Turning Bois D'arc

 Turning Bois D’Arc

By Bobby Neal Winters

My people call it Bois D’Arc.  Folks around here tend to call it Hedge.  There are some refined educated folks who call it Osage Orange, and they are welcome to do so.  

It is a free country.

But my people call it Bois D’Arc and pronounce it bow dark.  That is an example of a genuine folk etymology which is to say that knowing what something is influences the way you pronounce it.  You see, my people know that Indians (Native Americans, Indigenous people; pick one that makes you happy and push on) made bows from the wonderful wood of this tree.  

The French knew it too.  That’s why they called it bois d’arc.  But the bois is pronounced bwah and means “wood” and the d’arc means “of the bow.”  So it all makes sense and the folk who I call my people just don’t want anyone to forget that connection.  

It’s about history; it’s about reality.

I got a piece of bois d’arc from my brother some time back.  I want to say a year ago Thanksgiving. It might’ve been longer than that, but if so not too much.

I used some of it to make some woodworking mallets, but I still had some left.  I’d cut it from one of my brother’s trees. It’s about 3 or 4 inches through and it still has the bark on it.  

The Bois D’Arc is not a pretty tree.  Indeed, one might say without too much fear of contradiction that it’s ugly.  It’s got thorns on its limbs.  

It bears a fruit that not many animals find attractive, no matter how hungry they might be. The internet tells me that only the seeds are really edible and that the latex that permeates the fruit can irritate your skin.

But it is tough.  

It will grow in poor soil, in inhospitable places.

It is defiant. 

Yesterday, I took a piece of what my brother gave me and turned it on the lathe.

It is hard.

Very hard.

I had my doubts that I would be able to do much with it until I got past the bark, past the dry part of the wood.  When I got down to the wet part, the part that was still “green,” it turned easier.

I called it green, of course, just because it hadn’t dried out yet.  The wood beneath the bark was actually yellow, a beautiful, beautiful yellow.

I am just starting with the lathe, so I don’t know how to make much.  So far what I’ve done is make squarish objects into cylinders. Those things and a lot of saw dust.

But I’d seen a Russian guy on Youtube making whistles.

And I thought, “Hmm, whistles.”

That’s what grandpas do.

I made a couple from other wood: one from cedar and one from pine.

I thought to make one from bois d’arc.  The wood of my people.  The wood that exemplifies my people.

I turned it between centers to knock the bark off and to make it round.  I then stuck one end in a chuck while still having the other end held secure.  

I began taking off wood to take it down to the size of a whistle.

The yellow just got deeper and more beautiful.  But it’s still as hard as iron inside.

I was able to drill a hole down the axis without too much trouble, but cutting a wedge from the side with a chisel to make the whistle was just about as much as I could do.

With all the bark removed, it is revealed to be beautiful on the inside, but it’s still hard, still unrelenting, still something you don’t really want to mess with if you don’t have to.

The wood of my people.  

It is right.

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like” the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube.

What is the Right Word?

 What is the Right Word?

By Bobby Neal Winters

I am trying to find the right word for something.  

It would be a word that would describe a situation or a mindset.  It strikes me as something that is basic to dealing effectively in and/or happily with the world.  Because of this, there must be some word in Latin, Greek, or Hebrew for what I am talking about.  Likely as not, I’ve heard it, but I didn’t recognize its importance.

Since I don’t have the One Word, let me now use a lot of them.

When I tell students how to study their math, I tell them to pick a spot and prepare it.  Get their paper, their calculator, their pen, their pencil, their protract, that is to say get everything that they are going to need and gather it around them.  Turn OFF the flipping TV (and I don’t mean flipping), music, social media. Urinate--maybe on the social media. Take a deep breath.  Let it out slowly, and then get started, doing what they are going to do.  To those who’ve had jobs, I tell them to go at it like a job.

This is one example of the situation/mindset I am talking about.

This was my only example for many, many years.  As I’ve gotten into woodworking, I’ve noticed that you need the same mindset to do good woodworking.

Consider how you cut dovetails. Get your workbench cleared off.  That means you need to actually have a workbench.  Have your chisels, saws, marking implements, squares, and dovetail jigs close at hand.  Make sure that your wood is square and properly sized.  Make sure you have a clamp at your workbench so that you can clamp your board to the bench when it comes time to chisel out your dovetails.  Maybe I should have begun with the notion that you should have thought the entire process through from beginning to end before you sat down to cut the dovetails, but it (almost) goes without saying.  That might mean it should be said more often.

I am now learning how to use a lathe.  As with every other powertool I’ve learned about, a lathe is kind of scary.  I think that fear is left over from childhood.  Our parents didn’t want us to get hurt, so that created a general fear in us.

The cure to that fear is knowledge.  You can hurt yourself with a lathe. You can kill yourself with a lathe.  But you gain knowledge of how to deal with a lathe so as to minimize that possibility.  

You could say to just stay away from the lathe and you won’t get hurt.  The same philosophy will keep you safe from cars, dogs, cats, and the opposite sex.

While there are things that we leave alone because the learning curve of dealing with them safely overrides any benefit from dealing with them, we try to keep that set small.  I’ve got bungee jumping and skydiving in that set, but I know others who’ve crossed that line.

Somewhere within this notion is the idea that we become the despots of a small piece of spacetime.  We set aside a place where we are the absolute rulers of our environment for a carefully prescribed interval of time. For that time, in that space, whatever we say goes.

Many, many years ago--more than twenty--I had a class where one of the students thought he was smarter than me.  That doesn’t bother me. It happens all the time, and I enjoy it.  His thinking he was smarter wasn’t the problem.  The problem was that one day he tried to take over.  I came to class, and my desk at the front of the room was covered with boxes of donuts, a jug of milk, a jug of orange juice etc.  

He’d decided that we were going to have a party.

I didn’t say a word.

I sat down my books and began removing the accoutrements from the desk. After they were gone, I began to teach as if nothing had happened.

When you are the teacher, you are in charge. You decide what will be done that day.  Good teachers will read the room and take input from the students.  But if you let them take charge, why exactly are you getting a paycheck?

The student didn’t like me after that.

However agreeable you are, you must learn to draw the line, to be in charge, to take control:

“Hey, Eve, God told us not to eat that, and I won’t.”

“No, taking bribes is wrong, and I won’t do it.”

“No, I don’t think main-lining cocaine is a good idea, and I won’t do it.”

So, anyway, I’m trying to come up with the right word to describe this.  I know I will feel stupid when someone tells me, but I would like to know.

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like” the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube.

 Invisible Joinery

By Bobby Neal Winters

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about making a frame for a cedar chest.  My intention was to segue off that and talk about frameworks in a more abstract way, but I got sucked into a vortex of writing about woodwork and ran out of space.

I could just leave it lay, but the topic won’t let me go. Frameworks just keep popping into my head.  My preference as a teacher is to put a good solid example in the student’s mind before going off on an abstraction, so if you didn’t read that article, you might want to get on the web and find it.

We’ve got frameworks everywhere around us.  Let’s start with math.  Say you are going to add 5 to 7.  You could just remember that 5 plus 7 is 12, but you don’t have to, because we’ve got a framework.  As you learn to count, you learn to count by fives. Five, ten, fifteen, twenty, etc.  You are familiar enough with numbers to know that 7 is 5 plus 2.  So 5 plus 7 is 5 plus 5 plus 2.  Five plus five is ten, so 5 plus 5 plus 2 is 10 plus 2 which is 12.

