More bumper stickers

On one car: “You can no more win a war than win an earthquake” and “Let’s get together and feel all right.”

I’m trying to figure out under what set of definitions the first statement could be true. At first glance it seems counterfactual (a polite way of saying “stupid lie”): history is quite full of counterexamples. But let me try to get inside this person’s head and figure out what sort of view of the world they are using.

I have to assume that the person who wrote this, and the person who stuck it on his car, actually mean something logical by the statement. It of course could be illogical nonsense that sounds good, and it is tempting to classify it that way—lots of people hunger for nonsense, after all. Or it could be the product of ignorance; but I doubt it—high school history has been dumbed down, but not dumbed down that far.

I’ll assume we both understand war to mean what happens when at least one group of people band together to fight with another group to achieve some objectives (keeping the other guys from killing them, or capturing slaves or land, etc), and that this fighting is on some largish scale. History is full of cases where one side’s objectives (staying alive, keeping their own property, grabbing the other guys’, or whatever) were met. It also is larded with cases where neither side’s goals were met, and a lot of people died with not much result. Nobody won those wars—no argument there.

Take a common enough setting as the example: country A wants a chunk of country B, and would like some slaves and other loose booty to go with it. A’s armies attack B. Repeatedly. After a few decades A practically (though rarely officially) gives up. Lots of people are now dead and both countries are poorer, but B survived, and so their objectives in going to war were met. (Substitute “tribe” for country if you doubt that this is common.)

My Bumper-Sticker Philosopher looks at this and says that nobody wins. He must mean that everybody has lost, and plainly both sides have lost a good deal in this case. Perhaps he is thinking of lives and treasure. If so, then he is saying that lives and treasure are more important than whatever the object they were risked for was. That sounds good at first, but on closer examination it isn’t quite as obvious as it seems. First, notice that the people fighting disagreed with him—they were willing to risk their lives for some mutual goals. Some were willing to die for those goals.

Look at the goals of the people of country B. They want to keep from being robbed, and keep from being made slaves of. If they valued life and safety more than protecting each other, unfortunately they would quickly have neither. So in a way they have to lose their lives to save them: be willing to die in order to survive. (The goals of the people of country A, though less ethical, are founded on their intent to take risks to provide for their own.)

If you take the claim that a life is worth more than anything else to its logical conclusion, nothing is worth risking your life for either.

So by what means do you avoid predation? Perhaps my BSP expects that each person will, if he feels safe from your attack, feel no need to attack you. That’s a common formulation anyway. A cursory glance at society proves otherwise: at least 1% of the population is perfectly willing to prey violently on the rest. My BSP seems likely to reply that this would not be true in a perfectly just society. This is true by construction (in a perfectly just society there aren’t any predators to begin with), but is not very useful (and I get very tired of hearing it). It is quite easy to increase that percentage, but it has been very hard to reduce it.

So if my Bumper-Sticker Philosopher thinks of loss of lives and treasure as the loss of the war, then he seems to be saying that nothing is worth risking lives for, and that he trusts in an Edenic society to make people good.

Maybe the BSP is more subtle, and he means something else. Perhaps what he means by loss is more of a spiritual thing. When we fight we become killers, in intent if not in execution. So when people go to war, something happens to their characters, making them less than they ought to be.

OK, I can follow that line of reasoning. Of course you run into Hamlet’s problem: “whether tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” or “to take up arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing end them.” For willingness to protect the innocent is as obviously noble a characteristic as is a peaceful spirit.

I can go farther. Unwillingness to protect those in your care is an ignoble abdication of your responsibility unless there is some better guardian available. Frequently there is no other guardian, and so you must fight unless there is a supernatural guardian and supernatural justice available.

I note that in this case my BSP’s statement does not absolutely demand that there be no wars. It may be that you must choose between ignoble actions. This differs from the purely materialist attitude discussed above.

So perhaps my BSP is a pacifist on religious grounds. I’m inclined to doubt it, though—because of the second bumper sticker.

The second bumper sticker carries, in this culture, an erotic, promiscuous, message. I’m not aware of any major religions that command both pacifism and adultery. The combination is found in do-it-yourself religions, with each man his own prophet. I am reluctant to dignify “it’s true because I say so” with the title of religion, or honor such a jackdaw as a prophetic follower of God. The tests for prophethood are pretty strict.

So I reckon there are three possibilities:

The message is nonsense in pretty language.

The Bumper-Sticker Philosopher thinks that life is too important to risk and probably also that a Just World (&tm;) will have no war or crime.

He objects to war on religious grounds, as defined by himself

I think I have spilled a lot of virtual ink on nonsense.

I should revise the numbers. A survey done in 2005 says youth gang affiliation in Dane County is 6%. So my predator rate (based on prison populations) is a factor of 6 too low.

Aha! Light

The pastor’s sermon explained a lot. When he spoke about following God’s leading he said (among other things) that he had not wanted to come to such a small church. That wasn’t the Aha moment—I had to sleep on it—but the lights made it clear.

A big church has multiple pastors on staff, and can hire managers. So do we now. A big church doesn’t need to rely on volunteer advice; it can hire consultants. So do we now. A big church has the big spotlights shining on the pastor. So do we now, and very clunky they look in our small auditorium.

We aren’t a big church, but we’ve got a pile of money and we’re using it to buy big-church accouterments. That’s an expensive way to humor the pastor.

The official reason for the spending is that we are growing, and need to have people in place as we grow. But the lights, intended eventually for the new building, are pretty useless right now.

Of course a few mysteries remain: Why the allergy to AWANAs? Perhaps it was Not Invented Here, or perhaps there were personality conflicts. And the allergy to adult education is also odd. I warned X that relying on small groups meant there was no systematic training, and he said that was something he was working on. This Sunday for the first time they introduced the small group leaders—not as teachers but as pastors! Maybe this is the kickoff for his more organized curriculum. Still, “pastors?”

What to do?

Is this a time for you to be building yourselves paneled houses when my house is in ruins? Haggai

Is this applicable now? Is God’s house in ruins?

I don’t see this applying to the finances of our local church—they have money, and are running through it like drunken sailors.

And yet it does apply to them, and to many other churches as well, where the congregants do not do anything but sit and watch and leave. I overgeneralize: some members of our church are far stronger Christians than I; some do more good works than I (easily arranged, I fear) and have grown in faith and love. But a lot of those are leaving, and the design of the services and activities seems calculated to drive them away.

I hear rumors of the same sorts of problems elsewhere.

What’s the plan? Attract people with sermons addressing felt needs and popular culture, show them the gospel, baptize the persuaded—and then what? Enlist them to recruit more in a holy Ponzi scheme? Hand off all instruction and guidance to small group studies with random study plans and no culture of spiritual disciplines? What’s the point?

And he pitied them, for they were like sheep without a shepherd.

OK, maybe things are happening that I’m not seeing, that make the whole picture better. I doubt it, though. A large fraction of the youth in church youth groups don’t connect with a new church when they go off to college, and some never return to the faith. And when adult Christians, nominally instructed in the faith, can say things like “I have no problem with the idea of Jesus having been married” (yes, real quote; luckily not from our church), something serious is missing.

My own observations suggest that evangelicals often don’t get any systematic introduction to the faith, any systematic explanation of what is expected of them as Christians, and have no training to resist the solipsistic spirit of the age. I can name names of Christians whose only arguments to convince unbelievers are “The Bible says so” and “Darwin was wrong.” It’d be a pretty silly pagan who found that compelling.

I know the school of thought that holds that our true witness is our lives, and there is some truth to that—our lives should be signs and wonders that ratify what we say. But such content-free argument as I described mixes all too easily with the “Its true for you but not for me” attitude that saturates our society. Without clarity converts can and do mix in what they please, worshipping God and other gods—and we have some idea of what He thinks about that.

What we need to do is teach charity, clarity, and purity. Once saved, you are now a member of a new family and you must learn to grow in

• Charity: love for God, love for your brothers and sisters in Christ, and love for your neighbor; all eventually expressed in actions somehow
• Clarity: know what it is we believe, and why, and know how this differs from the blandishments of the world; and also to know what we don’t know and what we’re willing to disagree about.
• Purity: not just a negative—the absence of sin—but the positive changes in mind and spirit coming from a focus on God and His word, on righteousness, prayer, study and meditation, worship together, and more prayer

So what should I do in our local church? Make noise and complain about what’s missing? That’s been done—most of those complaining gave up and left.

Offer to teach it myself? That’s scary. About all I’m good at is the “clarity” part—I don’t have a stellar track record with “charity” and “purity” and I can read the book of James as well as the next guy.

I offered my ideas and service to the elders for the “clarity” part of the instruction we need in the church. Either they’re distracted, don’t like details in the offering, or don’t think it fits in with the grand scheme—the dime has not been gotten off. Maybe they were freaked out by the copyright notice on the book, but if it goes out under my name I want it to be what I said.

What next? Rattle X’s cage again? Ask Y for his take on the material/plans?

Or just do it? Announce that I’m offering this course at my home at such-and-such a time?

Why not?

• The material isn’t lesson-ready yet: it needs more questions, examples, suggested extra reading, and so on—several weeks at least, and I need some feedback wrt details and plans. I’m not a trained theologian, and there might even be a few mistakes in it.
• Venue: Parking is a problem around here, and the living room is small.
• Am I the right teacher for this? Will I be making myself the center? It is very easy for me to consider myself smarter and wiser than the elder board. They make it easy, but it isn’t a good attitude to have. (At least I don’t feel holier…)
• If the elders disapprove, there’ll be some more explosions, and likely a few more people leaving.
• Eats more of my time and adds some stress to the family—and with two Aspergers children at home we have an adequate amount of work and stress.

Of course all of these have answers: time, so what if we only have 3 people, somebody’s got to, too bad, and maybe it won’t be so bad.

I’ll keep praying.

Rolling Stone

I gather analysis isn't their strong suit. The sex scandal at Duke story has a few oddities that suggest that the reporter hung around with campus elites. Duke has 6500 undergrads, and they can't all hang out at Shooters. The author hung out with frats and sorors and talked about athletes. It makes for a juicy story, but I'd be more convinced if he'd talked to some chemistry majors too.

