Saturday, January 29, 2022

If I Had a Hammer

 If I Had a Hammer

By Bobby Neal Winters

I received an email this week from a friend and former coworker who, among other kind things, told me my writing just “keeps getting better.”  It kind of made my day.  She knew me well enough to know this was the best thing to say. Let me explain.

I’ve taken up wood work.  When I first typed that sentence, “wood work” came out as “word work.”  Word work would be writing, wouldn’t it?

When Jean and I first got to town almost 33 years ago, we had very little, but we did have a VCR, and we kept getting tapes for it.  These things begin to pile up, so I decided to make a cabinet to hold VHS tape.  I did it using only wood, glue, and dowel pegs.  I may have used a couple of metal hinges and the associated screws; I forget.

It was horrible.  And we used it for many years.

By horrible I mean, I used cheap wood; I didn’t sand it; the glue was e-v-e-r-y-w-h-e-r-e.  The hinges were crooked.  

But it did function. And only recently did it go in the dumpster.

A lot of writing is the same way. It can be ugly, but still function. Yet when you get to a certain point in your craft as a writer you might wish to put it in the dumpster.

As I watch videos about woodworking, I have noticed there is a collection of techniques and tools they run to again and again.  They build a lot of boxes.  Almost everything is a box.

You want to make a chest of drawers?  Well, a drawer is a box without a top. The chest is just a box with strategically placed holes in the front.

It is more than that, of course, but that will serve for broad strokes.  Even the boxes have pieces, and there are techniques in putting the pieces together.

I’ve been watching a lot of Steve Ramsey who has the WoodWorking For Mere Mortals channel. In one of his earlier videos, he made a chessboard, which is something I now want to do.  When he put the finish on, he put something like six layers of varnish on, letting it dry in between each layer. He then began the process of sanding. He sanded it down through finer and finer grits, using more and more sophisticated techniques.  It looked like jewelry when he was done.

These days, he recommends spray-on varnish. And sometimes he says you needn’t do any finish-work at all.

It’s about the purpose.  You see, you can take his techniques for finishing the chessboard, and use it to make a table top, desktop, etc, and make that surface very, very nice.  But that sort of attention is not needed for everything.

Likewise, in writing, we have our tools.  We break things into pieces.  Writers don’t build boxes; writers build paragraphs. Instead of using glue, screws, and mortise-and-tenon, we use transitions, themes, and metaphors.

Writers and woodworkers both have to practice.  If I say, “Practice makes perfect,” someone will say, “Perfect practice makes perfect,” so instead I will say, “Practice gives us opportunities to get better.”

In the end, in whatever you do, you aren’t going to be perfect.  At least I’m not. I do hope in writing and woodworking to get 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. )


Saturday, January 22, 2022

A Cold and a Broken Hallelujah

A Cold and a Broken Hallelujah

By Bobby Neal Winters

Leonard Cohen passed away in 2016 at the age of 82.  He was a tremendous song writer who wrote a couple of my favorite songs, but I’d never heard of him until years later.  It’s not that he didn’t record songs himself, but other people recorded his songs too and struck gold with them.

Other people were more successful in interpreting his songs than he was.  Don Henley and Sigrid somehow rendered more popular interpretations of “Everybody Knows” than he did.  Rufus Wright and Jeff Buckley had better interpretations of “Hallelujah” than he did.

Interpretation is an underrated gift.  I mean interpretation in art here not interpretation in language as you might think about it, but that is a good analogy.

The model of communication is simple.  The artist has a box of symbols; the interpreter has a box of symbols, not necessarily the same ones; and the artist sends his symbols to the interpreter over a channel that might have some noise in it.  Let’s ignore the noise because it will distract us from the point; it would be noise, as it were.

Think of it as the artist is trying to transmit a picture of something he sees to the interpreter.  He puts together a picture with some puzzle pieces that he has.  He sends the names of the puzzle pieces to the interpreter.  The interpreter picks out the puzzle pieces from his collection that he believes corresponds to the ones the artist sent.  

There is a subtle point here, so I am going to try to be careful.  The picture that the interpreter puts together may never look exactly like the one that the artist sent.  The interpreter’s puzzle pieces are either going to be bigger, smaller, or shaped differently.  But...

But the picture the interpreter puts may in fact look more like what the artist saw than the picture the artist put together.

This can happen in a number of ways.  The interpreter and the artist live in the same reality.  They craft their symbols, their puzzle pieces from that same reality.  The interpreter may have a more refined set of symbols than the artist has.  

This happens when the artist looks in a particular direction and sees something that no one has seen.  His message causes the interpreter to look in that same direction.  The interpreter then resends the message with his own set of symbols.

