How I Lost My Faith In Humanity...And My Wallet

It was 8:30 AM. I woke up with a start and a shiver. I had been visiting a dear friend the night before, and had arrived home at 3:16 AM, hitting the sheets immediately. My alarm was set for 5:30 AM, and I must have turned it off in my sleepy state.

This morning, I was supposed to take Fred (9) and Naya (12) to work with me. I told them it would be an early morning. 8:30 AM is kind of early, depending on what time zone you're in, I guess. But I was late. I texted my boss and let him know I would be in a bit after our morning meetings.

Tossing together my things, I left the house with the two squirts, got in the car, and drove to the local Kwik Trip. I figured I'd be an awesome daddy and get them doughnuts for breakfast.

We went in, grabbed doughnuts, coffee, muffins, and iced teas, they both stuffed it all in my arms, and I hobbled out to the car. Fred couldn't open the door, being that the handle had broken off a few months ago, requiring expert skill in opening it.

"Daddy, can you open the door for me?"

I looked at my arms and hands, full of everything, including my wallet and my phone, ran through a few sorting algorithms I had learned in CSci 101, and decided that it would be my wallet that went on the roof of the car, freeing up my hand to open the door.

And that's where the wallet stayed - until it must have flown off when I crossed the town railroad tracks.

I drove out of town and got stuck behind some old rusty white Ford Aerostar. I turned my right blinker on to get over and pass him in the right lane when a green car drove quickly up beside me. Out of my peripheral vision, I waited until he would pass, thinking I would get behind him. But he met my speed, mile for mile. Now, I was irritated, but he wouldn't budge.

"Um...Daddy. That guy is trying to tell you something," Naya nervously croaked from the back seat.

So, in a huff, I looked over to see a young looking gentleman, earnestly waving his own wallet, which he was quite happy to still have, at the moment. We pulled over and he told me that he saw my wallet fly off back in town, by the train tracks. This was bad. Bad, because we had recently started a new budget, where my bride and I each had $375 to spend on groceries, gas, necessities, et al, every two weeks. I had $185 left in that wallet.

We raced back to find it gone. I called into work and told them I would be taking the day off to put the pieces of my life back together. I find it amazing how much of our little world we can pack into a little piece of leather.

I took the kids back home and cancelled all my credit cards. The second I hung up the phone with the last company, there was a knock on the door. I opened it to find a very friendly young lady on the steps. She had piercings all over her face. In her hand was my wallet.

A flood of emotions swept through me, the chief of which was, "This woman is going to get $50 from me, right now!" I opened the wallet to make her day - and found it empty. No cash. Everything else was in there (and now useless, due to all my phone calls), except the green.

All I could do was warmly thank the woman, chat about life a bit, and then say goodbye.

I sure hope the thief puts that money to good use. He or she obviously needed it quite badly.

Louis Gohmert's Illegal Alien Crime Statistics Are a Ruse

I've said this before and I'll say it again:

Humans commit crimes. Humans break laws. Just because a criminal happens to be an "illegal alien" does not make that crime more alarming.

Enter Louis Gohmert, the ever fear mongering Congressman from the great state of Texas. This gentleman has been on the rampage against the recent influx of illegal border crossers, the majority of which are children.

According the Right Wing Watch's captured audio,  Gohmert said the following:

...in fact, of the 171,000 [illegals] who had committed a crime [within the last 5 years], there were uh 671,000 crimes committed..separate crimes committed, by those 171,000 people.

Now, at face value, this is an astonishing number. But, when you really begin to drill down into the actual details of the rhetoric, you begin to see a much different picture than the excitable Gohmert wants you to see.

First of all, when a crime is committed, that crime carries with it a number of charges. A neighbor of mine was recently arrested for breaking a "no contact" order, and was slapped with half a dozen charges at his initial hearing. The problem here is that these were not distinct crimes, insomuch that he had committed six separate acts of crime. Instead, they were six different charges for the exact same action - breaking the "no contact" order. To pretend that 671,000 crimes committed by 171,000 individuals is a bad number, is to purposefully inflate the idea, depending on your audiences ignorance.

Also, if we use the crime numbers from the last five years, in Texas (2008 - 2012), something interesting begins to take shape. In this equation we will be adding up the following crimes (which are not even remotely the same as the crimes listed in Gohmert's 671,000 number. With knowledge of how Louis works, that number includes crimes like jay-walking, etc.):

• Violent crimes
• Property crimes
• Murder
• Rape (Texas calls it "forcible rape", but I'll skip that label, being that I find it redundant)
• Robbery
• Aggravated assault
• Burglary
• Larceny/Theft
• Vehicle theft

Now, these numbers include ALL crimes by ALL inhabitants of Texas, not just illegals. It comes to 5,254,828 crimes. If you compare that to the 671,000 crimes, even assuming that all of those crimes are in the above list (though they are most likely not), you will notice that the crimes committed by illegals was about 12.7% of the total.