That’s some trouble, and it’s easier to memorize it, but it will help you get by until you do.

You can do this sort of thing with bigger numbers.  Say you want to multiply 27 by 8.  Well, 25 times 8 is 200; that’s not so hard.  Now 27 is 2 more than 25 and 2 times 8 is 16, so 27 times 8 will be 216.  Here you are using a framework of multiples of 25.

You get your framework in place and you work from that.

For me teaching became a lot easier, when I learned how to use the calendar as my framework.  I sit down before the beginning of the semester and look at the university calendar.  I note where the breaks are; I note the times that I will have to be off campus; I pick the test days at roughly equal intervals.

After I have those test days picked, the rest of the time is just talking to intelligent young people and grading tests. I keep track of what I’ve done; I keep track of what has worked and what hasn’t; I refine my teaching.

The value of a calendar as a framework can’t be overstated.

As is my predilection, let’s go back to the first chapter of Genesis. In verse 14 it says, “And God said, ‘Let there be lights in the vault of the sky to separate the day from the night, and let them serve as signs to mark sacred times, and days and years.’”

People have wasted a lot of time arguing about Genesis, what I will say is that when I read this, I can see that the author of Genesis knew that that constellations were connected to the seasons of the year. Even now, you can tell when winter is coming or summer is coming by where Orion the Hunter is in the night sky.

Put that together with the phases of the moon, and you’ve got the start of a calendar.

I’ve pointed out one way I use the calendar, but it’s everywhere. We schedule everything.  Everything from 7th grade B-teams playing basketball in Frontenac to the Superbowl is on the calendar.  

The days, months, and years are all framed out, and we can put our events on them.

There was a time when we paid more attention to the week.  We recalled that the story in Genesis set aside one day a week to rest. Don’t work; don’t let your servant work; don’t let your wife work. Don’t work.  Restaurants would be closed; stores would be closed.

But someone came along and said, “Don’t let those religious fanatics tell you what to do. You can work every day. That’ll show ‘em.”

So we now get to work everyday if we want to.  And sometimes even if we don’t want to because if we don’t someone else will.

We showed ‘em, all right.

But I digress.

To return to my point, we’ve got these invisible frameworks around us that work like the frame I made for my cedar chest.  You can attach other things to them and they will hold it together. They make our lives easier but are invisible.

Since the 1960s, there has been a reexamination of some of the frameworks that keep our society together.  We don’t trust institutions any more.  Membership has gone down in service clubs and churches.

These invisible structures, invisible frameworks of civilization are being lost, and it’s not clear what is replacing them. 

If anything.

I suppose time will tell. It might be quite a show.

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like” the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube.

The Answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything

The Answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything

By Bobby Neal Winters

The Scottish poet Robert Burns wrote a poem entitled “To a Mouse.” Therein he sympathizes with a mouse whose nest he has turned up while plowing.  However, at the end of the poem he reflects:

Still, thou art blest, compar’d wi’ me!//

The present only toucheth thee://

But Och! I backward cast my e’e,//

          On prospects drear!//

An’ forward tho’ I canna see,//

          I guess an’ fear!//

One might say he’s being a bit disingenuous by saying we can’t see forward. Maybe we can’t in specific terms, but we can in general terms.

As the engineer in the movie Titanic shared, the ship can and will sink, “It’s a mathematical certainty.”  As Jim Morrison from the Doors sang, “No one here gets out alive.”

That’s not very cheerful, is it? We are bothered by it.  It’s hard for us to think about, and I suppose that’s why some of the preachers when I grew up preached on the Rapture so much. Somehow the prospect of flying out of your car while you are raptured is easier to think about than the mundane--and certain--fact of your inevitable demise.

Thoughtful people throughout the ages wondered about this and discussed what the best pay to spend these finite hours of our lives.  They came up with a rainbow of solutions from grabbing as much pleasure on one end to serving others on the other.

Many of those who seek to live a good life, to make the best use of those too-small number of days we are given, gather with other like-minded individuals. Such were those who became the Disciples of Jesus.

They were looking for someone who knew something, someone to teach them. Many (most, all?) of them had been associated with John the Baptist as his students, disciples, and John directed them to Jesus as a better option.

Jesus didn’t knock on their door; he didn’t put out flyers; he didn’t have a huge building.

He had something they wanted.  

For some, it was something they wanted to learn. Others transferred their own hopes and desires onto him and were disappointed when he didn’t live up to them.  (I am thinking specifically about Judas here.)

For any of these people, he wasn’t hard-sell.  He just said, “Come and see.”

No doubt many came, saw, and then went again. And we know what Judas did.

But some remained.

It’s still the same. People who think about...life...still wonder what is the best way to spend the time we have? What are the best things to do?

The same range of answers are still out there that always were. For all the passage of time, the basic choices have remained the same.

We are living in a time when we are born into institutions, into churches, into synagogues. Most people don’t really think about “it” much.  

But thoughtful people will continue to think and continue to seek answers.

These thoughtful people are of all stripes. Some are scholars, sure. Not as many as you would think. It’s just that scholars are the ones who write and writing tends to get around.

Thoughtful people can be artists and artisans; waiters and waitresses; bartenders and baristas; beekeepers and bookkeepers.

Fishermen, tax collectors, and tent-makers.

They come to the Teacher because they want to be taught. How do I live a good life? What do I need to do with my shrinking number of days?  I don’t want to bury my gold coin, where should I invest it?

You will have to find someone who can help you.  He might just say, “Come and see.”

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like” the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube.

A Discourse on Joinery

 A Discourse on Joinery

By Bobby Neal Winters

I am making a cedar chest for one of my daughters.  I think I’ve mentioned this before. My plan is to make it 2 feet long, one foot wide, and one foot deep. 

Or thereabouts.

I find that I don’t use my tape measure as much as I thought I would.  I cut the certain boards to the size I need them and those boards provide my standard from that point on.

And I don’t use plans. That is to say, I don’t use a plan that anyone has put on paper. I’ve got an idea of what I want to make; I’ve got a small set of things I know how to do; and I’ve got the time to figure it out.  I am doing it just to please myself after all.

So far what I’ve done is to make a frame.  I’ve made a pair of identical rectangles using dovetails. (And might I say, these might be the finest dovetails I’ve ever done.)  One of these rectangles will sit on the bottom of the chest and the other will be at the top. I’ve cut some boards, let’s call them stretchers, to keep the top and the bottom separated.

This is a frame.

I am going to make the top, bottom, and sides of the chest from panels of cedar boards that have been glued together.  I will glue these to the frame.

Currently my plan is to cut a space in the bottom panel about an eighth of an inch deep for the bottom rectangle to fit in.  This will keep the frame from sliding out of square with the bottom panel.

This is key.  This is the point of doing it this way.  The cutting I am getting good at. The gluing--a skill we learn in kindergarten--is hard.

While glue does hold pieces of wood together, before it starts to dry it can be kind of a lubricant.  I’ve clamped up something to glue overnight and when I came out to inspect it the next morning, I’ve occasionally discovered that some of the pieces have slipped out of square.  

Sometimes rather badly.

The answer is more clamps.

For small projects, while you can never have too many clamps, I am close to having enough. 

Close.  Not there. Close.

For larger projects this isn’t the case.  But large projects require large clamps, and large clamps call for large amounts of cash.

There are other toys on which that cash can be spent.

