Ezekiel Bread

Ezekiel 4:9 Bread

The food Nazis have taken over my house and bread is now verboten, except one slice of Ezekial bread, once a week. It is not instantly appetizing, but I found that after I had eaten a few slices, when I went back to the kitchen to get a slice of bread (with butter and jam or pickles and ham or whatever), I tended to gravitate to Ezekiel. I suspect it is more substantial nutrition-wise than your regular tasty bread.
    Unfortunately, the only places around here that sell it are Whole Foods and New Seasons and I abhor those places. Too much foo foo, too much paint and glitter, more like a fashion palace than a serious supply house, like Freddie's. Since I have been going to Amazon so much lately, I got to wondering if they carried Ezekiel 4:9. They do. The price is exorbitant, but if you are stuck in lower slobsylvania and you are craving a slice of this particular loaf, and it's your birthday, why not?
    Since fancy bread bakers have started using double wrapping I suppose freshly baked bread could survive a two or three day UPS trip. Still, it's weird to have UPS delivering groceries.

Ekekiel 37

Singing Detective - Dem Bones.mp4
Marcel posted a version of this song by the Delta Rhythm Boys, and since I've run into Ezekiel before, I'm a-wondering, and since a-wondering is the past imperative of a-wandering, I proceeded to do just that, which produced the above video, which is what happens when Hollywood meets the bible. Gimme dancing girls over a bunch of stiffs in suits any day.

The Vision of The Valley of The Dry Bones - Gustave Doré engraving - 1866

Ezekiel is mostly known as being a prophet from around 600 BC, which is kind of a long time ago, but it ain't no 6,000 years, which is my current goal for preserving archival knowledge. Only another 3,400 years to go.

Pertinent bible verse here.

How the Bible Started the Internet

Arrival of a Caravan Outside The City of Morocco - Edwin Lord Weeks (1849 – 1903).

In ancient Israel, it came to pass that a trader by the name of Abraham Com did take into himself a healthy young wife by the name of Dorothy, who went by the name of Dot. Dot Com was a comely woman, large of breast, broad of shoulder, and long of leg. Indeed, she was often called, slangly, Amazon Dot Com.

And she said unto Abraham, her husband, "Why dost thou travel so far from town with thy goods when thou canst trade without ever leaving thy tent?"
And Abraham did look at her as though she were several saddle bags short of a full camel load, but simply said, "How, dear?"
And Dot replied, "I will place drums in all the towns and drums in between the towns to send messages saying what you have for sale, and they will reply telling you who hath the best price. The sale can be made on the drums and delivery made by Uriah's Pony Stable (UPS).

Abraham thought long and decided he would let Dot have her way with the drums. And the drums rang out and were an immediate success. Abraham sold all the goods he had at the top price, without ever having to move from his tent.

To prevent neighboring countries from overhearing what the drums were saying, Dot devised a system that only she and the drummers knew. It was known as Must Send Drum Over Sound (MSDOS), and she also developed a language to transmit ideas and pictures, Hebrew To The People (HTTP).

And the young men did take to Dot Com's trading as doth the greedy horsefly take to camel dung. They were called Nomadic Ecclesiastical Rich Dominican Sybarites, or NERDS.

And lo, the land was so feverish with joy at the new riches and the deafening sound of drums that no one noticed that the real riches were going to that enterprising drum dealer, Brother William of Gates, who bought off every drum maker in the land. Indeed he did insist on drums to be made that would work only with Brother Gates drumheads and drumsticks.

And Dot did say, "Oh Abraham, what we have started is being taken over by others." And Abraham looked out over the Bay of Ezekiel, or eBay as it came to be known.
He said "We need a name that reflects what we are."
And Dot replied, "Young Ambitious Hebrew Owner Operators."
"Yahoo," said Abraham.
And because it was Dot's idea, they named it Yahoo Dot Com.

Abraham's cousin, Joshua, being the Young Gregarious Energetic Educated Kid (GEEK), that he was, soon started using Dot's drums to locate things around the countryside.  The system soon became known as God's Own Official Guide To Locating Everything (GOOGLE).

That's how it all began, and that's the truth. I would not make up this stuff...

Via the Divine Jodiah Bensoni.

ID

Me in 3D

Friend on mine emailed me this morning to let me know that someone has apparently hacked my Facebook account and is using my name in vain. I don't really care, I haven't used Facebook in years, but I suppose I ought to secure my account. I mean, taking my name in vain! How dare they! Where the heck did I stash my lightning bolts?

Ezekiel 25:17 - Pulp Fiction (3/12) Movie CLIP (1994) HD
Movieclips

So I try to logon on to Facebook and I fail because I have no idea what my password is, so we go through the usual forgot-your-password routine where they send a secret code to my email. That only gets us through the first barrier, now Facebook wants to confirm my identity, so they put up the names and photos of five friends who I am supposed to call and ask them for secret codes. Yeah, that ain't gonna happen, even if I knew these five people, which I don't. I sort of recognized one of the names, but the rest of them are complete strangers.

