It took me a long time to go through this book. A couple of years, actually. I had it as my carry book for a while, which meant I’d put it on my dresser (a book accumulation point) and would throw it in my gym bag when going to the martial arts school or carry it along to church to read during the Sunday school hour, after which I throw it into my beautiful wife’s tote bag as I carry it to the car.
At some point, the book disappeared, and I thought I had put it into the tote bag, and it had disappeared into my wife’s sometimes untidy office, and I kind of found something else to read.
Well, I was recently cleaning out my gym bag, and I found that it had fallen to the bottom, beneath eight year old magazines that I’ll read one of these days at the martial arts school. No, scratch that: as our boys are in class with us for the nonce and are rapidly reaching the age of the adult classes, the nights where I’d show up at the school at 4:15 and have two hours until my class started are over, so I won’t be reading much at the dojo at all. So I can probably remove those old magazines unless I’m keeping them in the gym bag for the rare occasions when I go to the YMCA and finish my workout before my family does. But that does not happen often. So the glory days of the carry book are over.
But I digress. This book collects talks that Zen master Joko gave during sesshin weekend retreats like what you find in Shunryu Suzuki’s Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind.
I’ve mentioned before, I think, that the Buddhist ontology really doesn’t work for me. I’m one of those grazers who reads this sort of thing for the mindfulness and detachment lessons, but this book really does emphasize elements of the ontology that make me recoil a bit. I mean, the passivity in accepting each moment as it unfolds and not wanting anything out of it conflicts with, you know, getting anything done. Whether it’s picking up the house or changing the world, the book and its talks glides around what exactly it is that makes you decide what to do to do it instead of just chilling and enjoying the moment at a near-id level.
I think I’ll stick with stoicism which at least gives a little bit of a spark to get you moving. And the mindfulness training that you find in both.
The other evening driving out of Nogglestead, we frightened a couple of turkey vultures from their bounty at the end of the driveway. I assumed the hawks had gotten and dropped another bird, but when I went to the mailbox on foot, I saw what they had been picking at.
I wondered if it might be the remains of the famous Ozarkian giant carnivorous, venomous centipedes, but it’s actually a snake skeleton. Given that it’s picked pretty clean, they probably dragged an old skeleton out of the ditch to pick at.
But when presented with a snake skeleton, of course I had to take a picture and put a wry comment on Facebook. But a snake skeleton yields more quips than a single Facebook post could provide.
Think of this as a multiple choice quiz. Try to guess the quip I actually went with on Facebook and post your own in the comments.
Can anyone identify this kind of snake? It kind of looks like a diamond-backed water snake, but I’m not sure.
Does anyone need a snake skeleton? I have an extra.
When snake is served at Nogglestead, not a scrap goes to waste!
For proper snake broth, remember to simmer the snake carcass for two hours or more.
Strangely enough, there’s enough boy in me yet that I have the urge to do something with the skeleton other than toss it in the ditch on the other side of the road. Instead, I will probably ignore it until it gets crushed by passing cars or disappears–possibly due to the intervention of actual boys present in the household. I’ll let you know if I find it in their rooms in a couple years when cleaning them after they move out.
I read Gahr’s Random Realities last October after having bought these (and one or two others) at LibraryCon last year. I said then:
Well, I liked the book.
It’s a collection of science fiction short stories. Some of them are very short indeed–a couple of pages, which means they’re coming it at under 1000 words. So flash fiction. The plots are imaginative, but the execution is a little unsophisticated at times. The prose lacks any flourish, even the flourish of austerity. But, you know what? Who cares? Did I mention the plots are imaginative? And the stories are not woke parables, which I understand is a problem in some modern sci fi.
Well, basically, you could search and replace science fiction and sci fi with fantasy to describe how I feel about this book, although the stories tend to be longer (the last is novella-length). Still, interesting stories, simply told.
The book rather highlighted some difficulties I’ve had in completing fiction in recent years decades–trying, perhaps, for too much sophistication and perfection instead of just telling a story. Also, perhaps I am too focused on the concept or the gimmick and less on the people in the story. I’ve also got a pile of short stories from the olden days; I wonder if I could mind the peaks of my output and produce a collection of short stories for publication. Although since Charles Hill has passed away, I’m not sure anyone would buy it.
