Jamie gets baptized

While we were in the Detroit area to visit with friends and to say goodbye to Linda Krasa, we also had Jamie baptized at our church.

James Wyatt Passut was baptized on Monday, November 12, 2007 at Zion Lutheran Church in Ferndale, Mich. Pastor Paul Gateman officiated the ceremony. Jamie's godparents are George and Rebecca Aho of Royal Oak, Mich.

Bring back Sam the Robot!

Sam the Robot is a character who appeared on Sesame Street during the '70s. He hasn't been on the show in more than 30 years, but I think Sam (a.k.a. "Super Automated Machine") should be put back on as a recurring character, or at least given a cameo appearance.

This clip is from the Season 4 premiere, Episode 0406, Scene 8, which originally aired on November 27, 1972. Sam meets Gordon (then played by Hal Miller, who was also debuting in the role) and Susan (Loretta Long). Gordon asks Sam what he's doing on Sesame Street, but Sam gets all annoyingly authoritative and insists that he's on Mulberry Street because his programming told him to go there.

Now, for those of you who don't know, Mulberry Street is the hood. It's the ghetto. You hardly ever hear about it because it's so abysmally bad. Think hookers stepping over crack vials. So the very idea that Sam thinks they're all on Mulberry Street really irks Susan and Gordon, a happily married, middle class, African-American couple who work hard and don't appreciate being associated with the wrong side of town. (Is Sam a frickin' racist?) They try to point this out to Sam, who agrees to run his program again just to double-check. But the program (presumably written by Microsoft) comes back with the incorrect answer again that Sam is on Mulberry Street. Susan and Gordon are livid with rage, but they let Sam off with a warning and just smack him around a little bit. They secretly promise, however, to "bust him up royally" if he ever returns to Sesame Street.

This is probably the first time on television (well, on Sesame Street anyway) that the concept of a GPS device could be created and sold to the public. Surely the Garmin owes its very existence to Sam the Robot, defunct Sesame Street character.

Also during this scene, Sam spouts off these gems: "machines are better than people," "machines can do anything," and "machines are perfect," the latter of which throws him into an infinite loop that apparently can only be remedied with a punch in the face. We've always suspected that machines think we are stupid and inferior - at least Sam had the stones to come right out and say so. And remember this was a full 12 years before "The Terminator" came out, when the machines decided to do something about those inferior human beings once and for all. Sam was truly ahead of his time.

So this begs the question: Had Sam not been pulled from Sesame Street back in the mid-'70s, would his celebrity have spawned an entire generation of robot enthusiasts who would grow up to become the scientists that would have put a robot in every home in America by now? Surely the good folks at the Childrens Television Workshop (which ran Sesame Street back then) made a mistake when they pulled the plug on Sam. What did we get in his place? Elmo. You know, the annoying red one who only speaks in the third person.

If you're interested, and I'd be scared if you were, Sam appeared on Sesame Street from Season 4 through Season 7. He's in four books: "The Sesame Street 1, 2, 3 Storybook" (1973), "Oscar-the-Grouch's Alphabet of Trash" (1977), "Big Bird's Busy Book" (1975), and "The Sesame Street Dictionary" (1980 edition). And Sam also appeared in Marvel Comics' Spidey Super Stories #31, a Star Wars parody in which he assumed the role of R2-D2 and met Spider-Man.

And FYI, the Count also made his first appearance on Sesame Street in Episode 0406. Want to see the entire episode on DVD? You can, if you purchase "Sesame Street: Old School, Volume 1," a three-disc set which came out in 2006.

Bring back Sam!

Note: All information courtesy of Muppet Wiki.

A Scanner (for a) Darkie

On Sunday, October 20, we finally bought a flatbed scanner - a Canon CanoScan 4400F. It connects via hi-speed USB, has a scanning area of 8.5" x 11.7", and can scan either six negatives or four slides in one pass. The maximum color resolution is 4800 x 9600 pixels.

This is actually the second flatbed scanner I have owned. The first was a UMAX Astra 1200S model that I bought back in the mid-'90s. It connected via SCSI and still works pretty well, so it is probably a candidate for Craigslist or eBay. Unfortunately, the UMAX doesn't scan negatives or slides. (So, whatcha think, ask for 50 smackers?)

Jena had been wanting a flatbed scanner so that she could do some work at home. And I had been wanting one so that I could scan in new Brenda Monarch comic strips. Brenda's web site is still down, but hopefully I will be able to put her back online soon. In the meantime, here is a quick pic of Brenda with the new scanner. I tried to be as graphically correct as possible (but it's not too easy to do at .03 mm with a Pigma Micron).

Oh, and could this be some more ammunition for the argument that Brenda is 5'8" and not some dwarf?

Rest In Peace, Linda Krasa

There was a light in her eye.

Shortly after we moved to Royal Oak in 2003, we started shopping around for a church. We knew that joining a church and having God play a regular part of our lives was important to us, but we had been holding off on making a commitment to a congregation until we had put down roots and bought a house.

And you could tell that she was there.

We made a list of the ELCA Lutheran churches in our area and started to work our way through it by going to Sunday services. The first two were a bit of a disappointment; some members of the first bragged several times about how their church was in a windows commercial, and we were invited (to our horror) by the pastor of the second to join their "Middlers Club."

Her spirit was alive and well.

We were discouraged, but that all changed when we went to the third church on our list: Zion Lutheran Church in Ferndale. It was Rally Sunday, and there was quite a bit of pageantry. The music was amazing. There were choirs for the adults and children. The pastor was entertaining, but he also gave a sermon that really left an impression on me. Everyone held hands during the Lord's Prayer, something that I had never seen done before. The format of the service was very similar to what Jena and I were used to growing up. There was a nursery room, classes for Sunday school, and a long list of activities during the week. But above everything else, the congregation seemed like a close-knit family. There were smiles and handshakes all around during the sharing of the peace, and many more afterwards. Zion was warm and inviting. We knew we had found our church.

