Ritualistic Tackiness

For the second year in a row, the ELCA church down the street from where I live has posted the following post-Easter message on its lighted reader-board: "EVERY FLOWER OF SPRINGTIME SPEAKS OF RESURRECTION." I find this even more disturbing than the tackiness often displayed there. This annual repetition of the same, way-beside-the-point Easter message suggests that talking about spring flowers has become a hallowed tradition at that church, like a little fixture on the Church Year cycle that keeps coming around. How sad that it couldn't be something a bit more Christian, such as "HE IS RISEN! HE IS RISEN INDEED - ALLELUIA!"

As usual, I wouldn't want to make a big thing out of other people's stupidity without mentioning my own. Today, at work, I found myself way over my head in Adobe Creative Suite 2. I was trying to do something in InDesign that I should have been doing in Photoshop, for the simple reason that I know more about how to use InDesign. Grudgingly, I accepted correction and started trying to work with Photoshop, but my inexperience and the program's dogged user-unfriendliness brought my frustration to a peak. For example, the tool-box in Photoshop is superficially similar to the one in InDesign, but behaves completely differently and resists all attempts to figure out how to use it based on intuition and experience of other programs. Clearly the people who designed this had an interest in the how-to workshops and classroom-in-a-book racket. Finally, a pious co-worker cautioned me, "As Jesus would say, 'It is hard for you to kick against the pricks.'" I shot back, "I'd like to kick the pricks who designed this program."