And I do have another solution.

I build frames. 

The frame is skeletal by nature and because of this it can be clamped with small clamps. You then use small clamps to clamp panels to this as the glue dries. I’ve used frames to make night stands, a shelf for the garage, a number of cabinets of varying sizes for the garage, a shelf for the pantry, and now a smallish cedar chest.

I am getting better at making frames.  My joinery skills are getting better.  I am better at cutting dovetails than I used to be.

And I am getting more patient.

I glue the top of the frame together; then I glue the bottom of the frame together; then I join the top to the bottom.

I could join the sides to the frame with glue and just leave it at that, with no physical joinery between the sides, but what fun would that be.

I’ve got two ideas:  The first is to join the lateral sides with dovetails; the second is to use rabbets and dadoes. (This would be making a tongue on one board and a groove on the other, and then sliding them together.)  I’ve been thinking about this in the small hours of the morning before men who want to stay married get out of bed.

Like I said, I am getting more patient.

I think my next step is to prepare the bottom of the box to be joined to the frame.  Maybe I will start gluing up the panels for the sides as well.

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like” the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube.

Carrots, Sticks, Students, and Cedar

By Bobby Neal Winters

I go back to teaching full-time next Tuesday, as I write this. I am looking forward to it, but I’m a little nervous.  I’ve held it out in front of myself like a carrot on a stick. 

Think about that metaphor for a moment. The idea is that you hang a carrot on a stick and dangle it out in front of your horse to keep him moving.

He never gets the carrot. 

But I do believe that teaching is what God put me on this Earth to do, so I believe I will keep on moving even when I get the carrot.

I’ve been told that the students have changed.  I’ve been told that they are harder to teach in these post-Covid days.

We shall see because we have to work with what we have.

This is Biblical.  You can read this in Genesis. God approaches those who would do his work and he works with the talents they have: Noah, Abraham, Jacob, Joseph, Moses. He takes their strengths and works with them.

I am working on a new project.  I’ve set out on it, and I am determined to do it.  I’ve got a bunch of cedar wood and I am making a chest from it. I’ve made a lot of boxes.  A LOT of boxes.  But a chest is a bit different.

It’s bigger.

On one hand, the geometry is the same. It’s just a big box. On the other hand, the physics and biology are different.  By that I mean that the box exists in the real world and I have to make it out of real wood. When boards get bigger, they...well...get bigger. Sometimes they can be awkward for an old man to handle. After a certain point, I don’t have clamps that are big enough to hold it all together at one time. This will affect how I do my joinery.

The biology comes in with the cedar.

Cedar is a beautiful wood. The color is, no, the colors are amazing. There is more to it than just the reddish brown.

I came into a windfall of cedar. A friend of mine and I got a couple of pickup loads of it from one of the good men north of Arma. It’s beautiful and fragrant, but cedar has issues.

At this point whenever I am telling this to someone in person, they will chime in and talk about the knots.

Yes, cedar has knots.  The knots are not my main problem.  My problem is with the cracks. Cedar is brittle and it likes to crack. As I take the rough cut cedar and mill it into boards myself, I’ve had difficulty cutting pieces long enough. They get to a certain length and have a crack in them.

In the first couple of rough-cut planks I processed, I had difficulty getting any piece much more than 16 inches long.

But this is my project, and this is the wood that I have, so I’ve got to work with it.

What I am doing is taking two pieces of wood and gluing them end-to-end to extend them.  There are many different ways to do this, some of them really bad.  (For those of you who know about this stuff and want to know, I am cutting half-laps on the ends of the board and gluing them together along the rabbets. If there is a better way, catch me over coffee and let me know.) 

After the glue dries, I run them through a planer, and it’s beautiful. You can see the break, but if you work at it, you can do it in such a way so as to make it pretty.

It’s going to take me a while to do this. Every board in the chest is going to be its own individual creation.

I will make the boards; I will glue them together into panels for the top, bottom, and sides; I will attach them to a frame.  The last part is because of the constraints of my shop. I don’t have a vise big enough to cut the dovetails.  I don’t have clamps big enough to glue it all at one time, so I will need to attach it to a frame.

But--potentially, depending on my skill--this could be beautiful.

We work with what we have, and if we care, if we take our time, if we have patience, something beautiful can happen.

Post-Covid students are different.  They did lose something from going online. We knew they would, but we did what we had to do. Now we work with that.

Given patience and skill, we can make something beautiful.  

I think I just heard the school bell ring. I need to go try to catch that carrot.

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like” the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube.

 Percy, Tyson, and Pepe La Pew

By Bobby Neal Winters

Many years ago I put forth my theories of “Cat Physics” and “Cat Chemistry.”  Every home has a cat number attached to it. The cat number of my house is three and the universe conspires in ruthless ways to maintain that number.  If a cat died, a new one appeared, and, by doing so, preserved the cat number. If a new cat turned up, then one of the old ones (or perhaps even the new one) would meet some sort of--sometimes grisly--end. 

You don’t mess with physics.

But time rolls on, and all sorts of things have happened. We are down to two cats (Tyson and Tubby) and one dog (Percy). This has been the case for so long a time now that I thought I would have to scrap the theory. However, events have transpired that have given me cause to believe the theory of conservation of cat number can be saved. 

Percy is a cocker spaniel, a black cocker spaniel with bits of white thrown in.  Percy is not the most aggressive of animals. This is a polite way of saying he is an absolute wuss. He’s scared of me; he’s scared of other dogs; he’s scared of children.

He is not, by way of contrast, scared of cats.

No.

Much the reverse.

Indeed, he is very much enamored of Tyson. Very much.  Very much and not in appropriate ways. At any opportunity, Percy will attempt to share with Tyson that “special hug” reserved for mommies and daddies in private.

Tyson (who is an outdoor cat) will for his part endure these attentions when the weather is cold. Whenever the door is open, he will rush into the house and put up with being pestered until he can find his special hiding place about the heating vent.

The interactions between these two bring to mind the old Merrie Melodies series of Pepe LaPew cartoons. (These are still available on Youtube, by the way.)

My younger readers may not have been exposed to these because they are far from being politically correct, so let me describe them directly.

Pepe La Pew was a skunk.  He was a French skunk, hence the name. In each of the cartoons, he fell in love with an American cat and would pursue her.  The pursuit was in spite of her--at best--indifference to him.  No, it was not indifference. The cat was always repulsed by and terrified of Pepe. He stank and was of a different species. She always ran in a complete panic.

The Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies cartoons were ran over and over when I was a child, but now not so much. It is not difficult to see why they stopped being run. One can easily interpret Pepe La Pew as being a sexual predator and ignoring the “no means no” ethic of today.

Alternatively, one could regret that we've been robbed of a teaching metaphor.  Pepe was completely oblivious that his attentions were unwanted by the female in question. We’ve shelved a resource that we could refer to when a man is pursuing a woman who does not want to be pursued. 

Perhaps it’s just as well. I suppose that no man would want to admit to himself that he’s the human equivalent of a skunk.  The fact that Pepe continues in his pursuit because he believes the cat is just playing hard to get could be considered problematic as well.

With this background now established, let me now say that Pepe La Pew is being played out in my out in my house on a regular basis. 

It’s uncanny sometimes because we have hardwood floors. They don’t provide much friction for a fast start. Because of this, Tyson and Percy run in place for a while before their feet catch the floor, just like in the cartoons.

