Monday, July 22, 2002

I am in Java training this week.  It is given by Intertech on-site at a company called Retek in downtown Minneapolis.  I have never heard of Retek before, but they have this big fancy building with a clean room full of huge servers.  I guess they provide retail IT solutions.  Our class has several non-programmers and fortunately they are not holding things up by admitting they have no idea what is going on.  The teacher seems to be presenting in a scatterbrained manner but wraps things together into cohesive points time and time again.  I rode my bike there and back on busy Chicago Ave.  On the way home I rode past Mexican immigrants fixing the brakes on their minivan, a dude eating KFC out of a bucket in the front seat of his car, kids driving a golf cart down the sidewalk, people eating dinner at sidewalk tables, people waiting for the bus, kids playing ball, people working on their houses.  11:30:04 PM    comment []

We took our car to Bobby and Steve's Auto World Goodyear on Nicollete and 58th to have the muffler replaced.  Cost $200 bucks.  Early this morning Kate took the car to Iowa for a funeral and the exhaust assembly just fell apart on the road somewhere near Tripoli Iowa.  I will go back and demand that they fix it for free, but I would feel real uncomfortable with ever going back there again.  This is after we fired our old auto shop, Sandberg's for gross incompetence.  What the hell is up with Auto Shops around here? 7:25:38 PM    comment []

This is also the feast day of Mary Magdalen, after whom our daughter is named. There is an interesting piece about her here. There is controversy around her. In the Gospels, three loose women are described. There is Mary Magdalen who is the one who first saw Jesus resurrected. Then there is the sinner woman who anointed Jesus in the Gospel of Luke. Then there is the sister of Lazarus. The Roman Catholic Church maintains that these are all the same woman, Mary Magdalen. The Eastern Orthodox church thinks these are three different people and protestant churches believe they were two different people. (Definitely worth arguing over). Oh, and we still have her skull on hand. See it here for some high catholic weirdness. 4:51:02 AM    comment []

John Dillinger was shot on this day in 1934. People were dipping their hanker chiefs in his blood to make souvenirs.  The history channel site has a piece about it. The FBI man in charge of the operation was "Bitchy Little Melvin Purvis" who got famous for killing famous villains and was later run out of the FBI by J. Edgar Hoover who was supposedly jealous of Purvis' fame. You can score some points in certain trivia circles by knowing that he was just getting out of the movie "Manhattan Melodrama" when he got shot.  What movie was Lee Oswald watching when he got arrested in Dallas?  4:49:57 AM    comment []