RIP Scott Adams

loved me some dilbert. who didn't?

 

I'll admit, Dilbert made me laugh back in the day. But so did the news that his 2nd wife split five minutes after her pre-nup vested.

His first wife and her sister were taking care of him at the very end. As usual these days, a complicated situation.

 

I used to hang the relevant Dilberts in my cubical and my manager once stated to me that was management abuse. I stated that it's only abuse, if you admit to doing what the strip depicts.......

 

..."For the first part of my life, I was focused on making myself a worthy husband and parent, as a way to find meaning."
Probably one of the best of motives, and the most lasting testament.

Thanks for the memories, Scott!
Your art described HUMANS, a species that really hasn't changed all that much over the last several thousand years.
This is why your ART hung on office bulletin boards, factory floors, inside tanks and ships, and in both university and elementary classrooms and on kitchen refrigerators.

I hope to see you topside, later!

 

Yep, Scotts cartoons were legendary amongst corporate America! (We, still, have some on our bulletin board!) He will be missed but I was glad to see his post on X a while ago stating he'd accepted the Lord Jesus as his Savior....
https://www.cs.vu.nl/~frankh/dilbert/upgrade.jpg

 

This was my fave.

 

According to the sermons of some of the preachers I was subjected to in my youth and early adulthood, taking Pascal's Wager doesn't 'save' anyone.

 

Last fall, I was visiting at a local Assemblies of God church (in a tree of denominations, I'm told Assemblies of God fits somewhere among Finished-Work Pentecostal), where the preacher had a line somewhere in his message like "and that gets into the doctrines of justification and sanctification, which have been simple and uncontroversial all through Church history."

And then he paused, and then said "the four people who just laughed know a little about Church history."

I had a smug little smile for having been one of the four.

I'm not sure if the rest of the congregants who didn't laugh knew less about Church history, or were maybe just playing on their phones.

 

I use a iPad in church.
In my church this is considered to be less scandalous because our pastor uses one too.

I've visited other churches (my daughter's, particularly) where they lower the lights during the service and I get to bask in what their pastor calls 'the heavenly glow' of an electronically delivered bible.
If some of the more hidebound members do not approve of this, well....bless their hearts.

 

Churches seem to have taken widely different approaches during the pandemic to how they approached streaming.

There's one a few blocks from me that went and got one webcam, and stuck it up in the balcony, and it shows you one fixed unchanging view of the front of the sanctuary for an hour, during which a church service happens.

A few blocks further, there is one that has multiple panning/tilting/zooming cameras, at least one on a big counterweighted boom, and a production console up in the balcony where somebody sits during the service lining up shots and angles and cueing transitions.

I watched one of their streams and noticed that during communion (which that church does in a maybe-unusual way, congregants stay in the pews and ushers go out with the bread and cups, sort of like an offertory in reverse), they've got multiple cameras panning and zooming all over the pews the whole time. You see just who's there, who's not there, who's partaking, who isn't partaking, who's doing what on their phone, everything. Kinda beats being in church, where you'd look really nosy trying to see all that.

The pastor of the one-webcam-in-the-balcony church told me that a lot of his colleagues in the other churches had complained how hard it was to get in-person attendance back up after the pandemic, while he hadn't personally noticed a problem.

That church with the elaborate setup also has a really giant flat-screen TV that's spang front and center, right behind the altar, right below the cross (actually coming up a little in front of the cross). As you sit in a pew, the dominant visual element is this giant TV (which, if your eye is prone to wander, you may also notice has a cross above it).

Just before the preface for communion begins, the lights dim and this TV makes a slow, stately descent to disappear behind the altar. So, for this solemn portion of the service, your attention isn't riveted on a giant TV.

Of course, twenty seconds earlier, your attention is going WHOA LOOK AT THAT GIANT TV MAKING A SLOW STATELY DESCENT BEHIND THE ALTAR!

I commented on that once, within earshot of the member who turned out to have engineered it, and he filled me in on the history of it.

Seems that back in the early 2000s, they had invested in a very expensive, state-of-the-art, 80-foot-throw digital projector, and hired a fine finish carpenter to build it into the trim at the edge of the balcony, and used a motorized projection screen at the front. But that projector had dimmed over 20+ years, and the tech standards had changed, and upgrading that commercial-scale, 80-foot-throw projector was going to be a mid-five-figure project.

A giant flat-screen TV and a garage door opener came in under $3k.

 

We started attending a church that was doing outdoor mass during Covid.
They continue to broadcast outside and to car radios for the immune compromised, and live stream on fb

 

Yep I was raised Catholic and, still, have many great family members who go. I wasn't ever really "religious" but got invited to an Assembly of God missionary church in 1985 while we were stationed in the Air Force at Clark Air Base, Republic of the Philippines.

Long story short, got to reading the Holy Bible and we both ended up being Born Again, just like Jesus taught. (John 3:3) It's all about relationship with God, not religion even though Jesus intended for us to be active members in our local congregation...whatever that may be. (Catholic, A/G, Lutheran, Baptist, Methodist, Non-Denom...etc.)

I've heard, and agree, that the lack of "religious" stuff in the New Testament is because we are saved by grace, and by grace alone. So details are determined by our walk with the Lord...going where the Holy Ghost leads us and doing what He tells us. (Yes, the Good Lord is a Good Father who talks to His children, in many ways.)

If the Lord isn't talking to you, then you need to get Born Again...it's wonderful! Read the Gospel of John, Chapter 3.....He'll do what He did for me, for you!