Why I\’m Lutheran

Dave Farquhar Christianity

Reading Charlie’s blog pointed me at a debate (I’ll use polite words) between a Calvinist and a Lutheran. I’m vaguely familiar with the Calvinist; the Lutheran is someone I’ve met personally and I’ve even fixed his computer and on one or two occasions ate lunch with him.

I’m going to keep my diatribe simple. Very simple. Because I fall somewhere in between the two of them. (But I am Lutheran.)I’m Lutheran because of doctrine. Period. I don’t give a rip about Lutheran tradition. I’m not a 16th-century German. I’m an American of Scottish, English, and Irish descent with just a little German in me. Jesus wasn’t German and neither am I, so there’s nothing sacred to me about German traditions. If a church hocked its pipe organ and used the proceeds to buy bagpipes, I’d try to turn a cartwheel.

Music is one of the first things people notice about a church. So I fall in the camp that the music ought to be something that people can relate to. If the people who live around the church happen to be 16th century Germans, well, Martin Luther had an answer: Pipe organs, and sing in German. Novel idea. It worked. If the people around you are Scottish nationalists, then bagpipes would be a good idea. If the people around you are 30something 21st-century Americans, then it makes sense to consider guitars and drums. At my church last Sunday, horror of horrors, they actually used a Leonard Cohen song with Christianized lyrics as a hymn.

So, to some Lutherans, that makes me a Calvinist. And I do have some experience with Calvinism.

It was at a retreat sponsored by a Calvinist non-denominational organization (Great Commission Ministries) that I sang in church for the first time in nearly a decade. It was at that same retreat that God actually felt real for the first time in more than a decade. I suppose some Lutherans would call this a neo-Pentecostal movement because they talked about the Holy Spirit. Lutherans don’t talk about the Holy Spirit very much. It makes them uncomfortable.

I have to agree with the Lutheran that Calvinists tend to keep Jesus on the bench a little too much. But Lutherans keep the Holy Spirit on the bench too much.

And it’s not like the message at that retreat was emphasizing speaking in tongues or anything like that. I guess the reason he got through to me on that Sunday afternoon was because I’m a guy, and the Holy Spirit he presented was a tool. Plug the Fruits of the Spirit into you, and you see what’s wrong. If you read the fruits of the spirit and you don’t see you, then that means God isn’t working as well in your life as He could be. So what do you do about it? It has nothing to do with speaking in tongues, or that weird feeling in your stomach (I’ve had that). Ask Him to come in! What a novel idea…

So why am I Lutheran? The events that followed that weekend, frankly. Soon afterward, everything fell apart. And I mean everything. When I asked the people in my church home what everything that was going on meant, I got a long list of things I was supposed to be doing. None of it sounded right. So I started reading the Bible. Cover to cover. It took me about 10 weeks. I took the advice to heart and asked God what was wrong, what was missing. And you know what the answer was?

Grace.

My old Lutheran confirmation class definition of grade came to mind: God’s riches at Christ’s expense.

No room for Dave in that definition.

I asked around a little about grace. The definition I received had Dave in it.

So I asked whether I wanted to rely on Dave to get it all right, or whether I wanted to rely on God.

Well, if Dave could get it right, there wouldn’t be much need for Jesus, would there?

Over the course of the next few months, God led me to a Lutheran church that remembered the definition of grace and also offered the things I’d liked about that Calvinist evangelical experience: sermons that were relevent to daily life and music that helped me look forward to church, rather than being something that has to be endured.

I would have traded away the music and the easily applied messages for that correct definition of grace.

To me, that’s the great hidden treasure of Lutheranism. Grace. And those are the roots. It was grace that told Martin Luther that indulgences were wrong, not hearing the tune of “A Mighty Fortress” outside the door. (Not that there’s anything wrong with “A Mighty Fortress.” Our church plays old songs too sometimes, to remind us that the God who was there for our multiple-great grandparents is the same God who’s with us today.)

A couple of years ago, I found myself in a Methodist service. I’ve always admired the Methodists. My wife was raised Methodist. But there was something about the service that reminded me of why I’m Lutheran. Again. We confessed our sins. And then that was it. There was a sort of brief assurance that you’ll do better next time.

Hello? Forgiveness? Please?