But I digress. I rather like Gahr’s work. Other books I have of his are novel-length, one in fantasy and one in science fiction. I will have to delve into them when I get my stack of in-process books down a bit.
(Not that cousin but rather her sister, who often posts enlightened Buddhist- and Hindu-flavored posts but lately has given over to celebration of the current troubles and their themes.)
At any rate, I am no biblical scholar, but, come on. Let’s look at some whities in the Bible:
I would say Timothy, but he was of a Greek father but Jewish mother, but in the new old one-drop accounting, this means he was not white. Also note that in this ethnography, people of Jewish origin are no longer white, but I think in some accountings, they are still white or not POC. I get so very confused.
Various and sundry Romans and roman soldiers.
I am not a Biblical historian, but I can certainly think of a number of instances I can come up with off the top of my head where the Bible might have included a white people put this twee claim (from a church no less!) into doubt.
I don’t know why this rankled me so much. Perhaps because this kind of “truth” is passed around by people who probably don’t believe in the Christian faith to rebuke those who do and disagree with the meme-passers on current thought.
You could argue that most of the “white” people in the Bible are bad guys, I suppose, but it’s pointedly from the time of Paul onward designed to be a religion for Gentiles who are sinners, so perhaps if you went down that road of argument, you wouldn’t really have a point.
Why do I argue with memes? Don’t I have anything better to do than get outraged on the Internet? To be honest, it’s hard to be on the Internet now and not get incensed. Even on Facebook. Even on LinkedIn, which used to be a professional Web site but which is also currently filled with political content. Eesh, pardon me whilst I close my browser again.
On weekends in May, I did a number of virtual duathlons through the local multisport club that I belong to.
I’ve also posted some glib things on social media in an attempt to win some Ozark Multisport Club swag.
That day, I did a 1 mile run, a 11.64 mile bike ride, and a 3.1 mile run (a 5k).
I mentioned that the four routes out of Nogglestead are:
Hilly.
Very hilly.
Alpine.
Autobahn. Also, hilly.
Which is true: If you leave Nogglestead to the south, you can cut over to the smaller state highway on a farm road, and it’s only hilly. If you continue south to where the farm road intersects with the state highway, it’s very hilly. And kind of like an M.C. Escher drawing. You go up a hill and around a corner and up another hill and up another hill. To be honest, I’m not sure where you actually go downhill in that route. The third route is north out of Nogglestead; in addition to starting out with a couple of rolling hills, they’re followed by a couple of really large hills with a small valley in between them. The valley is more like a gulch. And if you go west out of Nogglestead, you get the farm road leading to Republic, which is narrow, curvy, high-speed, and hilly.
I have mapped out a number of routes, landmarks, and distances for runs. If I run to the farm road to the south and back, it’s a mile; if I run south to the church and back, it’s a very hilly two miles; if I run to the pipeline pumping station in Battlefield and back, it’s two miles and less hilly; if I run to pizza joint in Battlefields and back and once around the yard, it’s a 5k (3.1 miles); if I run north but turn at the road in the bottom of the gulch and around, it’s an alpine 3.1 miles and a very bad idea; once around the block across the street is 4.2 miles; if I run south to the state highway and take it through Battlefield to the gas station and come back around and down the private lane just south of here and out to my driveway, it’s 6.2 miles (a 10k).
The bike routes are a little dicier. I can use any of these loops to add mileage, but I really don’t have any good routes to the farm roads and state highways out west. The alpine route plus a high-speed, little shoulder state highway or the aforementioned hilly autobahn route. So I’ve ridden into town for my routes. Which includes some torturous hills you don’t notice in a car.
At any rate, I did the last of the OMC duathlons the last weekend in May:
I don’t think I take multisport competitions as seriously as some people do, but apparently, I take them too seriously.
So that last weekend of May, I did a 5k on the hilly route, a ride into town and back, and the alpine 5k route listed above (a run/walk situation instead of a true run).
Both of those efforts were about the length of a sprint triathlon’s bike and run component, and the last was the run equivalent of a 10k. So I felt prepared for this past weekend’s activity: An Olympic-length duathlon.
