Sunday Morning Coming Down

By Bobby Neal Winters

Word has come to me here in Asuncion that Kris Kristofferson has passed away.  I was thinking of him just yesterday morning.

I am in Paraguay for 3 weeks.  I’ve made a point to try to find an English language church service here. Sometimes we pray for help; I googled. I did a search for “English language church service.”  I got the website for St. Andrew’s Anglican church.  Services were at 10am.  There was a location.  

The site had last been updated in 2016.  Churches are notorious for not keeping their webpages up to date, but it was all I had.

Google maps assured me that it was a 34-minute walk, but I gave myself an hour, starting at 9.

It was a beautiful morning.  Traffic was light, mostly people who were clearing going to church.  I walked past two or three churches where services were being held in Spanish.

The sounds of liturgy came out from the sanctuaries, which were open to the outside.  Outside men stood in white shirts.  I don’t know if they were waiting for the next service, waiting as their wives worshiped without them, or just having a smoke.

I walked past kindergartens and grocery stores; past restaurants and bars; past car dealerships and ice cream parlors. 

Google maps took me up a street called Avenida Senador Huey P. Long.  Yes, that Huey P. Long.  It was a very nice neighborhood with inviting restaurants, bars, and pubs.  Senator Long would have approved.

I crossed Avenida Espana.  Google told me I was getting close.

“Destination on your left,” it said.

No. Not there. Neither a church nor anything that could plausibly serve as a church. Ever.

I still had half an hour, so I searched again.  This time from my phone instead of my computer.  I don’t know, maybe it would make a difference.

There it popped up: Saint Andrew’s Chapel.  This time there was a picture.  There was a sign in the picture in front of the church that confirmed that services started at 10AM.  Google maps confirmed that the chapel was on Avenida Espana...50 minutes by foot from where I stood.

Maybe I am stubborn. (Surely not.) Maybe I just didn’t have anything better to do. (Probably.) I began the trek.  Google told me I would get there by 10:24 am.  

So I would be a little late.

I began.

I set a good pace.  I was enjoying the morning, practicing my Spanish by reading signs.  Being philosophical about how they used English in some of their advertisements compared how we use Spanish. 

Then it got surreal.

I was walking under a palm tree and a bird dive-bombed my head.  It was kind of scary, but no harm done.

I walked two blocks further and it happened again.

I began to think about Joseph in pharaoh's prison and the baker who had had the dream about the loaves of bread being picked at by birds.

Nevertheless, I pressed on.  See the remark concerning stubbornness above.

Google assured me my destination was ahead on the right. I looked and saw the chapel.  I also noted there weren’t many vehicles there.  Not many as in not any.

The gate to the driveway was closed. 

Hmmm.

I talked to the gate to the sidewalk and checked the handle. It opened; I entered.

In the twinkling of an eye, there was a guard there.

Okay, the guard was somewhere between 16 and 20 years old; he wasn’t wearing a uniform; he didn’t have a gun; but I am still going to call him a guard.

I’ve reached a level in my Spanish where I can make myself understood a lot of the time, and I can kind of guess what they are saying to me.

This was the Sunday the priest went to preach to the Guarani, the local  indigenous people. There would be church at this location next Sunday.  

I walked back to a supermarket I’d passed and got a bottle of pop. Paraguay’s version of Fresca.  I drank my pop and thought it over.  Then I got a taxi to head back to the room.

Today I learned that Kris Kristofferson passed away yesterday. I think he would’ve kind of liked my story.

There’s nothing short of dying/ half as lonely as the sound/ of a sleeping city sidewalk/ Sunday Morning coming down.

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.

 Breakfast in (South) America

By Bobby Neal Winters

A remix of Breakfast in America was coming over the sound system. I was feeling good about myself for knowing what a re-mix was, kinda.  And I am old enough to remember when Breakfast in America was new.  I knew about Supertramp because my friend from high school (I was going to say old friend, but she will always be 17 to me) Robyn Phillips listened to them.

Anyway, I was in the La Vienesa on Civil Legionnaires de Extranjero next to where it crosses De Las Palmeras and this remix of Breakfast in America was playing.  This was my first morning in Asuncion.  I’d slept like the dead after a long day of travel the day before.  

I’d woke up refreshed, took a shower, and headed to breakfast.  After examining the menu, I ordered the cheapest breakfast item they had: Vienesa.  I figured they’d named it after themselves, so they were probably proud of it.  It consisted of coffee, orange juice, two slices of toast from thin bread, a slice of ham lunchmeat, and a sandwich slice of swiss cheese.

That was it.