Half of the equation was gone. After we confess our sins at my church, my pastor always says something like this: “It’s my great privelige to announce to you that your sins are forgiven in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.” Exactly what he says varies sometimes, but he always starts out with something like, “It’s my great privelige.” This is good news he’s delivering! It’s the only reason we’re all still here! He should be glad to be saying it, and we should be glad to be hearing it. And yes, I know what he’s saying isn’t exactly what the blue book says he’s supposed to say. It’s more important to him to tell us this is good news than it is for him to tell us he’s called and ordained. We already know that because he’s the one who’s up front and talking.

Sometimes he even reads a verse from Scripture to prove it. I kind of wish he’d do that a little more often.

The great theologians will be annoyed that I didn’t throw Bible verses around. But I’m reminded that Jesus said this is simple enough that a child can understand. A lot of times–well, most of the time, probably–we make this way too complicated. Christianity is very simple.

A pastor put a question on a confirmation test once. It read: “If you died tonight and God asked you why He should let you in to heaven, what would you say?”

The right answer (which, as I recall, I got wrong) was one word. Don’t read on. Stop for a minute and see if you can figure out what the answer is supposed to be.

Jesus.

If you get that answer right, and you know why that answer is right, then it doesn’t matter all that much what else you believe. If everything else you believe is wrong, you’ll get to heaven by the skin of your teeth. But so will those rare people whose beliefs are 100% dead on right. (I don’t know who those people are, by the way. I’m pretty sure that I’m not one of them and that I fall somewhere in between. And even if I had all the education in the world, I doubt I’m smart enough to be able to figure out who they were.)

But at least I got that important question right. And hopefully you do too.

Aliens on my train layout

Dave Farquhar Toy trains , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

I bought a couple of aliens for my train consist today. At the annual TCA Ozark Division train show at Lutheran South that happens every December, I spotted some lonely American Flyer bodies sitting neglected on a table. There were two steam locomotives, a gondola, a boxcar, and a caboose. I looked at the locomotives but there wasn’t any way I could remotor them with parts I had available. I did buy the boxcar, and then came back for the gondola.

I spent a total of $3 for these artifacts from 1958. Not bad.The problem for me is, they’re from 1958. American Flyer was doing S gauge in 1958. I’m into O gauge.

But that’s OK.  S gauge is 1:64 scale. O27 (which is the flavor of O I like, because it’s what I grew up with) is supposed to be 1:64 scale. Hold an American Flyer S gauge gondola up next to a Lionel or Marx O27 gondola, and they’re awfully close to the same size. Sure, there’s some difference, but when you look at real trains, not every boxcar is exactly the same height, and not every gondola is exactly the same height and length either.

K-Line took some criticism when it dusted off the old Marx O27 molds, outfitted them with S gauge trucks, and tried to market them to S gaugers because the Marx boxcars are taller than the American Flyers, and when you measure the Marx car with a scale ruler, it’s a funny length. But most people don’t notice. When I put a Marx O27 boxcar next to my Flyer 805 with O27 trucks on it, the difference wasn’t as pronounced. You can tell the Flyer is shorter, but something about the O gauge trucks makes the difference harder to notice.

It took me about 10 minutes to outfit the Flyer gondola with some spare Lionel trucks I had kicking around. Then I decided I wanted a conversion car, so I put a Marx truck on one end and a Lionel on the other. It looks good with my Marx and Lionel gondolas.

It took me considerably longer to get the boxcar in running order, since I had to fashion a frame for it. So I grabbed a bunch of junk from the scrap box and I fashioned a frame. That ended up taking me a couple of hours to do (I can do it a lot faster when I’m doing several at once and I have all my tools and materials in order). For what I make per hour, I could have bought several nice boxcars, I know. But this was more fun than what I get paid to do, and besides, nobody was offering to pay me to do anything today. And besides, rescuing a lonely boxcar off the scrap heap is a whole lot more meaningful than just plunking down some cash.

Once it was all together, I grabbed Dad’s old Lionel 2037 and put it on a loop of track on the floor with the Flyer 803 and 805 and a Marx boxcar that I rescued from a similar fate about a year ago. I had to work out a few kinks of course, but it wasn’t long before the consist was running smoothly.

I know a lot of people who run 1950s trains tend to do so homogeneously. It tends to be all Flyer or all Lionel or all Marx. But all of them have their strengths. For one, all of them did cars that the others didn’t. While American Flyer’s locomotives are amazingly smooth runners–even their cheapies–I don’t think American Flyer made anything that has all of the positive attributes of the Lionel 2037: It’s no slouch in the smooth running department itself, it’s a great puller, it’s reliable, and it’s common as dirt so you can easily find a good one for around $70. And as much as I like Marx, Marx never made anything quite like the 2037 either. The Marx 333 can’t pull with a 2037, it’s nowhere near as common, and these days it’s more expensive too.