Some of the people I work with put a new discussion group on the in-house collaboration software about running and biking and multisports. Apparently, a number of my co-workers are into it, too. A couple weeks back, a number of them did a 17 mile virtual duathlon. This time, though, it was a “Double Down” with about double the distance. A 6.2 mile run and a 24.8 mile bike ride. No sweat. I was ready, ainna?
Yeah, maybe not.
I didn’t sleep well on Friday night, partially concerned about the event. I didn’t eat well before hand, probably. I did hydrate pretty well, which is often a mistake I make, going a little dry because I don’t want to have to urinate during the race, and I cannot drink while running or biking–if I am breathing hard and swallow air while drinking, it’s a bad, bad thing.
My route out was the very hilly route, and it killed my mindset very early. I got right past the church, about a mile into the run, and I was already walking. And I walked a lot of it. Still, I ended up with a run/walk of about 1:15, which isn’t bad. Then I got on the bike, and I did the same route. It was less bad on the bike, but my route took me well into town, and then through a subdivision to add mileage, and then back. To make up the mileage, I went back down and around the very hilly route again to make my mileage. And I had to walk my bike up a hill.
I almost finished; it turns out, I did 24.73 miles instead of 24.8. I thought I had to do 24.2–I confused the tenths place with the 6.2.
I was one of the first three finishers of the event, and I was in last place for a long time. Watching the results come in on social media, I was an hour or more behind everyone on the bike. Because I went through town, because I’m on a crossover bike instead of a racing/road bike (and this gap will be exposed more with longer distances).
So I did not enjoy the event, and I did not do well. It took almost four hours out of Saturday–but I got an early start, so when I passed the pizza place, I could not stop in to place an order for delivery because it wasn’t even open yet.
Often, a triathlon will knock me out for the day, but this event really killed my energy and mindset for the whole weekend. I didn’t get anything else done but a bunch of reading.
So perhaps I should look back on the weekend and reflect fondly on all the reading I got to do. But reading does not feel like an accomplishment; reading is more akin to recreation and reward.
Ain’t that a pip? I completed an event that a lot of people cannot, but I’m not proud of it. As I’ve said before, I suffer from a mindset that says If I can do it/have done it, it’s easy; if I haven’t done it, it’s impossible.
At any rate with the completion of this event, I might be done with the road running for a while. Except I have a 5k coming up in a couple of weeks, so perhaps I and the boys should run a little before then. And my April triathlon is going to be rescheduled to some point in the near future along with four weeks of the training class ahead of it. And the Tiger Tri is coming up in August, and the boys and I don’t want to miss it.
As Shaman’s Harvest says, “I’m a glutton for punishment; yeah, it makes me feel alive.”
Although they probably didn’t include a semicolon in the actual lyrics.
When my sainted mother called me both names, I’d best heed!
A mail merge that somehow picks up both the first name and the middle name field or a miskey where both were put into the first name field? Not as binding.
Although my mother was the one to initially sign me up for AAA when I got my first car lo, those twenty some years ago. Yes, I was a late driver.
As I just read the Tron: The Storybook, I had to right away, wherein “right away” means in a week or so, watch the film.
As we’re watching, I see the character Bit:
and I think, what else have I seen him in?
Then, today, it finally hit me: He was also in the television series Automan:
Although the role on television was not a speaking role, it looks like it was physically demanding.
In Automan, he’s credited as “Cursor” as Himself. I guess the first appearance in Tron was uncredited, and he must have left the industry after the television program.
I might have mentioned that the news lately has me on edge, and some personal changes on the horizon have me a little on edge, and, face it, I’m still not getting the exercise I need.
But one thing calms me: Cleaning my pool. It gives me a chance to get outside, and I can watch the clouds in the sky and the ripples in the water while listening to the sounds of brushing the precipitant chlorine crystals. I think I would do it every day if I could. The first part of the job is backwashing and rinsing the filter, and I empty the skimmer baskets while doing so.
Yesterday, the first one I emptied had the usual leaves, bugs, and a dead frog in it. I dumped it out of the fence and saw something I couldn’t immediately identify. It was kind of round, patterned, and a little bigger than a fifty cent piece (which might not be helpful to you damn kids, but it’s not very big). I studied it, wondering if it was one of the boys’ pool toys that I’d have to go out and retrieve. As I studied it, it rocked a bit and turned over. It was a baby turtle, and it beat tiny feet away from the pool area.
