Hard Times

 Hard Times

By Bobby Neal Winters

I’ve had a couple of weeks where I’ve been whipsaw between the two imposters triumph and disaster. It’s not just me either.  COVID, though it seems it might be winding down, has left destruction in its wake.  It’s left us in a precarious age.  

But it is a rare event that does nothing good. If nothing else, these times have made me think back on the life my father led.

My father lived in a house with a dirt floor when he was a boy. He remembered at least one occasion when there was sleet falling and he was playing outside without any shoes because he had none. His family sharecropped, but then they left that life to follow the oil boom as it spread over Oklahoma.

He was out and out of school for a while so he could work in the oil field too.  Then he just dropped out so he could work as a day laborer in the oil field full time.  This continued until  World War II broke out.  He was then drafted and half a world away from home for a few years doing his bit in the war.

He knew hard times.

He did his best to protect his children, my brother and me, from hard times all his life.  He followed us around lest we dash our foot against a stone. He would say, “Watch me. Learn what I am doing.  I won’t always be here.”

He was trying to prepare us for hard times.

And he did, but not in the way he thought he was.  He was trying--with very little success--to teach specific skills.  What he truly taught was much more important.

He told stories about himself, about things that happened while hunting, about things that happened in the days of the old boom, and very rarely about things that happened in the war.

My brother and I loved the war stories.  

One theme that I remember being repeated: “Don’t just lay [sic] there and die.”

That is basically the advice they give you in active shooter drills. Humans have what is called the fight or flight response. That really isn’t the best name, because it leaves out one alternative: freeze.  Our instincts have been set with three ways to deal with fear:  

We can run.  Running is good when you can outrun the danger. (Though I am very fond of the joke, “I can’t outrun the bear, but I can outrun you.”)

We can choose to fight it out.  Even if we lose, we can make them pay for their meal.  We can slow them down while our offspring get away.

But we can also simply freeze.  This works if you are a tiny creature that has brush to hide in, but if you are big and out in the open, it turns into what dad said, you just lie there and die.

Times have changed since Daddy’s day.  Hard times look different now.  I really don’t know what he would’ve made of COVID or the changes associated with it.  But I think the attitude that we don’t just “lay there and die” is a good one.  Running is not always cowardly; fighting is not always brutal.  They are not mutually exclusive: You can run while you are fighting and fight while you are running.  

Don’t just lay there and die.

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. )

Lost

 Lost

By Bobby Neal Winters

How can a man be born when he is old?

It is a question that comes echoing down to us from history.  Nicodemus asked Jesus, and Jesus gave him a good answer.  I suspect Nicodemus had some idea of the answer, and if so Jesus would know that.  Sometimes smart people ask the questions they know the answer to already as a test.

This is a piece of scripture I am very familiar with.  Since I grew up as a Baptist, I am doubly familiar with it.  It has taken me until now, after years of contemplation and years of study, to understand it.  Maybe.  Maybe I understand it.

There is a word, an adjective, that is applied to a lot of things: Lost.  It can be applied to objects. I lost my wedding ring a year ago, and I’ve not found it yet.  It still exists.  It’s still out there.  But my direct connection with it has been severed. I don’t know where it is.

“Lost” can also be applied to people.  It takes on different nuances when applied to human beings. Sometimes it means the lost person does not know where he is.  Or maybe that should be put, he knows he is “here,” but he doesn’t know where “here” is.  And the “here” where he is at is not the place where he wants to be.

There was once a young man who left his family with some of his daddy’s money.  He spent it all and wound up wallowing with the hogs, eating their food.  He was in a place where he didn’t want to be.  He knew where he wanted to be, but only had hope that he could get back there.  He had to move himself to the place where he might be found.

That is the difficult thing.  Swallowing the pride.  Admitting not only that you are not perfect; admitting that you are wrong.

This is especially true when you are old, and when you’ve been wrong in the same way all of your life.  In my perennial favorite Christmas story, Charles Dickens “A Christmas Carol,” Marley’s ghost has a long line of bank boxes chained to him.  Marley was lost and died that way.  He had his old way of doing things chained to him.  Had he changed his ways while he was alive, the bank boxes would’ve been removed from him.  But--listen to this bit--he loved the bank boxes and didn’t want to let them go.

So he didn’t.  He kept them. Now he has them. Forever.

Change can be gradual.  I love the change and small dedicated effort can make. The mighty oak tree I see out my window has grown from a tiny acorn over the years with only air, water, and sunshine.

But we had to plant it in a new place for that to happen.  A squirrel had planted it up against the house.  The only thing for it there was eventual death. We dug it from the ground; it died to its old place; we planted it in a good place; it was born again.

It is straight, tall, and a blessing to all.

To become what it could be required a drastic change.

It was easier for the tree than it is for a human being.  My wife and I did all the deciding.

People are harder. When they are lost, they often won’t admit it.  It’s the world that is wrong.  Everyone is wrong but them.  They create a tiny hell for themselves, but they believe it is the whole world.  And they will work to drag everyone else into it with them.

Jewell asked, “Who will save your soul, if you won’t save your own?” 

How can a man be born when he is old?