Johnny Cash was very good at this.  It is well known that he interpreted the Nine Inch Nails song “Hurt” and owned it thereafter.  Cash had an amazing set of tools for this, especially when he recorded it. His voice was aged to perfection.  But this was magnified through the lens of Cash’s gigantic personna. We knew Johnny; we heard Johnny’ we believed Johnny.

Sometimes the relationship of the interpreter to the artist is like that of the merchant to the explorer.  The explorer goes to the islands on the other side of the world and brings back the exotic spices.  The merchant tastes the spices; feels the heat; and uses his tools to make them into a product.  Elvis was a merchant and Chuck Berry was the explorer for “Johnny B. Goode.”

This is a good place to mention Jimi Hendrix and “All Along the Watchtower.”  

“All Along the Watchtower” was written by Bob Dylan. But after Jimi Hendrix sang it, it became his.  He owned it; Dylan has said this himself. In the manner of Johnny Cash his skills and personna combined to bring it to another level.  But Hendrix also took the song from Dylan’s Folk market to the Rock market.  He was able to reach people Dylan was not.  

Sometimes, and this is much rarer than what I described above, the interpreter takes what the artist did to a completely different place.  He finds something within the message the artist sent a deeper truth than the artist himself knew.  He raises what the original artist did to a higher level of abstraction.  This is something the best preachers do in their sermons.  

They take life illustrations and raise them to a higher level.  As fewer people go to church and even fewer listen to sermons, there will be less and less of this.  I wonder what effect it will have on our culture.

In any case, thank God for the Artist and also for the interpreter.

Amen and amen.

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. )



 

Saturday, January 15, 2022

Some Applied Mathematics

 Some Applied Mathematics

By Bobby Neal Winters

Take control of your space.

That is the advice I gave to my students when I used to teach the introductory level math courses.  You need to find a quiet place.  You need to have your paper, your pencil, your eraser, and your calculator all right there.  If you need a protractor, a ruler, or a compass, have them all at hand.

Have your space organized and free of distractions.  Don’t tolerate invasions of it. It’s okay if someone borrows your protractor, but make them put the son of a gun back.

But control and order are the words of import.

Once you have control, you can proceed.

This is for basic mathematics.  The strength of higher mathematics is the abstraction.  Take a simple, concrete, easy-to-understand notion and raise it to a higher realm of thought.

One of the jobs that I have--either done one way or another--is helping students who are in some sort of academic trouble. A lot of this--and I didn’t keep track of the numbers, but a lot--is caused by not being in a stable situation at home.  They are in a position where they can’t set up the study environment that I described above.  It could be there are financial issues; it could be the parents have problems; it could be drugs and alcohol.

Whatever the reason, there is instability. Until that is fixed, the student is not going to have their best shot at an education.  Indeed, until that is fixed, the student--the human--is not going to have a good shot at life.  If they can get that instability fixed, it will be more important to them in the end than 100 college degrees.

They need to get control of their space.

Sometimes--often--the issue is deeper. The instability lies within themselves. Sometimes the drugs and alcohol are simply self-medication for a deeper illness.  We are getting a better understanding of mental health issues, and I hope we are on our way to being more enlightened. This is a hard step because at the mildest people with mental health issues can be annoying and sometimes they can be scary.

There are things that can be done with self-discipline, daily routines, building good habits, and counselling, but sometimes meds are the only way.  The meds, well..Sometimes they work better than others. They are hard to get calibrated to begin with, and then they can get uncalibrated and everything comes to pieces until the right mix can be found again.  

I’ve seen it over and over and over from multiple angles. 

But many people are striving with it in silence.

In order to proceed they must get control of their space.  It will be of more worth to them than 1000 college degrees if they do.

I am currently putting a workshop together.  That’s what has me thinking about all of this.  There are certain items that you have to have.  You have to know where they are.  That means that you have to have a place to put them; the way that things are stored has to make sense; and you have to put things back once you’ve used them.  You can loan things out, but when they are returned--if they are returned--you need to be sure they are back where they belong.

Because this is your space.

This transfers to the job as well.  You can see how a bookkeeper might do this; you can see how someone in the trades might; but it is also applicable in management.  There are certain things that have to be kept in order; certain things that need to be controlled.

But it is all the same principle.

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. )



Friday, January 07, 2022

The Holy Trinity of the Frontenac-Pittsburg Metroplex

 The Holy Trinity of the Frontenac-Pittsburg Metroplex

By Bobby Neal Winters

The leaders of commerce in this town are creating a paradise for us on the northern end of our lovely metroplex. They have created a Holy Trinity of stores for those of us of a certain turn of mind.

In the beginning were two words and those two words were Home Depot (which I sometimes jokingly turn into Home Despot--such jokes are more effective from more reliable spellers than me). And Home Depot was god and that god sat kitty-corner across from where Wal-Mart used to be.

Then came Tractor Supply.  Tractor Supply isn’t as showy as Home Despot (there I go), but it’s impressive.  The thing is that it has more than just supplies for tractors.  There is stuff in there that you didn’t know you wanted until you saw it.  There is stuff in there that would be better than gold to the sturdy men and women who carved this nation from the wilderness.

Now, at last, we have the completion of the Holy Trinity; the icing on the cake; the bow on the gift: Harbor Freight.

I’d only been to Harbor Freight once or twice in my life, and that was in Joplin.  To tell you the truth, I wasn’t very impressed.  That could be because I just didn’t look it over; or it could be because the one we have in the Frontenac-Pittsburg metroplex is just better.

I made my third trip to our new Harbor Freight yesterday, but this was my most important trip, because it’s the first time I’d been there alone.  My wife had been with me before, and as my fellow husbands can share, having the better half around affects matters.

Harbor Freight is the equivalent of a toy store to a certain turn of mind.  And what I said of Tractor Supply is even more true of Harbor Freight: There is stuff in there that you didn’t know you wanted until you saw it.  Then you might not know what it is, but you still want it.

I went there looking for something.  I didn’t find it, but I found a couple of other things I needed at a price below what I could’ve bought it for online.

I began this piece by praising the leaders of commerce in the area.  It could be that this happened by accident.  One has to be careful praising anyone from City Hall or downtown because sometimes it goes to their heads.  Luckily, we’ve got people who will complain if they buy sand for the roads because it might not snow; then they will complain if it snows, and there’s not enough sand.  There is no winning.

In any case, our current state of affairs is such a nice turn that it looks like design, so I am going to risk praising someone even if it’s not by name and even if they didn’t do it.

So excuse me.  I am now going to finish this up and make a run to the north end of town.

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. )



Saturday, January 01, 2022

Taking a Table Saw to the Tree of Knowledge

 Taking a Table Saw to the Tree of Knowledge

By Bobby Neal Winters

In the cult classic, The Gods Must Be Crazy, a tribe of hunter gatherers finds a Coke bottle, and it is such a strange, versatile object, it sows discord among the tribe, and the bulk of the movie consists of our hero on a journey to get rid of it.

The message of the film is that this primitive tribe, by virtue of taking this action, is wiser than the more “developed” peoples who created the bottle.  

If only you could just throw problems over a cliff and they would disappear into the clouds.

In our tradition, that notion was dealt with early.  When we ate from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, we were thrown out of paradise, and an angel with a flaming sword was put at its entrance to keep us from going back.

When you learn something new, there is no unlearning it.  The cat is out of the bag, the genie is out of the bottle.

It is just there.

What the righteous must do is to learn how to deal with it now that you know about it.

We’ve been cleaning out an old house we use for storage. In the course of doing that, we did two things: We found a table saw that belonged to Jean’s father and we cleaned out enough floor space that it could actually be used.

Over the last 32 years I’ve been in town, there have been many occasions when I could have used a table saw.  There have been many occasions when a table saw was exactly what I needed. And on every single one of those occasions I’ve had to figure out some other way to do what needed doing.

I’ve sawed boards in every conceivable awkward position you can imagine.  I could’ve written the kamasutra book of carpentry. Now here within my very grasp is a table saw.

Here’s the thing though:  I don’t know how to use a table saw.

And a table saw is a thing that needs knowing before you use it.

There are two types of people who just read that sentence.  One is confused because a table saw is very simple to use. You plug it in, turn it on, and slide a board across the blade. Very easy.  The second type of person says, yes, and you might very well have a few fingers laying loose when you are done.  (When I looked at the safety videos on this on YouTube, one emergency room physician remarked that reattaching fingers is not quite as easy as you may have been led to believe.)

The table saw is a simple device that you still have to learn to use.

That is true for every single thing that was ever invented.  The invention of the thing is only a small part of the story.  The rest of the story is the world learning the best way to use it.

Consider the knife, or more generally, the cutting edge.  Somebody came upon a sharp piece of flint.  He or she discovered you could cut with it. Somebody else figured out you could kill animals with it. Somebody else discovered you could cut your food into smaller pieces with it. Somebody else discovered you could kill people with it.  Now we’ve got it in operating rooms and wood carving sets.

The thing came into the world; there was no putting it back; then there was learning how to deal with it.

So I am spending some time learning the right way to use a table saw.  I am determined to leave this world with the same number of fingers that I came into it with.  I hope they don’t have to put them in a tupperware dish in the casket with me.

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. )