And they've an innuendo story about stealing elections . I judge that voting without a paper trail is a recipe for trouble. But I'm afraid that wishful thinking and skewed polls are not useful evidence of wrongdoing.

Both stories use biased sampling to try to reach conclusions (or more accurately, to give impressions and let us reach conclusions). I suppose reporters (not generally the best-educated among us) are never taught anything about statistics, and the editors seem to be no better. And I suppose a magazine devoted to the entertainment world isn't so used to looking past impressions to look at the details: impressions are a lot of what entertainment is about.

Rolling Stone is hardly the only offender (they're just handy). Think about the recent stories about the number of lives hospitals saved with more careful procedures in the last year and a half--and ask how many accidental deaths there were before, and start getting suspicious.

Wyalusing

Eldest son kept having butterflies (the tabby kind about 3 cm long) land on him and probe for water/ whatever (puddling, I think it is called). He wore a hummingbird-red shirt and had sprayed insect repellant on himself. Do butterflies like Deet?

The wind was strong enough to make my bottle sing its note if I held it just so. After a while youngest son figured out how to make his sing too.

I'd strained my Achilles tendon at the heel, and had an excellent excuse for not climbing bluffs. Unfortunately even the milder walks seem to have had ill effects.

I wonder where the Mound Builders went? There were some substantial migrations when the Iroquois started moving west--I recall reading that the Sioux were originally from the Iowa/Wisconsin neck of the woods.

For that matter, why do the bears and panthers have such round heads? Is that stylization or erosion? I tried to think up reasons for effigy mounds. Everybody thinks "totem," but it could be something like emblem: a memorial built when a leader from the bear clan or porcupine clan or clamshell clan (my idea--you'd get a conical mound that way :-)) was in charge.

It might make an interesting Boy Scout project for them to learn about and try to build their own mound. If it was 20' by 10' by 3' high and rounded, I'd guesstimate 300 cubic feet of dirt. Carrying the dirt isn't that big a deal, especially if you cheat and use inventions like wheelbarrows or the shoulder pole--digging is the hard part. If every boy moved 2 cubic feet of dirt in a day, that'd be 150 boy-days. If several groups got together (I suppose they'd have to, since you'd only build something like this on Scout property), they could build a fairly respectable mound in a couple of days without too many blisters.

Super Absorbant

The "superabsorbant" waffle-weave towels are supposed to be more absorbant and more durable than the usual tufted fabric ones. (They're also more expensive.) Well, a 18 inch by 36 inch one isn't enough to completely dry off a 6 foot tall man who is sopping wet. Your mileage may vary.

Monrovia Mon Amour

A visit to Liberia by Anthony Daniels

Anthony Daniels may be better known by his pseudonym Theodore Dalyrymple. He is a doctor and psychiatrist and a fine writer.

This book dates from 1992 and describes his observations from what must have been a couple of weeks visit to Monrovia during a time when the Interim Government of National Unity ran Monrovia (with the help of Ecomog aka Every Car Or Moveable Object Gone) and negotiations were in progress. Doe’s men still held the Executive Mansion and the military camp.

On the morning of my arrival in the Ivory Coast I learned that the Steel Trader was due to sail from Abidjan for Monrovia and I went straight down to the ‘Port Autonome.’ A man in khaki uniform, reclining on a bench like Madame Recamier, barred my way. I was not allowed to enter the port.

’Where are you going?’ he asked.

’The Steel Trader,’ I replied.

’Why?’

’I am a doctor,’ I said, leaving open the possibility that a terrible epidemic had broken out on board.

’Do you have medicine with you?’ asked the official.

’Of course,’ I said.

’I am always tired, doctor,’ said the guardian of port security.

’Why?’ I asked.

Laboriously, he levered himself up on to his elbow.

’Too much work,’ he said.

I searched in my box of time-expired medicaments for something suitable, and alighted on erythromycin, vivid pink antibiotic pills that looked as though they would glow in the dark.

’These,’ I said, ‘are very good for tiredness.’

’How many do I take?’ he asked.

’One a day, until you are no longer tired.’

’Merci. Bon voyage, docteur,’ said the official, collapsing back on to his bench.

That was the end of immigration and customs formalities in Abidjan.

The above is the first page of the book, and gives you a flavor of both the man and what he finds. (I’m violently allergic to erythromycin myself, and find his choice of medicines startling.) He toured the Masonic building, the University, the Maternity Hospital, and tried to invoke a feeling for the often banal existence before the violence, and from there arrive at an understanding of the destructiveness of that violence. For example, the Maternity Hospital was thoroughly looted and wrecked; the papers from it used apparently as toilet paper. Apparently only the medical records were so used, and not the more mundane correspondence, and from this he mused about the way the white man’s medicine must have evoked resentment from those whose world-view it was overthrowing. Maybe it did cause resentment, but he forgot that the looters were mostly illiterate; and a more mundane explanation might be that the medical records, on sturdier stock than typing paper, were a more useful substitute for the traditional toilet of large leaves.

He attended the All-Liberia Conference, discovering later that “the middle of the day was a good time to travel if you wanted to avoid road-blocks, because it was then too hot for security, and the soldiers would languidly wave you through from under the shade of a tree.” Of course the “history-making” conference made no history or breakthroughs. “The delegates sat around the tables, deep in political discussion. Lunch was delayed by an hour and a half. When finally the food arrived, there was a scramble for it as desperate as the scramble in which I had participated at Lagos airport one the boarding of the aircraft was announced (The Togolese market women had brushed me contemptuously aside with their baskets, seemingly laden with lead ingots). The leaders of the nation were terrified that there would not be enough lunch for them.” There he also met Tipetoh (leader of MOJA; Movement for Justice in Africa), whom he shreds (“He kindly gave me the Preface, a single sheet of paper, and also a large photograph of himself: in my experience, the few people who genuinely believe in the equality of man do not carry photographs of themselves in their attaché cases for distribution to as many people as possible”)

He later arranged to meet Prince Johnson, and was even more horrified by his vice-Marshall Varney than he is by Johnson. Still later he arranged to see the infamous movie of Doe’s murder by Johnson, and was startled at the glee his hosts display re-watching it.

Along the way he met and was suitably perturbed by various people with ill-concealed pasts—people who had active roles in the massacres on one side or another.

Memory can be a fuzzy thing sometimes, and many of the places he described are either places I didn’t visit more than once, or were built after my time. Providence Baptist Church—he slipped out of the service at the new building, which was still under construction when I left. Some of the ruins are of places not yet built 30 years ago, which makes his references hard to follow.

He toured JFK hospital, and the massacre site of St. Peters, and found some of Doe’s family still living in Doe’s house. He even got permission to tour the Barclay Training Center where Doe’s army remnant still camped, and eventually even the Executive Mansion. Along the way he met still more villains, but I have the feeling that a lot of his reaction was read into the men from what he knew of them; a reaction to his knowledge rather than to them personally. But he is honest with himself here. He attended an interview of General Brown by a Swedish TV team (and FWIW he found them an exception to the usual Swedes in Africa whom he describes, “I feared the compassion of the Scandinavians as I feared the cruelty of other peoples, for their compassion was simultaneously neurotic and abstract, sentimental and ruthless.” Yes, he justifies this with examples.). This Swedish team is interested in digging out stories, and grills the General, who says at the end of the interview “’You have asked a lot of questions,’ he said. ‘Now it is only fair that you should answer ours.’”

There were several questions I could think of which might have caused us some embarrassment: had we come to Liberia to further our own careers, did the destruction we found there confirm us in our feelings of cultural superiority, were we enjoying ourselves amidst the ruins, did the level of suffering in Monrovia match up to what we had expected and hoped for, or were we disappointed in it?

Dr Daniels doesn’t say as much outright, but the answers would probably have been “Yes,” or something closely kin to it. He is very sensitive to matters of architecture and culture, and sees meaning in things (such as the carefully sawn-off legs of the only Steinway piano in Liberia) that don’t always resonate with other people. His insights misfire sometimes, but he hits the nail on the head at others. The fall of every sparrow is attributed to some CIA conspiracy, because people want meaning in their lives and the notion that America just doesn’t care about Liberia is intolerable to them.

The situation in Liberia is now very different, of course. The corruption is still there, but for now there’s no war or threat of war. This dates the book slightly. Someone who had spent years there would no doubt have written a more accurate book. But the glimpses of what life is like with decommissioned murderers in the neighborhood are still useful. This book is good despite its flaws, and I recommend it.

20 months old

Neighbor Toby is twenty months old. He is cheerful and adventurous, and he speaks entirely in consonants, like the groundhog child Grundoon from the old Pogo comic strip. Yesterday he and his mom and brother were here because I had a new washer delivered, and every little boy loves to watch a big truck. Toby and brother Sammy, age 5, love exploring somebody else's house, and were thrilled to pet and play with our rabbits.

Toby's mom showed him our irises, which are huge and purple. The irises stood taller than Toby. We grownups forget what the world looks like from that level. I watched Toby reach up for a blossom, with the leaves framing his face. I remembered other adventures with our own kids, when their angle of view revealed delights I missed: the bumblebees hiding under a goldenrod during a shower; clams in the weeds under the "belly boards" along the marsh boardwalk, and the plain joy of counting frog noses in the pond.

Mrs james

No more drudgery!

I’ve never been a fan of fufu myself, but if hours of drudgery can be done away with, this might be a good idea. Of course, it has to be affordable; but the miller was a fixture in Medieval England—he made wheat convenient enough to warrant the extra cost.

Is That a Hint?

I’ve been reading Spiritual Disciplines for the Christian Life by Donald Whitney. This afternoon I read the chapter on fasting. As soon as I was done we went to a Memorial Day party at the neighbor’s house. (Two brats, red beans and rice, ice cream…) I came back after a while and started reading the chapter on Silence and Solitude. Youngest Son came home a few minutes later and started telling me all about his planned parody of Star Wars, with a “Death Grill.” All the details about it.