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 Carpenter's Hands

 The Carpenter’s Hands

By Bobby Neal Winters

In taking up woodworking, I’ve stepped into a new world.  No, new is not right, the world is not new, it is old, but it is different.  There’s a different language, different customs, different things to learn, but they are old things for the most part.

Man is a tool using animal. We use tools to do things, but we use tools to make other tools.  We’ve used this ability to leverage ourselves out of the mud. And to talk about our tools, to teach others how to use them, we’ve created words. Words have been some of our most important tools.

As I sit here, there is a tool called a “wheel marking gauge” that is just to my left hand.  It is a device to which I was happily ignorant as little as a week ago, but having learned of its existence I had to have one.

As you might’ve guessed, it’s a measuring device.  It can be used for a variety of applications, but when I first saw it on YouTube it was being used to make a mortise and tenon joint.

I had heard of a mortise and tenon joint in the past, but until recently that phrase was just a collection of syllables. These are words that come into the English language through Old French. A mortise is a hole and a tenon is a projection you put into a hole. What were two separate things, are now one.  Something new has come into the world.  

The mortise and tenon joint is a way that you join two boards together without nails or screws and maybe not even glue. The tenon must fit very tightly within the mortise, and, as a consequence, measurements must be precise.

As I typed the word measurement, the image of a tape measure popped into my head, so I figured it might have yours too.  I need to knock that thought out of both of our heads.  The type of measurement needed for this is much more exact than can be accomplished with just a tape measure.  

In transferring the measure of the mortise to the board out of which you are going to cut your tenon, you can’t use just a tape measure or ruler or anything that would cause you to write down a number.  There would always be rounding off, and you would always be wrong.

Because of this, they need a wheel marking gauge. You can set the device to the exact size needed on the mortise board and transfer it directly to the tenon board without changing it to a number in between.  The wheel gauge I have does have measurements calibrated on its axis, but you would never need to look at them when you are transferring the measurements.  They are there for other needs.

Having praised the wheel marking gauge, let me say that not everyone uses them.  There are those who’ve made their own measuring device that works in a similar way. It's made mainly of wood, but with a single nail through it to do the marking.

There are two breeds of woodworkers on the internet: The Power Tool folks and the Hand Tool folks. The hand tool people use very sharp chisels to cut their mortises and sharp Japanese saws to cut their tenons.  The hands of those who do this are rough, but amazingly skilled. There is something there to be admired.  

It makes me want to do my woodworking better. It makes me want to be a better writer.  Heck, it just makes me want to be better.

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

What We Are, We Are

 What We Are, We Are

By Bobby Neal Winters

When I was in high school, the father of a friend of mine had heart disease.  He was a good man, as is his son, and the community circled round them in love.  There was an event to help defray expenses, and a part of that was an auction and a cake walk.

One of the prizes was a poster of a setting sun with a cutting from Tennyson’s poem Ulysses in the background.

I am not a poet, nor do I read much poetry; I get my fix on poetry through song lyrics; but Ulysses captured me. I either bid on the poster and bought it or I won it at the cakewalk, and the poem has been my boon companion since that night. 

For those of you who may have grown up as an ignorant Okie like me, Ulysses was a hero of the Trojan War.  There is an ancient poem called the Odyssey which recounts his adventures/misadventures on his voyage home.  I don’t know any more about this than the Classic Comics that Mr. Gantt kept in his English Classroom, but that stuck with me. I often recite the portions I’ve memorized in my head, and I revisit the poem itself from time to time.

It has been a companion on my journey. There are days when I alternate between it and Reba McIntire singing Bobbie Gentry’s “Fancy.”

I’ve not been as bold a soul as Ulysses. My adventures have been of a different sort.  I have gone many more places than that Okie boy at the cakewalk would’ve believed, but most of my adventures have been of a different sort.

I like to learn things. I’ve learned how to calculate the positions of planets in the sky. In doing that, I got started on learning the Python computing language.   In learning the Python computing language, I discovered that when computer programs get big, they become hard to keep up with so I began learning how to organize them better.

At some point, I wanted to learn about robots and electronics. In doing the deepdive on that, I learned about the Maker Movement and all of the associated free resources on the internet to learn how to do things. 

Connected with that, I learned how to set up a simple home solar charging system.  Connected with that I began a project to set up a homemade, backyard weather station which is now on hold because of...weather.

Now I am learning woodworking.

None of this is like spending time with the Lotus Eaters or being captured by Cyclops, but, as Bobbie Gentry would say, “I ain’t done bad.”

Looking back on it, it seems kind of random because, well, it is.  But this is a connection. That connection is me.  I’ve learned things; I know the things; I think about the things; I share them with you.

The poet Dante I am told put Ulysses in hell, and I am sure he had his reasons. But this one fragment of a poem by an English aristocrat inspired by an ancient poem about a character from the Trojan war--which may never have happened--has had an effect.  It has been a chord in a string of random colored stones that has brought them together in a necklace.

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. )

If I Had a Hammer

 If I Had a Hammer

By Bobby Neal Winters

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Cold and a Broken Hallelujah

A Cold and a Broken Hallelujah

By Bobby Neal Winters

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Amen and amen.