We try to keep Tyson outside, but he is black and blends in well with the shadows. When a door opens during cold weather, he is ready and makes the dash into the warmth, knowing that he will have to endure the unwanted affection from Percy.

Patience with this behavior is wearing thin. At some point, our dear Percy might make a trip for “elective” surgery that will put an end to this, once and for all.

In the meantime, I am living in a politically incorrect cartoon.

I suppose we all are.

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like” the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube.

 The Three-Body Problem

By Bobby Neal Winters

I’ve just finished going through the audiobook version of The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu (translated by Ken Liu and Joel Martinsen).  If you like hard science-fiction, I recommend it, but the word “hard” there carries multiple meanings. It is not an easy book.

It’s made me think.

There is a line from The Lord of the Rings that comes into my head periodically: “Some things that should not have been forgotten were lost. History became legend. Legend became myth.”

We are in danger of forgetting that we are animals. We are, in fact, quite dangerous animals.  The error of forgetting that we are dangerous animals is self-correcting. When we forget, we are often reminded of it again in very concrete ways: the French Revolution; the Holocaust; the Cultural Revolution.

I mention the Cultural Revolution because it comes up in The Three-Body Problem. This is something most Americans are at best vaguely aware of. It is enough for us to keep track of our own atrocities. The TBP contains an account of a professor of theoretical physics who is beaten to death by a group of 15-year-old girls, who had been stirred into a frenzy of revolutionary zeal. 

I almost mis-used the word “righteousness” for zeal because this type of zeal is often associated with religion. While far too much blood has been shed in religious causes, religion does not have a monopoly here.

Part of forgetting that we are animals is the self-hatred that comes with it.  By self-hatred, I don’t mean to refer to a person hating himself, but to a person developing a hatred of the whole human race.

This is something that arises in the novel in connection with the Cultural Revolution but also in connection with the environmental movement.

I want to tread lightly here because I believe in taking care of the environment. In my personal interpretation of the scripture, I believe that Man was created to take care of the Earth--the plants, the animals, everything--for God, and that we are accountable to God for the job we do.   Even if we all agreed on that--and I truly doubt that we do--there is enough room for interpreting the details to keep us arguing for a long, long time.

Liu allows us to see that there are some among the environmental movement who hate the human race.  While they weep gallons at the extinction of a species of bird, they would not shed a tear if the human race disappeared forever. 

There are not many environmentalists like this, but they are there.

He also allows us to see that those who are too narrowly focused on the immediate needs of humans in the short-term can do needless, long-lasting damage to the environment. The thoughtless (read that word) exploitation of resources can be ultimately harmful to the human race.

There is a definite current in the TBP about the dangers of un-restrained zeal, whether that be in communism or environmentalism. We could no doubt add capitalism to that as well. 

For me, it took a while to figure out who the hero of this book actually is. 

The hero in a science fiction book is usually the first scientist who appears. Not so here.  It is a police detective named Da Shi who appears quite late. He’s crude; he’s obnoxious; but he saves the day and provides a ray of hope at the end.

There is not a shortage of villains.

The author has a warmth for the people in the country-side that shows through clearly, though he recognizes their foibles. He also recognizes the foibles and the fragility of intellectuals.

The title of the book, the Three-Body Problem, refers to an “unsolvable” mathematical problem. I put the quotes there because the solution requires a broadening of the idea of what a solution means.

The mathematical three-body problem is about the movement of celestial bodies. The two-body problem is solved: a planet circles its sun in an ellipse. It can be figured out with a formula. The general three-body problem cannot be solved in that way. It requires broadening one’s definition of what a solution is. One can know the truth, but that truth is no longer so specific as to be particularly useful.

Liu treats this part of the science in the book accurately. I was pleased as mathematics is not often dealt with in science fiction. In the tradition of all good science fiction, he science is accurate to the limit of current theories, though he does--in the tradition of the field--extrapolate to the point where the “science” is more like magic.

I’ll close as I opened.  I recommend this to science-fiction readers with the warning that it is challenging.

I understand that there is a series on Netflix...

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like” the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube.

Feeling Like Seven

 Feeling Like Seven 

By Bobby Neal Winters

Christmas has passed and we have all exchanged our gifts.  As a grandpa looking at his, I delight in the childlike wonder my grandsons exhibit, especially the wonder shown by the youngest.  At seven the world is still full of magic.

What we are reminded of while watching our grandchildren is that humans are like trees: We grow outward as we grow older. A tree grows taller and adds layers to itself, but that sapling that it began as is still there in the middle.  Indeed, that sapling in the middle gives a basic shape to everything that follows.

My Grandpa Byrd was a carpenter. He was until the day he died.  He’d kept his good mind almost to the end, but, as he was in the process of passing, he spent a lot of his time in a dream that was taking him back over the events of his life. He lay in bed having conversations with former co-workers with whom he was building. He used technical carpenter language which I cannot share in a family publication.

He never lost the wonder.

My parents would buy educational things for my brother and me: Magnets; magnifying glasses; such as that.

Magnifying glasses make things bigger. You can start fires with them. You can kill slow-moving insects with them. Don’t ask me how I know that last one.

Magnets can make things move at a distance. As Bruce Daniel, Professor of Physics, now deceased, once said, “You’ll never get closer to magic than that.”

My parents would buy us these things, and we would naturally show them to our grandfather. More often than you would expect, he would obtain these exact same items for himself at the TG&Y there in Ada.

Though he had been a carpenter and a guard on a chain gang; had buried two wives and raised two families; that seven-year-old with eyes open in wonder was still within him.

What brings this to a sharp point at the current time is a gift that my youngest grandson received: It was a UV resin set.

It occurs to me that this might require a bit of explanation. A resin is an organic polymer. Resins can come from nature. Amber is a resin.  Synthetic resins are available and very useful. The idea is that at first they are in a liquid form (like tree sap) and then they become solid (like amber).

I’ve become familiar with them because I want to use them in my woodworking.  There are times when after having spent hours with your wood, sizing it, shaping it, sanding it, joining it you make a slip and a small piece of it falls out.  Sometimes you can glue that back; often you cannot.  If you can’t glue the piece back, it would be nice if you had something that would fill the void.

Resin looks like a good solution.  In particular, I’ve had hopes for epoxy resin. Epoxy resin comes in two components, each of which is a liquid. You mix them together and they harden after time.

That last phrase “after time” is key here. 

How much time? 

Sometimes I’ve put the mixture in the void and it has all leaked out and then got hard.  By way of contrast, there have been occasions where it has gotten hard as I was mixing it.  Indeed, it got hard so fast that I couldn’t get the popsicle stick I was stirring it with out in time.  I was left with an epoxy resin popsicle that had the shape of the paper cup I was mixing it in.

I’ve gotten epoxy resin to do what I wanted on exactly one occasion.

But UV resin is different. 

There is no mixing. You have resin in an opaque bottle. You then squeeze it out where you need it and shine some UV (ultra-violet) light on it.  After a couple of minutes, it’s hard. The UV light--that you can’t even see--begins the hardening process.  It is, in short, like magic.

Someone had gotten my seven-year-old grandson a UV resin kit for Christmas and left it under the tree.

No sooner had he shown it to me and explained what it did than I had my phone out and placed an order on Amazon.

I was being like my Grandpa Byrd, but I didn’t even have to go to TG&Y.

I’ve already used it to fill a void in a box I am making out of oak that I reclaimed from a palette. It worked like a charm. It worked like magic.