Hand-Me-Ups?

At lunch today Youngest Son announced that he was “giving his Lord of the Rings action figures as hand-me-downs” to Youngest Daughter. He is 12. She is 15.

Why no book reviews?

I have been writing, just not here. Our church needs some material for introductory classes, so I wrote it. What with the many other things going on at the same time (writing DAQ software for one experiment, scrounging parts for a spark chamber demo, working on the silicon detector trigger for another experiment, trying to revamp a muon trigger, and puzzling through an astrophysics problem--not to mention family obligations) I've been a wee bit short of time.

I don't really think of them as book reviews so much as holding up my end of a dialog between the author and myself.

But I've read a few books along the way. Developing Talents by Temple Grandin is about how Aspergers folks can find jobs. I'm buying our own copy. Ten Questions to Diagnose your Spritual Health by Donald Whitney is just what it says: a set of questions and examples to set you trying to decide what is keeping you from growing as a Christian and how to get rid of it. Not perfect, but very much worth reading and thinking about. The Day of the False King by Brad Geagley is the second book (oops) in a series of detective stories about an ancient Egyptian detective. My wife says the first (The Year of the Hyena) is better, which doesn't surprise me. The False King tries very hard to give a flavor of the environment, but leaves out lots of details like what people ate--it left an unbalanced feel. The Insect Room was both a foolish plot-hole and not nearly so horrible as the real punishments the Babylonians had in store.

I still plan to write about Dogs of God.

I'm reading slowly through Prayer; re-reading Watership Down (we've got a new rabbit), reading The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, Persian Mirrors, Reflections on the Psalms, From Babel to Dragomans, Exploring Java, and re-reading My Favorite Intermissions.

I don't think I'll be finished with any of them this week.

DaVinci Code

I've been hearing two reactions in church to the upcoming movie: opportunity and boycott.

Boycott is the wrong word for my reaction. Boycotting presumes that I would be withholding my regular business. But that's backwards: it is the movie-makers' job to entice me to part with 20 of my dollars and 2 hours of my time. I looked at the movie listings, and none of them succeeded. There's almost nothing I'd bother to go look at even if it were free and next door. Maybe "Over the Hedge."

That doesn't even include the other demands on my time: I haven't even seen the Narnia movie yet, and that was on my list. (The kids have a copy, so I'll get to it sooner or later.)

So no, I won't be boycotting the movie. I won't be bothering.

And no, I don't think it offers an opportunity to discuss the foundations of Christianity with the curious. I judge that the popularity of the book comes because some people want to believe in secret conspiracies, and because there's been a huge PR push. People following the PR push don't care about whether it is true or not, and trying to reason with conspiracy fans is hopeless.

Time and Mother

The past is always with us. I feel this most with my wife: a moment with her recalls other moments. We shaped each other’s lives, and the marks each moment made are more than merely memories. We clean the kitchen, and in that time lives a little of the other times we’ve cleaned or kissed there. Not every echo is welcome—I remember times I’ve screwed up too—but each smile holds others; from shy beginnings to comfortable welcomings.

But my mother and I did not meet as equals. My parents were “in loco deus” for a while to me. True, I turned her life upside down (I was the firstborn), but I was completely unaware of that at the time. All I knew was that, for a time, she and my father were the center of my universe. Of course my universe grew, and eventually, thanks in part to their guidance, I met the God they served; and I have in my turn served (all too feebly) in the same capacity to my own children.

We meet as equals now: she a mother, I a father (and older now than she was when I left home). We’re equals and yet not equals, because the past is with us. The time for obedience is over, but the shape to my life from the times of obedience is still there for me, and the shape is there for her.

I remember, and try to imitate, her self-disciplined love—devoting her efforts to the needs we had, and looking out for ways to bring joy. I’m not nearly so good at figuring those out.

I love my mother.

Policeman to the world

The Darfur situation has been eliciting calls for intervention. Some of the same people are calling for us to intervene in the Sudan who despise our intervention in Iraq, though the latter would be justified by their own arguments. A lot of this looks like "When in danger or in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout" nonsense. These folks don't bother to think through the implications of action. "We've got to do something" isn't a plan. Stern rebukes didn't work, economic sanctions aren't going anywhere, so what's left? War or supporting a civil war.

I have no trouble with the assertion that Khartoum is the major culprit in this affair, or that Zimbabwe would be a happier land if Mugabe and a few hundred of his cronies lay at room temperature. These are almost certainly true statements. I also suspect that, on balance, Zimbabwe would be better off suffering a quick invasion, with all the destruction and turmoil that produces, if it succeeded in ridding them of the tyrant and gave them some help in reconstruction.

What I am afraid of is the soul-destroying attitude that says I have the right to do this because I know what's best. It is a dangerous temptation because the claim is (at least in these obvious case) so nearly correct.

I find that I cannot abide a holier-than-thou attitude in others. That reaction seems quite common. If I assert my right to judge other nations (either in my own capacity or as a citizen of a relatively benign country), I put myself in this same holier-than-thou position that I can't stand in other people. This naturally evokes an intense dislike from others, and it cultivates in me an attitude of superiority. And then it doesn't take very long to slide from "I am superior because I am doing the right things" to "what I do is right because I am superior." And then, of course, I become Mugabe myself.

Yes, I know that you are ethical, and will monitor yourself and not succomb to such temptations. But will you warrant the same for your children? And I'll guarantee that your grandchildren will not have your scruples. They'll inherit power, and experience it as entitlement.

I do not mean to impugn the motives of people who want us to become a humanitarian policeman to the world. There are a lot of terrible things happening, and we could help. You need to be either careless or hard-hearted to stand by and let them fester.

But I believe that we, and the world, will be far safer if we fight on more self-interested grounds.

We didn't resume the war against Iraq to liberate the people of Iraq from a brutal tyrant, though I hear that cited a lot as justification. That was a useful side effect, but not one of our principle objectives. We invaded for sound strategic reasons: the origins of the attacks against us lie in the vicious theocracies of Saudi Arabia and Iran, and Iraq provides a useful staging area; all the evidence said Saddam's nuclear and anthrax programs were alive and well (and there are still some missing pieces, as the report noted); we suspected (and later found the smoking gun for) Saddam's support for anti-American terrorist groups; we saw the sanctions program failing and judged that an Iraq in charge of most of the world's oil and nuclear armed was an unsupportable threat; and maybe, if we lucked out and the Iraqis locked onto a stable free government, we could start to drain the swamp of the Middle East.

Pretty much self-interest all the way, isn't it? And self-interest isn't pretty.

But I think "ugly self interest" will keep us humbler, and safer to the rest of the world and ourselves, than trying to be the world's liberator.

Sweet sentiments?

If your honey is a naturalist, fascinated by wild creatures great and small, perhaps she would appreciate what you find when you excavate into the small hole in the garden that conceals a nest, from which flies an annoyed bumbling mother bee. Will you offer her a bee mine, valentine?

Images

When I was young I saw shapes not just in clouds but also in maps. Everybody knows the Italian boot, but did you see that New Zealand is one also (albeit slightly broken)? If you look at Indonesia and the Philippines, you can see a skeleton riding a jet-ski.

Left Behind

Years ago Eldest Son was fascinated by constellations: not just any, but those of the Southern Sky. My wife decided he should have a shirt with the Southern Sky on it, and she got a dark shirt and fabric paint, and I painted the stars and lettering from Rey’s book. Eldest Son loved it, but outgrew it. Youngest Son outgrew it recently. The stars are still mostly there.

About the same time I picked up a packet of glow-in-the dark dots for stars, and mapped out where each star in the southern sky should be on the ceiling of my son’s room. With ruler and checklist and dots I spent several hours to do one quadrant of the ceiling. I wasn’t quite satisfied with the way things were turning out: reference marks were tricky and the pattern wasn’t quite right.

Evenings I generally spent with monitoring homework and other chores, and days had work to do. It has been over a dozen years, and the ceiling still only has one quadrant’s worth of stars. Eldest Son doesn’t live at home any more. I wonder if Youngest Son even notices the stars, or wonders why they aren’t all there.

The dresser and desk and original bed were gifts to Eldest Son from a neighbor in Aurora. (I fixed them up a bit) We chose the paint and accent wallpaper strip (of sailing ships) to match the furniture. You could tell it was a boy’s room, even without looking at the bookcase or the floor.

Eldest Son isn’t a boy anymore. A few relics of his are still in the room—a few figurines, a few books, the Space Shuttle poster—but most pertain to Youngest Son these days. Bionicle parts mingle with Legos (some of the Lego pieces I played with 40 years ago) and K-Nex on the floor now, and there’s a large box of pencils, which fascinate Youngest Son. A busted Space Shuttle is on the dresser and a crane (from the Crane Foundation, of course) hangs from the ceiling. The top bunk is abandoned to a K-Nex ferris wheel and roller coaster now.

Another half a dozen years and Youngest Son will be heading off for college too. I wonder what relics he’ll be leaving behind. I wonder if I’ll ever get the rest of those stars up.

Skits

The National Council of Less Commonly Taught Languages had a convention here in Madison this week, so the University language teachers had their students perform short plays for the group. Middle Daughter performed in a small sketch about Yoruba family life, with scenes set at home, at the Zo's (is that the right word for the Nigerian equivalent?)(EDIT: Nope. Babalawo. -Middle Daughter) home, and in the spirit world--all in Yoruba with English translations displayed on a screen nearby. (Spoiler alert) The old ways are the best--stay out of the rain!

The sound system needed some work--feedback several times--but the students had fun and so did the audience, some of whom actually spoke the language. I'm told that recordings of this will go to Nigeria and be shown at conferences there too. (EDIT: Well, I don't know FOR SURE if they'll send this one. They used the one from last semester at several conferences there, and I'm fairly certain they'll use this one too. Apparently, we're big stuff for being second semester speakers...)

I have never been in a conference like this before. Physics conferences are largely male, though religious ones have been more mixed. This one was largely female, and I've never seen so many children at a conference. They ranged in age from about 6 months to 13 or 14, and must have been at least a tenth of the total number present. (Most of the people with children were from our Universtity, and came to watch their students performing)

No, I didn't stick around for all the presentations. I should find out if there's DVD's of them.

