It is with great pride that I tell you all that one of my submissions to notfoolinganybody.com has been accepted and put online!

On my recent trip to Pensacola, I rented a car in Atlanta from a Budget car rental place. This particular establishment is just down the road from where La and Monkeyboy live. As I rolled up, I got the distinct sense that something wasn't quite right about the building. Maybe it was the nautical lanterns they left hanging on the place. Maybe it was the stale scent of assorted fried fish crispies hanging around the place like an an ethereal albatross: a ghost of rinds of an ancient marinator, as it were.

I kill myself sometimes!

At any rate, The Roost will now wear the official insignia of one of the NFA Rangers. The badge, I might add, is fittingly itself a ripoff of something else. But you weren't hoodwinked for a minute, were you?

In another ending this week, two days ago I finished reading the final volume in the 28-volume reprint collection of the greatest samurai manga ever written: Kozure Okami, or known here in the U.S. as Lone Wolf and Cub.

The tale is one of historical fiction based upon a real-life mystery: the disappearance of the once-powerful Yagyu clan from prominence in a relatively short time. The story of Ogami Itto, the former official executioner of the Tokugawa shogun, is that of a wandering assassin. Together with his infant son Daigoro, he uses his wits, his personal code of honor, a baby cart full of tricks, and his hell-sent skill with a dotanuki battle sword to make the Yagyu pay for the dirty deed they done did to this dude.

Yes, swordfights abound. Yes, it's bloody. And yes, it's damn good.

Dark Horse Comics released the series in translation, in manga compilation form; the only change apart from translation is that they reversed a number of pages to account for left-to-right reading. Frankly, given the propensity of authors Kazuo Koike and Goseki Kojima to create unusual, page-spilling panels, it's a tremendous feat that Dark Horse could pull it off at all. On top of that, some of the most noted names in comics took turns painting the cover art for the translated volumes, beginning with none other than Frank Miller, author of The Dark Knight Returns.

Each volume includes a context-specific glossary, for easy reference of the Japanese terms that have been retained wherever possible; in addition, there are continuing bits of interview with the creators of the characters in each volume.

If you consider yourself a comics reader, or even if you just like westerns or samurai films, you owe it to yourself to start reading Lone Wolf and Cub. In fact, I'm going to be writing an article on this manga in an upcoming essay, in collaboration with CH, for a prospective comics focus in the Books Section of Paste Magazine.

Last Friday, with heavy hearts and a deep sense of gratitude we bid farewell to our faithful ride of these past ten years: Tama-Chan (literally, "Little Ghost"), the little Honda CRX. Rather than go through the rigmarole of selling the Millenium Falcon of economy cars (a nimble hunk of junk), we decided to donate it to our public radio station, WUNC. That way, not only do we get rid of the thing, we assuage our guilt for not having contributed during recent years' fundraisers.

And thus ends nine years of partly unstinting service, along with wholly unstinting repair costs. We used to say that angels were holding our little bucket together, and that the minute we divested ourselves of it the thing would crumble into dust.

But we salute you, Little Ghost! You served us well.

(cue Little Rascals theme music)

Tama-Chan Fun Facts:

• Odometer reading at time of purchase: 55,000 (1995)
• Odometer reading at time of donation: 235,500 (2004)
• Stereo radio only since 1997 -- tape deck done died.
• Windshield replaced not once, but twice.
• FM antenna broken off by vandals in 1999.
• No A/C since 2002 -- estimated cost to repair: $750
• Source of "that musty smell": interior A/C leak, and bad moisture seals on windows
• Frame damage that one shop declared to have totaled the car; another shop undertook straightening the frame, only to realize upon completing the job that the first shop was probably right.
• Tastefully decorated on the inside with assorted pirate stickers
• Interior ceiling boasts multiple fist impressions from Randall's road rage
• French fries under seat only now approaching half-life

Here's NP saying goodbye to the Little Ghost. Apparently, you get beat in and beat out of NP's gang.

No, I haven't forgotten all about updating this blog. Two things have been in the way of regular updates this past week:

1. Shel and I were in Chicagoland closing on our new home this week, and
2. All of the blogging action was happening in the Comments section. To date I see upwards of 31 comments on the Post-Eva Ruminations Part II post.

Shel and I are thrilled to be moving. Er, except for the ridiculous hassle of moving itself. That much is nasty. In supremely bad timing, I have a week-long business trip to Orlando like the day after the moving company delivers our stuff. Shelley basically gets buried under boxes, while I catch a plane. No fair, is it? Believe me, I'd much rather be with Shel, settling in.