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

 

 Some Applied Mathematics

By Bobby Neal Winters

Take control of your space.

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

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

But control and order are the words of import.

Once you have control, you can proceed.

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

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

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

They need to get control of their space.

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

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

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

But many people are striving with it in silence.

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

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

Because this is your space.

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

But it is all the same principle.

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

The Holy Trinity of the Frontenac-Pittsburg Metroplex

 The Holy Trinity of the Frontenac-Pittsburg Metroplex

By Bobby Neal Winters

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 Taking a Table Saw to the Tree of Knowledge

By Bobby Neal Winters

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

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

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

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

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

It is just there.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 Half a Million Miles an Hour

By Bobby Neal Winters

On Tuesday, January 4, 2022, the planet Earth is at perihelion--its closest point of approach--to the Sun.  The Earth, on the average, is speeding around the Sun at almost 67 thousand miles an hour.

But we don’t notice it.

Our bodies don’t sense speed, or velocity, per se. Rather our bodies experience change in velocity, what the physicists call acceleration. There is acceleration, but it is mainly a change in direction as we go in a circle around the Sun.  This acceleration is small, on the order of a degree per day. (I am leaving out the rotation of the Earth here, because it doesn’t fit my New Year theme. Deal with it.)

All this to say, the human race has been going 67 thousand miles per hour its entire existence and has never felt it.  We know it now.  A few people choose not to believe it, but it is a known thing.

Last year at this time people were happy to be done with the year 2020.  They were looking forward to 2021 as a bring of new things, but it turned out, 2021 was just a knock-off sequel like 2020, Part 2: Delta Force. 

We feel like nothing has changed.

And in a certain sense we are right.  Human beings are still chimpanzees with nuclear bombs, alcohol, and cell phones.

In another sense, we are still going through space at 67 thousand miles per hour...in a circle.

However, there are other things going on. There are other directions of movement.  The Sun--and Earth with it--are traveling around the center of the Milky Way Galaxy (Is there a Snickers Galaxy somewhere? Maybe we should take that name because of all the nuts.) at almost half a million miles per hour.  This is even more imperceptible to us because the acceleration is even smaller.  

The Sun has been moving at this speed for billions of years, irrespective of us or any living thing on the planet.

There are things that are moving us great distances that we are completely unaware of.

Think of the things you can watch on TV now that would’ve shut down the networks for showing it in the 1970s.  There are now things on television that would’ve scandalized truck drivers in those days. The change happened, and was allowed to, because it happened slowly.

We’ve been annoyed since early 2020 because a lot of changes have happened fast.  In the long run, the big changes won’t be the things that stick around. We’ve noticed them.  The things that stick around will be the small things we’ve picked up along the way.  

When a fly annoys you, you swat it very quickly.  The fly will be gone, but the stain the flyswatter leaves might very well remain.

In any case, a New Year is coming.  The number at the end changes from 1 to 2. Life goes on.

The New Year will be full of love and blessings.  Don’t let them slip past 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. )

Counting Calories and Grapes

Counting Calories and Grapes

By Bobby Neal Winters

We are coming to the New Year and the time of resolutions.  Many of you will resolve to lose weight.  This gives me a legitimate opportunity to share.

A few weeks ago I shared that I had started a diet.  As one of my former colleagues said, “Again.”  I also shared that I didn’t have any illusions, and I don’t.

But it has been, and continues to be, a learning experience for me, and, because it is my purpose in life, I will share what I’ve learned so far.

This is the Noom program that you may have seen advertised.  It does cost money, but I found the pricing to be fair.  If I were to describe the Noom approach in one word it would be “mindfulness.” As that one word brings up images to me of sitting on the floor in lotus position in loose-fitting clothes and your palms turned upward while you are looking into the distance saying “OOOOOOOMMMMM,” let me expand on it a little.

What mindfulness is is all there in the word itself.  You are mindful of things. To unpack that a bit more, you pay attention to what you are doing.

The Noom program has made me pay attention to what I eat.  It does this by having me log into my phone everything with calories in it that goes into my mouth.  You type in what you are eating; from its database it brings up the item; you then put in how much of it you are eating; and it tells you the number of calories.  I’ve only stumped it once or twice.

I do this within a 2000-calorie a day budget.

In doing this, I’ve learned that most vegetables have hardly any calories at all.  Seriously. There are only 7 calories in a cup of spinach. You could eat 100 cups of spinach a day, but full, and starve to death in the long run.  No, actually, before you starved to death, you would die of methane poisoning--outside in the cold alone because your family would have kicked you out.

By way of contrast, butter and margarine have a ton of calories. Margarine has 34 calories per teaspoon. No, not tablespoon, but teaspoon. 

So, if you eat only raw spinach, you will be full, but you will not not live.  If you eat only margarine, you will live--and get fat--but you will not be full.

So there is a need for a balance.

I’ve heard the words “balanced diet” all of my life, but I’ve not internalized the meaning in this way until now.

In order to log the food, you must measure it.  This gets to be a pain because all of your measuring devices get dirty fast.  However, I’ve learned that a mug is just a bit over a cup, and some of our coffee cups do contain exactly a cup.

