I did a nice ride on the C&O Canal Towpath today; about 16 miles out and then 16 back for a total of about 32 miles. I started at Noland’s Ferry (which is as far as I got last season) and rode out to the bridge that connects the towpath with Harper’s Ferry, WV. I took a couple of pictures while I was resting at the half-way point. The first shows the rail lines going into a tunnel in a big, imposing rock. The second shows the former canal with the towpath on the right.
Remember back in January when I got a note from Washington Gas telling me my service was off due to a damaged line in the area? Well, apparently this is going to be an every-three-months trend. It happened again today. I think this, along with the road-nails, is just one of the joys of living in a construction zone.
This is only made all-the-more amusing by the wonderful, grammatical, chicken-scratch note: “Your Gas is off, do to Gas main brake, Gas repairs have been made, call to have Gas turn on” (sic).
Wow.
Anyway, I understand that accidents happen . . . but shouldn’t the gas company be answering the phone to fix the accident for us? Melissa has tried calling about six times now and gets no answer. Doesn’t a gas company have to be on-call 24 hours, since, you know, gas is both very important and potentially explosive?
Let us clear the air. Let us do so with some accuracy and honesty instead of pithy headlines and hyperactive sensationalism. Let us do so without a vehemently anti-Catholic agenda . . . and without a mindless pro-Catholic agenda either. Let’s speak with facts. Let’s speak the truth.
The first truth is this: there is no excuse for the sexual abuse of children. It’s among the most despicable crimes somebody can commit. This is as true for Catholic priests as it is for non-Catholic religious leaders, public school teachers, family, friends, and acquaintances. This is the only one of these truths I present today that you will hear about in media reports; the other truths that follow seems to get conveniently and consistently swept under the rug.
He is risen!
Today, most of the Christian world celebrates Easter—a commemoration of the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. In his death, celebrated on Good Friday, Jesus gained us pardon from sin. In his resurrection and triumph over death, he restored us to eternal life.
This is the most joyous day in the Christian calendar, and ends the forty days of Lenten prayer and penitence. Liturgically, in Roman Catholic tradition, the joyous ‘Gloria’ and ‘Alleluia’ are sung for the first time in Sunday Mass since Lent began. Our sorrowful focus on our own fallen nature and sinfulness turns, joyously, to a celebration of our forgiveness and eternal life in Jesus Christ. Our forty days of penitence turn to fifty days of Easter celebration.
Personally, Easter also marks our one-year anniversary as Catholics. We entered the church at the Easter Vigil in 2009, which is the evening mass on Saturday and the first (and most solemn, and most joyous) Easter mass. It’s on Saturday because Jewish tradition marks time by sunsets, so the ‘third day’ in scripture actually began at Saturday’s sunset. According to scripture, Jesus rose some time after Saturday’s sunset and before Sunday’s sunrise, because the women came to the tomb to find it empty while it was still dark on Sunday morning.
I wish you all a happy, joyous Easter season. God bless you!
There have been some changes to browser support for Off on a Tangent, mostly reflecting current browser usage trends.
I’ve dropped official support for a number of smaller, rarely used browsers like K-Meleon, Konqueror, and BeZilla Browser (based of Firefox 2). This doesn’t mean the site won’t work in these browsers, it just means I’m not officially supporting them, I don’t test in them, and any issues affecting users of these browsers will get less attention than issues affecting supported browsers.
I’ve added support for two new-ish WebKit-based browsers, Arora and its distant Haiku OS cousin, WebPositive.
Lastly, I’ve initiated official support for Apple’s new iPad tablet computer (now that an emulator is available free from Apple). The iPad, which launched on Saturday, runs a variant of the iPhone operating system. Right now, it’s supported as a mobile browser (mostly because it’s tough to use the full site’s drop-down menus on a touch-based system). I may change that in the future to default to the full site, if I can come up with a better way to handle the drop-downs. It seems silly to send my stripped-down mobile site to a device like the iPad, which has a screen resolution comparable to that on ‘netbooks’ and small notebooks.
If you have an iPad, let me know whether you prefer the full site or the mobile site. Thanks!
As always, a full list of supported browsers (and screenshots of the site in each) is available on the About the Site page.
Scott Bradford is a writer and technologist who has been putting his opinions online since 1995. He believes in three inviolable human rights: life, liberty, and property. He is a Catholic Christian who worships the trinitarian God described in the Nicene Creed. Scott is a husband, nerd, pet lover, and AMC/Jeep enthusiast with a B.S. degree in public administration from George Mason University.