At least Sher's coming to visit that week, so Shel won't be totally alone with the endless unpacking and arranging.

My first job is to clean, strip, and stain the wood trim baseboards. Can't wait!

Frequent visitors to James Lileks' Institute for Official Cheer, and its subsidiary operation, The Orphanage for Cast-Off Mascots, will no doubt be familiar with the sad plight of one out-of-work pork plugger. That's right, folks; good ol' Cudahy Sam, a has-been of ham hawking, has been homeless and unemployed for many a year.

But no more! You'll now enjoy the eager, slurping mug of our good friend Sam everytime you check out the list of links in the Beerfly section. I now officially dub him "Beerfly Sam"; long may he drool over favorite brewing links!

And you can all thank me for leaving off the bit about "Big Tender Chunks of Beef in Rich Brown Gravy." Hwarf!

The important questions remain: What are you doing? How do I know? What's your search for truth look like? How can I help you do it better?

In order to know how to help, I have to really know what it is that you are doing, and I have to respect it for what it is, and not try to make you do what I'm doing.

Tradition and the Individual Talent (apologies to T.S. Eliot)

Remember the parable of the talents (Matthew 25:13-30)? Some are given 1, some ten, and some thirty.

Should the man with thirty try to make the guy with 1 achieve the same result? What does someone with thirty talents have to say to someone with 1 talent?

Do you think that God didn't know what He was doing when he gave the 1 talent to one guy and thirty to another? In fact, the parable says that the businessman gave to each according to their respective abilities.

Are they measured by where they end up? No, they are measured by the extent to which they made something of what they were given. It's the proportionate response that counts.

So what's the significance of Christ? Is he the 50 talents we've been given? Is Buddha 1 talent, and Mohammed 10? Does it matter who gets what or how much? Are spear-chunking tribesmen deprived of light? It doesn't seem to me that they are, at all. They are indeed given enough light (Romans 1:20) with which to make a certain choice toward the divine. Will they seek truth in truth? Or will they turn away? Will God hide his face from those who seek with their whole hearts? No. Did it matter who got how much in the parable? Not really. What mattered was the heart response to what was given. Do you seek to make the best of it, figuratively speaking? Do you assume that how the folks to either side of you, who have been given 1 or ten talents should act in the same exact fashion as someone with thirty talents?

So the question that follows is what is the function of sharing yourself? What is the place of evangelism? What is the true form of evangelism, if such a term has any currency?

I finally finished my first arcade joystick. Those of you who have been reading since the beginning will remember that I mentioned this thing early on, and even had a picture of the work in progress. Since then, I've replaced the top with lexan, swapped out the stick, and whipped up a control panel overlay with my very own custom name. I called it the "Wunderstick" partly in deference to my wife, and partly in homage to Roy Hobbs's famous bat Wonderboy in Bernard Malamud's novel The Natural. Course, I'd prefer that this controller doesn't split in half during furious sessions of Tekken Tag Tournament or Soul Calibur 2.



Here you can see the control box attached to the controller's back jack. I built it like this so that no matter what system comes out in the future, I can hack a controller pad and create a new interface for this controller.

A Quick 'N Dirty Parable: The Corporation and the Hot Dog Stand

So there's a typical multibillion dollar corporation. It employs battalions of accountants and huge databases to manage information and finances. They use all manner of accounting methods to maximize their enormous financial flow. And, properly managed, they do quite well.

Now consider the guy on the corner who sells hot dogs to those accountants on their lunch break. He may keep his cash in a mason jar in the bottom of the weiner heater. He buys his stuff in the grocery store, in a just-in-time fashion, and pays his taxes as he can. He takes cash only.

And this system has been working for him, as it has for the past twenty years. He makes enough to live on, and is content.

What happens if the president of the corporation looks down from his office on the 95th floor of the building, and seeing the hot dog vendor, reasons "we make a helluva lot more money than that poor fool down there. As a service to him, I insist that we help him get up to speed with how businesses should be run in this day and age. Release the accountants!"

In response to which the accountants, database engineers, and financial consultants descend upon the hot dog vendor. They insist that he modernise with the latest computer equipment, digitize his financials, and develop a portfolio of investments. He now accounts for the exact count of his frankfurters with a sophisticated database.

Huh?

Has the corporation helped that hot dog vendor? Maybe. Probably not. But why not?

Because it acted without an accurate view of the hot dog man's goals and business. They assumed that what worked in their world must of necessity work when transplanted into another world. And isn't it a bit arrogant to assume from the get-go that the hot dog vendor doesn't know his own business?

I think that's a lot like contemporary evangelism.