Nature and Nature

By Bobby Neal Winters

Have you ever considered how odd it is that we have zoos?  Cattle ranches, I can understand; hunting ranches somewhat; but zoos?  

We rip wild animals out of their natural environments, and put them into enclosures so that we may see them safely. The more “realistic” it is, the better we feel about it.  We pay money for the privilege in most cases, and we believe it is important for our children to see them.  We believe it’s very important.

We do this because we enjoy seeing the animals and our children enjoy seeing the animals.  We like the feeling we get ourselves and we like the vicarious feeling we get from our children.  I enjoy zoos too.  Given a choice between going to a zoo for a few hours and sitting through a sporting event for an equal amount of time, I would choose the zoo every time.

I enjoy it; we enjoy it.  The question is why.

My answer is that it is natural for us to like animals, to like to see animals, to like to be around animals.

This raises (not begs!) another question: Why?  Why is it natural for us to like to be around animals?

One answer would be that we evolved as animals.  If there are other animals around, that means there is water somewhere around.  There are sources of food for the other animals, so there must be a source of food for us, and, of course, the other animals are a source of food for us.  If the other animals are predators, then seeing those predators trapped within a zoo’s enclosure gives us a safe adrenaline rush.

That all sounds quite reasonable, but let's try another.

We were created after all the other animals and given dominion over them.  This dominion is not to be the dominion of a despot over slaves, but it is to be a dominion modeled after the Loving God who created us.  We are to be caretakers rather than despots.  This is built into us.  This is why we have zoos; this is why we have pets.  We have a built-in need to nurture not only our own children, but the animals of the world as well.

First appearances aside, these two characterizations are not really at odds with each other.  They are just written in different languages, in different alphabets, by different typewriters.  Both explain, one gives meaning.

We’ve got raccoons in the neighborhood.  Jean and I walked past the old Methodist parsonage one day and saw a pair of yearlings in the garbage which had been dutifully set out on the curb.  We saw one the size of a full kitchen garbage bag stealing food from our cats as the cats looked on in terror and disgust.  While we were on vacation, a raccoon broke out of the vent on our roof like the Kool-Aid Man. 

Foxes roam around town in the twilight. There are squirrels in every tree.

All of this wildlife around us, but we don’t kill it. (Though that one raccoon is skating on thin ice!) Indeed, it is a subject for conversation and often delight.  We love the animals as long as they don’t encroach too far upon us.  We love seeing them; be love being around them.

It is the way we were made.

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. )

Some boring details about an exciting age

 Some boring details about an exciting age

By Bobby Neal Winters

One of the hats that I wear at the university is that I am the Director of the Polymer Chemistry Initiative.  I’m not a chemist, but don’t let that confuse you, because I am an administrator.  We specialize in directing things about which we know zip.  Sometimes it's easier to do if you don’t know anything about it. One of the issues we have is that not many of the general population know much about polymers.  What are they good for?

I recently purchased a 3-D printer.  I say recently, but I’ve had it since mid-June.  It came with some assembly required, and I was able to do that over the course of a Sunday with time enough for Bible Study in between.

The big issue with these devices is getting the bed correctly calibrated.  That took me the better part of a week.  The nozzle kept knocking whatever I was printing off the bed.  I was ever so patient in going through the procedures to calibrate.  Then I noticed a wire that was unplugged from a connector. (For those of you who are familiar with such things, it was the connector to my z-axis stepper.) I astutely plugged the wire back in, and, voila, it works.

I’ve been learning how to use the printer now and a whole new world has opened.

I am using it on my current project.  I want to make a weather station in my backyard.  As I am reaching a certain age, one of my duties will soon include talking about the weather in a level of detail that younger minds are not able to comprehend.  They don’t get how it was possible for us to walk to school twelve miles in the snow, uphill both ways. They will soon enough, but in the meantime, I will be up to me and others like me to fill them in.

I want to be able to tell them about the wind, the humidity, the dew point, how much rain we got last night and when it started.

For this, I need a weather station.  True, our local treasures Doug Heady and Mike Hayslip do give us great information, but they have to cover from Chanute to Bela Vista.  I want the lowdown on the southwest quadrant of Pittsburg.

Yes, you can buy weather stations, and ones that are probably better than what I am going to make.  Yes, they would probably cost less than what I am going to spend on building one.

But what is the fun in that?

For my project, I need a computer controller.  This will either be a Raspberry Pi computer or an Arduino controller.  I am sort of leaning toward the latter right now.  They will need a source of power.  I will be using a 12-volt marine battery.  I need a box to house it all in.  

As I don’t want to be having to interrupt my data to change or charge the battery, I want to have a solar panel to keep the battery charged.

My first priority is to get the power situation in order.  I bought a plastic storage box from Home Despot [sic] to mount everything to and in.  I want the battery and the controller (eventually) to be in the box, but the solar panel will have to be on the outside.  

In order to get the most out of the sunshine, I need to keep the solar panel angled to the south.  To do this, I 3-D printed some brackets to hold it at that angle.  Of course the first solar panel I got didn’t work (I don’t buy  the most expensive kind) and I had made my brackets specifically for that type, so when I bought my second solar panel it, quite naturally, didn’t fit.  As I type this, I am printing out an addition to my original brackets to make them work.

When I am done, I am going to mount my system on the top of a landscaping timber that is planted vertically like a fencepost in my backyard.  I printed a bracket that will hold it to the top of that poll.  I’ve also printed a variety of brackets to hold the battery and wires in place.  Believe me, there are a lot of wires.

If you’ve made it this far, you are probably thinking to yourself, he doesn’t have to have a weather station to become a bore, he’s there on several other fronts already.

I know it and I am okay with that.

But the point of this is the plastic filament that I am printing all this stuff with is a polymer.  These polymers can be created with different properties for different applications.  There is a lot of stuff that is coming together.  It is an exciting age.

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. )

Back from Virginia

 Back from Virginia

By Bobby Neal Winters

I recently got back from a trip to Virginia.  We visited Jamestown, Yorktown, and Monticello. (And they pronounce it Mont-i-CHEL-lo.)  We just soaked in history for three days.  The details presented clarified some perspectives which I think we need to think about as a nation.

Jamestown provides a nice place to look because in those early years we have three big influences on what it means to be an American already present: The English Settlers, the Indigenous Peoples, and the Enslaved Africans.  Yes, while the original colonists Jamestown didn’t have slaves, they did enter into the picture very shortly after the colony was established. 

This has all been swimming through my head for days now.  I’ve been waiting for it to jell so that I could write about it.  Here goes.

There’s been some nasty complicated stuff that those of us who are of English heritage really need to ruminate on.  I would have to include myself in that because as far as I’ve been able to discern, I don’t have a single ancestor who came from anywhere but England.  At various times, I thought there was some Cherokee ancestry; at others, I thought there was some Irish.  But with every DNA test, with every internet ancestry search, it’s just English, English, English.

That is so boring.

The previous sentence would so confuse my colonist ancestors because it was very important to them that they were English.  This seems to have been one of the bones of contention leading up to the American Revolution.  They didn’t feel like they were being treated as Englishmen. Then the Revolution was like a bad divorce. They didn’t want anything to do with England anymore.  

If you look at surveys of ethnicity, you will see a big stripe of “American” there.  Likely as not, the bulk of those are of English ancestry.  They say “American” instead of “English” because it had been so important for their ancestors to be English, but then they felt betrayed.

We need to pay close attention to that because this could happen again.

Here I am getting into dangerous ground and some of you might be mad at me.  The English, the Indigenous people, and the Enslaved Africans all had descendents who are now American.  (Yes, there are others and we love you too.) It is very important to all of these people that they be American.

But there are problems.  The descendents of the Enslaved Africans have problems.  It came to be currently encoded in the phrase “Black Lives Matter.”  There are those who say “All lives matter” or “Blue lives matter,” and these are all true too.  (I am not responsible for this nomenclature, but there it is.)