Concert

I took Youngest Daughter to see Eldest Daughter's choir concert last night. Youngest Daughter's Community Concert was Sunday at St. Alberts, and quite fun: All Things Bright and Beautiful to the Hallelujah Chorus. The college choir had beautiful voices, lively tunes sung precisely, and startlingly few in the audience. I've no idea why; I've never seen so few present. Still, we had fun, from Je n'ose dire to the song about the demon.

The binder of music looked heavy--some of the singers seemed almost overbalanced as they held their binder at chin level before them and leaned forward to project.

Sorry about that

The triple posting wasn't really my fault, but I should have checked more carefully.

To try and make up for it, let me bring you up to speed on Butler.

You know Butler: he and his girlfriend Rose wrote the definitive book on cooking with fresh green herbs. They're not married yet because he's so superstitious: his horoscope said that the only time to tie the knot is between 1:23 and 1:41 in the morning. That's the parsely sage Rose-marrying time.

Radiation environments

The BBC report on the Chernobyl disaster's effects on wildlife has some interesting features. A lot of species not seen for decades are multiplying. As you might expect, animals can't sense radiation and nest anywhere. Initially things died in the hotspots: trees, horses, mice. But the Red Forest, where all the pines died, is growing back "albeit with stunted and misshapen trees."

"We marked animals then recaptured them again much later," he says. "And we found they lived as long as animals in relatively clean areas." The next step was to take these other mice and put them in an enclosure in the Red Forest. "They felt not very well," Sergey says. "The distinction between the local and newcomer animals was very evident." Mutation In all his research, Sergey has only found one mouse with cancer-like symptoms. He has found ample evidence of DNA mutations, but nothing that affected the animals' physiology or reproductive ability.

Grant that seriously defective critters won't survive long enough to be caught by the researchers. Nevertheless, apparently the survivors live as long as comparable mice not in a radiation environment. At the same time, imported mice don't do well in the radiation area.

To understand why this is interesting, remember that most radiation damage isnot done to the nucleus, but to the rest of the cell. Mutations aren't what kill you, its the damaged proteins that don't work anymore, membranes that leak, and so on.

What this seems to suggest is that one can breed for radiation tolerance. Not radiation immunity--that's no more possible than immunity to fire. Tolerance means that the cell can stand a somewhat larger than usual amount of damage without failure. You might be able to get this by duplication: making extra copies of proteins, for example. This would obviously mean that the mouse would need more food, so this feature would ordinarily be selected against.

It shouldn't be too hard to test: do mice found in the radiation environment have babies that require more food than mice found elsewhere? Grow more slowly on the same diet?

If they were different, then it would be interesting to create a mouse breeding pen with controlled levels of radioactivity. Technically it wouldn't be much of a challenge, though the PR might be a mess.

Update: The researchers did not respond to my inquiries

Unfortunately, changing names appears to be a side effect of teaching one's daughters how to post on your site. Blogger has an obnoxious little thing where one cannot change the name for one post, it changes them for all...

And now it changed back again.

And I didn't change any settings.

VERY ODD

The nickname has changed from James to Sandra. I'm not sure why.

Travel

I never drive off down the road to Fermilab or set off for the airport without wondering if I will ever return. There are so many things that can go wrong; so many ways to say “Game’s over.” And then to never see the family again; and so much is left undone! Things I meant to say or do; one more kiss—not possible any more. (Truth to tell, you could more easily count the things I finished than those I started.)

When I travel it is brutally clear that I’m completely in God’s hands. No skill of mine means anything at all to a pilot, and even when I drive I know how close to the edge I am. A sneeze at the wrong time, or an inattentive truck driver, and time’s up.

Of course we’re always in God’s hands; we just let the daily routines take on the role of fortress walls. Outside those walls I have to pay more attention to God. Sad but true, that even prayer times turn into routines. Of course, they’re good routines to have, and God can use every opening.

Maybe I should travel more. Maybe I should travel more at home?

Baseball and chess

My wife is a Cubs fan. As we drove up through Illinois yesterday, listening to the Cubs win a game against the rather sloppy Reds, it struck me that the game is like chess in some ways. In both games you often try to psych-out your opponent. In both games the kibitzers are always smarter than the players. In both games a player may take a long time before making his move. Both have exhibition matches. Both games involve sacrifices. Baseball has night games and chess has knight’s games. Baseball has checked swings and chess has checked kings. Chess has rooks and baseball has rookies. Similar, no?

NDD

There’s a book out that I haven’t read yet with a title like Nature Deficit Disorder. I gather that the thesis is generally something along the lines of: we were made to interact with nature, and a purely artificial environment deprives us of certain kinds of training. Even tame outdoors environments invite the eyes to shift between the big picture and minute details, with every scale in between. As I sit here I see a painted wall. It has some grain to it, but no real details like those of the hairs on a leaf.

Even a tame outdoors environment is multi-sensory and varied. Just the presence of a few bushes or trees for shelter lets children create their own imaginative worlds of play, and it takes very little “wildness” to offer boys (and some girls) the chance to swing and climb and explore.

No doubt the author makes a better case, and offers examples. But I think I understand the principle.

We already know that green environments can be soothing, and CDs of rippling water or wind in the leaves or bird song and night noises are quite popular. I think it worthwhile to study the matter. Perhaps these sorts of things can help lower stress and maybe blood pressure. It would be fun to have a doctor prescribe a day in the desert, or a week by the pond, or a topical rain forest.

Katie

I gather from the plethora of stories about Katie Couric that to the reporters' fraternity no story is as interesting as a story about one of their own. And therefore no other story is quite as newsworthy.

"Racism-free"

In Meyrin I saw small billboards showing a picture of part of the moon with crosshairs zoomed in on the rim of one crater. The legend: "This is a 100% racism-free zone. Let's make our neighborhood one too." (Free paraphrasing by yours truly) If life in Switzerland is like life in the US, when you see ads like that you know that race hatred is a notable problem in the area. And in every single case of my observation these past 20 years, the hatred has been blacks hating whitey, or Arabs hating whites, or Hispanics hating blacks. I'm told that white racist groups are a big deal in prisons, but I don't hear much from them outside. And yes, you hear a lot of things if you ride the bus regularly and listen. And yet all the anti-racism campaign materials I saw or heard were directed at the white audience.

And so I suspect that the Meyrin racism campaign is another case of looking for your missing watch under the street light because it is brighter there. It's easier to talk to people like yourself than to try to figure out how to talk to the guy from the other culture and get him to cooperate.

Day by Day

Trimmed from letters home:

Of course the day isn't over for you yet, but I'm pretty beat. I dragged myself out of bed at 8 (=1am) to find that the room was quite cold. It is a top floor corner room, so I guess that's not a surprise.

Oleg and I went to a Carrefour in France. I found out the hard way that you have to have somebody in the back weigh and sticker your produce. You know how long the cheese section is at Sentry. Carrefour's is something like 4 times that size, and consists mostly of varieties I've never heard of; and apparently mostly soft cheeses. There were \$20/pound varieties next to \$5/pound: grab carefully! The whole facility smells of fish--and there were some pretty big fish sitting out for inspection--one must have been at least 20 pounds. Whole. Good bread, though. And yes, you can buy DVD players and blankets there too. Yes, I got some chocolate. And no, it wasn't the Nestle's. The meat isle had skinned rabbits--don't tell number 3 daughter.

I spent most of the day debugging, and finally figuring out that the serial port on this laptop no worketh. Once I got that out of the way, it was only 15 minutes to get the terminal server reconfigured. It is painful to try to run programs from Madison...

Tomorrow I have to get a washing machine access card from housing--Oleg says they don't use coins anymore. And I suppose more debugging is in my future. And somewhere around here is the kitchen and fridges, suitable for storing some clementine juice and cheese.

Oh yes, the lunch menu said something about turkey, but the cook said cheval. Tasted good, though I like your potatoes better. Nice view of the stubble in a farm and vinyard from the dining area of Restaurant #2. No birdses today, though.

As you probably can see from a couple of the pictures, the area around the main user's center is paved with flat rocks. They rock, it turns out, and squirt water on you from below. Which could be kind of fun if you found several and tried jumping from one to another. rock rock rock? (Or if a mythical bird did it, would it be a roc rock rock rock?)

The sun is shining brightly in the window--brighter than earlier days, and I got up earlier than ever. The clouds in the distance look ominious, though, and the forecast isn't so hot for visiting Geneva (which I was planning to do after the laundry gets done). The slats on the window only cover about 80% of the view, so this isn't the room you want if you have a night shift. The view is intermittently beautiful, though. I got to wondering: pinhole cameras have wonderful depth of field. What would it be like to use a couple side by side for stereo, and use the resulting pictures in a steropticon or viewmaster?

Here we go round the prickly pear
the prickly pear, the prickly pear
Here we go round the prickly pear
At 5 oclock in the morning.

Mount Blanc looms over Geneva in the distance, and I finally got my clothes through the laundry. Pants are still a bit damp, though. Well, so are a lot of things. Turns out "R" means refund, not "Return card." Live and learn. Also it turns out you put the powder in the left-hand bin and the fabric softener in the middle. Oopsies.

Time to head out for lunch, and then we'll see about Geneva. This is a much later start than I anticipated...

I took the bus to Geneva. You know that Wisconsin has winter and road construction? It seems similar in Geneva. A huge amount of a couple of important city streets were torn up. I decided to take the bus across the river, then wander a few blocks there, go up the west side of the lake, come back and catch the bus back. Oh the things that you see... Every sort of travel agency imaginable, the Arab Swiss bank, a store selling Bandes Dessigne (and Manga). Swans all over the place in the river, likewise ducks and geese and some odd dark duck with a white bill and top of the head (and odd quack. Saw more than one of these). Also pigeons.

In the old town, every other block had a street musician or duet. Pretty much everything was a store, too. Ancient alleyways were turned into high priced strip malls. The days when all the public art was in the likeness of something in the heavens above or the earth below or the waters under the earth is gone.

Faces from every land imaginable--though fewer Japanese than I'd have expected. Most were either silent or talking in French, of course. Mostly rather thinner than in the US. Lots of Africans--I was surprised how many.

Some Duke of Brunswick died in Geneva, and left his money to the city on the understanding that they would build him a mausoleum in the style of ???. Whee! 4 large statues of knights: well, 3 in classic armor and one in an 18th century suit coat. Lions everywhere around the spires and alcoves and even one lying across the statue of the dead man on a bier. one picture Or another for his equestrian statue viwed from the yet another. The lake is beautiful with the fountain going and the ridges in the background (they're maybe 3x the height of the Devil's Lake ridges, and so steep there's no development on them at all. Foothills of the mountain showed from time to time. The original building of the League of Nations used to be somebody's mansion. It'd have wonderful sledding if it were in Wisconsin.

Pick a restaurant: Thai, Japanese, Moroccan, French; there's plenty. I notice that they don't post prices on the outdoor menus in most of them--"If you have to ask, you can't afford it."

I stopped off at a shopping mall on the way back. I had no idea books were so expensive here: \$35 for something available equivalently for \$20 in the US. And not much selection, either. A dozen different movies; and the Pink Panther looked as uninteresting in French as it did in English. Huge crowds.

I was surprised to see as much grafitti in Geneva as I did. Not in the ritzy tourist areas of course. But it was nice to see apartment buildings designed to be colorful and different from the one next door: the architecture is slightly different and one has all bright blue shutters, the next all bright pink, the next yellow--and with different shapes of windows and arches.

I did not buy any DVD's of course--different zones, so they wouldn't play.

I've slightly sore feet, but it held off raining until I got back. After supper I'm going over to the ISR again to try to get some information, and then I'll try reading the DCOPS again.

Sunday: The skies are clear and the mountains are dark in the distance. There's still a haze obscuring the slopes, and caps of clouds over the peaks, but I can see the peaks near the north of the lake. There are small birds so fast I can't get a look at them, something that looks like a jay, and those huge pigeons. (They've got a larger head and back of the neck, and their coo is more like an owl's) There are also some crows/rooks(?) and the thin pigeons, some sparrows that look just like the ones in Wisconsin.

I didn't try to get to the English church in Geneva, so I read through Isaiah instead.

I'm waking up earlier. That'll make it easier to catch my plane, but harder to readjust back home.

T'was a grey and rainy day. You can dimly see the ridges and the Juras. The birds were quieter than usual this morning. I didn't hear Mr. ChirChirChirChirChirrrrp (and I've no idea what he looks like, either).

As you can tell from the log, I'm getting some new directions here. Next I've got to start fiddling with databases, and I'm sitting here trying to figure a good way of defining one for our DCOPS data. Whatever I do looks wasteful. (Among other things, wasteful means slow.)

Turns out they just had daylight savings time. I wondered why people seemed to be up so early...

I've been passing up desert, and I haven't touched any of the candy bars I bought and put in the wardrobe. I haven't tried to get in the wardrobe myself, which I suppose is just as well since I left my parka in Sun Prairie.

Later: I'm sitting at a desk the clean room next to building A4 in the ISR (Intersecting Storage Rings), which is a bit below ground. I'm surrounded by relay racks with high voltage equipment and computers in them, boxes and spools of cables, and tables with boxes and the odd tool on them. The clean room was made of 20-foot high white plastic fixed to a metal frame. Our house could almost fit in it, though the roof might peek out the top. On the wall before me is taped a calendar from 2004 and an enigmatic notice: A1 "Attention 2.5 bar Argon." That's taped to a steel box beam with a capped-off copper pipe above the sign, so I suppose it is warning you not to unscrew the cap or Argon will come out. Though I don't think the pipe is hooked up anymore. There's big round ventillation duct work here and there, and the inevitable fluorescent lighting. There are two Valeri's, a Vladimir, and an Oleg. The default language of the room is Russian. (Zoltan [upstairs] is Hungarian, and so is his student (help meet?) Noemi.

I finally figured out why the main cafeteria was so depressing. The population is almost entirely men, almost all wearing dark sweaters, almost all young to middle-aged Italians and Spanish and French--which means dark hair. Dark clothes, dark hair, dark tables and chairs--it gave the place a funereal air.

One pleasant innovation since I was here 20 years ago is that the menus in the cafeterias are in both French and English. Of course you still have to ask for the side orders in French or in pointing, but English is a help.

Every detector needs cables, every cable needs to be made to the right length and tested, every system that needs high voltage needs to have a spigot somewhere that provides it, likewise low voltages. Every extra sensor (temperature, humidity, whatever) also needs a cable, and to be tested, and to have a specific place to plug in. None of this is exciting or even interesting work, but there's a lot of it to be done and the detector won't work without it. That's what's happening in the building. So is chamber testing, which is much more fun; though even that palls after a while. So is testing alignment equipment and trying to calibrate it. So is programming in support of this.

On a desk 15 feet away is a stack of 3 metal crates stuffed with electronic cards with lots of blinking lights on the front. That has to do with the laser controls, and testing of some other sensors. To my right is a defunct PC, to my left the monitor for a computer imbedded in a high voltage control system in a relay rack.

The door for the clean room is lockable with an old-style key, which is always kept in the lock so it doesn't get lost. Yes, we lock up at the end of the day. Don't ask why.

When I walk to and from the ISR I take the stairs instead of the road--it is shorter. There's moss to each side of a clean spot on the steps, worn looking rails on each side, and some clipped bits of leaves to show that the trimmers came by recently to dispose of excess undergrowth. I feel rather like Frodo on the straight stairs, though it isn't really such a long trip: 4 or 5 stories worth. At the top there's a building and a fenced-off area with what looks like a giant can on a yellow pole--about 9 stories tall, with windows around the top. I'm not sure what it is or was--I need to ask. (A water tower with windows around the top!!!)

One thing never changes in labs: somebody can't find a tool they need and rummages around everywhere looking for one. Sometimes they even put it back when they're done.

In a relay rack about 25 feet away there are several front sections with wire mesh screwed to the frame. The spacing leaves openings about an inch square. Attached to this are some pieces of cardboard with the design of an electronics module printed on the front. Bundles of inch-thick cables come in the sides of the relay rack, swoop down inside and come up the front, where some are punched through the cardboard at the positions where connector pictures were printed on the front. And why, you ask? So that the cable makers can determine the exact cable routes and almost exact cable lengths, before trying to cut the cables and put on the connectors.

This hasn't been as dramatically successful a trip as I hoped, although I did get a few things accomplished: various minor milestones, and I got the ball rolling on determining exactly what our alignment readout system is going to look like: 3 PC's, 2 running windows, 1 running linux, and 9 different programs running. etc.

Wednesday: Its been a rainy day again. I just paid my bill at the hostel. Unfortunately the timing is such that I can't do my laundry, so I've got some dirty clothes bagged up and squashed as flat as I can manage.

It is 4 in the afternoon here, and I'm tired. There are lots of small details that ought to be fixed here and there, but most aren't very important. For example, I'm in the CMS people directory, but with my old UA1 office that I spent a couple of days in 18 years ago.

In the dorm: Every couple of minutes another jet takes off in this direction from the airport. Somebody is running a chainsaw, somebody else is running an excavator across the street, and the little bitty cars are going back and forth under my window.

Talking with name removed to protect the guilty was kind of depressing this morning. People from member states come to CERN to work on a joint project, but their funding comes from home. They expect services from CERN (to which the member states contribute) but not to be held accountable by the experiment's managers. At Fermilab each subgroup was subjected to annual reviews, or even bi-annual, to make sure they were making progress. If they weren't, they were warned and assigned folks to help them get things back on track. The CMS subsystem that is closest to completion, and closest to being on schedule, is the EndCap Muon (I'm working on alignment for it), which is mostly run by Americans. The Hadron calorimeter isn't on schedule, but they're less bad than most.

When I was here years ago, there were small rooms set aside for smoking and TV watching and reading. The places were usually littered with magazines and newspapers and books that somebody had bought and read and didn't want to carry away. Those rooms are a bit larger (somebody remodeled), and have empty bookcases, no TV (too much damage says the note), and empty chairs. Since everybody has a laptop, I guess they read in their rooms using wireless, or play DVDs for amusement, or, if they've got the money, go out on the town with friends. The kitchen usually has a few people in it, though one Indian fellow always glares at me when I come it. Dunno why; I just eat vegetarian stuff in there. Maybe I look American.

Naturally they have 3 washers and 2 dryers instead of the reverse. I commented on that on the Guest Satisfaction sheet.

And so home:

Since Madison is not an international airport, I'll have to pick up my luggage in Chicago. There's only an hour and a half layover, so this is going to be tight.

My bench-mate in the very back of the plane from Geneva to Brussels is reading something called Mare de Canard or some such. The newspaper's logo/emblem is a duck. I wonder if the editors know what "canard" means in English.

I go find my gate in Brussels and ignore all the opportunities to buy perfumes, cards, chocolates, magazines, electronics, ad nauseum. I get searched twice on the way. Over in the corner of the gate area sits an elderly fellow who needs a shave badly, wrapped in a blanket. A crowd of students from Culver Academy (they'd gone to a NATO educational thingamabob) descend upon us, and the old gentlemen scoots: I guess he lives in the airport. The plane starts boarding and I get paged!?! Turns out the boarding pass they issued in Geneva is only a bookmark. I have to answer a bunch of questions (am I carrying a weapon or something that could be used as a weapon?--actually, yes, but a bunch of keys is only good for close quarters defense) and get new boarding passes issued. Once again, I'm in the back--next to the last bench. Kitty-corner is a father and 9 or 10 year old daughter: at one of those chocolate stores they'd bought gummy worms. 9 hours of flying ensue. I'd wanted to see "Walk the Line" but some of the movie involved soft passages so I gave up. I'd griped about the sitcom acting on the flight from the US. They played an old I Love Lucy on the return trip--the one with her getting plastered on the vitamin supplement she is supposed to be shilling for a commercial. I was right to complain: she could act rings around the folks on Taxi. I timed the shows: modern sitcoms are 20 minutes long. One minute of commercials for every 2 minutes of show!