But Marx and American Flyer made plenty of cars in plenty of roadnames and paint schemes Lionel never made. And when they did overlap, there tended to be some differences, just like you see in real life. So turning some dilapidated American Flyer cars into O27s was a nice way to add some unique rolling stock to my roster.

I’m happy. I’ll definitely keep an eye out for more American Flyer cars that need running gear.

I\’m published again

Dave Farquhar Toy trains , , , ,

It was a small-time gig, but if it helps pay the bills, that’s all that matters. I published a guide to refurbishing 1950s Lionel, Marx, and American Flyer trains over at Associated Content.I guess it’s ironic that I used a picture of an American Flyer train, seeing as I only owned a postwar Flyer S gauge train for about two weeks before I traded it for some Marx stuff. But it was the only picture I had handy.

My first impressions of Pandora

Dave Farquhar Music ,

So I’ve been messing with Pandora, a new music service.

It’s interesting. Not foolproof, but interesting.The theory goes like this: Have highly experienced musicians overanalyze pop music, identifying its tonal qualities, and based on the qualities you find in a song that the masses (or any given individual) like, predict other songs that will have the same appeal because they share the same tonal qualities.

So I signed on, and it asked me for the name of a band or a song that I liked. So I picked “City of Blinding Lights” by U2 out of the air.

Two songs later, it played “Read ‘Em and Weep” by Meat Loaf.

Say what?

I gave it a chance. I thought more of Meat Loaf when he was a one-hit wonder than I did after he made that comeback in the ’90s. And this song is the epitome of why.

Let the record state that I don’t like over-the-hill wanna-be hard rockers singing songs that were originally written by Barry Manilow!

Note that I’m emphatic enough on that point to break out the italics and the exclamation point. I’m almost emphatic enough to break out the blink tag.

If I lose coolness points for not liking Meat Loaf-sung Barry Manilow cover tunes, then so be it.

I suppose it did have somewhat similar musical qualities to U2’s City of Blinding Lights. But this just goes to show there’s more to music than just, uh, the music.

To its credit, it did pick out a song by Delirious? that I liked.

But I guess U2 isn’t exactly the best experiment for something like this. While U2 has a reputation for all of its songs sounding the same, any serious U2 fan will point out that it’s several of U2’s hits that sound similar. But if I were to whip out a few of U2’s lesser hits, like, say, “A Day Without Me” off Boy and “The Fly” off Achtung Baby, to name two of the better songs off their two best albums, you might be hard-pressed to identify the band.

And since that’s one of the things I really like about the band, I abandoned the experiment. Tonal qualities alone won’t find another U2.

I forgot about the first time I ever heard “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For.” The reaction? “U2 records albums?” Yes, when I was 13, I thought U2 just toured and put on political demonstrations and that making records was an afterthought.

Sometimes the appeal isn’t just the music and how it’s played. Need another example? Anyone care to do a survey of how many people watch Jessica Simpson music videos with the volume muted?

So now that I’ve talked about why Pandora can’t work, let’s talk about when it does work.

After the Meat Loaf indignity, I typed in “What About Everything, Carbon Leaf” into Pandora. And it came back and said it didn’t know that song. So I just typed in “Carbon Leaf.” It came back and described Carbon Leaf as a band that uses subtle harmonies, electric instruments up front, a mixture of acoustic and electric in back, and prominent percussion.

I’d never thought about it that way, but that was what made the band catch my ear in the first place. The line “What about aeroplanes?” had a lot to do with it too, but Pandora’s technical description tells how the band said, “What about aeroplanes?” Had it been Pantera asking “What about aeroplanes?” I probably wouldn’t have liked it as much.

But when I think about the alt-rock that was being recorded in the early 1990s, before it became all-grunge-all-the-time, that description of Carbon Leaf pretty much could apply to the songs by Sugar, Material Issue, Aimee Mann, The Connells, and, for that matter, even Weezer, that I liked.

So out of curiosity, I punched in “The Sisters of Mercy.” It came back and asked if that was a song or a band. I had the band in mind, rather than the Leonard Cohen song. Leonard Cohen is an example of someone whose lyrics I like, even when I often don’t like the music.

It identified the Sisters of Mercy as having hard rock roots, electronica influences, and an emphasis on minor key tones. Fair enough.