I would like to characterize the situation a little differently.

Think of the descendents in America of the English, the Indigenous, the African, the Irish, the Italian, the Spanish, the Portuguese, the Vietnamese, the Chinese, etc as all being organs in the body.  They are all part of one thing: America. (The Apostle Paul does a nice riff on something similar in one of his epistles.) 

So think of your body.  Suppose you get an x-ray and there is a spot on your liver.  Would you react by saying, “All organs matter” and ignore the spot on your liver?  I don’t think so.  I think that you’d see about getting your liver fixed.

Not only is it a vital part of your body, but the spot might very well spread.

This is an analogy and arguing by analogy is always dangerous. It depends upon everyone realizing that we are all part of the same body.  But I believe it is good because it catches the fact that I am actually helping myself when I help someone else because we are all Americans and America is healthy to the extent its “members” 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. )

 Jamestown, Pocahontas, and Disney

By Bobby Neal Winters

In sixteen hundred seven
We sail the open sea
For glory, God, and gold
And The Virginia Company
--Alan Menken

I am in an AirBnB in Virginia as I write this.  It is located on the peninsula between the James and York rivers.  It is the location of the first successful English settlement in the New World.  If the family tree app that I have is right, some of my mother’s people lived here nigh on to 400 years ago.

Nobody’s told me that I look familiar.

We’ve literally spent days in museums.  We’ve talked to the docents who are knowledgeable, patient people.  We’ve seen the movies.  We looked at the exhibits.  We’ve tread the ancient ground.  We’ve learned a few things.

They’ve done a good bit of work to flesh out the roles of the indigenous peoples and Africans at various points.  I am not saying it is perfect, but they’ve moved it beyond Disney.  They’ve put enough details in to give me a feeling that there were real people involved. It seems to me to be closer to the truth.

There, I’ve said it.  I would like to know the truth about things.  The truth is often buried beneath a ton of sugar. The story of Pocahontas is a nice example here. 

The Disney movie Pocahontas came out when my girls were little, and we did watch it and enjoy it. We still have it on VHS somewhere.  Quite frankly, I have to admit that throughout the day we spent at Jamestown I had the tune “The Virginia Company” from that movie running through my head.  The only thing true about it is there is a place called Virginia.

 First of all, Pocahontas wasn’t her real name.  It was her nickname.  I don’t remember her real name, and in fact she had a couple of those: the one they called her and her secret name.  On top of those names she had her Christian name Rebecca Rolfe because she was a baptised Christian.

Even that isn’t the whole story.  The English had kidnapped her and were trying to use her to make her father, the leader of her tribe, see things their way.  This was actually a thing that the indigenous peoples were familiar with because they did it to each other.  There was a way you were supposed to act as a prisoner of another tribe: you changed your name and you worshipped the way they did.

Pocahontas/Rebecca bore a son to John Rolfe and died in England after having been there a year.  She was 20 years old.  Everything we know of her makes me think that she was a remarkable individual.  She’s buried at Saint George’s Church in Gravesend, Kent, United Kingdom.  Her grave is not far from the Thames.

It is a tragic story.  It is a human story.  It is the human story.

I mean to say the human story is a tragedy with elements of romance, farce, and true crime.  If it were a movie, they wouldn’t know how to market it, but they don’t have to because you are in the theater already with the doors locked behind you and there is only one exit.  

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. )

Building Bridges

 Building Bridges

By Bobby Neal Winters

Social media has supercharged our discourse.  I don’t use the word “supercharged” lightly because there are sparks flying off everything.  Recently this phenomenon has manifested itself in yours truly being tagged in a post of an article that conveyed a charge: Mathematics is racist.

So this was on Facebook. The article was written by a journalist who was writing about something a scholar had said.  I don’t even know if the journalist was writing for a right-wing rag or a left-wing rag.  There are plenty of both, each specializes in making things the other side says sound stupid and the stupid things they say sound even stupider.  They are people who are trying to build walls rather than bridges.

I’ve not read the words of the scholar.  I’ve not followed up on their research.  I’ve done no due diligence in this.

I will, regardless, use this as an opportunity to defend mathematics. I do this because mathematics has provided a bridge for me to a different sort of world than I grew up in.

As much as I was able to discern, there are those who claim that mathematics is racist because it says there is only one right answer.  Here I need to make a correction of fact; mathematics does not claim there is only one right answer. This might shock some of the right wingers who are waving this as a bloody shirt. 

In mathematics there are times when we can show--with a level of certainty that is not approached in any other area of human endeavor--there are infinitely many solutions to a given problem and we can describe exactly what they are.

This being said, mathematics specializes in being careful.  We teach processes.  The processes have multiple steps.  In each of these steps there is a possibility of going wrong, but typically we set the processes up so that at the end there is one correct answer that everyone should get to.  This makes homework easier to check.  In that way, mathematics is rigid.  

We get into trouble with this.  I wish I had a nickel for everytime I heard: “I got the right answer, but I didn’t do it the way the teacher said, so they counted it wrong.  I think the teacher is a jerk.  I hate math.”

This usually comes from the brighter students who are mistaken in what they think their teacher is teaching.  In the basic mathematics courses--and I am talking up to calculus and even beyond--we are not teaching problem solving, at least not in its full glory. We are teaching methods of problem solving.  

The methods we teach are tools, so when you get the right answer by using a method other than what the teacher was using, that’s like when you use a pair of pliers to tighten a nut when the shop teacher was trying to teach you how to use a socket wrench. Yes, I have no doubt that’s the way you will do it in real life, but you have just cheated yourself out of learning how to use a socket wrench.  Don’t expect to get credit for it.

The set of methods learned in math class form a toolbox.  I personally love to see students come up with ways I’ve not seen provided they are true methods and not just accidents.  

There is such a thing as mathematical truth. Here I will sound more like a theologian than a mathematician.  Mathematical truth is eternal: It is true yesterday, today, and forever.

Let me illustrate this with one of my favorite stories about spherical trigonometry.  Trigonometry is about triangles; spherical trigonometry is about triangles on the surfaces of spheres.  If a triangle on the surface of a sphere is bothersome to you, suck it up and push past it.  

Anyway, there was some wonderful work done on spherical trigonometry by the muslims in Persia.  They did the math so they would know the right direction to Mecca as an aid to them in prayer. It was brilliant work, then hundreds of years later, spherical trigonometry was used in navigation to aid in the exploration of the world.  

This spherical trigonometry--in tandem with mathematical development in astronomy and improved time-keeping devices--allowed sailors who were thousands of miles away from home to know where they were with incredible precision.  This kept them from getting lost and running up on shoals or getting lost and dying of scurvy or getting lost and having any number of other untoward things happen to them.

We need mathematics--and its incredible unforgiving precision--because sometimes it is the difference between life and death.

We can also do a better job of teaching it.  This goes for most subjects.  There are young people who don’t have the advantages of middle-class, suburban youths.  As teachers we will have to build our metaphorical bridges to the students.  At the end, those students are going to be building real bridges that we hope won’t give way.  In the end, the student will have a mathematical bridge that will take them to a new 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. )

The Flight of the Phoenix

By Bobby Neal Winters

Going back to revisit the movies of your youth is a dangerous pastime. Sometimes you discover that a movie that you loved wasn’t actually very good.  But there are other times too.

I’d remembered The Flight of the Phoenix with James Stewart, Richard Attenborough, Peter Finch, Christian Marquand, Ernest Borgnine, and Hardy Kruger as just another desert survival movie.  It is a desert survival movie, but there is something else there that I see now but had missed as a youth. It is not just a man versus nature story, but a man versus man story in a more subtle way.