It’s great to feel like seven again.

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like” the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube.

 Save Me

By Bobby Neal Winters

I’ve been listening to music in my garage again. A song I’d heard before caught my attention in a new way.  It was the song “Save Me” by Jelly Roll, but the thing that caught my attention wasn’t that this was a song by Jelly Roll. It’s a duet. The other half belongs to Laney Wilson of “Wild Flowers, Wild Horses” fame.  The duet is an old art form which has a comfortable home in country music.

As practiced in country music, the duet explores the relationship between man and woman.  While I can’t say that it grows out of the tradition of the Song of Songs from the Old Testament which is written as a poetic dialog, it is definitely in harmony with that tradition.  The male and female voice each explores its own side of the same situation.

The relationship between women and men is a paradox. It is symmetric and asymmetric at the same time. There are two sides: male and female.  They are on one hand seeking the same thing; but on the other seeking something different. When their shared purpose is achieved fully, the human race continues one more round. However, once that new life is begun, there are asymmetrical consequences. The woman bears those consequences and the man must be convinced to share the burden.

Like the old joke about the bacon and egg breakfast: Both are necessary; the hen is involved but the pig is committed. 

A song which demonstrates this paradox of symmetric-asymmetry well is “Stay in the Truck” by Hardy, again with Laney Wilson.  It demonstrates it so well that you might miss that it’s a duet. This song explores dark, dark corners of the male/female relationship. In its harsh, earthy art, it opens questions that would be perhaps uncomfortable, perhaps unwise to talk about openly. 

But we need to ask them, at least to ourselves.

In the history of country music, there have been pairs of singers who were prolific in their production of duets. I used “pairs” instead of couples because I don’t think they were all romantically involved. Loretta Lynn and Conway Twitty; Dolly Parton and Kenny Rogers; Johnny Cash and June Carter; George Jones and Tammy Wynette. 

Even as I look through this list of names I see symmetric-asymmetry. One of each pair is almost always dominant: Loretta over Conway; Dolly over Kenny; Johnny over June. Of all of them, George and Tammy seem the most evenly matched.  

The duets they collectively produced run from the happy little throw away of “Louisiana Woman/Mississippi Man” by Loretta and Conway to the tragic “Golden Ring” by George and Tammy.

Having the advantage of this history to build on, it seems to me the duets of late have become more artful and nuanced in the exploration of the relationship.

“I remember everything” with Luke Bryan and Kacey Musgove is subtle. The language used is quite poetic, but the interpretation by the singers is masterful. This is a song that could be sung by one person. However, sharing the verses among the two brings new meaning as by application of their art each brings different nuances to the exact same lines.

Of all of the songs I’ve mentioned, “Save Me” brings a sacred perfection to the genre. Jelly Roll begins,

Somebody save me, me from myself

I've spent so long living in hell.

He’s not a knight in shining armor rushing to save her. He’s calling out himself for help, for salvation.

Laney’s verse begins,

What if the night sky was missin' the moon?

There were no shootin' stars to use wishin' on you

This seems different. In her interpretation, we hear her as a separate person, the more stable of the couple, but as the chorus comes we see she is broken herself. They are two people whose broken edges mesh with each other.

Like “I remember everything,” “Save Me” could be sung as a solo with a single voice.  The words would not need to be changed, but oh, so much would be lost.

Herein lies the perfect metaphor for marriage. I can’t explain what I mean by that. You either understand me or you don’t.

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like” the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube.

 New Year Thoughts: Ashes in a Cedar Box

By Bobby Neal Winters

I’m thinking about life. I’m thinking about joy and suffering. I’m thinking about ways to explain my thoughts. Let’s work our way back to that.

I made a box from cedar for my mother-in-law’s ashes.

This will require some back story, so warm-up your coffee.

Here goes.

Next year is 2025. It has been a quarter of a bleeping century since the year 2000. It has been five years since 2020.

In late December of 2019, we were innocent of COVID-19. We had the dumpster-fire year of 2020 ahead of us. We didn’t know.

We just didn’t know.

Lock-down in March. Working from home. Working in our yards. Door-Dashing from restaurants.

We were always hoping it would just burn itself out, that it would just be over. Finally, we only have embers burning in odd corners, but that’s long after 2020.

Then we came to Christmas of that year. We took our lives in our hands and got together. It was a nice day. 

The next day--in separate events--a friend of mine passed-away from COVID, but before that my mother-in-law fell ill.

Seriously ill.

Because of the lockdown we couldn’t see her, couldn’t be with her.

That was the beginning of a 4-month waking-nightmare that ended with my mother-in-law’s death on May 1, 2021.  

We brought her home in January, so at least we had time with her, but that period marked everyone in the family, from oldest to youngest in a way that is still very present.

Each of us began to change in response to that event, to the interconnected events that occurred during the various dumpster fires associated with COVID. (“Dumpster fire” became part of my working idiom, for one thing.)

I took up wood-working in late 2021 and since then I’ve acquired some nice tools; have built up a nice shop; and have learned how to do hand-tool woodworking to a certain degree.

At some point I acquired a bit of rough-cut, locally-grown cedar.  Then this summer, the summer of 2024, I decided that I would make a box to put my mother-in-law’s ashes in. 

I measured the box the ashes are currently in. I cut and glued up some panels from the rough-cut cedar.

Then I just let them sit.  I had in my head what I wanted to do, but I just could not proceed. The wood panels just laid around my shop taking up space because I could not proceed.

Then Jean and I went to Scotland on a walking tour. This is something we just wouldn’t have done before. There was always time to do it later.

Then I went to Paraguay.

When I got back, Jean and I started talking about vacation for next year, and she said it was time to take Janet’s ashes to the family plot in Indiana.

I began squaring-up the wood for the cedar box right away, and within a week the box was done.

It is beautiful beyond my vision for it. 

It’s not perfect. If it were perfect, then it couldn’t’ve been made by me.

But it is beautiful.

Jean looked at it and said that we’re not burying it in her family’s plot in Indiana. We will keep it here and put some of her mom’s memorabilia in it. We will bury her ashes in something else.

Suffering is a part of life. Maybe we’re supposed to get something out of it; maybe not. It doesn’t matter because the suffering is just there.

You do what you can in response; it’s never enough; but maybe it’s better than not doing anything at all.

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like” the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube.

 Chisels, a cabinet, and the Bobist Way

By Bobby Neal Winters

Buying chisels, especially good chisels, is an addiction. They are useful, they are versatile, and they can be beautiful. I love my chisels, and I believe they love me too, even though they extract blood from me from time to time. I think that might be the way they show love.

I’ve gone from having one or two, to having several, and then to having many. Each has its use; each has its purpose; each is beautiful in its own special way.

Chisels need to be taken care of.  This means you need to keep them sharp; you need to keep them clean; you need to keep an imperceptibly thin coating of oil on them.  You take them out; you use them; you care for them; then you put them away. It is an eternal circle.

You need a place to put them.  This is key.

As my chisel addiction has come upon me gradually, I’ve not been intentional in having storage. First I had them in a drawer, then I bought a canvas roll with pockets, and then another canvas roll.

And then another.

I’m up to three canvas rolls for my chisels, and one or two more for my wood carving knives.  Wood carving knives is also an addiction.

A canvas roll as a means of storage is not completely satisfactory.