Chicago! I like the way they try to put some kind of art in the halls. One of the exhibits (hard to look at when you're on the run, but . . .) was Chicago stained glass. The works were good, but the back lighting was terrible: stained glass needs fairly uniform bright illumination.

Immigration didn't take too long; my bag came on the carousel early, and customs didn't take all that long. American had a man detailed to tell passengers which line to deposit their luggage in for transfers to local flights. Nice touch.

I grabbed the train to my terminal and quick-stepped through, and got to the gate with 8 minutes to spare.

This was a little bitty plane, and the gentleman kitty-corner from me found that his #2 carryon would not fit overhead or under seat. The fellow next to me was coming back from meeting with vendors in LA. He had an Econ exam at 6 that night, and was trying to study for it. His only calculator was his cell phone.

Madison airport! But where's my luggage? (and my bench-mate's, and about 7 other people's!--about 1/3 of the passengers lost their luggage!) The airline delivered it at 10pm. I'm going 2 for 2. Both the outgoing and incoming legs of my trip had my luggage searched by Homeland Security. And both times I've flown from Chicago into Madison, American has mislaid my luggage.

I'm going to have to have a little talk with the travel agent about how long layovers should be.

But I'm here, nothing permanently lost, and glad to be home. Now if I can just get my internal clock working again...

Travel

For some reason the trip started out seeming curiously unreal, as though nothing was out of the ordinary and I wouldn't be thousands of miles from home by the end of the day. Do this, go there, nothing strange.

I flew American Airlines this time, and they were able to check my bag all the way to Geneva. That helps a lot. And American boards passengers in groups, which is a huge improvement over the Air France free-for-all scrimmage. Though it would make a lot better sense to board special passengers first, and then board in groups from the back of the airplane. I sat by a Tennessee lady returning home from a "Pampered Chef" sales getogether. She said the mechanics were required to fly on the plane they just fixed.

O'Hare was nice and dull. Duty free shops don't hold a lot of attraction for me. I kept reading Dogs of God (of which more anon) until boarding call. A seat was broken, so one woman had to take a special seat. Which was odd, since the one next to me was empty. Unfortunately, having the empty seat didn't help with stretching out. The armrests are too low, and having my arms hang interferes with sleep. As does the roar. The tune stuck in my head didn't help: of all the chilling songs to go through a parent's head If He Walked into My Life from Auntie Mame must rank as one of the worst.

American lost no opportunity to make sales for extras: duty-free 'goods' in their catalog or booze at \$5 per bottle. The middle of each block of three seats had a phone you could call from at any time: just swipe your credit card.

Movies on the big screen--no choices. The CBS evening lineup takes a lot less time without commercials, and would probably have been equally good with the sound on. Something called Taxi involved the most amazing mumming and writhing on the part of what must have been the dispatch man. Chaplin he isn't: without the sound you can't tell anything. Then Pride and Prejudice, which I'd recently seen (good movie, but I was still trying to see if sleep was possible), and something called Best of Show about dog shows. Odd. Maybe if I kept my eyes open more often I'd have figured out what was going on.

Then of course the sun came up like thunder, reflected off the clouds. I'm not sure why the airlines consider yogurt to be a food, much less a breakfast food. I tried it, but found no reason to discard my old notions.

I can't say much about the Brussels airport, except that you have to walk for quite a while down some very dull corridors. Geneva was foggy, so the incoming plane was late and I got to watch a four-year-old making like an airplane and a bunch of grumpy business-types complaining loud and long on cell phones. The flight was only 2/3 full; every other seat was empty. My row-mate was a woman with an attractive face but oddly long and bloodless fingers--who read short sections of English and Flemish newspapers. She never seemed to finish anything, from the newspapers to the "meal."

I was in the last row, and my bag was about the last item left on the carousel. Out through the "nothing to declare" gate, and now to find the bus stop. Back and forth among the taxis; a sign here and a sign there but nothing I remember at all. Light dawns: this is the lower level.

With my bags I took up an unconscionable amount of room, which I was truly sorry for as the hinged bus fills up and a lad with a cast needs to find a seat. Bouchet is my stop, where it turns out the stop lights are out and work crews escort people across the street. I picked the wrong intersection, and missed my bus. No matter, another would be along in 12 minutes. And so it was. The whole area was loaded with children--I guess school lets out at 14:00 hereabouts. Some high-school-ages boys tried to see if a roll of plastic will trail behind the bus as it unrolls (it doesn't; it pulls free and falls behind) and left us with a string of firecrackers in one of the metal trash bins when they exit.

The buses are hinged in the middle. They stop at every stop (the motor turns off!), and if you want out from your section you push the button on the stantion. If you want in, you push the button by the door (there are 2 double-wide doors per bus section). Actually there are two buttons: one is marked with a stroller, and I suppose holds the door longer. You buy a ticket at the ticket machine, and nobody normally checks whether you have one or not--but sometimes an inspector is on the bus, and I understand the fine is substantial if you are riding without one.

My CERN badge didn't fit in my pocket, so I wore it all the way from Madison. The guard at the gate looked at it as I went by 10 feet away, and I was in--now to find the hostel and room and park my bags.

Of course there was a message stapled to my paperwork--a nice way to get in touch with people when you don't know their arrival. I dumped my bags in my room (5'th floor corner--it got pretty cold that night), and went off to change some money and get the laptop working in DHCP mode again. And then the day's work started.

Thud by Terry Pratchett

This is another of Pratchett's Diskworld series, about Vimes and justice again. Those who know what I'm talking about will understand; and those who don't should start with a different book in the series.

He's done better, and done worse. It hasn't as many of his characteristic offbeat asides, and he could have done without the pole-dancer character: she is only moderately amusing and the scenes don't fit well with the rest of the book. Perhaps he wanted to try to integrate Sally into the force quickly and needed a hen party to do it? The denoument has a couple of major plot-holes (dwarves paralyzed with fear at a berzerker's approach? And how did the ancients know any relics would survive?).

Still, he keeps the story flowing along pretty well, links the pieces of the mystery together nicely, and writes well.

What's So Amazing about Grace? by Phillip Yancey

Go read it.

Yancey's theme is grace. What is unique about Christianity among all religions? Grace. What breaks cycles of violence and bitterness? Grace.

The book is a plea for Christians to remember reaching out with grace and worry less about hedging themselves about with protective rules to keep sinners away. And he brings up example after example of grace in action and what happens when “ungrace” abounds.

He describes his own childhood, growing up racist. We all like to think we're independent, but I sometimes wonder what I would have been like if I'd grown up in an environment like his. And he describes the legalism of his Bible college years (not that the rules were bad but that they were an end in themselves). And he writes of what he sees now. He tells the story of Will Campbell, who became a kind of “missionary to the rednecks” when his friend was murdered by a racist, and of “Big Harold,” a kindly stand-in father when Yancey's own father died—and what became of him as he tried to live out a legalist life.

Grace is not just a response to repentance; it can be a call to repentance. Forgiving the undeserving and unrepentant can be grace. And of course if God can't forgive Stalin, God can't forgive anybody. It doesn't help to think about all the horrors someone has committed. They are not beyond God's grace—if they want it.

Our small group has been studying Romans, so I've been thinking a bit about the law. Paul said, and common sense affirms, that law is prior to grace.

In fact, in the sort of culture I find myself in, the law is good news: the world actually has some meaning and structure to it. Of course the good news is accompanied by the bad news that we've broken the law of God and broken ourselves on that law.

Fortunately it isn't necessary to have received the full clear revelation of the Law of God to experience grace—because as Paul notes, the image of that law, however maimed, is built into us. We already know enough of the law of God to condemn ourselves. And so we can know what grace is when God or man shows it to us.

One minor nitpick: Yancey quotes the results of a study that showed that Christians are just like everybody else in society—maybe even more likely to divorce than average. The book is from 1997, and the study has since been reanalyzed more carefully, adjusting for economic class (divorce rates are higher among the poor and the rich are less likely to be Christian) and using self-reported church attendance rates rather than self-identification as “born-again.” The new analysis reversed the original conclusion: active “Christians” are less likely to get into trouble, divorce, and so on than their peers.

Stents

"There was an old lady who swallowed a spider
that wriggled and jiggled and tickled inside 'er."

Ok, a stent from the bladder to the kidney doesn't wriggle or jiggle much. But it lets you know its there.

Kidney stones

\I've been a bit quiet lately. Well, moaning and groaning some, but quietly. I had a nice long visit to ER, a followup the next day to a Urologist, and then a "procedure" today: laser lithotripsy. I can't complain: compared to the kidney stones the soreness left behind is minor (seems urine is alkaline, and so all too frequently I wind up singing soprano).

The hospital is very careful--lots of low-tech (read "reliable") crosschecks to make sure that the right patient gets all the right steps done and gets operated on on the correct side. I had to give my birthdate a dozen times. A nurse said that yesterday the father of a 4-year-old went ape when the nurses kept asking the same question over and over again. But its such an easy safety check...

The urologist was very good--I'd never had somebody lay out a CAT scan before and explain it.

Sunday Nite

Funny how fame goes. Sunday Nite was a Christian variety show, modeled loosely after Prairie Home Companion, created by Richard K. Allison. It ran for several years out of Minneapolis/St. Paul, and was broadcast nationwide. Their most famous drama team was The Refreshment Committee, who put together some really good sketches. (It since morphed into another name, TCS, and then maybe out of existence completely--hard to say). Google for Sunday Nite. Deja for it. Not much, is there? I guess their teams didn't include computer geeks who'd have documented it for the web, and after Richard died they went their separate ways with no great interest in recording what they used to do. I'll bet there's a lot of material available in St. Paul and at Bethany, but not that the rest of us can get at easily. So by the new standards, the show wasn't famous--or it would have had Google listings.