As the movie is from 1965, I will not worry about spoilers.  A plane crashes in the desert; the survivors build a new plane from the wreckage of the old (hence the name Phoenix); they fly it to safety.

That paragraph describes the movie exactly as I remembered it.  The fact that it was a story inhabited by well-drawn characters eluded me.

The thread that unites them is they are all flawed, broken men.  Richard Attenborough plays the alcoholic navigator of the doomed plan.  Ernest Borgnine is suffering from what we would now call PTSD.  Jimmy Stewart is a burned out pilot whose best days are behind him.  Hardy Kruger is an arrogant engineer.

The movie begins on the ill-fated plane.  The pilot (played by Stewart) has not done due diligence in the aircraft’s upkeep and neither has the alcohol navigator.  They are taken off course by a dust storm, but as the radio is broken--and had been broken at the time of take-off--and are forced down hundreds of miles from even the tiniest outpost of civilization. 

They wait for rescue but that is for nought as they are too far off course.

Then the engineer announces they can build a plane from the parts of their craft that are still salvageable. 

This is not met by as much enthusiasm as one might expect.  It may be because the engineer is German; the rest of the survivors are American, British, and French; and the second world war is less than two decades in the past.

Or it may be because it wasn’t the pilot’s idea.

This was a surprise to me.  I’d remembered Stewart as someone who played the same sort of affable character over and over.  As the pilot of the downed plane, he’s not particularly affable; he’s not positive; he’s not nurturing; he’s not supportive.  He’s not even a good man, much less a hero.

And the engineer doesn’t make it easy either.  He’s arrogant, impatient, and hard-driving.  He and the pilot don’t like each other at all.

The only thing that keeps the tenuous project alive is the desire to survive and the efforts of the alcoholic navigator as a diplomat.

In the end, they survive, but only after the blood sacrifice of two of the more virtuous characters.

It’s been two weeks since I rewatched it, but it has been on my mind often during those two weeks.  The image it presents of broken people who don’t like each other being forced to work together to survive strikes me as a model we should examine.  

Maybe we should make them watch it in Washington.

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 God of tiny little things

The God of tiny little things

By Bobby Neal Winters

When my kids were young and my wife was teaching Sunday School, they taught the kids a new song.  It was supposed to go, “My God is a great big God / Big enough to save me / Big enough to keep me.”  I had some reservations because the last line seemed to deny free will.  I needn’t have worried.  The children learned the final couplet as “Big enough to save me / Big enough to eat me.”

The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, they say.

Perhaps the quasi-Calvanistic turn of the last line shouldn’t’ve bothered me as much on the emphasis on “Bigness.”  God is big in whatever sense that is meaningful for God, but God is also small.  While a God that is big enough to save us is comforting to a small child who feels so vulnerable in the world, the world is saved by small things.

This morning I am sitting on my new patio.  My wife and I build it one paver at a time.  It is sitting on a bed of sand.  I am sitting under an oak tree that my middle daughter brought home in a plastic cup from the second or third grade.  It is shading me with its leaves, each of which only measures a few square inches.  The tree itself grew to its current height bit by bit over the course of two decades.  Each of its cells is a tiny universe unto itself that we are only beginning to understand.

Without the tiny cells, the tree is nothing and I am being burned to a crisp in the mid-morning sun.

I’ve been writing a lot lately about my landscaping.  My latest efforts have been built over the moldering remains of what I attempted 20 or more years ago.  The results are much better this time.  What has happened?

Well, I’ve gotten better at landscaping.

This is not because I’ve laid a lot of pavers over the decades.  I have not.  My early efforts at shaping the earth into a place more agreeable to me were not so successful as to encourage practice.  Instead, years of frustration combined with prayer (and I consider writing to be a form of prayer) have created a certain reserve of patience within me.  

Patience is the reins upon our spirit that keeps us from rushing ahead too fast.  Patience allows us to map out paths within our world.

And patience, as is fitting, is not built overnight.  Patience is built tiny bit by tiny bit as we receive God’s grace through the things we do.  God exists within the tiny things.

We have the means of grace that the church has mapped out, and I am not for a moment saying anyone should abandon those. But through prayer and the tiny things you do during the day every day, God’s grace can change you.

Neither am I saying that God isn’t as big as the largest supercluster of galaxies.  He is big enough to save you; He’s even big enough to eat you.  But He’s also small enough to do what needs to be done.

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 Last Trip

 The Last Trip

By Bobby Neal Winters

In 2019, August of that year, the month in this town that if you haven’t taken a vacation yet, then it’s not going to happen, my family took a trip to Colorado, and we took my wife’s mother along.  Of all the trips I’ve ever taken, all over the world, four continents, eight countries, etc, that is the one I am most happy of.  I’m not happy because it was so much fun--and it was--or because I saw some cousins I hadn’t seen in a while--Hello Jan, Ed, and Judy--but because my mother-in-law Janet was on it.

Having a mother-in-law was not what TV had led me to believe.  Bewitched, which was my main source, misled us with Endora. (Although looking back as an adult, I find I have more sympathy with Endora and Maurice than I would’ve thought.) Janet, my mother-in-law, was a warm, wonderful person.  She never turned me into anything.

We invited her to go with us any time it was remotely likely--to the movies, to dinner, on vacations--and sometimes she went with us, and she was never any trouble.

So I am happy she decided to go on that vacation to Colorado with us, but that’s not the last trip I am talking about.

The last trip was at about 11 o’clock at night on the last Sunday of April 2021.  She’d been in good, solid health through Christmas Day and we’d celebrated together as much as the CDC would allow.  We got a call the next day that she was having trouble breathing.  She didn’t want us to come over because she was afraid she had COVID and didn’t want to expose us any more than she already might’ve.  She just wanted us to call the ambulance because she didn’t want to be any trouble.

We called the ambulance and then went over to guide them in.  What follows is a blur.  She was in the hospital for a month; she was released into hospice; Jean took care of her with the help of family; she began to get better and was released from hospice.

Things were definitely looking better, but then came the last weekend.  Friday things were kind of iffy.  Saturday things weren’t good.  Sunday things were definitely taking a turn for the worse.  

She was in tremendous pain.  Jean was dosing her with morphine, but she held out against any thought of going to the hospital.  

She didn’t want to be any trouble.

I’d gone to bed early as is my habit.  About 11pm I got a text from Jean: “...I think it’s time to go to the emergency room.”

I texted her back and went to her mother’s house.  I don’t remember putting my clothes on, but I suppose I did. We got her in the car and headed out.  

The most direct route from her house to the hospital is not the smoothes.  It goes over those brick streets the local residents are so fond of.  I went up to 4th Street and then over to Rouse, but I had forgotten about all of the construction.  It was dark; we hit every bump; and she gasped every time we did.

At some point, and I don’t remember exactly where, she said, “Thank you for being so good during all this.”

I knew at that point she thought it was her last trip with me.  

And it was.

Since that night, I’ve avoided that route as much as I could.  I’ve found other routes from here to the hospital with smoother roads, less construction, routes that wouldn’t’ve taken much longer but where she wouldn’t’ve experienced as much pain.

I’ve seen images in the distance that lit up recognition for her in my head, but of course when they resolved into detail they were not her.

Last Thursday, I drove Jean to the mortuary, she paid the bill, and we picked up Janet’s cremains.  I put her in the back of my car this time and we retraced some of the same path.  This time in the opposite direction with much less hurry.

We brought her home.  It wasn’t any bother.

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. )

 

Things I’ve Learned

 Things I’ve Learned

By Bobby Neal Winters

Before I start on the things I’ve learned over the years, let me say that the chief of these is that I am not as smart as I think I am.  So, if you want to tell me that after you’ve finished reading the list, you can keep it to yourself; I already know.

Problems are best dealt with at the lowest level possible. That is where the relationships are the strongest. That is where most of the work has to be done.

