Notepad

Prayer of Confession

We rotate through a series of prayers of confession at my church. Last Sunday, we came back around to my favorite one:

Lord, we have sinned against you in seeking to serve ourselves and living as if you do not exist. We have neglected our first duty to love you and we have failed in your call to love our neighbor as ourselves. Lord, be merciful to me a sinner.

That about covers it.

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Niche marketing

Sonic — "America's Drive-In!" — is a prolific advertiser on many of the stations I watch on cable. What's odd about this is that I live in Pennsylvania's Delaware Valley, and Sonic is a regional chain without a franchise within a three-hour drive of the area served by Comcast of Delaware County (see Sonic's market map).

I suppose Sonic is just buying national slots on the basic cable channels, but it's still strange, in this age of niche marketing, that they haven't taken a more targeted approach.

So I guess my question for those of you who live further south is this: Are their burgers any good?

P.S. David Brooks, if you're reading this, please resist the urge to use Sonic's market map as the excuse for another piece of Bobo-hackery on the difference between "red" and "blue" states. It's just a burger joint, OK? Burger joints are nonpartisan.

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Hatred and delusion

Patrick Nielsen Hayden points us to an insightful essay from hilzoy of Obsidian Wings titled "Hatred Is a Poison." I plan on coming back to this again later, but for now just go read the whole thing.

The text for halzoy's sermon is the following, from C.S. Lewis:

"The real test is this. Suppose one reads a story of filthy atrocities in the paper. Then suppose that something turns up suggesting that the story might not be quite true, or not quite so bad as it was made out. Is one's first feeling, 'Thank God, even they aren't quite so bad as that,' or is it a feeling of disappointment, and even a determination to cling to the first story for the sheer pleasure of thinking your enemies are as bad as possible? If it is the second then it is, I am afraid, the first step in a process which, if followed to the end, will make us into devils."

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The passive-aggressive library

Here's a book recommendation: "Working With Difficult People," by Muriel Solomon.

It may be full of sage advice, but I really don't know. I haven't read it, and I don't intend to read it. Reading it isn't the point.

The point is keeping it on your desk at work — prominently — where it can be seen by all of your coworkers and supervisors.

If anyone asks you about it, you can say something evasive, but suggestive, like, "I'm afraid it focuses mainly on moderately difficult people."

Seriously, though, one of my coworkers has had a copy of this on his desk for the past month or so. He works the day shift, so I'm pretty sure it's not because of me. Then again, one of the problems with most difficult people is that they don't realize that they're difficult people — so you can never be 100 percent sure you're safe.

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More tinkering

Several folks expressed a preference for Georgia (the font, not the state).

So, how's it look?