But it was trapped behind that one gray eye.

Enter Linda Krasa. That first day at church she came up to us and introduced herself. She introduced us to her husband, Ron, and her daughter, Kate. And she introduced us to a lot of other people. The amazing thing about Linda was that she put us at ease; she made us feel comfortable in a room full of strangers. She welcomed us to Zion and encouraged us to come back the next Sunday, which we did.

Trapped in a body that had been tortured mercilously by cancer for years.

Each time we came back to Zion, we were treated to the same experience we had on Rally Sunday; it wasn't just a one-time thing. Zion was special every week. And so was Linda. We visited with her after church and got to know more about her and her family. Her older brother, Paul, was the pastor. She lived in Ferndale, not too far from the church. Kate had Down's Syndrome, but Linda made sure that never kept her back. She enjoyed singing, collecting knickknacks, and going to all kinds of musical events in the Detroit area. We had lunch with her several times after church, usually frequenting Jimi's in Royal Oak or the Taco Bell on Woodward in Ferndale.

Her spirit, however, was unwavering.

We also learned that Linda had cancer. She had been through chemotherapy - a few times. Each time the cancer came back. One time she had her head shaved and had brain surgery. Sometimes we didn't see Linda at church for a few weeks, while she was at home recovering from cancer treatments. But she always came back, and she always had a smile on her face.

She was still fighting.

And for the four years that we knew Linda, neither Jena nor I ever heard her complain about having cancer. Not once. She was very matter-of-fact about it. Whenever we would see her, we would ask how she was feeling, and she would be up front about it. She had good days and bad. But she never complained being sick. Never. She met the challenge head-on and was determined to beat cancer.

She saw our faces.

When we became members of Zion, Linda was our sponsor. We were flattered that the pastor's sister had taken us under her wing, and she made sure we knew everything about the church. We must have met every single member of the congregation at some point, and Linda was there to introduce us to many of them. She encouraged us to become active in the church, and she more than likely had a hand in me being elected to the church council.

She recognized us.

When we announced that we were pregnant with Charlie, Linda was one of the first people we told. She was thrilled for us. And a couple of months after Charlie was born, Linda offered to babysit so that Jena and I could have a nice romantic dinner for our anniversary. Linda always had smiles, hugs and kisses for Charlie at church, and Kate enjoyed carrying him around. It was the same two years later when we had Jamie.

The corner of her open mouth turned upwards into a smile.

And when we decided earlier this year to move to Philadelphia, the most difficult thing was leaving our friends behind. We had no family members within 800 miles of Detroit, but our friends made us feel like we were at home. We counted Linda as one of our best friends, and we made sure to tell her so. She was sad to see us leave, but we made plans to keep in touch.

Her expression was one that I will never forget.

But Linda's cancer was never completely out of the picture, and her treatments continued. We heard from other people at Zion, especially the church secretary, Jackie Koivu, that Linda was not doing well. Then this past Friday afternoon, we received an email from Jackie: Linda was at home under hospice care. She was dying.

She seemed to be saying "You're here!"

We knew what we had to do. We immediately made plans to drive to Detroit to see Linda one more time. We wanted her to know that we loved her and that she meant a lot to us. We left New Jersey at about 6 p.m. on Saturday night, and pulled up to Linda's house at around 4:45 a.m. Sunday morning. Jackie was there; upon hearing that Linda was going to be at home in hospice care she volunteered to stay with her until the end, the best commitment that any friend could ever give. Jackie let us into the house so that we could visit Linda.

"You came all this way for me."

Linda was in the front room of her house. She was in a hospital bed and propped up at a slight incline. A small Christmas tree was in one corner of the room, its large bulbs filling the room with multi-colored light. There was also a glass bowl of illuminated lights on a shelf above Linda's head. We were told that these were her "happy lights." A boom box was in the corner, softly playing choir music. We later learned that this was a special CD that the choir at Zion had recorded for her to listen to. For that first visit, Linda was asleep. I thought that maybe I had seen her eye open for a second, but it was more than likely involuntary. Her breathing was heavy. Jackie said that she didn't think Linda would make it through the night. We sat next to Linda and held her hand and talked to her for a little while, on the chance that maybe she could hear our voices. We held out hope that there might be some chance that we could let her know that we were there.

"It means a lot to me that you are here."

We went to a friend's house and managed to get a couple hours of sleep before going to church. It was the first time that we had been at church since we moved to Philadelphia. The sermon was about Job and his suffering, which helped me make a little more sense of what was happening, but not enough. We gave Kate a big hug when we were returning to our seats after Holy Communion. After church, we saw the pastor and told him that we were planning to visit Linda again. He said that was fine, but not to expect her to be awake. We understood that there was a good chance our second visit was going to be much like the first.

"Thank you for being such good friends."

But a miracle happened. When we got to Linda's house we were told that she was awake and alert. There were several other people from Zion there as well. Our prayers had been answered; we could let our friend know how much we love her and care about her. We spent as much time with her as we could. She saw how big Charlie and (especially) Jamie had grown. She couldn't speak too much above a whisper, and her breathing was a little heavier.

"Remember me and how much I loved living."

We went back two more times, once on Sunday evening and again on Monday morning, but Linda was asleep. Her breathing was getting heavier and more forced. Everyone knew that the end was coming. We said our last goodbyes, and made the journey back to New Jersey. Last night, we received a call from Jackie that Linda had passed away at about 10 a.m. on Wednesday.

And now I see that light everywhere.