If the lowest levels are left on their own, that brings corruption.  The lower-level units need to be connected with each other and have good communication.  They need to be accountable, and there should be a mechanism wherein they can share solutions with each other.

There will be plenty of problems anyway.

Jealousy is a massive waste of time, energy, and emotion. Other people’s achievements are there to be admired.  We should use them to inspire us.  We should praise them highly instead of trying to minimize what they’ve done.

The biggest barriers you face fit nicely between your own two ears.  “I can’t” just can’t do it.

Everything comes at a cost. It might be planning; it might be hard work; it might be time; it is likely a combination of all three.  It might also be your soul. Some things just aren’t worth the price.

Nobody got to where they are alone.  Everybody is born into a family, and some of those families have money. Some men are great because they’ve got a wife that takes care of all their basic needs for them, and this allows them to go out and be the “Great Man.” 

If you know someone who never seems to be able to keep a good job, but always has a nice vehicle, then it is either credit or an inheritance.  

There are some people in positions of power who are like a tortoise on top of a fencepost: They have no business being there; they don’t really want to be there; they can’t do anything; and they sure as hell didn’t get there on their own.

You should floss.

Yes, everyday.

If you are in a country where you don’t have a good grasp of the language, you can get what you need if you don’t mind being embarrassed and can mime.  You might not want to do this for toilet paper.

If you are in a country where you don’t know the language, speaking English slowly and loudly and waiving $20-bills works.

You shouldn’t worry too much about petty embarrassments.  People are so self-involved that, while they might laugh, they are soon so absorbed in their own problems they forget whatever you may have done.

Even in the light of that, try not to do anything spectacularly stupid on a slow news day.

Tip.

I hope you are all off to a fantastic summer.

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. )

Building Wall

 Building Wall

By Bobby Neal Winters

Something there is that doesn't love a wall,

That wants it down.’

--Robert Frost

My driveway is parallel to my neighbor’s property.  There is a strip of land a few feet wide between the drive and where his lot begins.  His lot is a few feet higher than mine, and in the past there was a tendency for soil to wash from the higher ground onto my driveway.  This was just nature: gravity and water.

I forget when it was, so I am going to say it was twenty years ago, I built a retaining wall out of landscaping timbers. I did this without a plan, without advice.  Then I filled the area between the drive and the wall with brick, flat against the ground to keep grass from growing there.

And it worked...for a while.

Recently, however, it has become a mess.  Weeds have grown up through it and it is difficult to mow around.

I decided that something needed to be done.

The first step was to take out the old wall.  This was kind of an education. My mantra has been that it is easier to tear down than it is to build up, but I need to remember that is a relative statement. Tearing down was a sweaty job, and I never actually tore down the wall I’d made with landscaping timbers. Those timbers are there even yet. 

The hard part was the bricks. I’d used about 100 bricks to fill the area between the landscaping timbers and my drive.  They are sitting stacked neatly on my driveway even as I write this. Digging them out with a shovel, bending over my belly to pick them up, and then stacking them neatly in a pile required considerable effort. Thankfully Jean was there to help.

In the two decades since I built my old retaining wall, I’ve learned a lot of things. One of those things is that I am stupid; I can’t just make stuff up as I go along and expect it to go well.  Because of this, I got on YouTube and found a video--several actually--on building a retaining wall.

You should have a base of gravel of a certain depth, so I dug a ditch as long as my wall and filled it with gravel.  The gravel needs to be tamped down, so I bought a tamper and tamped it. As you lay your blocks, you need to tamp them down with a rubber mallet.

My neighbor came over about this stage of the process to see what I was doing.  He was curious because seeing me do anything physical is something of a novelty.  I brought him up to speed on it and we talked about our luck, or lack thereof, on such projects.

Once you get your first course of blocks laid on the gravel base, it is like putting together Legos, forty-pound Legos, but Legos but Legos nevertheless. 

When the wall is up, you need to fill in between the dirt and the wall with gravel so as to allow the water from the higher level to flow down.

I still need to do that part, so I will be making trips to Home Despot for gravel today.

Is the wall perfect? No, but it doesn’t look bad and it suits the person who paid for it: Me.  It will be easier to mow around and easier to keep presentable.

At least that’s the plan.

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. )

Battery-powered mowing: One year after starting

Battery-powered mowing: One year after starting

By Bobby Neal Winters

Last year, as the attentive reader may recall, I made the switch from ICE (internal combustion engine) mowing to battery-powered mowing.  I gave periodic reports on that last year and it all went great, as experiments like that always do.

When you make a switch to something it is because you want it to work.  You think that it is cool and everything you do is colored by the glow of your desires.  This is why the scientific method was developed: We know that we lie to ourselves, so we set up a structure to try to keep us honest.

I didn’t do any of that when I got my new battery-powered Ryobi mower. It was 2020 and I had absolutely no desire to take the glow off of anything. I needed all the glow I had, as I am sure you did too.

Now we’ve had winter; I’ve been fully vaccinated; the mask mandate has been lifted. There ain’t nothin’ but blue skies ahead now, Bro.

How is the battery-powered mower holding up now?

I believe I can be objective now because the shine has literally been worn-off of it. It is plastic so that means instead of scratching the paint you scratch the plastic.  And it has scratches.

But nothing has broken so far.

It is lighter than a metal mower and I do believe that has reduced the fatigue factor involved in mowing.

I absolutely do not miss the gasoline aspect.  It was awkward to go get gas for my gas mower.  In my dad’s day, that was easy. You filled up your car tank and then filled your mower using a siphoning hose.  Get ready to mow and gargle with gas at the same time; the chick’s really dug it.

But I found having to put a gas can in your car, schlepping it to Casey’s, filling it up, and then schlepping it back to be inconvenient.  

Now I have two batteries and I keep one of them charging all the time.

I have been asked whether I have to have the two batteries.  This is to say, can I finish daily mowing without changing the battery?

Let’s put this in context.  Back in the day when I was young, and my heart was an open book, I used to mow my whole lawn, front and back, in one go.  In those days, I would stop after the front was mowed and refill the mower with gas; this is the moral equivalent of a battery change.  But this ever-changing world in which we’re living made me older, so I now mow the front yard one day and the backyard the next.

When I did that, I didn’t have to stop to refill anymore.  Now I can mow the front yard with one battery and it is not even close.  The backyard is a closer thing.  When I do the first mowing of the year, the grass is very thick, so in the two season inaugural mows, I’ve had to change the battery both times.  

Last year, the first mowing was the only mowing I had to use two batteries.  This year the rain has mixed things up.  The first mowing, as I said, required both of my batteries, but then I went a few mowings with just one battery. Yesterday, the rain had forced me to go nine days instead of seven or eight.  And the grass was wet.  I had to use the second battery for just a few minutes.

Are battery-powered mowers a panacea?  No, no they aren’t.  You do have to modify the way you do things.  But they are quiet; they are convenient; there is less upkeep.

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. )

Landscaping as a Means of Grace

 Landscaping as a Means of Grace

By Bobby Neal Winters

John Wesley would say that God is continually improving us through his grace if we do what He says. James the brother of Jesus said, “Faith without works is dead.” Home Depot says we have that on sale.

Last summer during the lockdown, I became reacquainted with my shovel. The first thing that happened was that our dog Charlie died and I had to dig him a grave.  He was a biggish dog so I had to dig him a biggish/deepish grave, and in doing that I discovered that the shovel was comfortable in my hand.

I topped the grave off with a couple of pavers so that we wouldn’t lose Charlie.  His buddy Obidiah is barking at thin air, so his days are numbered on this earth.  It would be disturbing to find Charlie while burying Obie; therefore we mark his grave.

Pavers, as it turns out, are not all that expensive.  We had a path we continually used across the back yard that was a muddy mess whenever it rained. As a solution to this, I made a nice walkway with weed cloth, sand, pavers, and river pebbles.  (How do I know they were river pebbles? It said it right there on the bag in both English and Spanish.)

It is a thing of beauty, let me tell you.  After having finished that, I decided I wanted a fire pit.  There was a place in my backyard that had been a continual source of problems. These were mainly problems caused by us: We stack rocks there; we stacked brush there; the good folks at the City would occasionally write us nice letters about it.  

We decided to cure that problem by building our firepit there.

Now, I’ve called it a fire pit.  It is actually a tiny patio where I can put a metal contraption that Home Despot calls a fire pit.  Pits are on the ground; barbeque grills are in the air; this is between.

This allowed me to reorder a lot of other landscaping elements to this tiny patio.

And I looked at what I had done and saw that it was good. And the evening and the morning were November, so I stopped for the year.  My family complained it was too cold to use the fire pit. How can it be too cold to use a fire pit?  You got fire right there in it.

But now spring has sprung.  There had been an old picnic table in the back yard that Charlie had used like Snoopy’s dog house, but as I mentioned earlier, Charlie is no longer with us.  Obie is too blind and senile to even find a table.  The table itself was broken.  The metal had rusted so as to render it only safe enough to be a dog’s fantasy airplane.

Because of this, I borrowed my youngest daughter’s boyfriend’s angle-grinder, and took it apart, leaving the wood in nice shape.  I didn’t even know how expensive wood was at the time.

I then, using the skills I’d honed to perfection earlier, made a little patio where the table had been.  I am looking for a second hand garden table to put on it.  The folks at Home Despot are mighty proud of theirs.

The yard looks a lot better, and I feel like a better person.

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 Mercury Tracer

By Bobby Neal Winters

Those of you who are old like me will remember the days when there were Fords, Mercuries, and Lincolns.  They were in a continuum like that.  You started out with a Ford and as you climbed the ladder you would get a Mercury and when you had climbed to the top you would get a Lincoln. I don’t think I am going to use this as a metaphor in the rest of the column, I am just trying to jog your memories a bit because they don’t make Mercuries any more and I will need you to be thinking about Mercury automobiles.

Just before Jean and I got married, Jean’s mom Janet got a brand new Mercury Tracer.  A Mercury Tracer.  See, I said it twice, and you still didn’t recognize it as a type of car.  You might’ve thought it was some special kind of glowing ammunition.

Back in the day, the Tracer was Mercury’s version of the Ford Escort.  You need to further understand that in the 1980s, the Ford Escort was not the palace on wheels that it eventually came to be.  It was still quite small, and the Mercury Tracer was as well.  It was exactly like the Escort with a somewhat nicer trim.  I drove it from here to Tulsa once and had to rub my shoulders with vaseline to get it.   It is a four-on-the floor standard transmission with no AC. (I don’t think it has AC. You’d have to turn it on to know.)  It would go from 0 to 60 in...we will tell you when it happens.

It was Janet’s car until the day she died.  

The paint is faded by the sun, and it’s battery died this winter when the polar vortex hit, but I think of it as Janet’s new car.

We had Janet’s funeral yesterday as I write this.  She was not a person to force herself on anyone.  She was not one to force her opinions on anyone. She was a modest person, with modest needs, who took care of the people around her in a modest, steady way.

The human species is a strange thing.  While we--especially in our modern world--have a tendency toward individualism, we are in fact a social animal.  We talk like we are Paul Simon “I am a Rock, I am an Island,” in truth we are John Donne “No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main...”.  Our individuality is played out as being part of the group.  

I went to Rotary President Elect Training a number of years back.  There you find yourself surrounded by what I’ve come to think of as “Main Street” type people.  These are fine people.  They come at the world through a different set of metaphors than I do, so sometimes it takes me years to understand them.  What they make of me, I can only guess.  Anyway, one of the speakers posed a means of evaluating members by the question: “Are they a work horse, or are they a show horse?”

After years of mediating on this simple question, I’ve come to realize this isn’t really a scale with one end high and the other end low.  It is a classification of necessary types.  The human race needs the show horses as well as the work horses. We need those gleaming people who are bright and shiny and can make us feel good just by smiling at us, just by deigning to notice us.

But they are really very expensive and very high-maintenance so we really can’t afford many of them.

We really need more of those people who will quietly get in and do the jobs no one else really wants to do.  We need those people who will be the first one in the field to work in the morning and the last one to leave in the evening and then cook a meal and do dishes before bedtime.   

The people who get a new Lincoln every year are fine.  I admire the ones for whom a Mercury Tracer every four decades is enough.

We will miss you Janet.

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. )

Dear Graduates

 Dear Graduates

By Bobby Neal Winters

You are now graduating from college in the time of COVID.  Nothing is normal; neither New Normal nor otherwise.  But there are some eternal things that are happening now: Your parents are proud; your grandparents' hearts fill their chests; you are going off to start on something new.  

And if you are like I was, you don’t have a clue.  Even though you might be highly educated, there are some things that you may still need to learn.

One of these things--and the quicker you learn it the better off you will be--is how to separate money out for a particular purpose and pretend that you don’t have it until you use it for that purpose.  

Get a flower pot or a mayonnaise jar and put your pocket change in it.  If you get the urge to buy a lottery ticket, put the money in your flower pot instead. If you get the urge to buy a pack of cigarettes, put the money you would’ve spent in that flower pot.

When you get so much, you are nervous having it in the house, put it in the bank.  When you get tired of not drawing any interest on it, buy some stock. Whatever.  Develop the habit of putting money aside for a fixed-purpose and stick with it. It will work better if it is a small amount done on a regular basis.

Exercise on a regular basis.  Not strenuously for hours once a week because you won’t do it.  Do twenty minutes a day.  Every day.  Make it a thing. You don’t have to buy any equipment; you don’t have to get a membership at the Y, although that is a fine thing if you actually use it.  My personal choice is walking. Walking is free by the way and you get to keep engaged with your surroundings. But do a little bit everyday.

You only get one body. That is it.  You really need to take care of it. Regardless of how well you take care of your body, you will die one day.  That can’t be helped.  But your body needs to be used.  Think of it as being an old car for which they no longer make parts. You have to take care of the ones there are.

Negotiate for yourself.  This doesn’t mean to be a jerk.  Indeed, the best negotiations are done civilly. Pick the words that fit your style, but engage in give and take.  This might come naturally to you, but most likely it won’t.  Ask questions.  Don’t be afraid to look stupid.  Actually, try to give up being afraid just as a matter of course.  

Don’t be afraid to turn and walk away.  This part is easier if you’ve taken my first bit of advice about saving money.  Know yourself; know what you can do.  Know your own value.

There are lots of other things that you don’t know, but if you can do even one of what I’ve said, you will be better off.

Go forth and be a good person.

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. )

No easy answers

 No easy answers

By Bobby Neal Winters

I’ve been listening to so many people that I’m beginning to lose things I used to understand. (“The more I know, the less I understand / All the things I thought I knew, I'm learning again.”)  I don’t know what rights are anymore for example.  We talk about rights to healthcare, rights to cable to tv, rights not to wear a facemask during a time of global pandemic.  

I think I know what goods are, so let me think on paper about that.  A good is something that is, well, good.  We can be concrete and talk about canned goods, like pork and beans or whole kernel corn.  These are things that can keep you alive.

In the context I am thinking about, it is meant more abstractly.  Health is a good. Education is a good. Having a means of transportation is a good.  

I am healthy; that is a good I have. I’ve been privileged to go to school; that is a good I have.  I’ve got a car; this is a good I have.

Those were all statements of my own personal goods.  But I drive my car on roads that were built by various states sometimes with the aid of the federal government.  I attended schools that were paid for by the government.  I am healthy because I go to physicians who have to meet standards laid down by their associations and who are licensed to practice medicine by the government.

