That question has been on my mind during the whole season of Lent. Not that it matters what God looks like because I’ll get to meet him sooner than later. If one believes the movies, he looks like many different actors. In the “Passion of Christ,” He looks like Mel Gibson; in “Chosen,” he looks like Jonathan Roumie. In both cases, the actors convincingly portray Jesus Christ and the viewer comes away believing they watched Christ die on the cross.
Yesterday, I finished watching the third season of Chosen and looked for Season Four. Sadly, it will only be available in movie houses during the next few weeks. I’ll wait for it to be released to streaming services and watch it in the comfort of my home. Chosen began as a crowd-sourced movie. That means it is financed by people who have seen it and want to see more. When I first started to view the episodes, I fell in love with the story. Why not? I am Christian, and the story is about our hero, the founder of Christianity. I bought into financing seasons two and three.
The Producer, writer, and director is Dallas Jenkins, the son of Jerry Jenkins, who authored “Left Behind” in 1995 and, more recently, “The Rapture.” Dallas does a credible job of making the Bible stories come to life with accurate depictions of life in or about the year zero. I recall my wife reading “Left Behind.” She tried her damndest to get me hooked on the series, just as she was. She read each volume non-stop and couldn’t wait for the next volume to appear. As I write this, it occurs to me that I should read the story myself and learn why she was so hooked.
What surprises me is that the son of a successful author should also become a successful author. How many father-son duo authors can you name? I am also enamored by the name Dallas for a son. Even though I would never have called my son Dallas, perhaps I will in another lifetime. I wonder what his nickname was? Dal, or Ass, or Dally?
I give the series “Chosen” five stars. If you are Christian you will love it. If you are not, you will still love it because it is a good story and well-produced.
Over the last two months, I have been suffering intense pain in the right shoulder. Finally, I made an appointment with a doctor to find help. Simple things in life, like threading a belt through the seven belt loops on a pair of jeans, had become unbearable. I actually learned to thread the belt before I put on the pants. I had to put my right arm into a coat jacket first. Cleaning. myself on the toilet became an impossible task. The worst pains happened while sleeping. No matter how I twisted and turned to find a spot where the right arm felt comfortable it lasted for only seconds.
Throughout my life, I have self-treated muscle and tendon pains using ibuprofen, cold, heat, and rest, but this time none of that worked. I had to get help. I had a regular visit scheduled with my Primary Care doctor two weeks ago and drove to his office only to learn that he has been out because of illness and woudn’t return until sometime in April. I complained that it would have been nice to know that. The receptionist said they left a voice mail. Knowing me, I didn’t recognize his phone number and blew it off as a SPAM call. Not satisfied, I asked if anyone was covering for him. “Yes,” she said but “he is on vacation. Would you like me to make an appointment for you?”
“Don’t bother,” I said. “It is time for me to find a new doctor closer to home.” I hated to do this because he has been my primary for forty years, and we have become friends, but I do drive twenty-five miles one way to get to his office, and a new clinic just opened four miles from home. I called and made an appointment as soon as I got home.
The new doctor is young, probably in his forties, which I like because it’ll be hard to outlive him. He is only ten years out of medical school, which makes him current in medicine. After ten minutes of record review, discussion, and examination I explained that I just completed set of blood tests for my previous doctor and that the results are on MyChart. The previous doctor and the new doctor are in different organizations. I was surprised because he dialed them up and there they were. “I am impressed, the medical profession is finally catching up to the rest of the world in technology,” I said. He smiled and said, “we do our best.” Then he asked if I drink. “Of course I do,” was my reply. “You may want to cut back because it is proven that alcohol shrinks the brain which leads to dimentia.” I did not want to hear that at all!
