The Naked Young Man in Mark 14:51-52

I was reading Mark again, the shortest of the Gospels. I reached the passage where Jesus is on the Mount of Olives, getting ready for the last days. The emotions are tense: the High Priest comes with armed soldiers to arrest Jesus; Jesus himself has not slept in days, and has urged his disciples to pray; Judas Iscariot is getting ready for the betrayal that Jesus already prophecied.

Luke has a better account of the story. He will mention that Peter struck one of the soldiers with a sword, cutting off the soldier’s ear. Jesus will reprimand him and heal the wound, while commenting on the cowardice of the High Priest, who could have arrested Jesus at any time in the Temple, but didn’t do so to avoid public uproar.

Configuring Fetchmail -> Postfix -> Cyrus -> IMAP

A nightmare over several days. I had set my mind that a local store was no good, because I needed to be able to access my email from outside the apartment, and decided that IMAP would be the way to go.

Technically, what I needed to do was to take the mail I got from my outside provider and download it to my server (this one). Then I needed to pass that email to an IMAP server, finally to get to it from the outside world. This seems stupid at first, but I run a dozen filters on my email, so that it makes very little sense for me to access the email directly on my ISP’s site.

Step by Step

That’s how the whole house thing is slowly working out. There is always something new to learn, something new to do.

Today I found out that appraisal fees are twice as high in Hawai’i as they are in the Bay Area. My loan officer explained it was an appraiser market on the islands, and that I was very welcome to look for my own appraiser. We turned the conversation around quickly, and I really like her.

Hawai'i, I am coming

So, a lot happened lately…

1. My DSL router suddenly died, which explains why you have been unable to connect to this site for a while. I had to go in and re-route the whole shabang, ending up with the wireless router under the staircase and the phone cable draped across the floor just to make my life miserable.

2. I got my green card!!! Yes, two months after hearing that I was going to get it, there it is, in all its glory. A miracle, I would say. But one that prompted me to put copies of all my documents online, in a password protected zoom gallery. By the way: the green card is neither green nor (as they said it would be) pink. It’s simply white, with a metal box on the back.

Hanging out at the beach

A confession from a weird European: when I ride my bike for a longer distance, I will stop at a nude hangout and rest while my clothes are drying out. I did it at Baker Beach in the City today, and obviously it was not only my personal idea.

The currents are strong, and the waves still hit the beach halfway to the rocks. That means there was no real estate to be had, and I had to sit in the midst of testosterone laden muscle men. It felt a little uncomfy, naked as I was, still with the comments of one of my friends in my ears.

Summer is here…

I look out the window, and there is nothing but sunshine and blue sky. I have been waiting for this for a long time, holed up in my room, thinking of other things to do, and not realizing how much the sun changes life.

San Francisco has four seasons: two long ones, which are called the Rainy and the Foggy, and two short ones, which we call Long Sunny Days and Short Sunny Days. Right now, we are in Long Sunny Days, and it shows. The fog banks off the short of the ocean have not rolled in yet, but we are getting close to the solstice. The days are soaking in the radiation and the heat, and we are enjoying our life.

The Manchurian Candidate (2004)

Ok, so I am not the movie buff. When choosing between the original and the remake, I tend to prefer the remake, in the hope that thirty years of time have improved the storytelling. At least, thirty years are enough to change our attitudes about timing, script, and nudity a little.

So I chose the remake of “The Manchurian Candidate”. I loved thinking of Meryl Streep in the role of a domineering and successful mother and senator. And you can’t beat Denzel Washington in the role of the good-but-doomed-to-fail character.

Wilde (1997)

I shuddered at the thought of having to watch a movie about Oscar Wilde. I knew him as the nemesis of my youth: my high school teacher made us memorize all of “The Canterville Ghost”. I still remember the opening page to this day.

Then of course I always appreciated the wit that suffuses his writing. He succeeds in being superficial, deep, amusing, and cynical all in one sentence. What do you do with quips like: “To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance?”

FogCam

Amazing what kind of world this little city of San Francisco has become! When I was a kid, the only thing I knew about it was the Golden Gate bridge, the earthquakes, the steep streets, and of course, “The Streets of San Francisco”.

I grew older, and it became the city of flower power and gay power. Then hi-tech started picking up, and San Francisco became a suburb of Silicon Valley, dominated by such beacons of civilization as Cupertino (Apple), Sunnyvale (Atari), Palo Alto (PARC), etc.

Mostly Martha (‘Bella Martha', 2002)

Look at you – so you watch German movies in the original, and they are no better than in the English version. Isn’t that really sad, though?

Mostly Martha is about a German chef that inherits a child from her deceased sister. The story revolves around this burgeoning relationship and mostly deals with the conflicts engendered by the conflict between child rearing and a full time job at odd hours.