This and That

Nothing much earth-shaking has been going on in my life lately, but it's probably time for an update of sorts anyway.

Caroline got Eddie this card to welcome to the Friesen household. In case you can't read the caption, it says:

I had my own blog for a while, but I decided to go back to just pointless,
incessant barking.

It seems appropriate somehow.

After a week of living with me, Eddie is doing fine. He's showed his true colors as a loving little furball by sleeping with me and cuddling with me when I'm watching TV, but he still hides behind the facade of a vicious psychopathic killer when anyone comes to the door. He also can't deal with being alone for any length of time. A couple of nights ago, I left him alone for a few hours only to find him barking and howling and wimpering pathetically when I returned. The following night, I put him in Angus' old crate, which seemed to calm him down a bit. I guess it will take him a while to trust the fact that he's landed in a pretty good place to live.

I went to see Christopher Hitchens at Town Hall last Thursday night. He was pushing his new book, God is not Great, How Religion Poisons Everything. I haven't read this book yet, but it's the latest in a series of books by public intellectuals exposing the idiocy and danger of religions of all kinds. I did read two of them, The End of Faith, by Sam Harris, and The God Delusion, by Richard Dawkins. Both were excellent well-researched and well-reasoned arguments for atheism and agnosticism. Hitchens is a writer and political pundit who is hard to categorize. He would probably call himself a contrarian. He used to be a Trotskyite, but then settled into a more conventional left-leaning viewpoint. I agree with him on many issues, but his support of the war in Iraq is something I can't understand. He can bash Bush's lies and incompetence with the best of his critics, but he clings to the view that the initial invasion was the right thing to do. In any case, on Wednesday night he was both erudite and entertaining, sometimes coming across more as a stand-up comedian rather than an Oxford educated scholar. It was great fun!

I've been working on my boat on and off for most of this last week. I ended up buying a variable-speed angle grinder and buffing kit. The red paint has oxidized to the point I can't remove it with my limited muscle power alone. The whole rig cost me several hundred dollars, but it's still beneath the $600-800 cost of a professional wax job. So far I've done most of the transom and swim platform, and it seems to be working pretty well.

Well, it's time to carry on with my morning net-surf. If anything interesting comes up, I might even do another post.