Then, at about five thirty, a doe whitetail dear brought her fawn across our back yard, and the fawn was smaller than a dog. I managed to get my wife to the back windows in time to see it running off into the neighbor’s pasture, which provided her with a bright spot for her day as well.
You know, I’m not an especially cuddly person, but a couple glimpses of the wildlife as well as the time outside serves me better than long days in front of the computer. Unfortunately, they don’t pay as well.
When I bought most of them in May of 2019, my wife asked me if I was going to read them. To be honest, my positive response at the time was probably a little optimistic when I gave it, but after scouring the library for Charles Sanders Peirce last month, I managed to squeeze most of the books I’d ordered from ABC Books this spring and things I bought at LibraryCon last year (and the copy of Pragmatism by William James depicted in the post on Charles Sanders Peirce) into the gaps on the bookshelves.
But not, of course, the 30 inch stack of The Story of Civilization. I don’t have any 3″ gaps left on the shelves, much less 30″.
So I decided to start reading them. I mean, I found The Lessons of History to be readable even with their the old Left viewpoint expressed in the 1968 book.
I didn’t have the first volume, Our Oriental Heritage, as the one in the set I saw last spring was marked $129 (the whole story of my incomplete mismatched set is in the above linked post). So I ordered one off of eBay. And I started it.
The first volume is a book about the history of Egypt, China, and India, which the Durants (well, Will in this case, as Ariel becomes official co-author later in the series) assert offer the roots of Western civilization. I’m interested in getting these histories because although I got some history of Egypt from the audio course Origins of Great Ancient Civilizations, more is always better. I haven’t gotten much history of India (that is, the divided kingdoms that became the India of the British Raj and has since split again into separate nations). The Chinese history is pre-revolution, so I am interested to see how it differs from the more recent histories I’ve read.
But to get to that, I have to make it through 100+ pages of Durant laying out what he means by civilization and what makes a civilization civilized. Through it, we get a good table-setting of the old Left viewpoint, where natural rights do not exist and relativism between civilizations where the historian takes a dispassionate, detached view comparing the different customs and morals. Although some values are more better than others, of course. When talking about sexual morals and marriage, communal sex and partner swapping among primitive tribes is better than marriage, which treats women like slaves (as did primitive man, who hunted a bit and rested while the women foraged, kept the homes, and reared the children). So there’s a bit of pining for communal systems that did not lead to anything but sustenance level existence, a view you still find today.
I’m a bit of a homer who thinks Western civilization is the best produced so far (and which might adopt better practices it finds from other cultures, which is a feature of Western civilization). And I don’t think the Durants have written a polemic here, so it should prove readable and enjoyable once we get to the history.
I’m overexuberantly optimistic that I’ll read it all the way through, as it does run some 10,000 pages, but, come on, that’s like nine Stephen King and/or Tom Clancy books (I have that much on my shelves and most of it in the remaining five volumes of The Dark Tower alone). I’ve bought many fine series: Sandburg’s biography of Abraham Lincoln, Winston Churchill’s history of World War II, the complete works of George Bernard Shaw, Thomas Copleston’s A History of Philosophy. But I’ve rarely committed to reading them. I mean, I started Volume I of A History of Philosophy and took copious notes on it, but I was using it as a carry book and bogged down that way.
So I’m trying to read a chapter every day or so just to make incremental progress. Perhaps once the history part takes off, I’ll find it more riveting and captivating to read. However, it’s definitely a stretch goal to finish reading the this year or next (see also how I bogged down reading the complete works of Shakespeare: I got five comedies in 2018, and it’s languished beside my reading chair since).
So stay tuned to see how my reading goes. Assuming I make any progress, of course; if I don’t, I won’t speak of it again.
The current troubles, unlike the previous unpleasantness, made me do something that I probably haven’t done in twenty years.
I closed my Web browser yesterday.
I wish I could tell you I was more productive, but mostly I just wrote another letter to my grandmother who apparently delights in them, so I’m writing her every couple of weeks.
Which is more pleasant than either my Facebook feed or the Web currently.
It’s a common question in the St. Louis area, and if you asked Bob Behnken, astronaut aboard the International Space Station, he would answer Pattonville.