I do eat meat, but in measured amounts.  A half cup of ground beef is more than you might think and doesn’t have all that many calories compared to say, butter.  I do eat margarine and butter, but in teaspoon-sized proportions.  And I don’t seem to enjoy my toast less because of less margarine. 

Grapes are good.  They only have about three calories apiece so you can eat twenty of them, and that’s only sixty calories. By way of contrast, a raisin--an allomorph of the grape--has the same number of calories, but is less filling because it has less water in it.

Soup is also, in general, good.  Chicken noodle soup--Campbell’s as I recognize no other kind--has only 120 calories per cup. Have that--and 6 or eight crackers--and that will get you through the afternoon.

By paying attention, measuring my food, keeping track of the calories, and making sure I eat the right stuff to be full, I can make it.  I can even have a Son-of-Baconator every once in a while; but not fries at the same time.

As I read back over this, it kind of sounds like a religion.  Maybe I ought to just sit on the floor in the lotus position and say “OOOOOOMMMMM.”

But I’ve lost more than 25 pounds in less than two months, so “OOOOMMMM.”

Anyway, Happy New Year to you.  As for me, I will be counting calories and grapes for a while.

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. )

 Leviathan Falls, Fascism, and Winston Churchill

By Bobby Neal Winters

I just finished Leviathan Falls, the last book of the Expanse series. There are nine books in the series, and each one has a 20-hour audiobook version.  They are long books and it is a long series. (There is also a tv series on Amazon Prime.)

It is the best science fiction can be.

It follows the model of science fiction that I like the most. It takes known science and technology and extrapolates forward.  It then creates its world around that.  Then it goes one more step.  It adds something that we--and the people of the future human civilization it has created--can’t understand.  Something that might as well be magic.  And it extrapolates what the human race will do.

Within this framework, the Expanse explores several ways the human race can govern themselves.  Spoiler Alert: They are all bad.

In the Expanse series, there are three antagonists to the human race. The first of these are the builders of the “protomolecule,” a billions of years dead race whose advanced technology the human race has stumbled upon.  Then there are the mysterious entities who destroyed the protomolecule-builders.  And, add to those, our most constant enemy: the human race itself.

In the battle of Man versus Man, it explores fascism, and it does it in an un-cartoonish way.  This was interesting to me as someone who grew up on caricatures of Nazis from WWII movies.  

Before I write another sentence, let me state I have no sympathies with the Nazis or their latter-day wanna-bes.  I’ve seen the bones of their victims among the ashes of the bodies. But as I grew up and learned more, the Nazis became more mysterious.  The Germans are a people of high culture with a great value on education.  They’ve produced philosophers, scientists, theologians, and missionaries.  How could they also produce the Nazis?

Detailing the sins that led to this would undoubtedly take an encyclopedia.  To summarize, the Germans came into a time of disorder, and in the need for order, they let the Nazis in.

The Expanse series, within the framework of science fiction--which allows us to see something at a distance--puts fascism in a light where we can see it dispassionately.  We can move it to a distance from Auschwiz and Guernica; from Hitler, Mussilini, and Franco; remove the personalities; and see its basic flaws.

The fascists in the Expanse, as individuals, are presented as good people, by which I mean they are presented as people like you and me. Their leaders are just people who want the very best for humanity--as they see it.  Those words after the n-dash are very important.  The system of fascism puts too much power in the hands of too few human beings, and you all know about human beings and how rotten they can be.

The authors of the Expanse series, who together write under the pseudonym James S. A. Corey, don’t offer any answers.  They take nine long books in a series to say what Winston Churchill said: “democracy is the worst form of government – except for all the others that have been tried.” 

We may, understandably, become impatient with democracy.  We might want more efficient solutions to whatever the problem of the day might be.  A powerful government which acts in a unified, efficient manner, whether that government is fascist, communist, monarchist, or whatever, might be appealing...for a moment.

Democracy is inefficient, but inefficiency in genocide is not a bad thing.  If I want to improve a democracy, the beginning is easy: I can improve myself.  I can read more; I can listen more; I can try to see the other fellow’s side more.

In the meantime, if you like science fiction; if you like audiobooks; and if you have 180 hours of time to listen.  I recommend the Expanse series.  They are also available in print.

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. )

Creation from Chaos

 Creation from Chaos

By Bobby Neal Winters

We are in a time of disorder and chaos.  It’s not as bad as it might be, but I think I just heard a mystical voice in my head say, “Hold my beer.”  We need to lighten up just a bit.

I just remembered a joke that I’ll attribute to Isaac Asimov.  A doctor, an engineer, and a lawyer were discussing the ages of their respective professions.  The doctor said his was the oldest.

“When God removed the rib from Adam to make Eve, that was a surgical operation, so being a doctor is the oldest.”

The engineer disagreed.

“When God created the universe from Chaos,” he said.  “That was an act of engineering.”

The lawyer just shook his head and asked, “Who do you think created the chaos?”

I’m thinking of creating from chaos, not only because of the current world situation, but also because Jean and I are creating something new.  It is coming from the chaos that was left by the death of her mother.