From many years of traveling to Paraguay, I know this to be a typical breakfast.  You will see eggs in other places, unexpected places, but not at breakfast, normally. Eggs are for frying and putting on top of a steak.  Cold cuts are for breakfast.

And that was fine.  I wanted only a light meal, and cold cuts did it.  

I then went out on my mission: Shopping.  My shopping trip was two-fold: get some groceries and buy a pill calendar.

The groceries were easy: fruit, potatoes, yogurt, meat, and beans.  I sort of looked for the pill calendar at the Superseis, but experience has taught me that in Paraguay groceries and groceries and medicine is medicine.  You can’t get so much as a bandaid at a grocery store, you need a pharmacy.

I went to a pharmacy in one of the malls near this particular Superseis.  The sales girl--and it was a girl as the population pyramid is properly shaped here--was very attentive.

At that point it occurred to me that I didn’t know the Spanish phrase for “pill calendar.”

This kind of thing has happened to me before, so I have a strategy.  Step one: try a naive direct translation.

“Quisiera un calendario de medicinas,” which is “I would like a medicine calendar.

She became very excited at the challenge and began to look through her files.  She then produced a pill-splitter.

I then took my other method.  Recreate my world for her.

“Todas las semanas yo pongo mis medicinas en domingo, lunes, martes, miércoles,...”  

That is to say, “Every week I put my medicines in Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday...”

I saw the light of understanding go on in her eyes.

“No tenemos.”  We don’t have it.

Of course not.  In Paraguay everyone is young.  If you are old enough to take so many medicines that they have to be laid out, you can find some other solution.

That’s what I am going to do.

I think I will make some black beans and rice for supper tonight and have some left over.  I might fry up my meat for lunch tomorrow.

But I may very well head back over to La Vienesa for breakfast on Sunday morning.  Nothing quite like ham lunchmeat and cheese for breakfast.

Take a jumbo, across the water//

Like to see America.

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.

PIttsburg is on the map

 Pittsburg is on the map

By Bobby Neal Winters

I have a friend in Philadelphia who sends me news stories he thinks I might be interested in.  Most are about mathematics and mathematicians, but a recent one that he sent me was about Pittsburg, Kansas, my home, and for my Pittsburg readers, our home.  It was from the Associated Press and was concerning the new abortion clinic in town.

One of the themes of the article was that this is a small town, you know everybody, and you are going to see the people you disagree with. In reading the article I noted that I knew people on both sides of the controversy. I don’t need to mention their names because they know me too. This is a small town.

That there would be an abortion clinic in our town was not a surprise.  Indeed, from a particular point of view, its arrival was almost certain. This is because of the juxtaposition of two events.  The first was the reversal of Roe v. Wade which sent abortion laws back to the states.  This decision, I believe, was part of the impetus for the attempt to pass the “Value Them Both” amendment to the Kansas Constitution.

The second event was the subsequent defeat of the “Value Them Both” amendment. Its defeat solidified, in a political sense, Kansas’s very permissive abortion laws for the foreseeable future. It was defeated so decisively that it will take a while for its proponents to regroup. The current legal situation in our state is stable and possibly set in concrete.

Given those two events, human nature, economics, and geography, the establishment of an abortion clinic in this part of Kansas became something that was going to happen, a fait accompli. 

Full disclosure: I am pro-life, so I take no pleasure in the new clinic in town. 

Am I angry?

I’ve reached the age where events like this simply make me sad. The 1st verse of the 9th Chapter of the Book of Jeremiah hits tragically on the mark: “Oh that my head were waters, and mine eyes a fountain of tears, that I might weep day and night for the slain of the daughter of my people!”

But, regardless, the clinic is here. In our town. In my town.

What’s going to happen?

Yes, that is the question.

As the AP article pointed out, there have been times in Kansas where this state of affairs has not been handled very well.

I don’t want that for my town. For our town.

For those of us who are against abortion, what do we do?

In a small town, just ignoring it is not an option, not even if that option was acceptable to your conscience.  For my part, my personal physician and the pharmacy that I use are just a stone’s throw from the clinic.  I will be reminded of the clinic and what is going on there every time I have a checkup, everytime I get a prescription refilled, both of which happen with alarming regularity because I am old.

I can’t tell you what to do. You might be pro-choice and just be happy with this. You might be pro-life and getting guidance from your church on what to do.  

What I am going to do is pray.  

Prayer seems to have become more a theme of these columns recently.  I don’t know whether it’s because I am getting old and wise or simply old and irrelevant.

I think we need to pray for the women who are going through this. Please give me a moment to make my point.

