I finally invested in a ping pong paddle yesterday, and christened it Mjöllnir as per Jason’s suggestion. It’s a Harvard Tournament Series 50, which only set me back about $14. It’s proving a worthwhile investment already, as my control is much improved, and I can get about 70% more spin with it than with the cheap plywood pips-out house paddles I’ve been using up to now. Beware the mighty hammer of Thor!

I haven’t posted for the last couple of days, not because there hasn’t been much going on to write about, but because there’s been too much keeping me from the keyboard. My brother Adam married his long-time lady love Celeste over the weekend. My other brother Chris is in from his medical residency for a visit. Our health insurance finally kicked in, so we’ve been catching up on doctor visits. The selling and buying of houses old and new is still eating up more time and money than I’d like. And, of course, there’s the day job. A full account will eventually come, but things may be slow here in the meantime.

I’ve been listening to more Garrison Keillor this week on the way to and from work. Yesterday morning, smack in the middle of a bunch of News from Lake Woebegon segments, he told the Christmas story. I sat enraptured for 10 minutes as he laid out the familiar narrative with his own unique style, and realized something about the nature of storytelling. It’s not the saying of something new that makes a story wonderful so much as it is the ability to make us hear the old things as if for the first time, to make them fresh again for us. The best preachers, the best songwriters, and the best storytellers all realized this long before I did.

We have a TV, but it’s only connected to the VCR and DVD players. Even so, given their choice of activities, the kids will more often than not plop down to watch Star Wars for the 34th time. My instinctive parental reaction is, of course, “12 minutes of TV a week is plenty for any child.” But then I think of my childhood after-school ritual: Gilligan’s Island, The Brady Bunch, Star Trek, Welcome Back Kotter, etc. Not to mention the evening regulars: Love Boat, Fantasy Island, That’s Incredible, Wild Kingdom, and The Wonderful World of Disney. (Yeah, I know.) And in spite of all that TV, I turned out just fine, right? I said, I turned out just fine! Right? RIGHT?

I just finished listening to the audiobook version of Garrison Keillor’s The Book of Guys. Annoyingly enough, I’ve just found out that the book was castrated from 22 to 8 stories for the audio version, and now am going to have to go find the prose version so that I can finish the dang thing. Anyway, they’re wonderful, poignant, emotive tales, and getting to hear Garrison more than the once-a-week allotment Prairie Home Companion affords is a treat.

So after moving into the new house and arranging to lease it until closing, we have recently discovered that the fellow from whom we were to buy it declared bankruptcy three days after we signed the contract. The judge presiding over the proceedings has made it clear to him that the house is no longer his. And all of our Realtor friends, when we tell them what’s going on, shudder, get a hunted look, and say “get out of the house! Fast!” So, once more, we’re exploring alternatives, and may not end up staying in this house after all. Ain’t that a stinker?

Last night, our friends the Johnsons and Ardilas volunteered to watch our kiddos for a bit so that Kathy and I could have a mini-date. We haven’t been able to pull off many dates since the move stuff began, so we gratefully (and quickly) accepted. We spend about an hour wandering around the square in San Marcos. There are a ton of bars and coffee shops, many of which have stages for live music, promising good prospects for finding places to listen and to play. There aren’t many family-friendly places on the square proper, but we found Grin’s restaurant nearby which looks like a good place to haul the kids to sometime. They’ve got good iced tea in big glasses, and thus get my thumbs-up.

I’ve just posted the latest account of our collective life in the medium-sized city.

My commutes recently have been spent listening to Tony Hillerman’s Sacred Clowns, one of his Navajo Mysteries. Though it still works well as a mystery in its abridged audiobook form, it loses some of its flavor as a story, since many of the interesting details of reservation life are cut out in the interest of brevity.

I finished up The Emporer’s New Mind
yesterday just before getting home from work. It’s an interesting book. The
strongest argument against machine consciousness seemed to be that which relies
on Godel’s work in number theory. Godel proved that there are some statements
which are obviously true, but cannot be proven by algorithmic means. Penrose
asserts that since we can intuit that these statements are true without being
able to prove them, there’s something clearly non-algorithmic going on in our
thought processes. He goes on to appeal to quantum mechanics and some of its
interesting implications to demonstrate how this might work on a physical level
— the latter admitted conjecture, but intriguing
nonetheless.