That all sounds rather dramatic.  Chaos just means there is no order on things.  When Jean’s mother was alive, she was a big part of our lives.  We had a way of doing things and it included her in a substantial way.  With her passing, that way of doing things is over and we must come up with a new way of doing things.

She was just one person--and kind of a tiny person at that--but filled a large place in our lives.  Most of what we are doing is connected with, for lack of a better word, suff.  She--and her late husband--had some junk in a shared storage space with us.  It was in that shared storage space taking up space.

Was it good stuff? Was it bad stuff? Who the heck knew.  It was there and it was taking up space.  We didn’t know what was there; what we did know was there, we didn’t know where it was. If you don’t know you have it, and you don’t know where it is, then you  don’t really have it, do you?

While Jean’s mom was alive, there were always reasons not to change this state of affairs, but in the chaos of her passing, those reasons disappeared.  For her birthday, Jean got herself a roll-off dumpster, and we began the process of creation.

For us, that was throwing-away.

When you throw something out, you have to look at it, figure out what it is, and make a decision.  When you do this enough times so as to know what you have, you begin to create a classification scheme.  The stuff you decide to keep, you can then put in order.

In the act of putting things in order, we managed to carve out some space.  Within that space, I began to create a workshop of sorts for myself.  This is still in progress, but I’ve begun to work on projects in it already.  

One of these projects is making a desktop DC power supply from the power supply unit of an old personal computer.  Among the debris we dug through, we found some of those.  What computer power supplies do is take your wall current which is AC at 120 volts; lower its voltage; and then transform that to DC.  To make a desktop DC power supply, you just have to snip some wires and connect them to some other stuff while not electrocuting your fool self.  

I am still working on this.  I had to find another power supply unit because I shorted out the first, and it released its magic smoke.

So you take what still works from some things that are broken, and you put them together in a different order so that they work again.

This can be carried over to broader aspects of our lives.  What is working?  What needs to be kept and put to use? What needs to be thrown away?

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 Time of Darkness, Sciatica, and Samuel L. Jackson

The Time of Darkness, Sciatica, and Samuel L. Jackson

By Bobby Neal Winters

We are now in that darkest time of year that runs between Halloween and St. Valentine’s Day. It’s bookended between holidays that are strongly connected to candy. It between we have Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year’s, and all of the pumpkin spice and parties associated with each of them.  We eat to ward off depression, we eat to soften our fear of Death...and...

And I have gone on a diet.

There is a telephone app associated with it, but it’s basically counting calories.  I am currently on 2000 calories a day.  From the day that I started, November 3, until this writing, November 27, I have lost 15 pounds.

I feel better, my clothes fit better.

Those of you who follow this space know that I’ve been down this road before. 

I’d been having trouble with my back.  The cortisone shots weren’t working.  My back doctor said that we could get in there and “trim off that bone spur” and make my sciatica all better.  But another doctor had told me, “If you are having trouble with your back, look at your front.”

I can be dense sometimes, but I knew he was indicating my stomach.  I’d ignored his advice for a long time, but at that point--caught between sciatic and a surgeon’s knife--I chose to lose weight.  From that point in November 2019 until March 15, 2020, I lost 44 pounds.

That end date is very important.  Those of you who have been around during the last couple of years will recognize that as the first lockdown.  

At the time, I didn’t notice that I was putting weight back on.  It happened so slowly that I never caught on to the fact that I was sliding back (or back-sliding as Baptists are wont to call it) into bad habits.

So by November 3, 2021, I’d put back on 27 of the pounds I’d taken off before.

I’ve lost and regained hundreds of pounds over the course of my lifetime.  Quite frankly, even though I’ve always been fat (I was going to say “a bit on the husky side,” but I might as well own it), it’s always been easy for me to lose weight: I simply stop eating.  I just lock-in that crazy, obsessive-compulsive part of myself that I used to get my doctoral degree, and I pushed on through.  

In short, I made myself crazy.

Those who’ve been closest to me will testify to the truth of that last sentence.

My hope--and it is just a hope--that this time I will be able to avoid insanity.  I’ve got an app.  It has put me on a 2000 calorie a day budget.  I log everything I put into my mouth, and it has a nice library of foods with their calories that makes it easy to log.

On Thanksgiving, I was able to eat everything I wanted to, some of it in incredibly tiny amounts.

I weigh myself every day.  This might be the one lasting bit of knowledge that I brought out of my stint as chair of the university assessment committee: You have a target, you put your measures in place, and when you are off your target you do something.

I’m almost 60 years old.  I’ve been heavy my whole life.  I have no illusions.  By this time I know what my tendencies are.

The app asked me to set a goal.  Initially, it was to avoid surgery, and I think that’s a good one.  If the EMT folks ever come to get me, I’d like to make it easier on them.  And I suppose the final goal will be to make it easier on the pallbearers. 

But I have no illusions.  

Losing weight (and gaining weight for that matter) is easier than maintaining it. Statistically, you are either going up or coming down; there is no maintaining.

Anyway,if you offer me a cookie, and I start channelling Samuel L. Jackson, this is the reason.