Next, he told me what I had was tendonitis, but he will send me for an x-ray to make sure. He won’t send me for an MRI even though that is a more accurate picture of the bones, muscles and tendons because my insurance won’t pay. That was not happy news, because my Medicare is the best(it is the only) insurance in the country for taking care of seniors. I didn’t want to hear of them denying payment because of my age. He also recommended taking medication. His first choice was a drug which I don’t remember the name of but sounded like it was souped up Ibuprofen. I told him I would rather not be taking something that has made me bleed from various organs in the past. The next choice was methylprednisolone( mfg in China), a fancy word for prednesone, and I told him that it is hard on the stomach. What I didn’t tell him is that my wife had a terrible experience with prednesone and considered it the same as poison. I chose the prednesone.
It has been twenty-four hours since I began taking this drug, and I noticed it working within one hour of swallowing the first pill. WOW! What a relief. I also received a phone call from the doctor’s assistant, who reported to me that the x-ray confirmed that I had arthritis and tendinosis. I never heard of tendinosis before, so I looked it up. It is the same as tendinitis, except that tendinitis can be cured quickly (4-5 weeks), and tendinosis is a long-term cure, like 5-6 months, and must include physical therapy to strengthen the muscles and stretch the tendons of the shoulder.
Since I have not been doing anything physical like riding my bicycle, which has caused this condition in the past, I have been digging in my brain for other possibilities. One thing has come to mind: typing on the computer. In the past few weeks I have been diligently working on my novel and writing thousands of words by pressing thousands of keys. How does moving your fingers get you tendonitis of the shoulder, you ask? I can feel strain on the muscles in my right wrist and sometimes it reaches up to the elbow. That is still not the shoulder is it? But what if the ergonomics of my key board is placing a strain on the shoulder at the same time all of those finger muscles are straining the wrist to the elbow to the shoulder? There is a song lyric that explains the physiology of the human skeleton that tells the whole story.
Dem bones,
Dem bones, dem bones, dem dry bones, Dem bones, dem bones, dem dry bones, Dem bones, dem bones, dem dry bones, Now shake dem skeleton bones!
The toe bone’s connected to the foot bone, The foot bone’s connected to the ankle bone, The ankle bone’s connected to the leg bone, Now shake dem skeleton bones!
The leg bone’s connected to the knee bone, The knee bone’s connected to the thigh bone, The thigh bone’s connected to the hip bone, Now shake dem skeleton bones!
Dem bones, dem bones, dem dry bones, Dem bones, dem bones, dem dry bones, Dem bones, dem bones, dem dry bones, Now shake dem skeleton bones!
The hip bone’s connected to the back bone The back bone’s connected to the neck bone, The neck bone’s connected to the head bone, Now shake dem skeleton bones!
The finger bone’s connected to the hand bone, The hand bone’s connected to the arm bone, The arm bone’s connected to the shoulder bone, Now shake dem skeleton bones!
Dem bones, dem bones gonna walk around Dem bones, dem bones, gonna walk around Dem bones, dem bones, gonna walk around Now shake dem skeleton bones!
Last night I did what I promised myself I would not do. I watched the senior citizen tell me what a great job he is doing. Except he is not. I gave him forty-five minutes of energy before he began to lose it nationwide. I was off by ten minutes. He lasted longer than I predicted. I am four years older than him and I don’t have a lick of political experience to match his fifty years in Washington, but I would do a much better job of running the country than he has done. What I enjoyed the most about his speech occurred when he turned to the Red side of the room and began heckling back and forth with them.
Vice President Kamala Harris gets my nod for her continuous standing ovation. However, she loses to Nancy on the springy stand-up.
Looking at all the tired, old, and wrinkled faces of our government made the biggest impression of the night. Chuck Schummer wins the “most wrinkled face of all” contest beating out a box of Sunsweet’s best prunes. At least Nancy spent a few hours moisturizing her face to a smooth shiny sheen. One of the supremes stood out as one longing for recognition. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson stood alone at the end watching the wrinkles pass her by without so much as a hint of recognition. I give the House speaker credit for his ability to match Nancy and her ability to express what she is thinking without uttering a sound.
The only thing I give Biden an atta boy on is his theft of pushing for childcare for young kids of working moms. This is clearly stolen from Ivanka Trump who pushed her father for the same thing. I thought his screaming about making the rich pay more taxes was wasted energy. Obviously he has never been told that the Trump tax cuts helped the country not hurt it. What will we gain by extracting a few billion dollars from the rich and then spending a few trillion to balance the deal?