Men are traditionally supposed to be brave, but women are the brave ones. Historically, childbirth was probably the number one cause of the death of women. Yet consider the story of Rachel from the Book of Genesis who was absolutely desperate to have a child. She eventually did have two and died while having the second one. 

In that world, the women knew the risk; they had all seen other women die in childbirth; had been there as it happened; and yet they continued.

That is bravery.

I know that there are those who will disagree with me, but I believe nature has planted a desire in women to become mothers. For a woman to come to a point where she believes that killing her baby is a way out is in tension against that nature. 

It’s tragic.

But right now at this point in time, I believe prayer is just about all I can do.  Pray for the women; pray for their children. Pray that the men who fathered these children would step up and be men. Pray that these women will be able to find another way out.

God help us.

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.

Learning Arithmetic

 Learning Arithmetic

By Bobby Neal Winters

Arithmetic was never my favorite subject. (Can I have an AMEN?) Indeed, I hated it. I used to get my mother to do my long division homework for me.

What an irony then that I am now a Professor of Mathematics at a respected state university.  They probably won’t want to include that in their press release.

Actually, the take away from that is mathematics is quite a bit more than arithmetic.

But here I am now, turning 62 next month, relearning arithmetic. 

Having stepped out of administration, I’ve been having a sabbatical of sorts before going back to the classroom, and I am using it to equip myself to step into my university’s growing Computer Science program.

As a part of that, I’ve been learning the architecture (that’s the term they use) of a particular integrated circuit and learning how to program it in assembly language.

I will be getting a little technical but will try not to fly off into full geek mode. You will need to tell me how I do.

Computers store numbers in binary form.  The number 0 is still zero, and the number 1 is still one. Okay, hang on, here we go: The number 10 is two; the number 11 is three; the number 100 is four; and the number 110 is five. I could go on, but it’s not important that you understand the particulars, but that there is a different way numbers are stored in a computer.

The numbers are stored in “bytes.”  This is a pun on the word byte. (Geeks have always been geeks.) Historically bytes have had different sizes.  It’s now been pretty well settled that a byte is 8 bits, i.e. 8 binary digits.  So 11001010 would be a byte.

The unit of memory that a processor works with is called a “word.” The size of the word varies from one type of processor to another.  In most computers these days, you can figure that the word is 32 or 64 bits long.

To bring me back to my topic, the longer the word size the more arithmetic you can do.

The chip I am working with uses the 8-bit byte for its most basic operations and you have to build up from there. You have to know some arithmetic. Let me show you what I mean.

An 8-bit byte can represent a number between 0 and 255 (between 00000000 and 11111111). If you want to add say 17 (00010001) to 20 (00010100), you can do that easily enough to get 37 (00100101). But if you want to add 250 (11111010) to 10 (00001010), you’ve got a problem. The answer is 260 (00100000100). I’ll save you the counting; it requires more than 8 bits to represent.

On this chip, you have to write your coding to extend the addition process.  It’s not hard. The designers of the chip knew this limitation was there and prepared for it.

They did this with multiplication as well. By its very nature, multiplication gives you bigger numbers quickly. The chip I am working with anticipates this by assuming that multiplying two 8-bit numbers will require 16-bits of storage. So right off the bat you can have a product that is as big as 65535 (1111111111111111).

As nice as that is, it will only get you so far, but you can get around this limitation by doing a little math and a little more programming.

Subtraction is handled in a way more similar to addition than it is to multiplication, though there are some complications in the way negative numbers are handled. (Buy me a coffee and a cookie at Signet, and I will tell you about it. You might want a whiskey. Signet can’t help you there.) 

We can even do the equivalent of decimal multiplication using this chip, but I am still getting my head wrapped around it.

Here we come to my favorite subject: division.  This chip doesn’t have 

If I am going to deal with division, there is not going to be any help from the chip. It’s all going to have to be done by programming.

I wish my momma was around to help, but I think she’d just tell me I was on my own.

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.

Fighting about words

 Fighting about words

By Bobby Neal Winters

Is a tomato a vegetable or a fruit?

A lot of time has been spent--not to say wasted--arguing this point. We think of fruit as being sweet, and a tomato is not sweet, so one would then argue it’s a vegetable. And the argument goes round and round, unresolved.

This is because the question is set up wrong.

First of all, this is not an either or sort of question.  It’s what is called a “false dichotomy.”  The world of objects is not split into disjoint sets, one of which is fruit and the other vegetables. What we have here is different sets of nomenclatures coming into conflict.

When we talk of vegetables, it is almost always in the context of food for human beings. We think of a meal as being constituted of meat and vegetables.

Fruit, by way of contrast, is the name of part of a plant, that is the fleshy part of the plant that contains the seeds. 

