea…

I also find it interesting that her phrases (as I have heard them in documentaries) are the accent and tones that I heard imitated by itinerant preachers that came. I aways wondered why people would get that prophesying tone.

Oh Lord-ah…we prayyy for sturength-uh

I wondered about that as a kid…People who spoke normally in conversation would start talking all funny..

IT WAS HER! she talked like that.

And I never knew. I never knew that such an incredible strong woman got baptized in the man-centered church of my youth..baptized SO HARD she never came up for air.

and I had to learn about her through a PBS documentary.

…yet another example of how anonymous is a woman…

There was no end to the references of the Asuza street revival. But heavens, I never knew what it was.