Of Chisels and Men

 Of Chisels and Men

By Bobby Neal Winters

They say that iron sharpens iron. If you get nothing else from this, stick that in your pocket and keep it.

I sharpened my chisels last night.  

This is not a sentence that I ever thought I’d write, not even in a work of fiction.  I could have imagined writing, “We planted gooseberries on Ganymede,” in a work of science fiction, but not the sentence about the chisels. 

This is nuts.

I’ve been tracing back my entry into woodworking to having found my father-in-law’s table saw.  That was an import point of transition on the route, but there were multiple other such points on the way.

Summer 2020, we were in the lockdown, working from home. No movies; no vacation; no restaurants. Stuck.At.Home.

I went into the back yard, and I saw my youngest daughter’s boyfriend working on his car.  I went into the front yard, and I saw my neighbor across the street working on his house.  

With their inspiration, I decided to become more active.  I began putting in a paver sidewalk in the backyard.

I looked at what I’d done; I saw that it was good; and I started doing more things out of the stinking house.

These are both young men: the first under 30 and the second under 40.  Young men, healthy men, working men.  Neither men of many words.  I looked at their actions, and they inspired me.

So here I am, sharpening chisels.

There is a right way to do this.  Or maybe I should say, a good way.  I would hate to rule out all other methods, because even among the pros there are a variety of ways.

This particular method involves taping different grades of sandpaper to glass, spraying the glass with Windex, and sharpening the chisels on the coarser sandpaper first and then working your way up to the finer.  After that, you polish your edge on a leather strop.

It doesn’t take as long as it might sound, and when you are done--if you do it correctly--you have a sharp chisel.

I fell in love with chisels by watching Paul Sellers on YouTube.  He is a master.  He makes it look so easy.  He comes off as a model teacher; he seems kind; he’s not dogmatic; he teaches by showing.

He doesn’t say, I am going to tell you the right way to do things. Rather, he does something well, and you want to do the same.

Doing that requires a sharp chisel.

As a part of our rite of passage into manhood, Dad gave my brother and me pocket knives.  Sharp pieces of steel.  We were told never to hammer on them.

A chisel is a sharp piece of steel that you can hammer on.  

I think I’ve just glimpsed a great truth of the universe so indulge me for a moment.  The steel is necessary for neither the knife nor the chisel. A sharp piece of flint would do in either case.  Sharp pieces of flint were lying around long before Man ever came along, but there were neither knives nor chisels then.  It was Man who created knives and chisels; it was his use of each of these that made them what they are.

Until a few months back, I’d only owned one chisel.  In light the the previous paragraph, I should say that I owned a piece of steel that was kind of sharp on one end and had a bakelite handle on the other. 

Only after having watched Paul Sellers at work and put in some practice myself did that piece of steel turn into a chisel. This is beginning to sound a little mystical even to me, but “You ain’t heard nothin’ yet.”

I got myself set up to sharpen my now multiple chisels first by setting out all of my sharpening paraphernalia: sandpaper, strop, Windex; the whole shebang.

Then I began to gather my chisels.  I had the one I had owned for years; I had three that my brother had given me; I had six that I had gotten from Amazon.

Then, from the corner of my eye, I saw three more.  They were in an ancient plastic bag.  They had obviously belonged to my father-in-law.  I removed them from the bag, and it was as if I’d never seen them before.  I looked at them, and I could tell these were good chisels.  While my father-in-law never wasted money, and there was quite a bit of er....crap...among the tools that he left, there were also some quite fine pieces.

These were quite fine.

I tested them on some wood I had there.  

They were already sharp.

What had been just pieces of steel that were sharp on one end and had plastic on the other, became chisels and appeared before my eyes.

They were a gift from Jim, my father-in-law, who passed away 16 years ago.

I did feel a bit of chill.

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.

Shaving in Full Circle

 Shaving in Full Circle

By Bobby Neal Winters

A few years ago I started shaving with oil instead of shaving cream. I liked the simplicity: You didn’t have to wipe it off afterwards. I liked the smell: cloves.

Word started coming back to me from some of my readers that you could shave with other things too, like hair conditioner, for example.  Just save those tiny little bottles every time you go to a motel and use them for shaving.  Or just steal some of your wife’s hair conditioner; you won’t use enough that she will ever miss it.

So I shaved my way through a variety of odd substances. It was a good time in which I didn’t spend any money on shaving cream.

It is now that I pause and note that this is just a little bit crazy. Shaving cream is not the big expense associated with shaving. The big expense comes with the disposable razors with the brand I used to use costing $2.40 apiece. To make the math come out even, say you get 6 shaves out of one. That’s $0.40 per shave.  Even if you are stealing hair conditioner to shave with, that’s expensive.

I’d gotten tired of that.  I decided that I wanted to “put it to the Man,” so I made a change.

