Our Dumb Blog

I was in Turin the week AFTER they ended the 1998 viewing.

Here’s an excellent site concerning the Shroud of Turin.

Here’s an article explaining why the 1988 carbon-14 dating test was flawed and how it’s actually much older. The first link goes into greater detail.

Nobody still knows how the image came to be, though a very interesting theory has emerged, explaining how a dead body in contact with linen woven using first century methods could leave such an impression. No one has been able to replicate it. It’s not painted–the image is a thin film of melanoidins, thick as the wall of a soap bubble. A forger would have to have scientific knowledge beyond what society has today to create an image like that. He’d also have to be able to accomplish this whole list.

Still, there are problems with the shroud. It doesn’t seem to jive with the Gospel of John, which says Jesus was buried with a separate cloth for the face and was bound in a cloth, which would surely produce wrinkles and distortion in the image. John also says Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus included a hundred pounds of spices, but there doesn’t seem to be much sign of them. And there are proportional problems with the image…the body seems elongated, one arm is longer than the other, the fingers are too thin and long, the head is too small, the lower part of the face is too big. Or maybe there aren’t enough distortions, if the cloth should have wrapped around the body.

Wikipedia also has a good overview.

Actual Fact: King Charles VI of France ordered the removal of the shroud, which was being displayed in Lirey, France, citing impropriety (the image consists of the front and back of a naked man). But the shroud was too popular, and the sheriffs were unable to carry out his order.

“Hey, I get to sleep in until 5:20am tomorrow!”

You might be a flight instructor if you get kinda happy when you wake up and the weather is crap. As a student, it was always infuriating. As an instructor, it means a relatively stress-free day.

Unfortunately, since we’ve got a base salary, they can make us stand around and do nothing. Which is what I did until about 2pm, and then got to come home. It was a nice break. I’ll try to remember that when I’m there at 6am on Saturday.

I wonder if I’ll be any good at this job in a few months. I try hard, but sometimes it seems like I’m just not getting though. Sometime in the next couple of weeks, I’m going to be faced with the responsibility of signing a couple students off to solo. Right now, it doesn’t look like I’m going to be able to do it in the allotted flights. And I’m not sure if it’s my teaching ability or their learning ability. Probably a combination of both. Still, the idea of signing them off to solo scares me. To state, legally, that I think that some kid, in a matter of 10 flights, is capable of taking off, flying around the pattern and landing, all on his own. That’s a lot of responsibility and risk. Fortunately, it’s somewhat mitigated by the fact that they’ll have to pass a check ride with someone else first.

So, Joanna’s job is now full-time and official. For some reason, this meant I got to cook lamb after work on Monday. But, this is good. She’s not working in a warehouse and maybe we’ll manage to get out of debt sometime in the next 40 years.

Other than the yuppies and the traffic, I like living here. With any luck I’ll never live anywhere souther or easter. From the air you can still see patches of snow on ground, but it’s mostly gone now. The outside air temperature guage in the plane was reading 84F yesterday, which just doesn’t work. Low to mid 40s all day today, which makes up for it. We still haven’t turned on the heater– we seem to do just fine by sucking our neighbor’s warmth.

Jonah’s been making mead. Or claiming she is. I told her that if she were going to go through the trouble of fermenting 5 gallons of something, she ought to at least make a drink that I like. I suppose it’s possible that I might like the mead, but considering I really don’t like the taste of honey, I doubt it.

Her reason for making mead? She’d picked a couple gallons of rose hips and that’s all she could think to do with them. So we had to buy lots of honey to make an icky drink with a useless fruit. Woohoo.

She’s been checking it every couple of minutes. Immediately after sealing it she pointed out with glee that that water lock showed signs of increased pressure inside the container. I didn’t point out that this was probably because it was warm.

I’ve been amusing myself reading her mead books and telling her everything she’s doing wrong, though nothing I say tends to faze her. “Did you aerate it?” “Uhh. I tried. I rolled it around.” “Oh, that won’t work. It’ll never work now. It’ll be a dud.” “I’ll just add more yeast if it doesn’t work.” Actually, I think it’d be really hard to actually screw it up. Mead is apparently the easiest fermented drink in the world to make. And seriously, people have been doing it for longer than Joanna thinks the Earth is old, without even knowing that such a thing as yeast existed. That said, it’s still an awful lot of bother for something that’s going to taste like honey.

I’ve always wanted to try my hand at making beer, but everytime I look at what it takes, I’ve decided it’s way too much work and equipment considering that I’m probably not going to be able to make it as good as I can buy it, and the money savings isn’t as good as one might think. But still, the idea appeals to me. So maybe after Joanna makes some nasty mead, I can coerce her into making beer while I supervise.

In any case, watching her bottle of really nasty looking crud is making her happy, and that’s good.

Things I would be if I celebrated the pagan holiday form of All Hallows’ Eve by dressing in costume:

Zoe (you can apparently buy a vest like this girl did)

Peppermint Patty (a green top–what is that, a referee shirt?–black shorts, flip flops, and freckles)

Martha Stewart (stylish pant suit and ankle monitor)