The rolls are nice, don’t get me wrong. They are a great place to put your chisels if you need to carry them from one place to the next. The problem comes with normal usage: You have to unroll them every time you use them and then put them back. Then unroll them again, the next time. 

And so on.

With all the rolling and unrolling it becomes easier just to leave them laying out, where they can get lost; where they can get something else put on them; where they can get knocked to the floor and chipped; where some other man might just come along and take them. (I shudder just thinking about it.)

I’m building a cabinet for my chisels.

This has happened by accident.  I bought a book on making tool cabinets with the hope there would be a nice, easy to follow plan in.  

This was not the case.

There were lots of pictures of lots of pretty, homemade tool chests, but not a plan for a single one. Here’s a picture of an acorn; now go and build a house.

So I didn’t have a plan, but I had an idea. Build some trays--some drawers with separators in it--for my chisels. I thought I might need to build two. Do the same for my knives. Then after the drawers were built, then build the cabinet.

There might be some great woodworking guru, some skillful master of tools who says this is the way to do it.

Don’t.

This next bit I am going to write carefully because they might be the most important words I’ve written.  If they ever start a religious order based on one of my writings, it will be about this one, so pay attention.

You are going to mess up. You ought to do everything as carefully as possible. Measure twice, cut once. That’s great. But as careful as you are going to be, you will still mess up from time to time.  Order your work so that when you do mess up you will be able to fix it.

For example, if you are cutting a board, arrange your actions so that if you err you will cut it a little too long instead of a little too short. It’s easier to take off a little more wood than to put it back on.

And again, if you are cutting a mortise and tenon, cut the mortise first and then cut the tenon. It is easier to cut a tenon to fit the mortise than the other way around. You can cut the tenon a little too fat and then slowly shave it to fit the mortise.

And finally, which I have just learned the hard way, when you are making a cabinet to hold drawers, make your cabinet first because it’s easier to make drawers to fit a cabinet than to change the whole cabinet to fit the drawers.  

That’s it. That’s what the Bobists will vow.

As I sit here, the glue is drying. It is probably as square as anything I’ve ever made, but it would be nicer and I would be less stressed out if I had made the cabinet first.

After the glue is dry, I will go out and put it conveniently located in my workspace. I’ll wax the drawers and the drawer runners. And I will rest better knowing my lovely chisels have a place to rest.

But it could’ve been better.

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like” the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube.

 A Wicked Image

By Bobby Neal Winters

Jean and I went to see “Wicked” on Black Friday. 

For those of you who don’t know, “Wicked” is a reimagining of “The Wizard of Oz” from the point of view of the Wicked Witch of the West. I suppose many of you are like me in that “The Wizard of Oz” was an annual treat for my family while growing up.  They used to show it on the holidays. I most strongly associate it with Easter.

The new offering, “Wicked” is funny; it’s got some great songs; and it will make you think if you are so inclined.

Oddly enough, the main theme in “Wicked” is the same as that of the original “Wizard of Oz”: Image.

There are spoilers ahead so I suggest seeing both “Wicked” and “The Wizard of Oz” before proceeding further.

As you recall, the big reveal in “The Wizard of Oz” was that the wizard wasn’t really a wizard at all.  He was a fast-talking carnaval showman. He’d created the illusion of magic to mislead the simple folk into thinking he was a wizard.

When Dorothy, the Tinman, the Cowardly Lion, and the Scarecrow went to him, he first sent them on a quest; when they unexpectedly succeeded, i.e. lived, the Wizard attempted to put them off.  After he was revealed to be a charlatan, the Wizard then gave the Tinman, the Lion, and the Scarecrow visible symbols of what they wanted rather than the things themselves. That is to say, he gave them the sort of “magic” that he did know how to use.

“Wicked” starts in time with the birth of Elphaba, the Wicked Witch of the West. She is born green and because of this is despised by her supposed father. I say supposed because it’s hinted that the Wizard is her father.  Because of her green color, she is an outcast.

At an early age, she discovers that she has true magical powers, something which is increasingly rare, even in the merry old land of Oz. Those of you who are interested in such things, take note that this is the textbook start for the classic “hero’s journey.”

Not an accident.

But I digress.

“Wicked” is a study of the importance of “image.” At University, the magically talented but green Elphaba meets the untalented but beautiful and ambitious Galenda (eventually to rename herself Glenda). Glenda is the archetypal popular girl.  She is beautiful, shallow, and un-self aware, serving as a perfect complement to Elphaba.

Glenda is one of those people who we are naturally drawn to love.  Their beauty is such that you must love them--if you can get over wanting to kill them.  Nature or God must have put them among us for a purpose. Whether they are designed by divine plan or by evolution, they are ultimately used by those who really run things to sway the opinion of us normal, homely folk.

One might be tempted to hate them because, but they are only cogs in the machine, just like the rest of us.

Elphaba, it seems, is the first person in Oz after a long, long time, who has any real magical ability at all. She, however, is unaware of this.  She believes that the Great and Powerful Wizard and her mentor at the university have magical power. 

This is not the case, but they carefully maintain the image of having magic.

Elphaba does have magic, but she doesn’t control her image, so it doesn’t matter.  She’s just green, and therefore, wicked.

While this movie is entertaining and has wonderful songs--though a young man of my acquaintance suggested it could be made a lot shorter by cutting the songs out--I believe we need to pay close attention. We are living in an age that is becoming increasingly “post-truth.” Image and perception are only things that matter. And as I think about it, this has been true for a long, long time.  

We are separated out into groups, set against each other, lied to, given a common enemy to hate.

And it is all laid out before us, in a “light” entertaining musical.

The whole battle plan of the ruling elite is rolled out in front of us in shocking clarity, and the ruling elite lets it happen.

They must not be very afraid of us.

On the lighter side, the movie is entertaining, does have some good songs, and they managed to make the flying monkeys scary again.

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like” the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube.

 A Four-Digit Word for Fool

By Bobby Neal Winters

Think about the first calculator you owned or your first LED watch, if you had one.  The symbols it used were displayed on a seven-segment LED.  These are somewhat misnamed. They have eight segments, not seven. One of the “segments” is not geometrically a segment; it’s a decimal point.

But the geometrical segments are the important part.  There are two vertical segments on the left; two vertical segments on the right; three horizontal segments up the middle.  Two plus two plus three equals seven, and you don’t even need an electronic calculator for that.

These LEDs are limited as to the symbols they can display. You can do the decimal digits: 0, 1, 2,..., 8, 9.  You have to have those for arithmetic.  You can also do: A, b, C, d, E, and F.  These are important to machine-level programmers who work in hexadecimal, i.e. base 16, arithmetic.  But there are constraints.  Note that even in getting all of the extra hexadecimal digits, I had to go lowercase for b and d.

Such is the skill of the brain of interpreting and reinterpreting that there were games played by nerds back in the 70s in making calculators spell words like bOObIES.

And nerds we were, but rest assured I never used my intelligence for anything that salacious. 

Since the first half of the year, I’ve been devoting a large chunk of my time to learning the details of the Atmega328P microcontroller. I’ve learned enough to add it to the list of things I can be a bore on. (That list is published in three volumes, and each volume is as thick as the Oxford English Dictionary.)

Given that this chip is smaller than a kidney bean, there is a surprising amount written on it.  The basic resources I’ve been using consist of a pair of 250-page technical documents.  Think of the style of writing in these documents being like the IKEA instructions for putting together the Roswell Probe, but without as many helpful pictures.