There is another method, you can upload a photo ID like a copy of your driver's license or passport, which sounds worse than handing over your Social Security number, but Facebook is a good corporate citizen, they wouldn't use my driver's license for any nefarious purposes, would they? It happens I already have a scanned copy of my driver's license so I upload it but it's not good enough. They want an image that is at least 1500 pixels wide. I could take a photo with my phone, but I still haven't figured out how to take close ups of small objects that are well focused. (I get them sometimes, but it's mostly a matter of luck and a lot of messing about.) I also have a scanner that claims to have a high resolution mode that will scan at 600 dots per inch. Let's try that.

Load my driver's license into the scanner and point and click and I have a high res image on the screen. The scanning software won't crop anything that small so I use Pix to cut it down to size. I was a little worried that the image would not be large enough for facebook, I mean the driver's license is only a couple of inches wide. Times that by 600 and you are only up to 1200 pixels. I check the dimensions and it's fine.

Now I upload it and Facebook ignores it. It's like it doesn't even see it. Might be the wrong format, though that seems unlikely being as everyone and their mother seems to be able to handle most any kind of image format you have. Whatever, I'll try again later, if I remember.

Poking around I come across their requirements for the photo and I realize that the smaller image probably would have worked if it just a big fat border around it. Curse my compulsive image cropping.

While we are on the subject of ID's, Home Depot has some new tech. I returned a bunch of doo-dads and gee-gaws the other day and while most of it went back on my credit card (which they remembered, which was nice because the receipts had long since dried up and blown away), some of the refund went on the store-credit card, which is fine because a week doesn't go by that I'm spending a zillion dollars for materials for the next phase of my new house remodeling project. The clerk wants to see my driver's license for the store-credit, doesn't need it for the stuff that is going back on the credit card, but for store-credit she does. Now when I want to buy something using store-credit, I use the scanner to scan the store-credit card, but then I also have to scan the barcode on the back of my driver's license.

Barcodes on back of Oregon driver's license

No, not that one, not the one that looks like a normal barcode, scan the one that looks like a scrambled mess of black and white dots. That's the one they want. After some digging I turned up this video that goes into all the gory details.

How to Decode PDF417 Barcodes | Dynamsoft Tutorials
Dynamsoft

The scrambled mess is a PDF417 barcode . It encodes all of the information on the front of the card. The AAMVA  (American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators) adopted it for driver's licenses. Huh, another organization that I've never heard of. Probably in cahoots with the cabal of evil motherfuckers that are trying to ruin our lives by making everything easier.

Police Etiquette

Morpheus didn't say this. I have no idea if Mr. Fishburne ever said it or not.

Wondermark points to a Pacific Standard story by Ezekiel Kweku that talks about black people and the police, wherein I found this paragraph:

. . . the tactics I use to avoid being arrested or killed by the police have been instilled too deeply in me for me to forget. It is a carefully calibrated etiquette that feels like a delicate dance, . . . . Answer questions quickly, but not so quickly that you come off as snippy. If you have to move, move deliberately, but not so slowly that you look reluctant to obey or are stalling for time. Speak calmly and conversationally, but be polite and not too familiar. Answer questions, but don’t offer any information you don’t have to. And on it goes, each balance to be carefully struck, each parameter to be tuned in response to changing circumstances.

It struck me as I was reading this that these are the same rules that I follow. It was kind of surprising, because it made me feel just like I do when I am talking to the police. I'm not sure where I got these rules. Did my parents drill them into me? Or is is just part of being respectful, or perhaps 'showing respectfulness'? All I know is that I don't treat an encounter with the police the same as would with any other, non-police person.

OK, that's a post, but now I need a picture, so I go a Googl-ing and I find a very good article by Max Tucker entitled How To Deal With Cops. He covers the same ground from a slightly different perspective.

Part 1: Understanding CopsThe first step in dealing with cops is empathy. Seriously, it sounds like bullshit, but understanding them and relating with their position is critically important if you want them to let you skate on the stupid things you do. 

The 3 Things You MUST Understand About How Cops Think: 

1. Cops’ first and biggest concern is safety: I cannot over-emphasize this: The job of a police officer puts him in potentially dangerous situations every day, so everything he does starts with ensuring his personal safety. I’ve known and been friends with so many cops and all of them say the same thing: You’re always on guard because you never know what you’re walking into, and mistakes can get you killed. Every single cop knows other cops who have died in the line of duty. When an officer comes up to a car he’s pulled over or knocks on the door of a home that has reported a domestic disturbance, he has no idea who he’s going to be dealing with. You may understand that you are a perfectly nice, non-threatening person, but he doesn’t know that–he’s thinking about the guy who graduated with him at the police academy and got gunned down by a tweaker on a routine traffic stop last week. This concept—the primacy of personal safety—is drilled into them from the beginning of training onward, so understand that when a cop walks up to you he is–at the very minimum–suspicious and wary.
That is why the first minute of your interaction with a police officer—especially during a traffic stop or potentially dangerous situation–is so crucial. In this small window it is imperative you display the fact that you’re not a threat to him. This can mean hands up and open, a nice calm demeanor, a submissive tone, etc. Your specific actions depend on the situation, but everything you do upon initial contact with a cop should be about displaying the fact that you are not a threat. If you do that right, you will put yourself in a great position with the cop who has your immediate fate in his hands.