Joe Scott, who runs the YouTube Channel, “Answers with Joe,” started advertising a “new” way to shave.  Actually, it’s a retro way to shave. It’s using something which used to be called (and now seems ironic) a “safety razor.”

There is a company which sells a slightly updated version of the safety razor which uses the old-fashioned single blades.

Men of my age will remember these.  They were what our fathers and grandfathers used.  

These men of my age will also remember the arms race involved when first they went to the two blades (there was a commercial with an animation showing the old-fashioned blade bend in-two), then to three, then to four, and, I believe, now to five. There was justification for every step. The first blade pulls it out; second cuts it off.  Then the reasoning became a bit less intuitive.  I suppose they took for granted that “more is better” would carry the day, and it did.

And, of course, the more blades, the more you pay.

Anyway, Joe Scott on YouTube was recommending this old-school solution and it appealed to me.

The company selling the old-school solution has a different business model.  It makes its money off the razor itself which costs $60 up front in a one-time expense.  Their razor differs from Dad’s razor in that it is designed to hold your blade at an angle to make it cut better.

In contrast to disposable razors, the blades cost $6 per hundred instead of $2.40 apiece.  I currently (remember that word) am getting about 5 shaves per blade, but let’s be conservative while making the math easier at the same time and say I get three shaves out of a blade. That would be about $0.02 per shave if nothing else changed. If.

I said I am currently getting 5 shaves per blade.  When I started using them, I was getting one or two.  That is still only three to six cents per shave, but something else was happening.  

You see there was another reason for the paradigm shift to the double, triple, quadruple, and (dear Lord) quintuple blades.  They don’t cut you as bad as the ironically named “safety razor.” 

In the beginning, shaving with hair conditioner, I was cutting the fool out of my face.  I was walking around with my face looking like a rare cut of steak some days.

Some men would’ve switched back to the multiple-bladed crimes against nature, but not me.  I’d suck $60 into my old-school solution, so nevertheless, I persisted.

Seeing my quandary, and knowing that she is married to an idiot, my dear wife suggested I start using shaving cream.

So I did.

The difference that made was almost immediate.

My shaves were much less bloody, and my blades started lasting longer.

My wife does the shopping so I don’t know what she paid for the generic can she bought me, but you can bet that it was less than the $1.80 per can that Barbasol gets. I believe that it’s safe to assume that one can will last for a month’s worth of shaves, so that is 6 cents per shave. 

With the 2 cents per shave I am spending on blades, that is a total of 8 cents per shave.  This means that I am saving $0.32 per shave.  I still have to account for the $60 I spend up front on the “specially designed” safety razor, but that will be paid for by the savings in 188 shaves.

Yes, growing a beard would’ve paid for it faster.  But being clean-shaven is the tradition of my people, so there.  

To summarize, through years of expense, experimentation, and blood, I am now shaving the way my grandfather did 100 years ago.

It’s progress, I guess.

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 Case for Standard Time

The Case for Standard Time

By Bobby Neal Winters

By the time this reaches the newspaper, we will have endured yet another brutal time change. I hate the time change.  I hate change, but let’s not digress. Many would agree with me on hating the time change and say that we should stay with daylight savings time year round. 

That is where we would part ways.

I’ve no illusion that what I write here will change anyone’s mind, but occasionally, in my role as a scholar, I must choose to die on a hill that no one cares about.  

This is that hill.

We switch between two time frames: Standard Time and Daylight Savings Time.  By the choice of nomenclature, clearly they want us to believe that Daylight Savings Time saves daylight.  It does not.  There is exactly the same amount of daylight regardless.

In contrast to this, Standard Time is standard.  I will now explain why that is. There was a time before clocks. When you got up when the light woke you, and you went to sleep after the dark had made you sleepy.  It was back in the days we were all red in tooth and claw, aka Hobb’s State of Nature.

In getting through the day, people would mark the path of the sun.  How high was it in the sky?  Was it at its high point, half way through the day yet?  If not, that was morning; if it had passed that it was afternoon; but the important part that helped divide it all up was noon.  

Noon was the basic standard.

At some point astronomers (or maybe astrologers, let’s not split that hair) split the day up into finer pieces.  We call them hours. Because the sun travels a semicircle (more or less) across the sky, they begin to think of the whole day/night cycle as a circle.  Because the math was easy, they cut each half of the cycle into twelve pieces.  These pieces are what come down to us as hours.

Before we got clocks, people dealt with time in a much looser way. I’ll get there at noon would mean some time in the middle of the day.

Then we got clocks, and the world got more rigid.  A town big enough to have a clock tower set its time so that it was 12 Noon when the sun was near its zenith.  If you had a watch, you would synchronize your watch with that clock.  Given that, when someone said to meet them at place x at time t, you could do that.  

