This week I returned from a cousin's wedding and got ready for a special congregational event this weekend.
Next week I plan for my Fall term math teaching. Teaching math at a community college is a wonderful side job for which I am very thankful.
This week I have time to start a very interesting but rather long book about the early development of Judaism and Christianity. Last week I read a shorter book: Paul by E.P. Sanders. Both books are useful for prompting me to think about worthwhile issues, in particular how much Protestant theology has watered down Paul's expectation that followers of Yeshua would stop sinning.
My wife is away in Seattle, on a business trip until late Sunday night. She does not like watching movies much, so I took advantage of her absence by finally renting the second and third Matrix movies. Sadly, this turned out to be a waste of time. The DVD of the third movie was broken and only would show the first half of that film--and I found I did not mind. I later found commentary on the movies that was more intriguing than either movie.
I liked the first Matrix movie. It focused on real human religious issues: unnoticed enslavement, escape to freedom, receiving gifts that are confusing to use, and how the power to resist evil is an inferior substitute to the authority to judge evil. I had neat conversations with friends after that movie, in which we figured out why the heroes could have fancy guns but not superpowers (they had FTP access but no "write" file privilege).
The latter two movies just seemed a convoluted science fiction story that unraveled a puzzle about powerful AI "fake people" who were all manipulating the protagonist to advance their own agendas. This could have been done well, but except for the special effects it was nothing special.
While on vacation I was introduced to Firefly by relatives. That was something special. I spent some birthday gift money at Amazon. The DVDs should arrive soon.