I have my own personal goods, but so many--and perhaps all--are supported by institutions that were created for the Common Good.  I come from plain people who have been plain all the way back as far as we have knowledge. I have an interest in supporting the Common Good.  Supporting the Common Good supports my personal interest.  It is a very seductive idea, but as beautiful as it is we got to be careful.

Suppose there are three people who are going to die shortly:  a person who needs a heart, another who needs a liver, and another who needs lungs.  To make it interesting, say they are important people who contribute to the Common Good in some way.  Now suppose there is a vagrant who steals and makes messes in the public square but nevertheless has a healthy heart, a healthy liver, and a sound pair of lungs and happens to be a tissue match--the ONLY tissue match--to the three worthy individuals mentioned before.

Do you use his parts to save them?

If you say, no, he has a right to live.  Don’t the three individuals also have a right to live?  Why does his right to live override their rights to live? There are three of them and they are better people.  Not only do they match him in rights, keeping them alive supports the Common Good.

I know my answer. We don’t kill people for such things because it is just...wrong.  But how do I justify that in absence of my personal religious beliefs. I don’t want to be ramming my religion down someone else’s throat, right? (“I am so sorry you are being vivisected, but it is wrong for me to impose my religious beliefs on others.”)

This started out to be a column in support of the Common Good, but I got lost along the way by thinking too much.  Sorry, I will try not to let that happen 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. )

 Pee Mud

By Bobby Neal Winters

I am back from my cousin Karen’s funeral.  Strictly speaking, she wasn’t my cousin; she was my cousin’s wife.  But there are some relationships that are so long standing time erases the difference between blood and non blood.

Suffice it to say that I never didn’t know Karen.  She was there in my earliest memories.  I look now at the relationship between my youngest daughter and my grandsons and say, yes, it was like this.

She gave me one of the best gifts I’ve ever received.  It is an image of myself--I tried to type that as “my self” but my grammar corrector wouldn’t let me; damned machines.  So often people who’ve known us a long time will remember scenes that we have forgotten because we were so young when they happened.  This I remember myself.

It was a hot summer day in Oklahoma.  I was sitting in a part of our yard where the grass was dead because it was on a path between our house and my grandparent’s house.  It had been dry for so long that the ground was dusty.  I was three years old.

Karen came up to me and asked, “What are you doing?”

“I’m making mud pies!” I replied with glee.

“Making mud pies?” she asked with some confusion. “How can you make mud pies? There’s no mud!”

Whereupon, I stood, peed in the dust as little boys in the country are wont to do, and made mud from the dust.  Thence I began to make mud pies.

Any gift someone gives you is a mixture of them and you.  It is a reflection of you in them.  Sometimes it is more of them; sometimes it is more clearly of you.  To me, this is one of the most accurate reflections of myself that I have seen.

I could attempt to elevate this, and talk about Jesus curing the man from blindness.  He spat in dirt to make mud and rubbed it in the blind man’s eyes.  In this, he used the mystical elements of water and earth along with his own divine essence to give the gift of sight.

I didn’t do any of that.

This is a strange self-image for someone who has gotten a PhD in mathematics, who’s been an academic for more than thirty years, who has traveled the world to London, Moscow, and Sao Paulo.

Karen repeated the story to me many times at transitions in my life when there may have been a danger of me forgetting who I really was: graduations, marriage, jobs.

In some sense, the story serves the same function as God telling Adam, you were made from dust and to dust you shall return.  I am, and always will be, that little Okie boy in the dust, wanting to make mud pies.

Remember your origins.  Remember the people who’ve always been around you.  Never forget who you are.

I can always make my own fun.  I can always make do with what I have.

There are times that, when I am making do, I make other people shudder.  That is their problem.

Thank you, Karen, for helping me remember who I am. Because of this I will never forget you.

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. )

  Is Cat Physics Broken?

By Bobby Neal Winters

You may recall that I have developed an intricate theory of cat physics.  There are more details to it than this, but it developed out of the phenomenon that my family always has three cats.  If one of our cats passed away, another cat would turn up from nowhere to take its place to maintain the number three.  If an extra cat turned up when we already had three, then something untoward would happen to one of the three we already had.

This phenomenon was stable for years.  It did require a little fudging from time to time.  We would have an extra cat around for a while, but would then discover that it belonged to the Lady Violist who lived on the corner.  

This caused me to discover cat-sharing and the cat-e-cule wherein a number of houses can share cats amongst them, and the movement of cats from house to house would allow a greater total number of cats to be supported than could be supported by the houses individually.

Last summer, this theory appeared to be shattered.  It was like James Taylor’s Flying Machine, in pieces on the ground.

This disaster was presaged by the appearance of Goldie.  Goldie at the time was a female kitten no larger than a brick, brick covered with nettles as it were.  It was clear from the first that she would be an outdoor cat.  (Her later tendency towards weapon-zed flatulence confirmed this.)  While her battles at the beginning with our outdoor Tom’s were uncertain, nevertheless she persisted.  

I thought we should’ve named her Ruth Bader Ginsburg, but by then she had already been Christened. 

By my theory of cat physics, one of my cats should have died or disappeared. For a while, we thought it would be Mischief because she began to shed fur and throw up a lot.  Indeed, if she had continued to throw up on my stuff (always MY stuff), cat physics may have received a little artificial help.  Thank goodness, her health rallied, but cat physics remained shattered.

I couldn’t call upon the cat-e-cule to save cat physics, because the dear Lady Violist had passed-away.  What could be done?

I had no answer until last night. 

Last night a racoon roughly the size and shape of a bean bag chair turned up eating cat food at our kitchen door.  The creature was of such size that all of our outdoor cats--even the ferocious Golden--yielded their food without complaint or even remark.

Seeing this creature, I could find no explanation for its existence.  Then in the night, it came to me.  I had an explanation that covered everything.

Last summer, shortly before Goldie arrived, our dog Charlie had passed away.  Typically, conservation laws of the dog world and cat world do not interact, but our region was in an odd state.  The loss of our cat-e-cule had weakened the barrier between the dog-o-sphere and the cat-o-sphere.  This weakened barrier had allowed for the decreasing number of dogs to be compensated for an increased number of cats.

I had thought this at the time, but I couldn’t account for the extra mass.  The theory of such cross-space interactions requires the conservation of both number and mass.  The extra mass was poured out into the rotund racoon because racoons span the void between the cat-o-sphere and the dog-o-sphere.

So my fear of cat physics being broken was unfounded.  Indeed, it has emerged from the crisis stronger than ever.

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 Whole New World

 A Whole New World

By Bobby Neal Winters

It’s spring and flowers are popping out.  The State of Kansas has opened up the COVID vaccine to everyone.  We are primed to begin again, to build a New World for ourselves.

God created the world from nothing and then he began moving things around to put it into shape.

Each of us makes a world for ourselves, but we don’t get to start from nothing. We have to use whatever there is around us. Knowing what there is to work with is the problem. We spend our lives looking around the world’s cupboard, the world’s workshop, the world’s potting shed trying to figure out what ingredients there are.

Ever since I turned 25, I’ve been looking back and thinking what an idiot I was five years before.  All of the things I know now that I didn’t know then.

After a certain point it becomes ridiculous. You finally figure out that you are a fool and beat yourself up for that.  Then that gets ridiculous as you forgive yourself.

There’s not a rewind button, but you can take notes.

How do you build a world?  What is a world?

A world is the people you know and the things you do.

The first step in building a world by meeting people and getting to know them. 

I am not good at this part.  For the most part, I don’t like to force myself on people, and I think this is because I don’t like people to force themselves upon me.  I like to spend a lot of time in my head.  My way of reaching out to connect is writing.  I can’t force my writing on you.  If you don’t like it, you can put it down at any time.

The second step in building a world is by doing things. 

Get up in the morning; shower-shave-shoot your breakfast. Do some Bible study; learn a language; go to work and do the best job you can.  If your job is cleaning toilets, make those toilets shine.  If you work with people, treat each person you meet as if that person were Christ.  Do this even with jerks; do this especially with jerks.

You can combine steps one and two. You can do stuff with people; you can do stuff for people; you can combine these two.  

The last of these is the best.  The people you work with who want to help others inevitably make you better.  They aren’t perfect, but their imperfections are in places where you might be pretty good already. If you concentrate on where they are good, you can pick that up from them.

And, here’s the thing, you can always find people who want and need to be helped.  Jesus said this.  He said, “The poor will always be with you.”  He didn’t lay that out for you to use as an excuse not to help. He was simply stating the fact that there will always be people that you can build your world by helping.

So to build a good world for yourself, join something where you can help others: a church, a Rotary Club, or even...the Kiwanis.

Build yourself a New World, a good one, one that is full of love.

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. )

Happy Easter in Ice Cream

 Happy Easter in Ice Cream

By Bobby Neal Winters

A vision can keep us together when nothing else will.  A vision can foster Hope and Hope is one of the strongest forces there is.

In this year of COVID along with all of the unrest of the summer and the contentious presidential election, there was a vision that kept our small town together.  It was the vision of a better town.  It was the vision of a town that was better equipped to face an uncertain future.  It was the vision of a town unlike any town the world has ever known.

It was the vision of a new Dairy Queen just south of the Sonic.

Jesus said there would be wars and rumors of wars.  This was more like bulldozers and rumors of bulldozers.

“When are they going to start?”

“Have they started?”

“I think they are going to pull out.”

“I saw that they’d mowed the lot.  I don’t think they’d’ve mowed the lot if they weren’t goin’ to do anything.”

“I saw a for-sale sign on the lot.”

I must admit, that when I heard the last one, I actually drove by the lot to see if there was in fact a sign, and there was...not!

Since then, every time I run up to the big WalMart to do a grocery pick up I look at the lot.  A few weeks ago I was rewarded with the sight of actual bulldozers and actual dirt being moved.  A hymn began to burst forth from my heart:

“And Lord, haste the day when my faith shall be sight /
The clouds be rolled back as a scroll /
The trump shall resound, and the Lord shall descend /
Even so, it is well with my soul!”

Believe me when I say that I look now every time I go by to gauge the progress.

In the 21st Chapter of the Book of Revelation, we are given something similar. It is a vision of a new heaven and a new earth and a vividly drawn picture of a New Jerusalem,”coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.” 

There, John, the author of Revelation, is trying to describe his vision with the best words he has.  He makes use of light as a metaphor.  Light is symbolic of wisdom.  In this new heaven and new earth they will use the light of Wisdom to guide themselves.  John makes a statement that sounds like nonsense: “The Lamb is the light.” Had he been writing in English we would think he might’ve made a typo, writing Lamb for lamp.  But as Christians, especially after Easter, we know that the Lamb is Jesus and that the wisdom of Jesus will be the light in this New Jerusalem coming down from heaven.

And it is here that another hymn bursts into my heart:

“In Him, there is no darkness at all /
The night and the day are both alike /
The Lamb is the light of the city of God /
Shine in my heart, Lord Jesus”

Even while there is that hymn in my heart, I have doubts like with the construction of the Dairy Queen.  Is there anything happening?  Is it going to appear in stages?  There is so much evil in the world, why has he made us wait so long.

But in the vision is hope.  Come, Lord Jesus!

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. )

NALM and the New Normal

 NALM and the New Normal

By Bobby Neal Winters

‘The first mowing of the new lawn year is fast approaching, and it is time to look ahead to that new year.  Because of COVID 19, last year brought about a lot of changes.  That’s right, not even mowing escaped.

You may recall that last year I made the switch from my ICE (internal combustion engine) mower to a battery-powered mower.  This was a big game changer and won me some points with NALM, the National Association of Lawn Mowers.  NALM is incredibly woke.  They are rooted in that old, northeastern establishment elite.  They are dominated by a small group that is similar to the Skull and Bones Society. It’s called the Gopher and Grub Society.

While the Skull and Bones Society promotes a “new world order” with a “thousand points of light,” the Gopher and Grubs shoot for a “well-edged world” with a “trillion blades of grass.”  And they want those trillion blades to all be exactly alike.

I didn’t know this when I got into NALM  I just wanted to make myself a better person by having a better lawn.  But I got into this an inch at a time, and I don’t know a way out.

Anyway, NALM likes battery-powered mowers because they are more eco-friendly than ICE mowers and they are quieter.  And I do too.  I will admit I bought my electric mower of my own accord, and only found out later that NALM approved.  In any case, those two factors are not an issue with NALM.  

NALM is an organization that is deeply divided over a question that is of a lot of interest to most of us mowers: How short do you mow your grass?

This is very contentious.  On one hand, if you mow your grass short, say almost into the dirt, then you don’t have to mow it as often.  This means you will use less energy and will put less carbon into the atmosphere.  On the other hand, if you keep your grass long, then the carbon stays sequestered in the grass.

The Cut-it-short group fears that if the Long-grass group gets their way, folks will take it to the extreme of not mowing at all.  We will have acres and acres of grass in city after city, just growing and going to seed.

The Long-grass group fears if the Cut-it-short group’s point of view is taken to its logical conclusion that people will just pave over their yards.

There was a big video conference this winter where partisans for each point of view squared off over the issue.  It began civilly enough, but by the end the exchange had degenerated to:

“Oh yeah?”

“Yeah!”

One side of the issue will start the rumor that a member of the other side has dandelions in their yard or has at some point in the past.  This is a serious thing in NALM, especially among the elite. 

For my part, I keep my head down and try not to get noticed.  I’ve got so many dandelions in my lawn, I am thinking of using them as a food source.  I remember that aphorism, “Do not meddle in the affairs of dragons for you are crunchy and taste good with ketchup. ”

That is about all that can be done in this sort of atmosphere.  I will keep my lawn mown short enough to keep the snakes out, but not so short as to cut the dirt.  I will try to make the weeds in my yard as attractive as possible.

That’s about all anybody can 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 on YouTube. )

Shameless Self-Promotion

Shameless Self-Promotion

By Bobby Neal Winters

I have a channel on YouTube.  I have had it for at least 14 years, and it kind of surprises me that I’ve had it so long.  During the time I’ve had it, I’ve worked at it more intensely at some times than at others.  I’ve used it mainly for mathematics, though I have put some videos on it to share it with my extended family.

Over the past year, I’ve used it a lot more as I have put some content for my classes online.  I’ve also put up a few videos in an attempt to help my colleagues learn about Zoom and Microsoft Teams.  I don’t know if I was successful, but some of them were kind enough to thank me.  (You are welcome, by the way.) 

A week or so ago, I decided to get back into my channel and to try to do it in a semi professional way.  By semi professional, I don’t mean to semi make money on it, rather I mean to try to copy what my favorite channels do.  I have an “intro” and an “outro.” I show my face and talk to the camera to introduce the topic.  I break it up into segments.

Before anybody rushes out to look up the channel, let me warn you that it is all math and is likely to stay that way.  There are a few math channels: StandUp Maths, Mathologer, 3Blue1Brown, and UpAndAtom.  They all do math and they are all much, much better than mine.  They are slick, and I suspect they have professionals to do their writing and editing.  They are all smarter than me.  They are all much better looking...

I’d better stop going down this road because it might make me sad.

It does raise the question: Why bother?

To be up front about it: It is something I enjoy doing.  I like the act of thinking about a nice bit of math.  I like the act of making it into something someone else can understand.  I like making the pieces of the video and then putting them together.  It is my hope to put out a new video every week and to get a little better at it over time.