I’ve done this project in order to teach a class. And it is going to be a good class. But my idea of what I am going to do has changed tremendously as a result of my own learning experience. 

Tremendously.  I didn’t choose that word lightly.

A device like this--and indeed any computer-like device--does three things: it takes in data; it processes that data; it then displays its results. We can call that Input, Process, and Output. 

Of these three parts, we usually spend most of the time on the middle part, Process. This is not because it is so hard, but rather the reverse.  The remainder, Input/Output, is so hard that it has been done for us by others. It has been dealt with and put to the side so that most people can concentrate on the process part.

The thing is that someone has to think about Input/Output. Someone has to work out those details to make it easier for everyone else.

Last night I was at a Computer Science Club meeting. (It was at 6pm on the Friday night before Thanksgiving break; that is hardcore.) Two of the students who presented did so on computer mice they had made and programmed in one of their EET classes. They were amazing.

Computer mice represent input.

For my part, I’ve been working on writing to the seven-segment LED I mentioned at the beginning of this column.  The hardware I am working with (a Freenove project board for those of you who are interested) has a four-digit seven-segment LED.  This will let me display a decimal number between 0 and 9,999. If I use hexadecimal, I can get any number between 0 and 65,535, but only a nerd could read it. 

By the end of September--just before I left for Paraguay--I’d managed to write a program that would output to that four-digit display.  The problem was that I could no longer find anything in that program. It had grown organically as I was in the process of learning what I was doing, and it had gotten away from me.

Since that point, I’ve been going back over the code and basically rewriting it from scratch.

Last night, before the CS Club members gave their presentations, I went in and fiddled with my program just a little.  I’d been having trouble getting it to act predictably, but I had an insight and fixed something. 

I put in my code, pressed run, and there came my output in four seven-segment digits: bOOb.  While this has a salacious interpretation, I mean it as a description of someone who enjoys solving this sort of puzzle as much as I do.

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like” the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube.

 The Perfect Gift

By Bobby Neal Winters

I’ve finished the chess set.

Let me take that back.  I may put a coat of wax on the pieces, but, to outside observers, I have finished the chess set.

They are carved.  I’ve stained the hillbilly farmers and have oiled the dairy farmers.  I’ve made a box to keep them in. I’ve put dividers in to keep the pieces in order.

I am only lacking a hook latch to keep the box closed, and that is in the mail.

But, were I to die today.  If I had a coronary between this paragraph and the next one, there would be a tearful moment on Christmas morning when Jean shakily handed one present to my grandsons saying, “Your grandpa loved you. This was the last thing he made.  It was for you boys.”

Kind of makes you want to see the movie, doesn’t it?

This was an incredibly satisfying project.

Those of you who are of a certain age, know what I have in mind with it.  Fifty, sixty, one-hundred years from now, some child yet unborn will be rifling through a closet looking for games to play,come upon this box, and open it.

“What’s this?” the child will ask.

“Your grandfather’s grandfather carved it,” the mother will answer.

We just have to hope that things are going well enough that they don’t decide to use it as firewood.  But if they must, they must, and they have my blessing.

This is the nature of a gift. You give it, and you let go with hope.

I am now in a pleasant period of a good life.  In the 16th Psalm it is written:

Lord, you alone are my portion and my cup;

you make my lot secure./

The boundary lines have fallen for me in pleasant places;

surely I have a delightful inheritance./

I will praise the Lord, who counsels me;

even at night my heart instructs me.

I don’t have to worry financially. I have time to do things. I’ve got as much health as a 62-year-old could hope for. In other words, the boundary lines have fallen for me in pleasant places.

In addition to all of this, I’ve discovered the things that make me happiest, the things that give me the most satisfaction: Giving in secret to those who can’t repay.

If they know it’s me, if they thank me, it makes me uncomfortable. I am an introvert at the end of the day.

It’s nice if they actually appreciate it and if I can see that they do, but that is not necessary.

As much as I support giving money to institutions (the University, the Salvation Army, the Lord’s Diner), the feeling is strongest when whatever I am giving goes to individual people.

The chess set provides a nice metaphor for this.  It provides a connection between me and some people who won’t even know me one-hundred years from now. (Again, barring termites, fire, a family dog that likes to chew, etc.) I can think about the person taking it out, setting it up, and using it without the awkward discomfort of them coming to thank me.

My vision of this is somehow better for me than actually seeing it. That says something about me that I might need to think about, but let’s move on.

I’ve made clear the trouble with giving something like the chess set: These earthly treasures can be destroyed by moths and vermin.  We can give things that are harder to destroy.

When you teach someone how to do something, that can’t be destroyed.  Here I am talking about small, tiny things. Like how to wash a sharp knife. You keep it out of the sink until last, and you never let go of it. My father taught me this; his mother-in-law taught him this.  There might be a chain of learning that goes back to the invention of washing cutlery. 

Acts of kindness work in the same way.  If you treat someone with kindness, you are teaching them how to be kind. We are monkeys after all and monkey-see, monkey-do.

As in the sense of giving a gift, you have no control on what happens next; you have no control on what the person you give it to does with it.  There is just this vision in your mind that, maybe, somewhere down the line someone will get just a tiny bit of happiness out of something you’ve given, something you’ve done.

And they won’t even know it was you, so no awkward discomfort of thanks.

How perfect.

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like” the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube.

 The Right Words

By Bobby Neal Winters

When you are joining a couple of boards together, there are times when one of the boards sticks up a little bit higher than the other. We say that the board that is sticking up higher than the other is proud.  This is the classical meaning of pride: it sticks up just a bit higher than the rest.

If you are a joiner, what you do is to take your plane and shave the proud board down until it aligns with its partner.  Then everything is nice and even.

As speaking humans, words are our tools just as a plane is a tool to a joiner.  Instead of “speaking humans,” I was going to write “writers,” but every adult human being uses words as tools.  

I hate myself for what I am about to write. No, let me correct myself, I feel humbled for what I am about to write. And that is this: We need to be very, very careful in our use of words.

There are three words/phrases that are often used interchangeably.  I am of the opinion that those who are using these fragments of language believe in their hearts they all mean the same thing. 

No.

No, there are important differences.

What are these phrases?  Have I kept you in suspense long enough?  Okay, they are these:  Pride, Self-Esteem, and Self-Respect.

Consider the situation where someone is looking at a homeless person drunk in the gutter.  They see this person and ask, “Why don’t they have more pride?”

They don’t mean to ask that.  What they mean is, “Why doesn’t that person have more self-respect?”

Before you all go off on me, there are other questions that could be asked: What can I do to help?  What can be done to help? What is the best way to proceed with my life?

And there are all sorts of assumptions that are made in the question.

But that is what they mean to ask. They aren’t asking why the person isn't puffed-up, putting himself above others. They are asking why the person isn’t giving himself respect as a human being, as a child of God?

Respect is a call for mindfulness in the sense you really need to pay attention to something.  You respect a sharp knife; you take care when you are handling it so as not to cut yourself.  But you also keep it sharp and avoid abusing it when you work with it.

Respect is a good word.

But we can also get into trouble with the use of the word “respect.”  There is a persistent, and dare I say respectable, cohort of the human race that says, respect must be earned. It carries the sense that you save your respect for something better.

I think about this on and off.  I will think about it some more.

We now come to the phrase “self-esteem” because it is also problematic.  This is to say, it rubs some people the wrong way. In particular, the teaching of self-esteem in the public schools is considered suspect in some quarters.  Is too much self-esteem really healthy?  

