Thor:Ragnarok spoilers

One of the advantages of having absorbed a lot of very old media (the Bible) is the pleasure of recognising elements when they recur in popular culture.

Thor spoilers follow -

Hela returns when Odin passes on and reveals how she was his deadly right hand in his conquest of the nine realms, his first daughter and she revelled in the bloodletting as the Goddess of Death.

Compare this to the female personification of wisdom in Proverbs 8:22-ff. 'I, Wisdom, was with the Lord when he began his work, long before he made anything else. I was created in the very beginning, even before the world was set up.'...':30 'Then I was beside him, like a master workman, and I was daily his delight, rejoicing before him always, rejoicing in his inhabited world and delighting in the children of humankind.'

I doubt that the contrast with Wisdom was much in the mind of the creators of Thor:Ragnarok, but I think it makes a good illustration of the way that the Lord was not always or exclusively understood as essentially warlike, for all the wars his people were engaged in.

Top-mount Oliveri Monet 71U

I bought this unit second hand, with a set of mounting clamps as pictured. They won't grip the small flange available, and Oliveri claim that this is an under-mount sink. I don't want it undermounted, and don't think the design wants to be undermounted.  So, to use these clamps, here is what to do:. Cut down the body of the clamp and the bolt by about 5mm or 2-3 threads. I ended up with a range of sizes and most worked. If you start with 12, lose a couple to error, then you still have enough.  Bend the legs away from the biting teeth - they are going to press inside the curve of the flange and balance the torque produced by screwing down.  

Hard parts - getting a hole through the flange, driving the bolt through the hole without the thread stripping, getting the whole job done in a way that lets you seal with silicone and put the clamps on to hold it in place.  Getting the clamps down is sufficiently difficult that I chose not to undo them to silicone under the lip of the sink.  

Google Problematic

Press release, Google, 1 Apr 2017

As an important internet company, Google owns a lot of information, and let's be real, a lot of it is problematic: it is the sort of thing that knowing it will get on your conscience and keep you up at night: searches for hit men, questions about how prosecutions of accidental sex deaths failed, searches for grotesquely of every kind. And then there's everything else, everything we index, which is about everything. Also, we know who is searching for or uploading these things: people.  Parents, kids, serious people with responsibility for other people's lives, managers, leaders, judges, politiicians, the desperate, the mentally ill, the unstable. All with an expectation of privacy, despite the reality that everyone is tracking everyone around the internet: governments most of all, but also advertisers, credit raters and general internet intelligence gathering snoops. We at Google generally believe in transparency and being real.

So since 1 Oct 2016, Google's latest team, Google Problematic, has been emailing a machine curated digest each week of the online behaviour of concern to those it might concern: the people who will find it a problem:  your wife, your parents, your parole officer, your kids, your boss, your female subordinates or co-workers, your therapist.  We hope it has helped.  We certainly feel better taking what responsibility we can.

The Fool Proof

If you are a gin enthusiast, you could do worse than laying out for Poor Tom's gin.  For Fathers Day I have been graced with a bottle of the 'Fool Proof' 52% Poor Tom's.  I have just had a dry G&T (equal parts making it 'dry') and holy kablooey in. A craniium.  Delicious, and nourishing.

Love your work

You might not have picked this up, but my foolery extends to the workplace.  I have been through an escalating series of difficult conversations about my non-compliance, non-performance and general devil-may-care attitude to achievement.

This results from an accumulation of disappointment.  I thought I was going to be amazing the world with discoveries and inventions, but so far the only thing I've invented has been generally regarded as silly or incomplete.  Those who judge these things use criteria pretty far from those I would apply, and if I judge their performance I find leadership almost totally lacking except in the domain of domination, performance measurement - very rarely are we stopped from addressing clients' non-problems.  Someone once asked "could the leaders give us an overview of their understanding of the field we're in, just once a year?" and the answer was a round rejection of the very idea.  So my demotivation is not coming from nowhere.

Still, I was being pretty ridiculous.  So I went into a long weekend seething with resentment that I was being held accountable for my timesheets, a very weak tool measuring in painful accuracy, my attendance. My performance is also measured, but less frequently and with better-designed paperwork.

Then, I watched a lecture on Oedipus from Peter Sruck's Coursera.com course on Myths from Greece and Rome.  Oedipus' story is amazing. Peter brought out the question of Oedipus' responsibility.  Here was Oedipus meeting a man of his fathers age on the road and, over the issue of who should step aside, killing Lais (his true father) and his whole retinue. I had been thinking about the Oedipus complex of irresponsibility and wondering why I was so much closer to Oedipus than Oddyseus.  This moment crystallised it.  Even if I am in the right about the uninspiring leaders, the naff prescription of measures and mechanisms that are not applicable to my type of work (I am not manning a desk for a shift, I am solving problems), I still believe I should get out of the way of the silly old king when he asks.  And that gave me the key.

I have to love work charitably, not Libidinally.I am not going, ever, to get a glandular charge from doing what these guys ask.  It will always be disappointing. But I shouldn't make these guys die in a ditch defending their stupid practices and total lack of vision. There are times to represent that, but stepping aside, just going along a bit more, out of charity for their feeble age might be the answer I can live with.

Church and the Fundamental Attribution Error

Psychology* describes the Fundamental Attribution Error as the error of attributing outcomes to circumstances and the individual in a biased way - with the bias tending to reflect individual self-esteem.  So my failures result from hard times, yours are because you are weak and ineffectual.

We are each others circumstances.

The gospel way, among other things, requires a reversal of the attributive, judging gaze.  Take the log from your own eye; give to (and forgive) others as you do yourself.  This is not a reflex - it is consciously acknowledging the FAE as an enabler of sin, and consciously redirecting that gaze.

In church, we need practices that reflect this reversed gaze and make us the circumstances of other people's best selves.  This means, for example, not frustrating or confusing each other, but listening and accepting as instructive the expectations of others.  It might mean finding some way to engage their bad behaviour that helps them stop it freely, without bad feeling.

*Well, some of it, at the moment.

Wishlisting

A short list of stuff I need or want:

Sound stuff:  too expensive but I don't want to forget it.

Clavia Nord G2 Engine (prefer fully expanded)  ($1500?)

ADAT 8-channel Preamp like Focusrite Octopre  ($600)

Cakewalk Studio ($200)

Screenwriting:

Voucher for review and hosting at blcklst.com ($100 / screenplay)

Voucher for 10+ hours a week.

Weight training:

5kg vanilla whey concentrate from Proteinauthority.com.au  ($130)

weight training belt  ($40-50)

Books I don't have by Gene Wolfe, Alfred Bester, Charles L Harness.

Scifi movies or Film Noir movies I don't have

Season 5 of The Wire in particular.

Renovation tools: A good sander with an effective dust collector, other tools for weatherboard maintenance - e.g. board removing saws, pry bars, etc

Heart rate monitor + other functions thing:

• Microsoft Band 2 (Basically unavailable)
  
• Atlas Wearables Atlas (US $250)
  
• Fitbit Charge HR ($180) or Surge ($245)
  

Many other things received with thanks.