Waiting an hour for the man to arrive made me feel that his importance overshadowed my time. His speech made me feel like he was angry with me for living and for showing up. After all, the King does not answer to his serfs. We all live to serve him and his stupid policies. DON’T WE??? The answer is a big fat NO, he serves us.
If I were the House Speaker, I wouldn’t have torn the speech in half like Nancy did, I would have set fire to it on the dias.
I predict we won’t see or hear from Joe Biden for the next two weeks because he’ll be on vacation recovering from his effort.
Today, I took a fifty-mile round trip drive to learn that my Primary Care Physician, whom I have been going to for forty years, is off sick. I should have called first, but I thought he would have someone covering for him. No such luck. His cover is off on vacation. So, I decided to turn the lemon into lemonade by listening to Dan Bongino while driving.
When I arrived home I began researching Doctors. I found one in Mokena, the town bordering Frankfort and about 4 miles away. The appointment is one week out, but I’ll tough out the shoulder pain until then. I’ve had this mysterious ache for eight weeks now, and I think I can live with it for another week before I get it checked out. In the meantime, I’ll have to send my ailing doctor a thank you note to tell him how grateful I am to have had him take care of me over all of the years.
Meanwhile, As I listened to Bongino he verified my theory that Obama is running the country. Biden is too stupid to have all these left wing policies on his own, So the BIG O has been feeding them into his former operatives who now call Biden boss. In other words Obama who was never born in the USA, and not entitled to be president is now running behind the scenes in a third term. Bongino commented that Obama was politically smarter than Biden and was afraid to push radical left ideas too far under his presidency, but under Biden he can blame it all on Biden and Trump and succeed in demolishing our Republic.
How many thoughts does a person have during one day?
Google says:
Every day, our minds are flooded with a constant stream of thoughts, ranging from mundane daily tasks to deeper contemplations about life and the world around us. According to research, the average person has approximately 60,000 thoughts per day.
Thatquestion is currently on my mind, but why? I have no clue why, but it occurs to me that with 8 billion people on planet Earth, there is a lot of thinking going on. Imagine if this thing called Artificial Intelligence (AI) could harness all the thinking going on worldwide. Would the genie in the computer be able to bring about world peace? Or cure all sicknesses? Indeed, that would be a dream come true. Perhaps someday we will build a computer with enough memory to accomplish feats like the ones mentioned. What if scientists discovered a way to link all human brains together to preclude the need to build a computer large enough to hold all the thoughts in the world? That might be easier to accomplish than trying to make something that is mechanical into which every human’s brain content could be transferred. Think about the loss of thought that would occur the day after the first brain dump occurred, and today humanity has a new set of thoughts.
Maybe the tequila over ice I drank last evening planted this conversation in my mind. Or, perhaps it is the fact that I spent an hour reading about AI yesterday to understand just how and why AI is so dangerous. Actually, what I learned is that AI will not take over the world by itself like a god but will be used as a tool to help people do their jobs. As I write this, I am using AI in the form of Grammarly to correct my lousy punctuation and grammar. What I am learning is that Grammarly has a writing style that is unlike my own, and I don’t like the changes it suggests about seventy percent of the time. I like to use extra words using my street vocabulary to inject my personality into a piece, but AI chooses to eliminate many of my adjectives for the purpose of making the writing clearer.
Eventually, AI will indeed take over the world and cause many people pain, just as every social revolution has in the past. People will lose their current jobs and will need to adapt to make a living. Or, they will beg and plead with the government to throw them a safety net in some form of a handout to save them from looking for new work. It isn’t going to be pretty, and I am glad it will not affect me. I will, however, be affected by the suffering I will see. As a Lion, it will afford me many new opportunities to serve my community. For every negative, there is a positive. Will we be smart enough to identify the opportunities, or will we need AI to do it for us? And if we do have to use AI to find the opportunities, so what? Isn’t that why AI has been invented in the first place?