This worked when the speed of travel and communication was slow. Then the railroad and the telegraph came in and ruined all that.

A system was created that allowed people to communicate around the world. This system went through a number of tweaks through the years.  The system we have now is called Coordinated Universal Time.  We abbreviate this as UTC.  

Shouldn’t that be CUT?

Okay.

The French name of the system is Temps Universel Coordonné and they were involved in the negotiation. I assume they wanted TUC to be the abbreviation. So nobody gets their own way.  

Humans, they make me laugh.

We measure our time in coordinated universal time.  We set up time zones around the world so that the sun is near its zenith at 12 Noon in each of those zones. 

The system is set up so that the base zone called UTC+0 is centered around the prime meridian which runs through the Royal Observatory at Greenwich, England. (Why that is the case is a whole different story.) Both England and France are in UTC+0, by the way, so they didn’t have to compromise on that.

We here, in God’s country, are on UTC-6.  We are 6 hours behind the folks in London and Paris.  In Seoul, South Korea (and Tokyo, Japan) they are at UTC+9.  So they are 10 hours ahead of us.

It’s all there right in the system.  

When we switch to Daylight Savings Time, we add an hour to our offset.  We will be UTC-5.  But most of the folks in the northern hemisphere do too, so the time differences will remain the same.

It becomes trickier when dealing with time differences between hemispheres because when one springs forward, the other falls back, but they don’t all do it at the same time.  

Brazil sticks to Standard Time all year round.  I imagine this is because the time change makes even less sense for them because they are in general nearer to the equator than we are, and it makes even less sense for them than for us.

So there is the case: Having Noon at the middle of the day.  If we are going to stay with one time--as we should--that should be Standard Time.

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. )

 Behind the Mask

By Bobby Neal Winters

Everybody is broken.

Everybody.

That is what I’ve learned.

We build a persona. A persona is a mask that we put on to deal with others. I said that we build a persona, and we do, but we often don’t realize it at the time.  A lot of people, maybe most, are not aware that’s what they are doing. They are not aware how important it is.  And their parents aren’t either.

Oh, our mothers are worried about what people will think.  They will make us comb our hair and brush our teeth.  They will tell us to wear clean underwear so that if we are in an accident we won’t shock the nurses. (The nurses with whom I am acquainted don’t shock that easily.)  But most moms are not consciously working to help their children create personas.

Regardless of that, some people are quite good at it, and those are the people who are running the world.  I looked at the previous sentence and thought about it a while.  It doesn’t quite get it: There are people who have carefully crafted personas who’ve been kicked to the curb as far as running the world is concerned; there may be a few folks turning the tiller of the world who are just naturals; but by at large the folks at the top are very careful about what they let people see.

Given that, let’s look back at the first part of this column: Everybody is broken.

This includes the people in power.  In my darker moments, I think maybe especially the people in power.  I should probably stop listening to the news.

Our brokenness can be an asset.

Pain is a path that goes to everyone’s house.

We can always connect through pain.

Everyone has lost a parent, has lost a sibling, has lost a pet.  Everyone has been fired, has failed a test, has lost a love.  We may speak different languages, but everyone can cry.

Many people craft personas that cover all that up.  They constantly radiate joy.  And God bless them for it, because they can spread joy.

For a moment.

I’m a fan of the movie “Inside Out.”  The girl in the movie has all these (joy, sadness, anger, disgust) emotions running around in her head, but joy dominates.  Joy will not let sadness hold the stage.

But there are times when sadness is appropriate.  There are times when sadness must hold the stage.

There are at least two points in the Bible where men who had very carefully created personas, let sadness take the stage.  When Joseph was testing his brothers, he let the mask slip and called out, “Is my father still alive?”  When David’s son Absalom had been trying to overthrow him but was killed, David let his mask slip and called out, “Absalom, Absalom, my son, my son.”

It makes people uncomfortable when authority figures do that.  The raw emotion is too much. It’s as if the emotion gets amplified by the mask itself.  It acts as a lens instead of a shade.

But the authority figures are broken too.  We forget that, but we shouldn’t. Ever.

Sometimes it is their brokenness that drives them to seek authority over others.  This usually isn’t good.

The best use their brokenness as a way to connect to others, as a way to serve others, as a way to serve God.

The brokenness serves as a way to connect with God.

Oscar Wilde was a brilliant man, famous for his wit.  He had a carefully crafted persona that came apart.  Of all the things he said, of all the things he wrote, one bit is fit for scripture:

Ah! happy they whose hearts can break

And peace of pardon win!

How else may man make straight his plan

And cleanse his soul from Sin?

How else but through a broken heart

May Lord Christ enter in?

We can connect with Christ, we can connect with each other through our brokenness. 

Everybody is connected, because everyone is broken.

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. )