I see why there are problems with this, but I also see the attraction of teaching self-esteem. That is, I see why some would say it is a good thing.

Maybe we are trying to get a word or two to do too much work.

The question--it seems to me--is less about the particular words, and more about the actions we take.

We need to look at ourselves to see who we really are. This may be the hardest part, and it might very well be spread over a period of years.  To do this, you have to look at yourself from a distance.  

This is hard. 

As Robert Burns said: “O wad some Power the giftie gie us/ To see oursels as ithers see us!”

Then, like you were looking at something that has value but needs help, you go to work fixing it.

The phrase we often use in a situation like this is, “This needs a little love.”

That four-letter word is a bit over-burdened itself, but maybe it is the one I am looking for.

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like” the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube.

 Rockets, Fanny Hill, Computer Programming

By Bobby Neal Winters

Rules can be frustrating, but they can free us.

One of my favorite science communicators, Scott Manley, did a YouTube video recently about the engineering reasons for the shape of Blue Origin’s rocket. If you don’t know what I am talking about, I suggest you google this very carefully and you will be enlightened. In order to prevent being too--direct--in describing “the shape,” Manley makes use of quotations from “Fanny Hill: The memoirs of a woman of pleasure” by John Cleland.  

My understanding--I’ve never read it--is that “Fanny Hill” (written in the 1700s) is a work of pornography.  Because of the times, Cleland had to be very careful about avoiding direct language. Because of this, he was forced into the world of colorful euphemism.  For similar reasons, Manley makes use of the reservoir of creative description from “Fanny Hill” in his video on the unfortunate shape of Blue Origin’s rocket.

I found it to be hilarious. Perhaps that is a sign of my fallen nature.

But there is a point to be made here: Constraints foster creativity.  Having rules in place to avoid direct description of vulgar objects, forced Cleland to be creative in his euphemisms. 

While goodness knows we don’t have the same sort of constraints in place now that they did in the 1700s, there is quite a tradition of being roundabout in language for the sake of preserving the innocence of children, a noble cause. This tradition has produced quite a bit of very good art.

I faced this myself recently while carving some chess pieces for  my grandsons. (Please, please, if you run into them, don’t let on.) Each of the main pieces was carved from a piece of bass wood that was one-inch square and 4 inches tall.

As you may recall from a previous column, this is a non-traditional chess set.  Instead of a king and queen, there are farm couples.  Instead of knights, one side has dogs and the other has cats. Instead of bishops, one side has priests and the other has preachers. 

There were lots and lots of different ways the carving could have gone, but the size constraint made of a lot of my decisions for me.  There were things that I simply could not have done--with my small skillset--in that space.

Art is not the only place where this phenomena occurs. I’ve run into it in computer programming.  (Indeed, I owe the notion to the computer programming guru Robert “Uncle Bob” Martin.) For the past several months, I’ve been learning assembly language programming.  Those of you who have been loyal sufferers of this space, may recall that I went through a period of learning Python programming.  

What is the difference between these two? By analogy, Python is London where you have subways,taxis, Ubers, and trains.  Assembly language is the Amazon where if you want to get anywhere, you need to first make a dugout canoe, but before you do that you need to make an ax, but before you do that, you need to learn to smelt iron, etc.

This comparison goes further.  Python, like London, has a lot of laws; by way of contrast, there may be laws in the Amazon, but who is there to enforce them?

Assembly language is wide open; there are very few constraints. Which means it can be hard to do, but there is a trick to make it easier: you put the constraints on yourself.  Arrange your code like you arrange your workshop.  Force some structure on yourself.

This will require some creativity on your part, but it will make what you write easier to read.  The time you save may be your own.

None of this is new. Members of religions have been putting constraints on themselves for thousands of years. (Or God, has.)  THOU SHALT NOT! 

Monastic orders impose rules upon themselves. Times of prayer throughout the day, throughout the year.  Times for restricting the intake of food; times for feasting! Rules to be followed.

We do have to be careful.  Too many rules will try us down like the Lilliputians tied down Gulliver. But--as a friend told me once--if a kite doesn’t have a string on it, it can’t fly.

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like” the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube.

The Quintessence of a Dog

 The Quintessence of a Dog

By Bobby Neal Winters

I’ve been back in my workshop, back working with wood.  I aim to be an artisan, not an artist.  Indeed, to be recognized as an artisan would be a great step forward for me as a hobbyist. 

But I have made a discovery: If you aspire to be an artisan, you must open yourself to be at least a little bit of an artist. 

To be either, I need to put in a lot more practice.  In order to do this, I’ve set up some projects.

Don’t tell my grandsons, but I am carving them a set of chessmen for Christmas. Before you set the wrong image in your head, let me explain that this isn’t the usual King, Queen, Bishop, Knight, Rook, Pawn setup.  

It’s a country chess set.  I am carving it out of one inch by one inch by four inch balsa wood.

Instead of the King and Queen, I’ve got a farm couple, or farm couples, I should say, because I am making them different from each other.  One man is wearing a cowboy hat and his wife is wearing a bonnet.  The other man is wearing a baseball cap and his wife’s hair is uncovered.

Instead of Knights, I am giving one side dogs and the other side cats. Instead of bishops, I am giving them preachers. If I can figure out how to carve collars, I will make one side Catholic and the other Protestant. 

Rooks, at this point, are undecided.

Outhouses have been suggested, and I am fond of that suggestion.  I think they will be easy to carve in a recognizable way--and that is important as I will explain later--and that they will be cute.  For the other side, I am thinking of milk tanks because--in my mind--the man with the cap and the woman with the flowing hair are dairy farmers. That is why they have cats.  However, they are not easily recognized.

Let me now explain why that is important.

I am in an interesting phase of my craft. When I carve, say, a dog, I will show it to a nice person to ask what they think. They look at it, study it carefully, and say, “What a cute...dog?”

I will then heave a sigh of relief, and say, “Yes, yes, a dog.”

Let me just say, it takes a lot of work to carve even something that looks barely like a dog, and to do it on a small piece of wood.

I am mentioning dogs rather than cats because they have been harder for me.  It’s the noses, the snouts.  

All cats' noses look alike--at least at the point of view of someone with my tiny skill set--but dogs have a huge variety of snouts. They have all sorts of lengths and all sorts of angles.  If you are just a tiny bit off with a short nose, you go from dog to pig. And that’s no good.

I’ve had to do some thinking about what makes a dog look like a dog, what makes a cat look like a cat, what makes a farmer look like a farmer etc.

To make a dog look like a dog, I’ve had to stop worrying about making it a realistic dog. For me, the snout can’t be realist, or, as has been mentioned, we slide the slippery slope down into pig-hood. 

The snout must be--at least a little--cartoonish.

At my low level of carving skill, the photo-reality of a dog is in tension with the dog’s quintessence. And the quintessence has got to win if someone untutored beforehand looks at it and says, “What a cute dog!” with the exclamation point there instead of a question mark.

What makes a dog--in my opinion at least--is its snout AND its ears.  For the cat, it’s the ears and the tail.  Whiskers add a bit as well, but it is hard to tell in a small medium.

At the end of this, I will have increased my skill set a bit. I know this because I’ve gotten better already.  And my grandsons will have something to remember grandpa by.  

And I hope they will have evidence that they themselves will always be able to learn something new. And that I love them. And that those are dogs.

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like” the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube.