Category Archives: Friends, Family, Life

Teen dies, starved and alone

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Abused and starving, Chester Lee Miller, 18, was forced sometime this month to make a desperate 1,000-mile bus journey from the home of his mother and stepfather in Hazleton, Pa., to the Florida Panhandle, a place from which his natural father had earlier sent him packing.

Aboard the bus, in terminal after terminal, town after town, Miller said, he cried and begged strangers for help.

No one listened.

…Severely malnourished and succumbing to extensive organ failure, the youth died alone yesterday in a Florida hospital room.

His mother and stepfather, Lyda Miller, 37, and Paul Hoffman Sr., 38, who were charged earlier this week with aggravated assault and reckless endangerment, face additional charges, police said last night: homicide.

And in Milton, population 7,400, the stranger who took in the dying boy nobody wanted said her family is trying to raise money for a funeral.

“We’re trying to at least let him have a decent burial,” Goodman said. “It’s the least we can do.” A relative of her family has donated a burial plot.

Though still hazy, the picture emerging of Chester Lee Miller’s life is one of suffering and torture.

Before he died, Miller was able to tell authorities that his father, Robert Lee Miller, dispatched him to Pennsylvania last year to live with his mother and stepfather in Hazleton, about 120 miles north of Philadelphia. He told of being kept mostly in one room, often forced to stand for hours in a corner, being beaten every day, fed only scraps of food, and not allowed out of the house to go to school or see friends.

What a horrific story. Reminds me of reading Dave Pelzer’s A Child Called “It”. Chester had nobody.

Not related, but strangely timed, comes the story of an 11 year old pleading with police to save him from his parents.

And also not related, but immediately recalled, except for a wonderful Grandmother, Erica Pratt, the 7 year old who made headlines for escaping her kidnappers, has no family to rely on. “This is no environment for a child to grow up. Poverty. Drugs. Despair. And most importantly, an absence of male role models.” Yep.

Flesh and blood, not ones and zeros

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I wonder how Shelley is. It’s been around seven days since her last post. She did say she is gonna take a road trip. I can be such a worry wart.

When you get the chance you want to read Bill’s The Fear. Excellent fun story. Cool seeing it posted one chapter at a time.

Looks like The Phoenix Trap were on the radio. Congrats to yas!

Now this post is going to go many different ways. Try and keep up.

Meryl points to an example of cliques and the web, “I feel like I’m in high school again, watching the kids in the cliques ignore everyone but the members of their own cliques.” Boy, a scan what’s occured these past few days in the blogosphere just reinforces that.

Dawn Olson is apologizing. Think about it.

Speaking of growing up, check out this thread at BlogRoots covering weblogs and Libel. Looks like, as Rebecca Blood says, “anyone who wishes to be accorded the protections of a professional journalist should be prepared to go further than this, following established journalistic ethical and professional practices: you can’t decide that you’re a journalist only when it’s convenient to be one.”

That’s deep.

After you’re done thinking about these things, and much more importantly, say a prayer for Dean and his wife.

This leads me back to my weekend. A huge one in many different ways. A funeral, a surprise birthday party (thank you!), a walk to fight against SIDS, and the anniversary of Hunter’s passing.

Flesh and blood. Not these ones and zeroes. People matter. Life matters.

Hopefully I am growing up. Becoming less of an asshole. “I’ve been learning how to live my life, learning when to pick my fights. Take my shots while I’m still burning.” Yeah. I guess that’s what it’s all about. Keepin’ what’s important at the center of your life and ignoring the signal noise that distracts you from it.

It has been a year….

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?and my greatest fear today is not of attacks or airplanes ? though I still do dread more violence, and I still have not boarded a jet.

No, my worst fear is instead that I have wasted this year.

The first words I wrote after surviving the attacks were, ?Yes, I am blessed to be alive.? And I am reminded of the truth of that every day. I compare my fate with those who were only a city block away from me that day and who died. I look at my family and my friends and the circumstances of my life and I do not call this just luck. I know it is a blessing. I am blessed to be alive.

I had thought ? I had hoped ? that that the important events of September 11th would lead to important change not only in the nation and the world but also in my life. Of course, I was not alone in that hope.

Writer Norah Vincent said in the Los Angeles Times:

Scratch most Americans these days and you’ll find that many of them have made a big change in their lives in the last 12 months, something not obviously attributable to Sept. 11 but a response to it nonetheless.

It might be something as outwardly trivial as finally sticking to the Atkins diet, quitting smoking or taking up yoga. Then again, it might be something monumental like ending a decades-old bad marriage or quitting a cushy job to pursue a life in the arts. But whatever it is, the impetus behind the changes we made is essentially the same for everyone.

Deep down, we all did it because we knew that it might have been us in those towers.

I am frankly appalled by this sort of self-absorbed California-think: reducing the unimaginable tragedy, the monstrous crime of September 11th into an excuse for a diet or divorce or a yoga class.

No, the blessing of surviving September 11th is an obligation: an obligation to take the time that is now a gift and use it well, an obligation to return the blessing, to improve the world, not just yourself.

I had hoped that I would have had the courage to do something important. I don?t know what I had in mind: writing a book of note; starting a good company; helping build this small church.

But I did none of that.

For it did not take long at all for life to return to normal. And the truth is that normal life can be banal and irritating; normal life can be filled with petty politics and silly make-work and turf squabbles and self-centered worries; normal life is the distraction from the important; this is the nature of normal.

September 11th, on the other hand, was profound: profound in its tragedy, in its heroism, in its challenge, in its evil, and in its virtue.

And so I suppose I have been suffering a withdrawal from profundity. I suppose I wanted to find the way to make life stay profound.

But now I admit: that?s not normal; it?s not possible; it?s not even desirable; it?s not what life is about.

Life is about the every day.

And I have come to realize lately that the true test of us is not how we act in profound times but in normal times. Can we take the selflessness and sacrifice and courage and generosity and loyalty and concern and charity we saw on September 11th and bring it to the every day of normal life?

When you think about it, that is the exact challenge our God gives us: Can we take the profound virtue in the profound tests in the Bible and bring it into our daily lives, into our work, and homes, and friendships?

Read the rest of what is to be Jeff Jarvis’ sermon at his church’s memorial service this Wednesday.

Previous to 9.11, I had already felt blessed. I’ve overcome much in my life to be where I am and am thankful. 9.11 amplified my feelings ten fold – I needed to dedicate my life to something. Just what I had no idea. I still don’t.

Sometimes a talk with a priest can help you sort your emotions, so that Saturday I went to confession. I do face to face confessions. I tried the private kind once and I felt silly. We had a good talk. I explained my feelings. My desire to do something with my life that counted. How watching so many stand up that day was so inspirational. Shouldn’t I be running off to New York? Father expained to me what Jeff is explaining above to his congregation. That the best thing I can do in this world is become a better person. Be the best husband I can be. The best brother. The best uncle. Be there for my family. They needed me first.

Two hours later, we would get the call that Hunter was in the hospital, not breathing. My three month old nephew had died from SIDS.

I havn’t gone to confession since – even if I knew Father’s words were prophetic and spot on.

I wish I could make it to Jeff’s service. That’s gonna be one great sermon.

The Pope’s Telescope – and yes you read that right

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There was no way around actually seeing it. When someone tells you the Vatican has its own $3 million telescope atop a two-mile-high mountain rising out of the desert in southeastern Arizona, staffed by Jesuit astronomers, you have to see it for yourself.

Read the rest in today’s Philadelphia Inquirer.

(yes… I’ve gone image crazy today. You gotta admit these three are classics however)

Larry Wall at Slashdot, On Perl, Religion, and more

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…Java was, in that sense, much less structured than Python, I think. That’s part of the reason for Java’s success, but it came at a price. One of the problems with Java is that they swept a bit too much of the innate complexity of life under the carpet of the libraries. And so now they’ve had to replace the carpets several times.

So, yes, Java started with a “clean slate”, but it was a rather undersized slate, methinks. But as for “structured play time” in Java, the structure has been imposed more by cultural norms than by the language itself.

…Python is cool to look at small bits of, but I think the “outline” syntax breaks down with larger chunks of code. I’m with Aristotle on the structure of discourse–a story should have a beginning, and middle, and an end. So should blocks.

…When you say “how in the world”, I take it to mean that you find it more or less inconceivable that someone with a scientific mind (or at least technical mind, hah!) could chooose to believe in God. I’d like to at least get you to the point where you find it conceivable. I expect a good deal of the problem is that you are busy disbelieving a different God than the one I am busy believing in. In theological discussions more than any other kind, it’s easy to talk at right angles and never even realize it.

So let me try to clarify what I mean, and reduce it to as few information bits as possible. A lot of people have a vested interest in making this a lot tougher to swallow than it needs to be, but it’s supposed to be simple enough that a child can understand it. It doesn’t take great energetic gobs of faith on your part–after all, Jesus said you only have to have faith the size of a mustard seed. So just how big is that, in information theory terms? I think it’s just two bits big. Please allow me to qoute a couple “bits” from Hebrews, slightly paraphrased:

You can’t please God the way Enoch did without some faith, because those who come to God must (minimally) believe that:
A) God exists, and
B) God is good to people who really look for him.

That’s it. The “good news” is so simple that a child can understand it, and so deep that a philosopher can’t.

Now, it appears that you’re willing to admit the possibility of bit A being a 1, so you’re almost halfway there. Or maybe you’re a quarter way there on average, if it’s a qubit that’s still flopping around like Shoedinger’s Cat. You’re the observer there, not me–unless of course you’re dead. 🙂

A lot of folks get hung up at point B for various reasons, some logical and some moral, but mostly because of Shroedinger again. People are almost afraid to observe the B qubit because they don’t want the wave function to collapse either to a 0 or a 1, since both choices are deemed unpalatable. A lot of people who claim to be agnostics don’t take the position so much because they don’t know, but because they don’t want to know, sometimes desperately so.

Because if it turns out to be a 0, then we really are the slaves of our selfish genes, and there’s no basis for morality other than various forms of tribalism.

And because if it turns out to be a 1, then you have swallow a whole bunch of flim-flam that goes with it. Or do you?

Let me admit to you that I came at this from the opposite direction. I grew up in a religious culture, and I had to learn to “unswallow” an awful lot of stuff in order to strip my faith down to these two bits.

I tried to strip it down further, but I couldn’t, because God told me: “That’s far enough. I already flipped your faith bits to 1, because I’m a better Observer than you are. You are Shroedinger’s cat in reverse–you were dead spiritually, but I’ve already examined the qubits for you, and I think they’re both 1. Who are you to disagree with me?”

So, who am I to disagree with God? 🙂 If he really is the Author of the universe, he’s allowed to observe the qubits, and he’s probably even allowed to cheat occasionally and force a few bit flips to make it a better story. That’s how Authors work. Whether or not they have thumbs…

Once you see the universe from that point of view, many arguments fade into unimportance, such as Hawking’s argument that the universe fuzzed into existence at the beginning, and therefore there was no creator. But it’s also true that the Lord of the Rings fuzzed into existence, and that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have a creator. It just means that the creator doesn’t create on the same schedule as the creature’s.

If God is creating the universe sideways like an Author, then the proper place to look for the effects of that is not at the fuzzy edges, but at the heart of the story. And I am personally convinced that Jesus stands at the heart of the story. The evidence is there if you care to look, and if you don’t get distracted by the claims of various people who have various agendas to lead you in every possible direction, and if you don’t fall into the trap of looking for a formula rather than looking for God as a person. All human institutions are fallible, and will create a formula for you to determine whether you belong to the tribe or not. Very often these formulas are called doctrines and traditions and such, and there is some value in them, as there is some value in any human culture. But they all kind of miss the point.

“Systematic theology” is an oxymoron. God is not a system. Christians are fond of asking: “What would Jesus do in this situation?” Unfortunately, they very rarely come up with the correct answer, which is: “Something unexpected!” If the Creator really did write himself into his own story, that’s what we ought to expect to see. Creative solutions.

And this creativity is intended to be transitive. We are expected to be creative. And we’re expected to help others be creative.

And that leads us back (finally) to the last part of your question, how all this relates to Perl.

Perl is obviously my attempt to help other people be creative. In my little way, I’m sneakily helping people understand a bit more about the sort of people God likes.

Going further, we have the notion that a narrative should be defined by its heart and not by its borders. That ties in with my linguistic notions that things ought to be defined by prototype rather than by formula. It ties in to my refusal to define who is or is not a “good” Perl programmer, or who exactly is or isn’t a member of the “Perl community”. These things are all defined by their centers, not by their peripheries.

The philosophy of TMTOWTDI (“There’s more than one way to do it.”) is a direct result of observing that the Author of the universe is humble, and chooses to exercise control in subtle rather than in heavy-handed ways. The universe doesn’t come with enforced style guidelines. Creative people will develop style on their own. Those are the sort of people that will make heaven a nice place.

And finally, there is the underlying conviction that, if you define both science and religion from their true centers, they cannot be in confict. So despite all the “religiosity” of Perl culture, we also believe in the benefits of computer science. I didn’t put lexicals and closures into Perl 5 just because I thought people would start jumping up and down and shouting “Hallelujah!” (Which happens, but that’s not why I did it.)

And now let’s all sing hymn #42…

What a great Larry Wall session on Slashdot. Wow.