Problem is, it gave me Pig Society by Dope, Loco by Coal Chamber, and Set Me Free by Velvet Revolver, followed by Big Truck by Coal Chamber (which sounded like a monster truck rally).

How much does Andrew Eldritch know about monster trucks, anyway?

Once I gave it enough thumbs-downs, it tried Sonic Youth on me. Sonic Youth isn’t very goth, but it’s a much better fit than something called “Big Truck.”

So I decided to see what it said about Joy Division. “Punk influences, mild rhythmic syncopation, extensive vamping, electronica influences, and minor key tonality,” it said. OK, basically Sisters of Mercy minus the heavy metal with a little punk instead? I’ll buy that. I let it play. So far, no songs about monster trucks, but the songs it did play were songs I wouldn’t mind hearing again. Tactic learned: If you punch in one band and don’t like what it finds you, punch in the name of a somewhat similar band and see what it finds.

For entertainment value, I have to give Pandora some props. Sometimes the entertainment value is unintentional. But hey, even Babe Ruth only hit a home run 8.5% of the time. There are worse ways to discover new music than this.

Like turning on the radio, for instance.

Keeping a Lionel 1122 switch from buzzing

Dave Farquhar Toy trains , , ,

The other day I helped someone troubleshoot a Lionel 1122 switch that was buzzing and not operating. I don’t have time to take pictures or anything but hopefully this brief rundown will be helpful for someone.First, some background information: The Lionel 1122 and later switches are designed to switch automatically for an incoming train, because a train approaching the curved section of the switch when the switch is set straight will derail.

The buzzing generally is caused by a short circuit making the switch think a train is approaching when it isn’t.

This same procedure will aid in the troubleshooting of Lionel O22 switches as well as later non-derailing switches made by Lionel and K-Line.

First, remove the troublesome switch from the track. Connect two wires directly to the transformer, and touch one of the wires to any center rail. Touch the other wire to one of the outer rails of the curved leg. If the switch doesn’t snap, touch the wire to the other outer rail. The switch should operate. Whichever rail causes the switch to operate when touched with a wire needs an insulating O27 track pin, rather than a standard metal track pin. These pins, which used to be made of fiber but are now made of plastic, are available online and possibly from your local hobby shop.

Now that you’ve confirmed the curved leg works, repeat for the straight leg, and insert an insulating pin into that rail if one isn’t already present. If the switch operates on both legs in this fashion, the switch is operable and you just have a short circuit somewhere.

If the activating rails already had insulating pins and the switch still buzzes, you have a short circuit somewhere and you probably need to add more insulating pins. The center rail should never be insulated. But you may need to add insulating pins to several of the other rails. The easiest way to do this is to set up a simple loop on the floor with two switches, connect a transformer, put a locomotive on the track, and apply a little bit of power. If one or more switches still buzz, add insulating pins until the buzz goes away. This solution worked for us and got a layout that had two buzzing 1122s (out of three total) working again.

Time to winterize the house…

Dave Farquhar Saving money , ,

We had a day last week where we topped 80 degrees and set a record, so small wonder I never thought winter would actually get here.

But we’ve had our first good freeze and it looks like that’ll be a weekly thing from here on out (assuming we don’t get multiples every week), so it’s time to winterize the house.I learned about plastic film window insulation when I was in college and lived in a drafty old barn–it wasn’t really a barn, but it felt like one–where the inside temperature was rarely higher than 60 during the winter and space heaters were strictly prohibited. It’s best to buy the stuff at the end of the winter and save it for next winter, but if you’re like me, you always underestimate how much you need.

The tape that came with one of my kits seemed strong enough to hold a car together, while the tape that came with another kit isn’t suitable for wrapping a present, let alone holding plastic to cold aluminum window frames. I ended up using packing tape to hold part of the plastic to a window, since I ran out of good tape.

Of course when I was finished with one package, I ended up with three odd-sized pieces, none of which fit any of my windows. So I tried an experiment. Out came the packing tape and the scissors. I taped together the odd-sized sheets to make one suitable for one of the windows, then I put it in the window. It held together just fine when I hit it with the hair dryer to shrink it into place. I don’t think this method will get wife approval, but it works. I guess I can tell her that Red Green would have used duct tape.

I also changed my furnace filter. My size was sold out at all of the usual places I buy them, but I happened to find them at Big Lots for $1.79 each. They’re rated for two months instead of three and they probably don’t catch as much, but they’re definitely better than the clogged filter that was in there. I don’t know when the last time was I changed the filter. Shame on me. For $1.79 I need to be changing it every month because it’ll save me a lot more than that if I don’t do it, at least in the summer and winter months.