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 Rose Window

The Rose Window

By Bobby Neal Winters

We are surrounded by beauty, both seen and unseen.

For the first time in the 32 years I’ve been in town, I visited the interior of St. Peter’s Episcopal Church.  I’ve been walking by it almost every day since I started my walking discipline back in 1996.  During that time, every time I passed it, I’d created my own mental image of what it looked like inside.

I was totally wrong.  I’d even gotten the orientation of the sanctuary wrong, though in highsight I don’t know how.

The church faces the south and there is a circular stained glass rose window up toward the peak of the roof.  As beautiful as this window is from the outside, it is even more beautiful from the inside, at least on a bright, sunny day.

When the sun is shining, not only does the backlighting bring out the colors, but the window shapes the sun’s rays, bringing them down to an oval (an elliptical region to be precise) on the floor.  As the sun goes from east to west across the sky, the oval goes from west to east.  

Since the church faces south and the altar is on the north side of the sanctuary, the aisle that goes between the benches follows a north-south line.  Because of this, at one point of time during the day, the oval is centered exactly on that north-south line.  That moment of time is what astronomers refer to as Solar noon.

It’s called “Solar noon” rather than simply “noon” because it doesn’t always occur at 12 o’clock.  Indeed, it hardly ever does.  But it is our original noon. People were noticing when the sun was high in the sky long before anyone ever thought about inventing a clock. Solar noon is nature’s noon.  It is the noon that we learned the idea of noon from, the Mother of all Noons.  Then we mechanized time; calibrated it;redefined it; and have tried to give the impression it belongs to us altogether.

But the sun shining through the rose window, pouring its light in front of the altar bears witness to the fact it was there first.  Let the clock on the wall say what it will, the sun will continue along its ancient highway in heaven.

I find that fact more beautiful than the colors from the stained glass.

We are surrounded by things like this.  Just as I’ve been walking past this beautiful church with its wonderful rose window for three decades, what else have I been walking past?

There is beauty, like the stained glass inside the church, that only requires us to step through the door to see, but there is another kind of beauty as well.  There is a beauty you have to prepare yourself to see.

A couple of decades ago, I attended a mathematical conference. A woman gave a research talk that was of such astounding beauty that it touched me.  It was a beautiful result in my area of specialization that she presented in a very clear way.  To a random person from the street it would’ve sounded like nonsense.  They would’ve understood the words as being English words; they would’ve understood that the sentences were grammatically correct; but the meaning of it would have escaped them.  And they certainly wouldn’t have seen the beauty of it.

I was left simply in awe.

I’d had to work for years and years to be able to appreciate the presentation. I’d walked through door after door, reading article upon article.  When the talk was finished, I thought, “If only for this, it was all worth it.”

We are surrounded by beauty.  Some of it is available to us just by walking through the right door.  Some of it requires an amazing amount of work to see.

It’s all grace.

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 Ties that Bind

 The Ties that Bind

By Bobby Neal Winters

That we continue to exist after we die--to me--is just a fact.  I’m not talking about ghosts--though I won’t rule those out at some suitable level of abstraction.  

Before I go on, let me warn the reader that this is going to be a mess because I am still working out my thoughts on this and I’m not nearly as smart as I think I am.  So be forewarned.

We like to think of ourselves as individuals.  Individuality is a problematic notion.  Human beings are born as naked, helpless creatures and remain that way for some time.  (For some, this is into their thirties.) We are born totally dependent and with the help of our parents, our teachers, and other people in our lives, we gradually reduce the bonds of dependency.

But it never quite disappears.

True, there are some people who give more help than they receive, but even they receive help.  And they receive the sort of help that can’t be repaid.  They can’t just cut themselves off from everyone else.  In the words of the song, “Everybody needs somebody sometime.”

By virtue of this, we have connection with others. (My grammar checker doesn’t like “connection” as a singular in the previous sentence, but the computers don’t rule us...yet.)  That connection is real.  They are in our heads even when they are not in our presence. 

We had our kitchen door replaced.  For years it squeaked, and we could live with that, but the cats had about ripped it to shreds so we had it replaced with a metal one and a storm door. (That will show the cats.) Now the squeak is gone.

For years, my wife’s dear mother would come in through that door, and the squeak would be a signal for us that she was coming into our home. Our minds would reorder themselves in anticipation of her visit.

Between the time she died and the time the door was replaced, the door would squeak, and I would think, “Janet is coming,” as an automatic reflex.  Then my conscious mind would kick in, and correct me, no that is not going to happen.

Yet, from time to time, something happens at that corner of the house that gives me the same reaction; this happens to my wife too.  Janet is still here, if only in our heads and hearts.

This is because we are not completely individuals.  Our existence is spread out through the herd, as it were.

It is as if we are tied to each other with rubber bands.  When we are in the process of dying, those rubber bands are stretched tighter and tighter.  When we die, the bands are cut at the point of connection.  They spring out and sting those to whom they are connected, but the connections are still there.  

They are still a part of us.

How we live our lives will determine what those who remain make of the connections when we die.

Whenever I have that fraction of a second when I feel that Janet is going to enter the room, it’s a happy moment.  The next moment is a realization of grief.  Perhaps, I simply need to learn to turn that grief into an appreciation for the continued relationship.