Concert

Youngest son had an orchestra concert Thursday. Sixth grade had two orchestras, and his was up first. They played two rhythmically complex pieces about as well as you’d expect new students to play.

I was disappointed at first. I couldn’t see him on stage at all, and wondered if something had gone wrong. But as they filed offstage I saw him, sandwiched in between far taller students. He was unmistakable as he walked off stage with his clarinet held high like a drum major’s baton.

Buzzing

Youngest son has created his own “Gronk-a-phone,” which consists of a length of plastic hose from an air mattress inflation kit, with optional marble inside (or some water in the lower loop) to give it some vibrato. He prefers practicing with it to practicing the piano or clarinet. The instrument’s name was given by his mother, and is onomatopoeic.

This morning he added a little sea-anemone-like finger puppet to the far end of the hose. When he blows it inflates, and when he sounds his instrument the tiny tentacles vibrate amusingly; even tickle a bit.

Curious vanity plate

On an SUV this evening here in so-blue-its-ultraviolet Madison, a vanity plate that read AK741T. Is that a Marxist call for revolution (all too common around here), or a gun buff who likes to blow stuff apart? (For those not familiar with Russian weapons, see here). An odd sort of advertisement on an SUV, anyhow.

Headline

The Wisconsin State Journal top headline today is "Abortion Case to Test Alito." Isn't this exactly backwards?

Doctors and lethal injection in California

Doctors are objecting to their role in an execution in California. I'm glad to see it, though their objections could be stronger. Not that I object to the death penalty as such, but I want a bright line between the roles of healer and executioner. Let a doctor verify the death, but don't have a doctor give the injection, or release the trap, or pull the trigger.

OK, now I'm hungry

Song Dong makes cookie cities. I wonder if he'd be willing to create a Sesame Street for PBS?

No wonder I didn't hear a gunshot

It turns out the older son had bought a gun, and he and some others were horsing around and accidently shot his brother's friend. So they decided to tell the cops it was a drive-by shooting. Their various stories fell apart, of course; but its no wonder I heard nothing. The shot was indoors, not outside.

I didn't hear a thing

Two nights ago a 16-year-old was shot at the duplex across the street from our back yard. It isn't 70 yards away. He'll live; the paper said it wasn't life-threatening.

I didn't hear anything. I was awake and in the living room working on the computer. The snowfall was too light to muffle sounds, the curtain isn't that heavy, but I heard nothing at all. We didn't know anything had happened until the mars lights from 6 squad cars woke up Youngest Son.

The oldest son in that house (and probably the second, as well) are infamously into drugs, so I'd guess that it was some drug dispute.

I've seen but never met the older sons. When I'm out they're not, and they're not out very often. They live in their own world. And they're just 70 yards away.

Am I out of touch or are they crazy?

I took Middle Daughter to Urgent Care the other night to see about some unreasonable dizziness. While she was closeted with a doctor checking her out for concussion and not paying much mind to her disclaimers, I sat in the waiting room. The TV was on, of course, and what to my wondering eyes should appear but something called Entertainment Tonight.

I used to think that laundry soap commercials in which apparently ordinary housewives went into depression over “ring around the collar” were the epitome of breathless nonsense. I was mistaken. They worked up an excitement over their reporter “crashing Madonna’s rehearsal” that I’d think better suited for a cancer cure or a story about bin Laden becoming a Pentecostal.

The hostess interviewed a man about women’s costumes for the Grammy’s, with both predicting that lots of skin and “skin tight,” (which I understand proved not to be the case), since sex appeal was a bigger deal than musical talent. No, not in so many words, but that was implied.

So, am I out of touch or are they crazy? Is there a large audience that really cares if Carey has one earring or two? (Then they’re crazy.) Or is the audience amused by watching the hosts act enthused?

Next came the Grammy’s, which I’ve never seen before. The opening number had a bunch of puppets dancing, which isn’t that bad. Then we got Madonna’s dance crew and Herself singing and dancing. I think the puppets were better. Of course, Madonna has always left me cold. From Desperately Seeking Susan to now she’s always seemed to exude an air of self-absorbed detachment.

Some singer I’d not heard of won an award I didn’t know existed and proceeded to squeal her way through bad acting and a prepared text.

About this time Middle Daughter appeared, and rescued me from the dreary lands.

Fountains

As part of a large remodeling program the pair of fountains at the East Washington side of the Capitol Square have been replaced. No doubt the plumbing was in bad shape, and they needed replacement, but I’m sorry to see them go.

The old fountains had a touch of Wisconsin character. They were made of layers of brick with rounded edges, were about six feet wide and three feet high, and resembled nothing quite so much as a stack of cow pies—which is altogether fitting and proper for the Dairy State.

I haven’t seen the new structures in action yet, but the fountain portion seems much smaller now. Most of the structure is now large stone-face blocks, suitable for carving and decoration. It looks like the water will now be cascading down a set of oddly shaped basins with a vaguely gynecological aspect.

There isn’t room on the sidewalk for something more classical, with naiads and tritons. And too many people would get drenched if it were something like the water fountain sculpture by the Engineering Hall. And I suppose the State Capitol needs to be a little bit dignified. Pity.

Cartoons

I pointed out a couple of years ago how it is natural to conclude that the worst believer is better than the best unbeliever. It is clearly more important to get the most important relationship in your life (with God) correct than any other relationship, and if that is guaranteed, then obviously you're morally better than someone who doesn't have that supremely important relationship correct.

Of course, when the signs of that "correct relationship" aren't closely related to anything in your soul, it is pretty easy to fake it. Reciting something in arabic, or getting yourself baptised are a lot easier than actually trying to worship God.

Jesus said "By their fruits you will know them."

That's a fairly powerful tool. If we apply it here to Muslim, Christian, whatever; we find that:

• The editors of Jyllands-Posten love to mock and to offend.
• The imams of Islamisk Trossamfund love to hate and to lie (they faked some pictures to circulate).
• The mobs of Islamists love to destroy.

Of course mobs are generally fairly easy to assemble: you can always find people who love to destroy. The timing of this collection of riots seems to suit the political purposes of Iran and Saudi Arabia pretty well, oddly enough. And two of the editors are quoted as admitting that they like to mock and be edgy.

To the mobs I say nothing. We know the kind of people these are, and it is the duty of the government to keep them from ruining life for everyone else.

The JP editors are examples of the corrosive attitude that wants to live detached so it can mock and tear down. It isn't a new attitude. Thirty-some years ago I read about a commune in Denmark. The reporter asked one of its men why he didn't go get a productive job. The answer: "But I have a productive job already, for which society must reward me; I keep track of police misdeeds." I'm not sure there remains any common language I can use with people so detached.

Of the imams I ask: "Who do you worship? If I mock God you disregard me, but if I mock Muhammad you try to kill me. I don't think you are Muslims at all. You are Muhammadans."

"Let's just count the spoons before you leave, shall we?"

Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf is requiring former government ministers to stay in the country pending an audit of government property. I have a funny feeling some ministers will be more eager than ever to leave.

Coretta Scott King

I tuned in the radio this morning to hear NPR talking about her life. That's a sure sign that someone is dead. I gather NPR was caught flat-footed: they next went to an interview with someone (didn't catch the name) who "knew her." All he could think of to say was that her training in music hadn't prepared her for a life as widow of a great civil rights leader.

That's rather telling: he thought only in terms of training in skills, not training in character. I think she could have taught him better, if he'd really known her.

Alito

Madison is one of the shrill centers for anti-Alito panic. I suppose it's good for fund-raising. Fund-raising was undoubtedly the purpose of the week's delay--I doubt that anybody changed his voting plans. And I doubt that he'll actually ever vote to repeal Roe vs Wade: unfortunately.

Even if the Supreme Court did repeal it, and also the disastrous Doe vs Bolton, it'd not be a cure-all. We've trained up two generations of lawyers to believe that women have an ancient Roman paterfamilias power of life and death, and it will take a long time to work that poison out of our system.

Democracy and Christianity and Policemen

Monarchist Christians have it easy compared with democratic ones. They don't have the burden of deciding justice—Caesar can do it for them.

The first order of business of any government is to protect its people, and since there's no shortage of enemies outside and criminals within, a government must not “bear the sword in vain.”

An army's job is to “kill people and break things;” and however much he may try to keep the peace, a policeman's ultimate backup is deadly force.

How soft and pleasant it must be to pretend that crime will vanish with just the right program, and dream on that it isn't a problem because you didn't see it in your neighborhood; or to imagine that an interlude of peace and plenty is eternal and that the divine millennium has come.

For those who let reality break through and see that violence must be done on their behalf, it is comforting to fob off responsibility on a “king.” But democrats must suck it up and say, however sorrowfully “Yes, I authorize this violence.” “Yes, a cop may need to beat the crap out of a man raged-out on angel-dust.” “Yes, bomb that refinery.” When does it end? Never as soon as our simple models of the world predict. And there are no perfect rules, except the promise that there is a time for war and a time for peace.

Those called to pacifism should never sneer at those called to fight. Somebody's got to be Martha. And Caiaphas was also a prophet.

And those called to fight should not sneer at those called to pacifisim. Perhaps that's a problem in some sections of this country.

It is a real dilemma: To fight isn't exactly loving, but neither is to abdicate.

And yes, my angel-dust example was provacative. But in real life the options are a bit limited: let him go on his rampage, try to back off enough to unlimber your gun to kill him, or whack him with a club. Want to pick?

Forever and Always

Quantum mechanics allows a little fuzziness in time, but on any sort of human time scale, the past is done. We each know our life as a little point riding and guiding the arc of our years. Our moving finger writes, and having writ . . . the curve of life we wrote on the world and on each other is indelible, timeless, fixed in eternity. We don't perceive it that way, but the past is now always, and perhaps our knowledge will change and we will see it so too.

Forever and always—that glorious picnic and the baby's smile. And also forever furtively reading your sister's diary. And forever the horror in the village when the raiders came. If God erased the evil He would have to remake the world entirely—our lives, our choices, everything—we'd no longer have been.

