Tag: circa63

And spent some time jamming with the owner because it wasn’t
charged yet when the cookout was over.

This confirmed my impression that the range isn’t yet where it
needs to be for my purposes. It actually is where it needs to be
for my friend — his wife drives a gas-powered car, and when he
goes far enough that the range of the Nissan Leaf is questionable, the plan was that
he’d use her car, but it’s a shiny new toy (2013 model, purchased
less than a month ago) and he wanted to try it
out.

So he emailed my sister that he needed there to be a modern
outlet less than 20 feet from where he could park. Her front door
is farther than that from the road, and she doesn’t have one in
the garage that was built in 1949, but she talked to a neighbor
whose house is closer to the street than hers and he was excited
about being a charging station, so Harold drove the Nissan Leaf
instead of the gas-guzzler.

He lives about 50 miles from my sister’s house, and when it was
time to leave the party, the charger only showed 36 miles worth of
juice. There is a charging station 3 miles from my sister’s
house, but he doesn’t have the right card to use it, so he got
directions to the nearest Nissan dealer and went there.

Half an hour later, he was back — the dealership had been
completely locked up (this was about 9 on Saturday night) with no way to get at a charger, so he was
plugged back in to the neighbor’s. He’s a composer and
agile on the keyboard, so we jammed on folk tunes for a while, and
then I left to get back to the lonely, starving dog, and he and my
sister were playing a piano four-hands arrangement of the fifth
Brandenburg concerto.

He wrote this morning:

I rested a few minutes in the car after our 4-hands evening, and then
left ca. 11:45 with 54 miles of charge shown.
I drove about 45 mph the whole way home, with extreme efficiency of
braking etc.

I started to see that 1 odometer mile was equaling less than 1 charge
mile after just 15 min, or so, and this generally stayed true.
However, when I exited 93/95 to 1A north, I was merely down to 20
miles of charge capacity, and 18 by the time I was home – 
so I likely could’ve left back earlier in the evening with the 49
miles of capacity shown at no empty battery risk, especially if I
drove similar to just now.

I do know the metering is adaptive to your driving, but ultimately,
while relieved I had excess charge upon arrival,
I felt a bit cheated to see that so many miles were yet available.

I’ve always assumed that driving an electric car to Fall River would
be like that. The majority of my trips are within Route 128, and
there are lots of charging stations in Cambridge, so for those
trips I’m sure an electric car would be fine. But the majority of
the miles I put on the car are driving the 60 miles to Fall River
and then back again, so if you need to stay in Fall River longer than I would
want to to get your car charged, then it isn’t yet the right
technology for me.

I read the whole
thing. You can get everything you want to know about the
contraception and birth control and gay marriage thing from the press
coverage.

But what struck me most was this paragraph:

In my experience as superior in the Society, to be honest, I have not always behaved in that way—that is, I did not always do the necessary consultation. And this was not a good thing. My style of government as a Jesuit at the beginning had many faults. That was a difficult time for the Society: an entire generation of Jesuits had disappeared. Because of this I found myself provincial when I was still very young. I was only 36 years old. That was crazy. I had to deal with difficult situations, and I made my decisions abruptly and by myself. Yes, but I must add one thing: when I entrust something to someone, I totally trust that person. He or she must make a really big mistake before I rebuke that person. But despite this, eventually people get tired of authoritarianism.

It’s pretty common for Church dignitaries to talk about the
crisis of vocations, but I don’t remember ever hearing one talk
about the missing generation. Pope Francis was born in 1936, so
he would have been 36 in 1972. This was exactly the period when I
was going home to Fall River and hearing that all the dynamic
young nuns and priests I’d known in high school (I graduated from
high school in 1968) had left.

Andrew Greeley and others have documented what a problem it is
to find good bishops if you restrict yourself to the minority of
priests who agree with the official position of the church on
contraception. But I hadn’t before thought about the problem of
finding people to promote when everyone you would normally be
thinking about promoting was leaving the priesthood.

I actually had more religious education than a lot of the
people I know, and I’m pretty sure that at one time I knew why
there were wars fought over whether the Holy Ghost proceded from
the Father and the Son or from the Father
through the Son.

It isn’t a problem that usually impacts my current life, but
I was delighted when my reading of RSS feeds led me to this
article about the making of the New Testament. It’s a pretty
long post, so here’s a brief excerpt, which should show you
whether you want to read more of it:

Among the books that Eusebius of Caesarea was considering were the Apocalypse of Peter and the Apocalypse of John. He had to have an apocalypse, the end of the world, because he’d started with the Gospel of John at “In Principio.” Nice symmetrical bookending. But he had several Apocalypses in his Disputed list and none in his Accepted list. What to do?

He had many objections to the Apocalypse of John, starting with What Was He Smoking, and moving on to Too Many Contemporary Political References and I’m Not 100% Sure John Was The Guy Who Wrote This. Eusebius preferred the Apocalypse of Peter, where Jesus takes Peter on a long tour of Heaven and Hell. And after Christ explains all the tortures of the damned, according to category (quite Dantesque), Peter says, “Hey, Josh. You and me go way back, went fishing together, been out drinking, talking philosophy ‘til dawn, and the whole time You’ve been all peace and love and forgiveness and mercy. Isn’t this a little dark for You?” And Jesus replies, “Yeah, Pete. I know. I’ve got to have a hell because it’s a logical necessity, but I never liked the place. Let me tell you a secret, just between you and me: I’m not going to actually put anyone in here. I’m going to save everyone.”

So Eusebius of Caesarea thought about this and said to himself, “If everyone gets saved why will anyone bother believing in Christ and being good and doing good works and loving their neighbor?” so he went with the Apocalypse of John with the seven seals and the great beast and 666 and all that instead.

I was reading email and thinking about having supper and
watching TV last night, when there was a loud knock on my door and
the doorbell also rang. (They use the
Winnie-the-Pooh method.)

It turned out to be two policemen, who apologized for
disturbing me, but someone had hit my car, which was parked in
front of my building. They had an eye-witness report of the
hit-and-run driver, including license place number. The witness
stated that the car had attempted a u-turn, and managed to hit
parked vehicles on both sides of the street. I have a small car,
and I can make a u-turn (carefully) with a car parked on one side
of the street, but even my Honda Civic needs a 3-point turn if
there are cars on both sides.

I said it sounded to me like that person shouldn’t have been
driving, and they agreed that it sounded that way to them,
too.

I called the insurance company and made the claim this morning,
and they were very sympathetic, and said that if the police have
turned up the other driver there shouldn’t be any problem getting
the other insurance company to pay the deductible.

The visible damage is pretty much just the driver side of the
front bumper, but I don’t think I’ve ever had body work done that
takes less than a week, so I have to find a week when I don’t need
the car. The body shop I’ve used the last couple of times is
walking distance and fairly good to deal with, so it won’t be
terrible, but it’s a nuisance. I hope they do something
appropriate about the driver.

The picture I managed to get of the damage isn’t very good
(using my phone at all in the sunlight is difficult, and I was too
lazy to get out the real camera and upload pictures from it), so
I’m also giving you a picture of the sunset we had two days ago,
right after a thunderstorm blew through.