Like I said, I am still working it out.

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. )

Cain and Abel; Caf-Pow; and Lunch Ladies

 Cain and Abel; Caf-Pow; and Lunch Ladies

By Bobby Neal Winters

Human beings are incredibly strange.

I could just leave that first sentence there and never write anything truer.  It’s right up there with two plus two equals four.  But let me expand a bit.

Last week I mentioned the story of Cain and Abel.  Cain’s sacrifice was not accepted and it hurt his feelings.  He was jealous of Abel and you know the result of that.  Before everything went to pot, God told Cain not to worry about what anyone else was doing: Do better yourself, and that will be recognized.

We have a need to be recognized.

Eleven years ago, when I was still getting my feet wet in administration, I did something to ease tension in a particular situation and, as a result of this, I was given a “Caf-Pow.”  For those of you who don’t know, Caf-Pow is a fictional energy drink on the TV series NCIS that Gibbs gives to Abbie for a job well done.  As this is fictional, the Caf-Pow cup given me was handmade. It even came with a Pepsi.  It was a seemingly small thing, but I still have the cup.

Symbols of recognition are important.

This next bit is more complicated.  We human beings have some system of hierarchy that works on an unconscious level.  It is far from transparent.  I remember a story from forty years ago about a football player at my Alma Mater who let himself into a place in the cafeteria that had been roped off.  This was a big guy; a big man on campus; he eventually went on to play for the New York Jets.  A little lunch lady who barely came up to his belly-button read him the riot act and he moved back into the part of the cafeteria that was not roped off all the time apologizing, “Yes, ma’am. I am sorry ma’am.”

We have this invisible hierarchical structure that we all fit into, and sometimes, especially if you try to be modest and humble, it is hard to know where you fit into it.  Sometimes they hand out titles to help with this, but again, if you seek to be modest and humble, it is hard to recognize that you have status in the hierarchy.

I’ve spent some space explaining this, because I’m trying to get a handle on it myself.  The point is that if you are “higher in the hierarchy” people will count what you say more heavily than they would otherwise.  Your praises will raise them higher; your criticisms will take them lower.

If you are a person who still sees himself as a little Okie boy playing in the dirt, it can be kind of hard to get your head around, but there it is.

This tells me if we are to try to do better--even if we seek to be modest and humble--we need to have some knowledge of our place in this invisible hierarchy.  Our words can hurt; our words can heal; we must be aware.

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. )

Red on My Ledger

 Red on My Ledger

By Bobby Neal Winters

When my wife and I were married, it was in a Presbyterian Church.  The minister, knowing our plans to become Methodists when we joined a church together after our marriage, noted a difference between the way the Methodists and Presbyterians say the Lord’s Prayer.  

“The property-minded English Methodist pray for their trespasses to be forgiven, but a good Scottish Presbyterian would rather be forgiven his debts than his trespasses any day.”

Our sin is viewed as a debt, but as a debt owed to whom? 

Natasha Romanoff, aka “The Black Widow”, from the Marvel Avenger movies uses the phrase “red on my ledger” in referring to her past misdeeds.  She uses it to answer the question of why she is taking part in the Avengers’ activities.

A ledger is a place where we keep account of our business transactions.  Traditionally, profit is entered in black, but debts are entered in red.  For her the red takes on a second meaning as it is the color of blood, and she has had a very bloody past.  She has a deep sense--using a word the Avengers would never use--that she has sinned. 

But to whom is the debt owed?  Who can she repay?  The people she has sinned against are dead. 

By being part of the Avengers, being one of the good guys, she is trying to get that red off her ledger.  She is trying to atone. Her character progresses, but the red--in her heart at least--remains on her ledger.  She does not feel forgiven.  Whatever she’s done, it doesn’t feel like enough.

Blood is a part of our Christian tradition.

The first sacrifices mentioned in the Bible were those of Cain and Abel.  Abel’s was accepted but Cain’s was not, so Cain--in a fit of jealousy--killed Abel.

One question that always comes up is why didn’t God accept Cain’s offering?  This has been debated for literally thousands of years, but one answer is that Cain’s offering didn’t require the shedding of blood, it wasn’t a true sacrifice. 

It is more than somewhat perverse that while Cain did not shed the blood of an animal, in killing Abel out of jealousy, blood was shed, and Abel becomes Cain’s blood sacrifice as it were.  Because of this, in ancient Christian tradition, Abel is a type of Christ.  Christ’s blood wipes out all of our ledgers.

In Avengers: Endgame, Natasha sacrificed herself in place of her friend Clint Barton in order that they secure the “Soul Stone,” a McGuffin needed by their fellow Avengers. Ultimately none of her other actions--again, in her heart at least--were able to remove the red from her ledger. 

To put it in Christian language, the “red on her ledger” was a Cross to her.  Christ invited us to take up our crosses and follow him. When you take up your Cross,  you are giving your life.  For the overwhelming vast majority of us, we give our lives minute by minute, hour by hour, day by day over the course of our normal three-score and ten in service to our family, our loved-ones, and our neighbors.  A few are called to larger sacrifices, to martyrdom.