So a tomato is both a fruit and a vegetable.

This may disturb you, but this is just logic and using a dictionary.  If you are disturbed, hold on to your horses, it gets worse. 

An apple is a vegetable and a fruit as well.  So is a grape; so is a banana.

The devil lies in the word vegetable, because vegetables are just parts of plants that people eat.  We don’t speak that way in English, though.  We like to give fruits a special place--because they are sweet for the most part--and refer to fruits and vegetables.  But in reality we are just singling out fruit as a special kind of vegetable.

Another question that suffers from a bad set up is this: Mickey’s a mouse; Donald is a duck; Pluto is a pup. What is Goofy?

Here we are referring to classic Disney characters.  Characters they had long before they became the Borg of the entertainment industry and acquired Marvel, Star Wars, etc, etc.

It was a much simpler world made complicated by a deliberately bad question.

Mickey, Donald, and Goofy are characters who interact with each other. They possess the ability to speak what appears to be English to each other, though be it in annoying accents.  They are natural creatures who are caricatures of human form.  To put it in Greek and make it sound scholarly, I could say, Mickey is an anthropomorphic mouse and Donald is an anthropomorphic duck.  Pluto is still a pup, but Goofy, with this nomenclature in place, is an anthropomorphic dog.

As Disney has taken its Star Wars intellectual property and made all sorts of new back stories in the setting, do you think they would ever go back and create a mythology of how Mickey, Donald, and Goofy attained the power of human speech but how little Pluto was left out?

We now come to what is to me a more serious matter:  The story of Jonah and the Whale.

Any serious Bible scholar will know that the Bible doesn’t refer to the creature who swallowed Jonah as a whale, but as a fish. However, in popular telling of the story it becomes a whale.

Here’s the thing. It makes no literary difference to the story: Being swallowed by a big fish and being swallowed by a whale are exactly as dramatic as each other. It makes no theological difference to the story: Jonah prefigures Jesus with the time in the belly of the fish/whale as the time in the tomb.

This is a pointless argument from every dimension.

But more so pointless because at the time of the writing a whale would’ve been considered a fish because the ancients (the ancient people in general and the ancient Hebrews in particular) had a completely different way to classify animals that we do. Linnaean taxonomy was far in the future; DNA after that.  Distinguishing fish from mammals was not one of their major problems.

Considering they were sheep herders who had very little business to do with the sea, I think they left a remarkably large impression on the world.

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.

 These Precious Days

By Bobby Neal Winters

In June and July, the sun remains in the sky until late in the evening, and to us it feels like youth. Not to say that we feel young, but rather to say it feels normal. It feels as if it is due to us. It is owed us. We are entitled to it.

The long, warm days will go on forever, and we will be young and vigorous forever, until the end of days.

But June passes and then July is gone.  August disappears like an ice cube on a Dallas sidewalk, and we find ourselves in September.

The days don’t last as long now.  The sun remains abed later and it pulls the curtains earlier. It’s as if the days themselves are entering into old age.  Those that once bounded out of bed like they were mounted on springs now have to sit on the edge of the bed awhile to get their balance before staggering off for the start of their day.

We are still at the part of the year where there is more daylight that night.  We can still hear the grasshoppers singing in the grass. (Or is that my tinnitus?) Light and warmth still have the upper hand, but the Old Ones know those times are ending.

In a few weeks, there will be the equinox, and after that, darkness will have the upper hand for six months. The darkness will come and the cold along with it.

There was a time when I hated the cold and dark of winter. There was a time when I hated the heat and aridity of summer. There was a time when I resented spring’s unpredictability.

At some point, I decided to stop wishing my life away, to stop rushing through the seasons, to stop hating the moment, to stop hating life.

The summer may burn our faces with the blistering sun; the winter may chap our skin with its cold wind; the spring may rob our sleep with thunder and hail; but everyday is still another day of life.

All that said, I do love autumn in particular.

Here on the Great Plains, we see the extremes. Sun and snow; Darkness and dust. From ten degrees to a hundred and ten in the same calendar year.

But God owes us nothing in compensation. 

I am owed nothing.

But if we were, if I were, these coming days of September with cool mornings and warm afternoons are days of blessing, days of grace. They would make it worthwhile.

I love them.

Sometimes I just stand still and try to record the moment, to put it into memory for later. I just want to make a mental tape of the way the sun and the air feel against my skin and play it on a loop.

We come into this world naked and we take nothing with us when we leave.  If we are truly wealthy, it will be known from what we leave behind: friendship, love, truths said and knowledge passed along.

Everyday is a gift, but these glorious days of September, days of the Fall are especially so.

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.