This means that non-illegals committed a whopping 87.3% of all listed crimes in the state of Texas in the last five years.

Also, Governor Perry has been talking about how this influx of illegals began in the year 2012 or earlier. If you look at crime statistics in Texas, you will notice that they are dropping. In sheer numbers, they are dropping. But, then, Texas is one of the fastest growing states in the union, by population, which dramatically increases the rate of the drop in crime statistics.

Couple all this with known facts that the American magnet lost it's pull during the Great Recession, causing illegal border crossing to drop off sharply after 2008, only recently increasing in numbers, due to an improving economy here and reported violence in Central America, and you begin to diverge from Gohmert's clean narrative.

Humans commit crimes. Illegal aliens (migrants) do not have a greater propensity to commit crimes, just by the mere fact that they are here illegally. In fact, if we were to decide which area of the population to deport based on crime statistics, we should probably shine a greater light on the non-illegal inhabitants of Texas, being they commit the vast majority of the criminal acts.

Humans Aren't Worth Much to God, Fetuses and Babies, Even Less So

I've been following Steve Wells at Dwindling In Unbelief for years now. He's the author of the Skeptics Annotated Bible, something you may have come across beside the Gideon Bible in a hotel room.

In this post, he graphs and charts the Levitical worth of every human being, according to words from God's own mouth. It's bloody brilliant.

Enjoy.

The Evolution of a Sin

What is sin exactly? How is it defined? Does sin morph, or is it static with time? Surely, anyone who has studied any amount of religious history, can see that sin changes with each generation. 

Can religious masses be expected to understand a generally accepted rule book, delineating every little detail of life, telling them what is wrong and what is not right? After all, most of religious theology, especially Christianity, the religion I am most familiar with, deals with what man, throughout history, has done wrong, and what can be done about it.

When I was a young lad, I used to drink water - a lot! I would go into the bathroom, cup my hand under the faucet, fill it with water, and bring it to my mouth, repeatedly. I loved the taste of Minneapolis water. It was sweet, with a hint of lemon and lime. 

Then, my Mama found religion. Religion was an Artesian well. Once a fortnight, we would drive our old van forty minutes to the well, fill scores of gallon glass bottles up under the flowing metal pipe, then drive them back home.

Mama made it a rule that we were no longer allowed to drink city water. Artesian well water was blessed by the gods. It was healthy. Checked for all sorts of chemicals every four years or something.

Drinking city water was now a sin.

My sinful nature took over, as it was wont to do. I was a descendant of Adam. I had no choice but to want to sin. So I drank city water. I couldn't stand the crap from the well unless it was so ice cold, you could barely taste the flavor. Kind of like how you have to drink Coors Lite, hoping, beyond hope, that you swallow it before any sensation remotely resembling the taste of piss-water, becomes recognizable by the receptors in your brain.

A year later, I was convicted of my sins. I went to a seminar where the guru, Billy Boy G. (Gothard) told us all to think of two sins we wanted to confess to our Mamas and then remove from our lives. So we could be good smelling to the gods, or something. The two sins I picked were drinking city water and picking my nose and eating it. In other words, within one evening in front of that black-haired, lying bastard, I removed my only hope of street survival.

From that moment on, I never picked my nose and ate it again. I did, on the other hand, drink city water, here and there. I told you...I was a descendant of Adam. I had a sin nature. What the hell was I supposed to do? Be perfect? Oh yeah...like I was Jesus. Sure, HE never picked his nose and ate it and always drank Artesian well water. But dammit! That's because he probably turned his bloody snot into loaves and Swedish fishies, and his Artesian water into delectable Italian wine. I didn't have those powers. That man had it easy.

And so, sin was what I was made to feel guilty about, then established in my life what I needed to do about eradicating it, then constantly focusing on not partaking in it, so I could feel right and proper when taking communion the next Sunday, needing to dig deeper to find other sins I could create, starting the cycle all over again.

I'm thirsty. The tap is calling.

My Friend, Collin Engstrom, is Pretty Smart

I went to college in Marshall, Minnesota. Southwest Minnesota State University, to be exact. I received a Bachelor's in Computer Science and missed a math minor by three credits. I was terrified of the Calculus 3 professor, who had a reputation for eating his students alive, after dismembering them with chalk he sharpened with his teeth.