If I ever make a dime on it, I might just fall over dead.  That having been said, I am willing to take the risk. 

But my thinking is this.  We are going into a new future.  This year of living remotely has had an effect on us.  We’ve discovered new things. We’ve not been able to reach out in the normal ways, so, like water when one path is cut off, we’ve found new ways.  We need help on a homework problem, we don’t go to Poindexter down the block.  We go to YouTube and search. (If you want to find my channel, search my name. There are only two people by that name on YouTube so far.)

If I can help a kid with his homework at sometime in the future by doing what I like to do now, why wouldn’t I?  I am--at the very core of my being--a math teacher.

I am still finding my feet.  I’ve improved the graphics in my videos. (Improved is a relative term.) I’ve added some sound effects to my intro and I might improve my outro as well.  At this point with my most popular video having received 16 views, I don’t have to please anyone but myself.  If more people watch, I will probably become more self-conscious.

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 on YouTube. )

Sam I Am

Sam I Am

By Bobby Neal Winters

I was a picky eater, and it drove my parents to distraction.  In a vain attempt to fix this, one of the first books they read to me was “Green Eggs and Ham.”

Let me tell you, I rocked that book.  I got to the point where, in the words of my mother, I knew it by heart.  I can still quote vast pieces of it. “I do not like it here or there. I do not like it anywhere.”

It didn’t cure me of being a picky eater.  And--entirely unintentionally--gave me a better vocabulary to talk about it.

I almost wrote that we are living in a strange time, but then I thought it’s probably no stranger than any other.  The biggest difference is that we are the ones living through it. I was going to use that as a segue to talk about the latest tempest in a teapot over Dr. Suess. 

Let me preface this by saying that I don’t know anymore about the goings on here that anyone else.  Will Rogers used to say that he only knew what he read in the newspapers.  I’m not as well-off as that: I only know what I see in social media.  

But I do know this: Controversy draws reporters like cow flop draws flies. New innovations come along in how to generate it.  Right now there is a machine out there that uses words like Social Justice Warriors, Woke, and I am sure there are a few others, but you can go a long way on just those.  They are used as cuss-words and insults by some; by others they are worn proudly by others.

We hear about “cancelling.” While right now the right wing is telling us that it is something the left wing is doing, you might remember it as something that was done to “The Dixie Chicks” for some political comments they made.  

In my opinion, “cancelling” is a very un-American thing to do, but it has been done by many Americans.

Here’s the thing.  It is a weapon that is most effectively used against one’s own people.  The Left couldn’t cancel Rush Limbaugh because they were not his market; the Right cannot cancel Rachel Maddow for the same reason. However, if a member of your group does not toe the party line, then you can come down on them like a hammer.

This is not healthy, but it does explain some of what is going on in this country.  We get in our own bubbles, our own echo chambers.  It all starts feeding back on us.  And if anybody in our bubble says that maybe someone in that other bubble has a point, they get kicked--or cancelled--right out of the bubble.

The bit with Dr. Seuss is kind of instructive. Perhaps we’d better pause here to learn all we can from it.  My first reaction to this controversy was, huh?  This is Dr. Seuss who wrote about the star-bellied sneetches and the great controversy about sneetches whose bellies were plain and the ones with stars upon thar’s.

Then I used my old friend Google to find some of the pictures. Oh. My.

There are quotes by Theodor Giesel that are anti-Japanese, for instance. Quite frankly, you can’t twist it enough to clean it up. This was during WWII and that was the way we were “supposed” to think then, just as there are ways we are “supposed” to think now.  Over the course of time, his thinking changed.  He was able to see the unity of the human race in Horton Hears a Who writing: “A person’s a person no matter how small.”

Maybe the lesson here is to judge individual works on their own intellectual merits and not dismiss all of someone’s work because you don’t like some of what they did.  Maybe the lesson is to sharpen your own thinking and to resist being herded by what the group is thinking.

If you do, you might just find out that you like green eggs and ham, or you might find out they are gross, regardless of what they are pressuring you to think.

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. )

In Defense of Algebra 2

 In Defense of Algebra 2

By Bobby Neal Winters

I attended McLish High School in Fittstown, Oklahoma.  It was a small school at the time, and since then it has been consolidated with our neighboring school Stonewall, but it served me well.  I was always lousy with arithmetic, but when I got to algebra, something clicked with me.  I think this was because the arithmetic in algebra is easier.  When I got into geometry, I caught on fire.  

I took these courses as a freshman and a sophomore.  When I was a junior, there was a crisis.  Trigonometry and Algebra 2 were both being offered.  Trigonometry wouldn’t be offered again while I was in high school because it was only offered every other year, but Algebra 2 is a prerequisite for Trigonometry and for good reason.  I talked it out with the teacher (Mr. Hoyt Sloan) and administration (Billy R. Scott, in pace requiem), and they let me take both.

I hunkered-down and I did it. I worked every homework problem twice. Seriously.  There were nights doing my homework when I literally cried. But I did it.  Having gotten my Algebra and Trigonometry out of the way, I was able to start college in the mathematical sciences on the right foot.

These days, I spend way too much time on Facebook.  I do it because you can keep up with your friends and not use much of your brain.  If you’ve been there, you know there are other people who are not using much of their brain either. (Rim shot)

That having been said, sometimes you see things that are well-meant, put up by good people with the very best of intentions, but are in need of, shall we say, a bit of nuancing.  The one I have in mind begins, “It’s 2019...get rid of Algebra 2 in high schools and replace it with Finance Fundamentals. Teach kids about careers (not just college), salaries, credit, budgeting, money management, taking out a loan, buying a house, filing their taxes.”

As you can imagine given my history, this makes me set my jaw.  This was a course that I suffered to take.

Let’s take a look at this and dissect it a bit.  It starts with an attack on Algebra 2.  Does everybody have to take this class?  I don’t think so. It has been put there for a couple of reasons.  

It gets the reader’s attention and puts them on the writer’s side. Everybody hates algebra.  The students hate learning it, and their teachers hate teaching it.  It requires patience.  It requires building the capacity to abstract.  It requires attention to detail.  Very little of this comes naturally to us.  It can be very frustrating.  Whatever we math teachers may say in jest, we don’t enjoy making students suffer.  (Well, not all of them.)

Algebra is taught because it is a foundational skill for physical science and engineering. If you are going to be in any of those disciplines you need to have Algebra 1, Algebra 2, and a whole lot more.  In my personal opinion, teaching Algebra 1 in middle school is too early, and while we are at it, I don’t think Calculus should be taught in high school at all, but that is just as I said, my opinion. 

Not everybody is going to be in the physical sciences or engineering.  This is understood.  There are reasons for taking Algebra besides this.  It does require the building of the abilities I described above, which are useful in other areas.  I use the ability to be frustrated every single day of my life; Algebra 2 ain’t nothing compared to some of the stuff I put up with, but I digress.

The suggestion in the meme is to replace Algebra 2 with Finance Fundamentals.  It sounds like a good class, but this isn’t an either/or thing.  While I absolutely don’t think everyone will specifically use the knowledge they learn in algebra, students in high school take 6 classes a year for 4 years.  That is 24 classes.  You can go wild and take Math, Science, and English every year and still have 12 other classes wherein that Finance Fundamentals class can be fit, just sayin’. 

Having wrestled with writing this column--and I have wrestled with it--it seems the central issue is college preparation. I will stipulate the following: If you are not going to college, the probability you are going to need the subject matter in Algebra 2 (or Algebra 1) is vanishingly small. So this is really a meme about college tracking versus non-college tracking.

Did you know what you were going to do with your life when you were 14 or 15 years old?  

I was still in the process of figuring it out. To be honest, I did know I wanted to go to college and because I took algebra, I learned I could make it in a mathematical scientific area. Let people like me have the chance.

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. )