Some of you may think it worth it—the ones who endure the burden of broken self hood in a ruined world. “Let it all have never been and I can find oblivion!” God had a subtler idea, and He offers the chance to redeem us.

Does He then redeem the past too? Or do only a new nature of grace and the works of it survive, with all the evil ripped away into the abyss? Can good works exist without context? If not then perhaps the past will be redeemed—occasions for grace covered by the sacrifice of Jesus. Perhaps we will be able to look at our anguished history and praise God for the great good revealed.

Belvedere Oasis

Odd how 7pm on a Thursday has a 1am feeling there. The west-side McD's stand was closed, and the Doghouse was closing. There was country music in the air: "Nothin' on but the radio." I bought a gyro combo from the Hispanic family running the place. A rotund black man in superbaggy pants bought the same thing, and wandered off looking for a newspaper for 5 minutes before coming back for his order--that's how quiet it was. (Don't order the combo unless you really like french fries.) The advertising kiosk announced that their firm could "reach over 3 billion motorists annually." Another rejoiced in "the passion of shopping" and the "satisfaction of saving."

Sometimes I have to pinch myself to see if I'm awake and on planet Earth. Perhaps they meant "passion" in the old sense of pain?

Church History in Plain Language

second edition, by Bruce L Shelley

The book is what is says: a history of the church, and well written. I learned quite a bit.

I'm not going to summarize it. OK, actually I did, but the result is about 14 pages and is for a church class.

The book leaves some things out--it is only 500 pages long, after all. And there were a couple of small points I thought were almost but not quite right. But, as I discovered when writing my own summary, that's inevitable when you're summarizing.

Its a fun read. Go read it.

Emerging Churches

by Eddie Gibbs and Ryan Bolger

It may seem odd to start with this book, rather than one of the manifestos about Emergent Churches, but this one is overdue at the library. Of such mundane concerns are schedules made . . .

The subtitle is creating christian community in postmodern cultures. And that, I think, explains the purpose rather nicely. The interviewees, on the whole, seem to be trying to create either missions among the “Generation X” or Christian communities among the “Gen X.” The research methodology is biased towards finding these kinds of “churches” (Appendix B), but I’ll assume that their approach gives an accurate picture.

The authors interviewed dozens of leaders of such groups, trying to find out where they came from, what needs they were trying to meet, whether evangelism is important, the role of creativity, and what leadership is like—among other questions.

The results are all over the map. Some are in love with spontaneity and creative worship while others found the hard way that some order and accountability are critical. Some have “club scene” churches and others try to make room for quiet and meditation. Some have happy links to denominations and others are so bitter against the organized church that you can taste it. Rachelle goes so far as to say “I came to realize that artists ought to function as the main leaders of the gathering, setting the tone for worship. Artists intuit the truth through their art.” And the Greek poets were the spokesmen of the gods.

Spokesmen for the “movement” have said that our culture is changing from a “modernist” philosophy to a “postmodernist” philosophy, and that this is a big change. I’ll not go into all that just now (check the references: you’ll be little wiser than you were before). The gist of their point is that churches accommodated themselves to “modernism” and aren’t equipped to deal with the new “postmodern” culture, which deals more with stories and images than teacher/student relationships. (The whole “postmodernist” cult is afflicted with worry about hierarchy and sources of power.)

Let’s stipulate that the groups described in the book are representative, or maybe even definitive, of the emergent movement. It saves time, and I’m in no position to say for sure. They are, on the whole, trying to address two rather grave problems:

• The usual evangelistic approaches aren’t coming close to where a huge fraction of the lost actually are. The culture has carefully trained the young to find common expressions of Christianity silly or stupid; only a novel or obscure Christianity (Celtic or Greek Orthodox) is “authentic.” Most people in Britain apparently can’t imagine entering a church to worship.
• Churches are often boxed-in affairs: Sunday-only and with only a restricted amount of community. This shows up dramatically in what happens to youth: they get involved in youth groups, but not in the life of the church. When they go to college, “goodbye youth group” and since they’re not used to community with the rest of the church, most fall away from active participation.

The problem with creating a mission to “clubbers,” for example, is that they represent a particular age group, and with time members age out of the target group; and the group winds up as “boxed-in” as the church they tried to extend. Quite a number of the mission groups in the book have this problem; most admit it. I’ve not got any good solutions either, but at least the gospel is getting out there.

Some groups have been trying to create holy community by working to become part of each other’s lives, meeting frequently, praying together when they meet, and so on. The obvious problem is that there are only 24 hours in the day, and the number of brothers and sisters we can become deeply involved with is relatively small. The not-so obvious problem is that when we try to make every part of our lives sacred, we wind up with everything partly secular. We don’t seem to have enough attention to God to make every moment sacred, so the best of a bad situation is rhythm: sacred times and non-sacred times.

And, of course, when you try outreach by welcoming nonbelievers into this community, it can lose distinctiveness and become a “group of friends” rather than a holy community. What is Holy Communion/Lord’s Supper if half the participants aren’t Christian?

Still, the problem of unredeemed time is big enough that some experimentation is worthwhile.

Another big feature of these groups is “creativity.” Some use DJs in clubs, some create special artwork for the service, some experiment with liturgies: all sorts of things.

We sat each week surrounded by some of the brightest talents in film, TV, art, social work, and politics who were made to watch in virtual silence because they did not play guitar or preach. . . . We saw that if worship is about gift, then what we bring to worship has to be integral to us, something meaningful from who we are.

I’m talented in mathematics, but I haven’t found that bringing mathematical operations into the service enhances the worship of others, no matter how integral my gift may be to me. pun intended

Several groups found that they had to temper the enthusiasms of their artists—the services were supposed to be about God, not about novelty.

This isn’t a book to read for fun; it feels scattershot and the prose isn’t scintillating. But it is useful. And I haven’t touched on half the things the authors cover.

IPass

Let me see if I understand this Illinois IPass . I buy the pass and use my credit card to add $$, which debited each time I pass through a toll booth. So far so good. If I commit some violation, such as using the IPass on a different car, they can assess fees which can be drawn from my credit card. And they reserve the right to change terms merely by sending me an email. And they get a timestamp every time I pass through the gates. So all they have to do is ship out an email and they can start printing money by deducting traffic fines (double if there was a work zone) from my credit card if I happen to travel at the prevailing speed. Hmmm. I don't think I drive that way enough to make it worthwhile.

Tombstoning

Sometimes I wonder if people do things like this deliberately. The sign for a gas station read
COLD BEER
Unleaded 235.9
PLUS 243.9
PREM 251.9

I'm glad their beer is unleaded.

Flocks

Fermilab has a sufficiency of geese. An abundance. A superfluity. An avalanche. Sidewalks full. "Oh me, oh my--you wanna buy a goose?"

Though it is kind of fun to see a flock taking off in front of a car, trying to clear the road before the car crawling through hits them. (Not that you dare hit a goose; they're are a protected species and you'd be in the soup if you squashed one.)

Brothers

I was reading Emerging Churches by Gibbs and Bolger on the bus this morning. They aren't the finest apologists I've ever run across. Their approach is rather scrambled, they use the usual "define the best as the stuff we've got" approach, and they overstate (to the point of misrepresentation) problems with traditional churches. I'm not happy with myself when I do things like that; and if I get annoyed with good-old-me, imagine how I regard folks misrepresenting me!

I looked up and the woman in front of me was reading a printout titled "My Initiation into the Goddess Hecate" by Rev Greg Crowfoot.

I looked down at the book, and thought "Hi, brothers!"

Precision

My father was a missionary accountant. He did the mundane grunt work that let the preaching types do the church planting. And the hundreds of sympathy messages my mother received show that even the laborer in the back room touched many lives.

He valued precision, as I suppose an accountant ought to do. This showed up in some unexpected ways.

My shoes are New Balance sneakers, and when untied each lace provides over 14 inches free on each side. (I measured them. One day I'll buy some shorter ones.) Dad's dress shoes had 3 inches free. To tie those things takes more finicky precision than I could stand, but he preferred it.

Fear Less

by Gavin de Becker

Gavin wrote the famous The Gift of Fear about how fear is supposed to be used to keep you safe, and how to understand risks. We have used this with a couple of our kids with Aspergers to try to explain how to analyse behaviors, something Aspergers folks don't learn automatically. This book is an application of those same principles to the fear of terrorists post-911.

Some of what he writes about is common sense. The world has never been safe. If your enemy threatens you, he isn't attacking you. Try to understand what the real risks are, not just those things that worry you. Learn how to trust your fears. Don't feed your fears; you want to be able to trust your instincts and you can't do that if you try to worry about everything. Don't demonize your enemy; you can't defeat a demon.

His analysis of airline security is scathing: most of the "security" precautions are designed to make people feel confident, not address the real risks: which aren't that hard to address. He calls in the experts to explain how to survive chemical or biological attack--and it isn't nearly as hard as you think. (Don't panic, keep stuff off your skin, breathe slowly and get away from the area. You've now got an excellent chance to exagerate your story to your grandkids.)

And he devotes two chapters to explaining why you shouldn't watch TV news reports. Their stock in trade is exageration and fear-mongering, and you want your fear sense tuned to real risks. "Anytime you hear the word possible, it's probably not happening right now." "Almost always when you hear the word link, there is no confirmed link." On experts: "Imagine being challenged by a difficult illness and finding that your doctor's compassionate and complete thirty-minute presentation had been edited down to twenty-three seconds."

The chapter on the enemy and compassion seems more or less sensible, though it isn't quite clear what measures he supports during a war. FWIW, I can't recall anything in ancient or modern history that resembles the care we've tried to take to protect civilians in Iraq, except similar measures in Kosovo and the first Iraq campaign. I don't know if that's what he's talking about or not.

He offers resource pointers in appendices, and advice about how to talk to kids about terrorism and how to keep them from excessive worry. Roughly, this is: Explain that parents protect their kids. Don't watch and rewatch terrifying scenes (network TV again), and don't talk about worst case scenarios when the kids are around.

Read it. And get ahold of The Gift of Fear while you're at it. You probably won't need his company's services, though.