My dearest friend from college took that class. This gentleman, Collin Engstrom is a genius. He has so many degrees, he makes Al Gore look lowly in his shadow. He graduated with a double degree in Computer Science and Mathematics. Even though he was brilliant, that Calc 3 class killed him. He ended up taking the beating twice, and still couldn't get up to an 'A'.

Then he went on to smash records in everything else. Had to be the professor.

Anyway, Collin is finally published and the paper is a good read for smart people.

Check it out here.

Title: Design Patterns for Tunable and Efficient SSD-based Indexes

The Hotel from Hell: America's Best Value Inn, Sarasota, Florida

It was 11:00 PM on a Saturday night in June. I was driving from Orlando, Florida to Sarasota with a dear friend of mine. We needed a place to stay. So, as I navigated the oddly heavy traffic on I-4, she jumped on her cell and called Hotels.com.

After a few minutes of nearly dropped calls, the Hotels.com staff member found her a deal she couldn't refuse. For just about $150 and six minutes from Siesta Beach, we could have a good room for two nights - at America's Best Value Inn, Sarasota, Florida.

After hanging up, my friend nervously turned to me and asked if I had ever heard of this hotel chain. I had. A few years ago, they built one in Pipestone, Minnesota. It looked very much like an AmericInn, but with cheaper siding and windows. I assumed this one would be about the same. America's Best Value Inn had touted itself, recently, as the "fastest growing, discount hotel chain" in the United States. You can't grow fast without doing something right. Right?

There's always a bad apple in a good box of fruit.

America's Best Value Inn of Sarasota is located right on the edge of downtown. Downtown Sarasota is beautiful. It's an eclectic mix of eateries, shops, and small towers, where people allegedly work, when they're not staring out at the beauty of the surf and the approaching angry skies. A hotel in that area would naturally be a fine establishment.

We pulled into the parking lot and stepped out of our vehicle. Our nostrils were met with a stench that reminded us of a mix between a backed up sewer and sulfur from a reverse osmosis water purification system. Broken blinds were hanging in the windows of several of the units. But, through the fence, we could see a pool that looked okay. A unique-looking walking bridge spanned the two buildings.

Shrugging off the stench, assuming it could be coming from somewhere else, we walked around to the front of the hotel, and buzzed the attendant. She grudgingly looked up at us, waited a few long seconds, and then pressed a button to let us in.

Inside the cramped lobby was a messy assortment of tables, resembling an attempt at a breakfast area. On the counter of the lobby desk was what looked like a five-gallon, pump-action bottle of hand sanitizer. That should have been our first warning. Behind us, a television was on, blaring some 'B' movie, semi-drowning out ours and the manager's voices. The lobby smelled like floor cleaner on top of mold and smoke and old socks, smelly feet, a hint of rotten orange juice, and possibly a hidden carcass of a mouse or a yellow-bellied small-mouthed bass.

The manager didn't attempt to turn the movie down. She was too busy filing her nails and picking up a blue Magic Marker to color in a missing area of nail paint. The color didn't match, but it wouldn't have mattered anyway. Her clothes were haphazardly matching as she slouched in the chair, obviously irritated that we had even dared to show up at her hotel. Without looking at us, she mumbled something, inaudible to either my friend or I.

"Excuse me?," my friend asked politely.

"Driver's license and credit card, please," the lady croaked out, angrily.

My friend looked at me, a look of concern crossing her face. I raised my eyebrows and assumed an acquiescent nature that I wear, anytime I need to entice a horrid person to like me. I mumbled some sort of joke, chuckled nervously, and received a look of disdain, shot at me from behind the desk. The lady grabbed the credit card and pulled out a knuckle buster from below the desk.

Yeah. A knuckle buster. Who uses those anymore!?

Afterwards, she proceeded to type random characters into her computer for nearly five minutes, chewing loudly on her gum, over the noise of the television, ignoring us, treating it as if we didn't exist. I had a notion to ask her if we were good and if we could have the keys, but, terrified of what she might say, I abstained and instead, shifted on my feet, sighing loudly, letting my passive aggressive, Norwegian heritage do the work. She heard me, lowered her head, and typed harder, paying special attention to ignoring us.

Finally, she ripped open a drawer, produced two odd looking keys, and handed them to me. We walked out and went to gather our things from the vehicle. Returning to our entrance door, we noticed the handle of the door was broken, swinging freely. It opened without a key. Discovering no elevator, we began to climb the stairs to the second floor. The stench had grown. We couldn't breathe without closing our noses. It smelled like rotting feet now. Like an old baseball stadium after all the fans have left from a double-header. 