I also went looking, without success, for insulation pads for electrical outlets and light switches. I have some double-sized ones and other oddities that I didn’t have a good fit for. When I came home I still didn’t have a good fit. So I ended up removing the plate, taking a styrofoam meat tray, and cutting my own with a hobby knife. It’s not quite the same material commercial insulators are made from, but it has good insulating properties and it’s hard to beat the price.

Of course I’m looking for other ideas, but these three things are a good start. I installed a programmable thermostat about two years ago and it paid for itself in the first month. The basic models cost half as much now.

Addendum: After sealing the sliding glass door and two of the three largest windows in the house, last night after the programmable thermostat kicked down I noticed that the temperature in the house dropped by about a degree an hour. The temperature inside the house started at 70, and the low overnight was around 30. I know under similar conditions earlier in the week, the temperature was dropping at least two or possibly even three degrees an hour.

I think that plastic is going to pay for itself very quickly.

The tipping point of obsolesence

Dave Farquhar Hardware , ,

Gatermann just sent me a link to a $33 Dell P3-500 at Surplus Computers. It got both of us feeling old, because the day when that was a hot machine doesn’t seem long ago at all to either of us.

My initial reaction: That’s a lot of computer for 33 bucks. You get a 500 MHz CPU, 128 megs of RAM, and a 6 gig hard drive.

And then I got to thinking about it some more. I can think of people who could get by with that machine, but there’s a good reason why the P3-500’s star has fallen and you can get one for $33 without feeling like you’re at a Who concert.I guess first and foremost, you don’t get an operating system. That’s fine; OEM copies of XP home are cheap enough. Older versions of Windows are even cheaper because nobody wants them.

But even if you’re running 2000, you really want a minimum of 256 megs of RAM. For XP you want more than that; my mother-in-law’s PC, which is a Compaq with some flavor of Athlon in it, really drags these days because it only has 256 megs.

So I bopped on over to Crucial to see what I’d need to make that old Dell Optiplex GX1 rev its engine. And the price of a 256-meg DIMM was (sit down): $77.

So to max out the memory on this $33 machine, you’d need to spend another $231.

Gatermann just bought a gig of PC3200 DDR memory for $98.

So rather than spend $231 on 768 megs of PC133 SDRAM, you’d literally be better off buying the PC3200 and getting a $50 motherboard and a $60 CPU to put on it.

Trouble is, this is a Dell. You can’t swap off-the-shelf motherboards into a Dell. Some Dell cases will take a standard board, but you’ll have to replace the power supply. But the GX1 doesn’t use an ATX board.

That’s why this system costs 33 bucks. It’s pretty much at a dead end, and the memory it uses is no longer a mass-market item, so its price is inflated. It’s the same thing that happened to the 72-pin EDO SIMMs we used to put in our original Pentiums–you know, the ones that topped out at 233 MHz.

It’s a great machine for a tinkerer who happens to have a lot of PC100 or PC133 memory around, or for the Ebay addict. Obsolescent memory always sells more cheaply on Ebay.

I’ve always been in favor of upgrading a computer until it no longer makes economic sense to do so. If you’ve ever wondered when that is, this is a classic example.

This isn\’t the weirdest thing I\’ve seen stolen

Dave Farquhar General , ,

I heard about this on the radio yesterday: A Baltimore man was arrested when he was spotted driving with a 30-foot light pole belonging to Baltimore Gas and Electric sticking out of the front and rear windows of his station wagon.The DJs had some good questions, of course. Did the station wagon have fake wood paneling? How’d he get the pole into the wagon by himself? What was he going to do with the pole?

I suspect he was going to sell the pole for scrap. I thought they said it was made of aluminum (the story I found online didn’t say). At 40 cents a pound, a 30-foot aluminum light pole would be worth more than a few bucks. But I would think the people at the recycling center might get a little bit suspicious when someone brought in a pole that looks just like the one across the street. But maybe that’s just me.

Another possible explanation is just that there was alcohol involved.

The weirdest thing I’ve ever seen stolen was a 12-foot fiberglass chicken valued at approximately $1,500 (in the early 1990s). The chicken had been standing in front of a trailer park (where else?) in Columbia, Mo. When I did a search in the newspaper morgue, I found two other instances of chicken theft since the mid-1980s before the owner put an end to it by erecting a tall pole for the chicken to stand on.

