Today's random thoughts

Is it wrong when you go the bank - that charges endless fees for seemingly even just breathing near your business account and then you have to queue 1/2 hour to get anyone to help - that you want to take your waiting fee in large numbers of candy canes from the counter?

One can only be impressed when you see a bloke that has the balls to shave his head but leave a little strip right across his head and then grow a beard so his face is surrounded in a neatly trimmed halo - awesome!

Sometimes you can click a link and read on a blog words that touch your very soul. Words that express exactly what you feel but didn't know others felt the same and it totally makes your day - to not be alone, to know you are not weird and that you can change it. The person will never know their eight sentences has affected someone a world away. Someone who is so grateful they wrote it. Even I left a comment on the old post, it probably wouldn't get across what those eight sentences meant. Sometimes you just gotta love the internet.

how will the future view us?

If you read a historical novel, like "Pillars of the Earth", or watch of a movie of a similar era there are the landowners and there are the workers and boy do they work for not a lot.
Some landowners are nice to their tenants. Other landowners are horrible and evil and despite their wealth take everything, while the people that have actually done all the work, go hungry.
When I watch or read these things I don't want to be the ones doing the back-breaking labour, but I want to be the nice landowners being generous to those worse off - while of course living in a big house.
Then I think of today. There is still the split, but it is on a global scale. Instead of on the land outside the big house, it is offshore, elsewhere people are getting paid very little so I can have cheap clothes and shoes and so many other things I buy everyday.
I can't see them so I can live in my castle and pretend they don't exist. I can pretend that can of tuna was not put together by someone working really long hours in the heat and smell for little pay. And yet I read the labels and carefully pick the one that is mostly skipjack tuna since I have been told this tuna is not overfished and is doing okay. But what of the people catching it and canning it?
Sure we get told the wages are low but that is because it is cheap to live in that country. But then from a friend who used to work a call centre in India sometimes after the travel expenses they didn't have enough for food - that doesn't sound like a living wage to me. They were extremely grateful for the job, just as the fish factory workers are. But is that right?
If someone knows it is not enough, surely it is not just to only pay what they do?
A living wage should be enough to live with your immediate family - not have them live somewhere else that you can only afford to visit once a month even though it is only one bus ride away.
In a hundred years - how will the stories be written about our era? Who will be the heroes and who will be the underdogs?
I can look around see much wealthier people and be smug at my small efforts of charity and choosing items on where items are made. But I wonder at what size is a three bedroom house just a big house?

Service by the Lay

I was biking home tonight and passed a place selling stone. It had a sign out the front; "Full Supply and Lay Service".
As a Christian - gosh I hate that phrase, so usually followed by some judgemental statement about something. As an aside I don't think Jesus ever used that sort of condescending approach, he seems a lot more straight up about things - anyway I digress.
The reason I mention the Christian bit is because probably to others this sign made perfect sense but for some reason my brain was on another track. Lay in a church setting usually refers to people who are not clergy(the ones who are vicars and bishops and stuff). The Lay people are everyone else.
So here I am thinking why are they saying "lay service"? Is their service a step down, dealing with the everyday people not the people set aside to be in charge of the stone? Are they planning a service run by the lay and what has this to do with stone?
Then it clicked.
Oh they lay the stone for you.
I didn't even go to any service on Sunday, Lay or otherwise. But I think I need to get some sleep, my brain has gone weird.