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. )

2020, 2021, 2022, Pogo, and Pittsburg

 2020, 2021, 2022, Pogo, and Pittsburg

By Bobby Neal Winters

Last year about this time we began looking forward to the New Year with a great deal of eagerness as if the changing of a digit from zero to one would magically make everything new.

I think we are all over that.

There were some who believed the election results would magically settle everything down.  This is an easy trap to fall into.  It’s like having a Judas goat we can put all of our sins into and chase out into the desert.

The trouble with elected officials is that we elect them.  They  get elected by getting their messages synchronised with what we want to hear.  The successful ones put together a montage image that is attractive to just enough of the electorate while their opponents are hideous to just enough of the electorate.  But in the end both sides come from the same place.

To quote Pogo one more time, “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

That having been said about politics at the national level, I am much more sanguine about politics at the local level.  This I think is due to the place I live.  

It’s a pretty good place.

It was my pleasure to be present at a candidate forum at the Noon Rotary Club the other day.  All seven candidates were there.  As you undoubtedly know, we’ve got three open seats that will be filled by the top vote-getters from this slate of seven.  From these seven, I would be comfortable with a random draw of any three.

This is not just coming from what they said.  They said what most candidates running for office would say.  Just as you can put together what a football coach is going to say about the coming year (“We had a good year last year, but we lost some strong players.  The folks we are playing against this coming year have been under-rated...”) there are things all local candidates for office say.

This is coming from the fact I’ve known some of these people for many years in contexts where it matters.  The word that comes to mind is this: Solid. These are solid people with solid values, and I am kind of proud to see such a group drawn from our fine community.

How is such a fine community formed?

I don’t know for sure, but let me tell you about my best guess.  There are two pieces that have to be put together.  If you do the first without the second, you will wind up with what we have on the national level.

Step one: You need to learn how to take care of yourself.  Step two: You’ve got to help your neighbor to do the same.  Billions of people working for thousands of years have been working on the details of implementation with, shall we say, mixed results.

So next year is probably going to be a lot like this one, but I am optimistic nonetheless.  Here in our little town we have good people. 

I know I’ve become better by being among them. 

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. )

Darkness, Cold, and Horror

 Darkness, Cold, and Horror

By Bobby Neal Winters

Halloween is a time for horror.

It is a dark time.  While the nights will be getting longer until just before Christmas, at Halloween it is just about as dark as it is going to get. Night is yet upon us when we leave for work in the morning as it is upon us again when we go home in the evening.  We wrap it around us like a cloak and hide within it. 

During the summer if we wanted to see the stars, we had to wait until very, very late, but around Halloween--provided the clouds don’t blacken even them out--they are there to see by the time supper rolls around.  While their beauty might provide comfort to some, if you think about it too much, they will help horror to descend upon you. They are reminders that the Earth is a mote of dust in space; we are fragile creatures protected from the many dangers of the universe by an ever so thin layer of atmosphere; one stray asteroid, and we are done for.

It has happened before.

The coming of darkness also brings horror because things happen in the darkness, things we cannot see coming, things we cannot defend against.  If we could see it, we could devise a plan; if we could see it, we could run from it; but we can’t. It’s there hidden in the darkness waiting for us, and there is nothing we can do. 

The name Halloween comes from All Hallow’s Eve. All Hallow’s Day was what we used to call All Saints Day.  From that nomenclature, one might think that All Saints Day came first, and Halloween followed.  The secular scholars will be quick to tell you that Christian missionaries co-opted the pagan holiday creating All Saints Day in reaction to it.  (“Bad missionaries. Go sit in the corner. No supper for you.”)  

For the sake of argument, we can grant that and note we’ve come from a point where we paid bribes to keep kids from over-turning outhouses to giving candy to children dressed as fairy princesses and ninja turtles.  (There are those who say it was human sacrifices in the beginning instead of tipping over outhouses, but that is another argument.)

Darkness is just a part of the horror.  The cold is coming.  We can’t grow our crops in the northerly latitudes, and unless we’ve prepared enough, starvation will come.

Halloween is a time after the harvest is done.  You’ve taken stock of your work and preparations from the previous year.  If you’ve not stored up enough food, death from hunger in the cold awaits.  Here the ignorant have an advantage: if you were just too stupid to plan, then you likely don’t know what lay ahead; if you were smart enough to plan, and the plan didn’t come together, you know the horror that awaits.  You can dread it as it comes.  If you are evil in addition to being smart, you start looking to see which of the neighborhood children is the fattest.

Trick or Treat indeed.

But surely this horror is all in the past?  Surely our knowledge will save us?

I think we’ve all seen these last couple of years that our knowledge is as thin as our atmosphere.  Unless we do a better job of teaching our children, here comes the darkness, here comes the cold, here comes the horror.

Halloween and All Saints Day are an inextricable pair. The Horror of Halloween is in tension against the Hope of the Saints.  Halloween is about the darkness of ignorance; All Saints Day is a witness to the Saints overcoming that darkness.

Now we stare into the darkness.  We know the light will come again. We pray that we will be strong enough to last until that happens.

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. )