The last theft turned into a media frenzy–hey, not much else happens in Columbia on Mondays–with people calling in to radio stations reporting chicken sightings all over town and people getting teary-eyed on the 6 o’clock news, bawling that the chicken meant so many things to so many people and they couldn’t believe it was gone, and wondering who’d steal a chicken.

I guess they forgot about the other two times the chicken had been recovered. People have short memories, I guess. After they put the chicken on a pole, reports of thefts ceased. (I have spies who keep an eye on Columbia for me, although, come to think of it, I do have much more important things going on.)

Hey, maybe the guy who stole the Baltimore Gas & Electric pole had a fiberglass chicken?

The new nontraditional homeless

Dave Farquhar Society

This St. Louis Post-Dispatch article talks about a new type of homeless: A family, in most cases, where both parents work, but neither makes enough to be able to afford both a home and transportation.

This is where salary deflation and the end of inexpensive housing meet, and it’s not pretty.One of the many reasons I oppose eminent domain is because it wipes out private housing. While the targeted areas often aren’t the nicest neighborhoods, frequently the people who live in them aren’t able to afford other housing in the area–that’s why they opposed the buyout in the first place. If your home is worth $40,000 and you can’t find another $40,000 home, or the only comparable home you can find is next door to a crack house, you’re not going to want to leave either.

But since affordable housing can’t stand in the way of progress, inevitably the buildings fall, our country gets another strip mall, which causes a domino effect where another strip mall gets abandoned and blighted. And if that area isn’t redeveloped, property values there will fall, but not quickly enough to help the people who were displaced.

I don’t know about anywhere else in the country, but in St. Louis, it’s exceedingly difficult to live on $8.50 an hour. That’s $1300 a month, which is enough for a single person to afford a small apartment (say, $400) and some kind of transportation and a simple life. But it’s tight some months. I remember the utilities in my one-bedroom apartment topping $200 a month during the hottest and coldest months. The heating and cooling systems in apartments tend not to be very efficient. And mine wasn’t a cheap apartment by any stretch. Add kids into the equation and it gets difficult.

Ten years ago, when someone asked me to sign a petition to raise the minimum wage, I gave them a lecture about why that was a bad idea. Like a good Republican, I said the cost of everything would increase, and the people who were making minimum wage wouldn’t end up being any better off.

Besides, at that point in time I had seen minimum wage rise three times since I’d been a teenager. The argument may have been valid then.

Minimum wage increased that year, although not by as much as that group wanted. And I remember restaurant owners grumbling about it and saying that prices would have to increase in order to support it.

But a funny thing happened along the way. I worked fast food 15 years ago. And 15 years ago, when minimum wage was $4.15 an hour (up from $3.35) you could pretty much expect to pay about five bucks for a meal at a fast-food joint. When I was 14, before I was working, and minimum wage was $3.35 an hour, I usually paid $5 or less for a meal at a fast-food joint.

And today, with a minimum wage of $5.15 an hour, I still pay about $5 for lunch at a fast-food joint. The $5 lunch might be a bit smaller than the $5 lunch of 1990, but for about 50 cents, I can get 1990 portions.

Minimum wage peaked in 1968. Adjusted for inflation, 1968’s minimum wage would be about $8 today.

Frankly, I think $8 is probably a fair minimum wage when I consider that the cost of living in St. Louis is lower than the national average and yet it’s difficult to get an apartment for less than $400 if you don’t like living around gunshots, and considering that monthly payments on a Kia Rio are $166 a month. At $5.15 an hour, that leaves $258 for utilities, food, clothes, health insurance, and gas to put in that Rio. Health insurance and utilities can easily wipe that out.

Even when you argue that someone making minimum wage ought to be driving an older car, eliminating that $166 payment still makes for a tight budget. If you get sick and miss more than a day of work, it’s a budget breaker.

Oh, and by the way, we’re talking pre-tax dollars here. That $800 a month is really less than $700 by the time the government gets its share.

Better get a $300 apartment. And a gun, just in case you need to shoot back when you hear those gunshots. Hopefully you’ve got enough money left over for bullets.

Come to think of it, living on the street probably is safer alternative.

Dumbest line I heard all day, Installment I

Dave Farquhar General

"You don’t have to know how to program in PERL, you just have to know how to use PERL."

PERL, in case you don’t know, is a programming language. If you’re not going to program in PERL, what are you going to do with it?To me that’s like saying you don’t have to know how to ride a bicycle, you just have to know how to use one.