We were halfway up the first flight of stairs when, from around a corner, stepped a man in nothing but underwear. He looked like death. His pectorals were drooping, nearly hitting his belly button. His face, contorted into a drug-induced insomnia. His eyes were so wide open, one would be convinced the balls would pop from their sockets and bounce lightly on the dirty concrete, rolling under poorly installed trim, hitting the wall behind, then heading directly into a storm drain.

I held my breath and stood behind my friend, in case the dripping-skinned gentleman needed to choose the easiest target to murder. I would go quietly, I knew, never having been in a fight in my life. I held my breath. He passed the bottom of the stairs and disappeared.

We made it to the top of the second flight and found the hallway door propped open. No key was needed to enter this wing of the "hotel". The carpet in the hall was stained with disgusting black stains. The walls had odd stains and scratches on them. The smell worsened. Every door we passed gave us a semblance of the occupants within. The walls were paper thin, allowing the screams of children, the loud noises of televisions, the fighting of spouses (or whatever they were), the bangings of bodies against cheap construction, and maybe scratching noises of what we had now reasoned would not surprise us, had they been the scratching of rats. Families of rats. Cockroaches. Bugs. All sorts of bugs. Poisonous lizards. Snakes. Runaway alligators. Dumped pets. Fleas. Bed bugs. Nothing would surprise us now.

We opened the door to Room #215.

That was our next mistake.

See, my friend is the closest thing to a germaphobe. She carries a can of Lysol spray into every hotel room she enters and immediately sprays down all furniture, the bed cover, all handles to doors, toilets, sinks, the hangars in the closet, and, if she gets really carried away, sprays me too.  This room wouldn't have been acceptable to her unless dozens of Lysol spray cans - the jumbo family size - were used. Even I, not a germaphobe, would have been very happy with a military-grade flame thrower, at this juncture.

The second you entered the room, your throat closed. I am not allergic to anything, but this room was allergic to me. It stank. There was old caulk everywhere, covering up holes in the walls. The bathroom curtain was untouchable. Stains on the walls in the bathroom. Stains on the carpet. The furniture was scratched and scuffed. The bed, hard as a rock. In short, I cannot describe the awfulness of the room without nightmares coursing through my head.

We turned around and left, feeling dirty for having just stepped into the room.

At 2:00AM, we found Hampton Inn & Suites, Sarasota, by the airport. They rented us a third floor room. The lady at the desk was pleasant and fun. The room smelled fresh and clean. Everything was white. Everything worked. All the carpets were new and fresh looking. No scratches or stains adorned the walls. The bed was comfortable. And, best of all, the Lysol spray can sat on one of the tables, unused, smiling at itself.

As I drifted off to sleep, I turned to my friend and asked, "Are you feeling better now?"

"They wash the bed covers here," she murmured happily, with a dazed smile on her lips, as she drifted off to sleep. 

Bruce's Letters to Those Who Try to Evangelize Him

I've been reading Bruce Gerencser's blog for quite a while now. He is so well spoken. He used to be a pastor and then, in 2008, walked out of religion altogether with his wife.

His latest post is about writing letters to those that make a valiant attempt at evangelizing you. He gives ample examples of his own writings, as well as some tips.

It's a very good read.

I'm Going to See a Urologist

I've been terribly non-existent here at Incongruous Circumspection. Part of that is due to my ambivalence about writing. That will pass, once my bride graduates from college and I have some time on my hands from our currently busy schedule (I'll keep lying to myself). But also, This year has been bloody horrendous for health issues. Nothing major yet, but every one of them causes me to think I'm dying (my wife will say that's nothing new).

So, on July 22nd at 3:15PM, I will be seeing a urologist about various issues I have been having (pun intended, sort of). Here are the top five things I expect them to discover:

1. Prostate cancer. Surgery will completely render my sexual function useless, leaving me an empty shell of a human being.

2. A brain tumor that fell through my neck cavity, bounced off my pelvic bone, and lodged onto the exterior of my stomach wall.

3. A permanently damaged liver from drinking an average of one fine brew a week.

4. Both kidneys, shutting down, with no hope of a donor, leaving me on dialysis for the rest of my short life.

and finally...

5. A disease, yet undiscovered, now named after me. 

While flattering, that's one thing I don't want in my eulogy.

I'll keep everyone posted and try to keep the dirty details as few as possible.

Love,

I. C.