That’s in Maryland Heights, about 1 mile walking from our home in Casinoport and where our children would have gone if we hadn’t moved to Old Trees and then Nogglestead. Of course, we moved about a month and a half before we had our first child, so they never lived in the school district. But still, he’s from the old neighborhood. Well, one of the many.
I have not gotten into high dudgeon about President Trump’s executive order on social media “censorship” because my understanding of the situation is that Internet Service Providers and forums have long been covered under special rules that treat them like a utility rather than a content provider (or newspaper/television station) that gave them immunity from lawsuits for the content passing through their systems, and that because they’re starting to “monitor” and “fact check” their users’ content, they’re acting more like a publisher than a mere conduit for information.
Which is why when I saw this piece in the New York Post, Mark Zuckerberg criticizes Twitter for fact-checking Trump, I thought, Yeah, Zuckerberg knows what’s at stake here, and he does not want his company subject to those lawsuits.
But the new executive order came down, and now Zuckerberg has to go on the offense against it, which yields stories like Mark Zuckerberg says social media censorship not the ‘right reflex’, and my response is Yeah, it’s not censorship. Do what you want. Cut off who you want. But recognize that you’re now subject to the liability rules that other publishers are.
That’s what I thought. Hindrocket at Powerline, an actual attorney, seems to interpret it the same way. I guess he goes by his real name now, but I’m an old school blogger.
Well, not really. But my youngest was bored and came into my office whilst I was trying to work (and not just write twee things for this blog, gentle reader), so I told him to shred the papers that my beautiful wife had brought in for document destruction.
“Do you have to pay sometimes?” he asked.
The shredder has a little slot where you can put your old credit cards in for destruction, but I don’t tend to use it as I prefer to grind my old credit cards exceedingly fine.
But the lad had only seen that sort of iconography on places where you use a credit card to pay for things.
And in this world of interconnectedness of things and pay-as-you-go models, perhaps it would not be at all surprising to have to pay extra to use something you’ve already bought. As a matter of fact, in this third decade of the millennium, that’s the normal for technology.
Saw this meme on Facebook last week with undoubtedly adulation in all the wrong places:
Neil Ty, Science Guy, says:
I dream of a world where the truth is what shapes people’s politics, rather than politics shaping what people think is true.
Okay, they’re all in caps, but you know some people hear The Truth capitalized. Which leads to some interesting speculation here: What is the truth? After all, science is not the answer to science; it is a process for testing hypotheses against reality via experiment to see what proves repeatable. Science has no answer to the ultimate truth; it only produces our best current approximation. I mean, real science does that. Social science does whatever it wants, however it wants.
Some classes of people, not scientists, often have an idea of Truth which comes through revelation or introspection or some other means of receiving that Truth, and yet I don’t think people who dig Neil Ty or post memes about f-n loving science really want people shaping their polity based on those beliefs, ainna?
And politics are not about truth; they’re about how to live together amongst people of differing opinions and worldviews without slaughtering them. It’s supposed to be about compromise and reaching consensus (someone said, and I forget who said it recently). It works best with a limited, localized government with more space to live and let live.
Because, to be honest, those whose politics dictate what they think is true have had their sway recently, and with decidedly poor results, ainna?
Restaurants are having to cut back on the number of people allowed inside due to social distancing and guidelines from local and state leaders.
One dining establishment uses unique stand-ins for customers to sit next to instead of an empty table.
I didn’t have to go to a national news segment to know it. I mentioned that my beautiful wife and I went to dinner on Friday. The restaurant had removed the tables in the middle of the floor and told us to sit on the same side of the booth so that people sitting in the next booth on the same side would be six feet apart (but we were so early that the other booths were not yet in use).
For the bar seating, though, instead of removing stools, they put mannequins every other seat or so. Which did trigger my uncanny valley response sometimes.
But I was able to mostly focus on the food and the company.
It took me a long time to go through this book. A couple of years, actually. I had it as my carry book for a while, which meant I’d put it on my dresser (a book accumulation point) and would throw it in my gym bag when going to the martial arts school or carry it along to church to read during the Sunday school hour, after which I throw it into my beautiful wife’s tote bag as I carry it to the car.
I read Gahr’s 
