dual personalities

August 25, 2022

God’s gonna trouble the water

by chuckofish

I continue to read through the Bible and I am enjoying it. Barring some catastrophe, I know I can finish! Daughter #1 says my plan is weird, and it is true that in my plan I read through the NT twice, but I am sticking with it. And when I finish, I will start all over. Last week I read Romans chapter 12 (again) and I was struck by verses 9-21. Here are some clearcut, straightforward rules for life, as laid out by Saint Paul:

1. Rejoice in hope, be patient in tribulation, be constant in prayer. 

2. Contribute to the needs of the saints and seek to show hospitality.

3. Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse them. 

4. Rejoice with those who rejoice, weep with those who weep. 

5. Live in harmony with one another. Do not be haughty, but associate with the lowly. Never be wise in your own sight. 

6. Repay no one evil for evil, but give thought to do what is honorable in the sight of all. 

7. If possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all. 

8. Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave it to the wrath of God, for it is written, “Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord.” 

9. To the contrary, “if your enemy is hungry, feed him; if he is thirsty, give him something to drink; for by so doing you will heap burning coals on his head.” 

10. Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.

–Romans 12: 12-21 (ESV)

Post these simple rules on your refrigerator and read them every morning!

“A Bible that’s falling apart usually belongs to someone who isn’t.”― Charles H. Spurgeon

Here’s a song I like:

And here’s a little good news for a change, care of Albert Pujols.

Don’t worry. Wade in the water, children.

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August 24, 2022

The world is vast and boundless. Be steadfast.

by chuckofish

Daughter #1 usually posts on Wednesdays, but her internet was out last night so she could not write her post about the Missouri State Fair as she had planned. C’est la vie.

I was not prepared to write a post on short notice so I will just note that I DVR’d, as planned, all the samurai movies which TCM ran on Toshiro Mifune day last week. Last night I watched Samurai I: Musashi Miyamoto (1954), directed by Hiroshi Inagaki and starring Toshiro Mifune.

It won the Academy Award for outstanding foreign film that year and they got that right.

Personally, I really love Toshiro Mifune, and I would even go so far as to say he is in the Top Five of my all-time favorite actors. (Who are the other four you ask? That is a post for another day.)

And here’s a samurai poem by Robert Pinsky.

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August 23, 2022

“No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.”*

by chuckofish

Another summer is slipping away. The twins have started kindergarten! The time just skis by.

Sunrise, sunset.

I must note that tomorrow is the birthday of the great Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986). A toast (or two or three) is in order for this great Argentine short-story writer, essayist, poet and translator, who thought about time a lot too.

We are the time. We are the famous
metaphor from Heraclitus the Obscure.

We are the water, not the hard diamond,
the one that is lost, not the one that stands still.

We are the river and we are that greek
that looks himself into the river. His reflection
changes into the waters of the changing mirror,
into the crystal that changes like the fire.

We are the vain predetermined river,
in his travel to his sea.

The shadows have surrounded him.
Everything said goodbye to us, everything goes away.

Memory does not stamp his own coin.

However, there is something that stays
however, there is something that bemoans.

–“We are the Time. We are the Famous”

*Heraclitus

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August 22, 2022

You know my sitting down and my rising up”*

by chuckofish

We had a nice weekend in flyover land with temperatures in the low eighties and low humidity. That is about as good as it gets here in the summer and I am grateful.

Daughter #1 came home and we enjoyed some normal weekend-y activities. The boy and I also went in his truck to pick up a “new” vintage camelback sofa I had bought at our local antique mall last week. Now we have to deal with disposing of our old sofa, which, believe me, is not easy!

We went to church on Sunday where we heard a good, long sermon on Luke 16:1-13, a hard parable, which the preacher met head-on. Later in the afternoon the OM and I returned for the fall ministry kickoff picnic which was actually a lot of fun. Everyone is returning to school and that means that the summer, I guess, is more or less officially over. Sigh.

I was sad to read that the College Hill Presbyterian Church in Oxford, Mississippi, had burned to the ground. The church was built in 1846 and was the oldest church structure in Oxford, as well as the oldest Presbyterian church in all of North Mississippi. The grounds of the church were used by Union troops under Generals Grant and Sherman during the Civil War, and it is where William Faulkner was married.

Before the fire

In other news, a ridiculous story has recently been making the rounds of social media claiming that six security men had to hold back John Wayne from assaulting Sacheen Littlefeather at the 1973 Academy Awards. Blogger Farran Smith Nehme, aka the Self-Styled Siren, has now thoroughly researched and debunked this fantasy in a well-written article. People have no shame nowadays about lying and spreading more lies.

But this story about the Samaritan’s Purse volunteers helping people right here in St. Louis is uplifting. They walk the walk. Check out the video.

Also, Katiebelle got a haircut…

…and she approved…

And here’s R.C. Sproul explaining flat-out nonsense:

Well, have a good week!

*Psalm 139: 2

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August 19, 2022

Full many a flower is born to blush unseen, And waste its sweetness on the desert air*

by chuckofish

Earlier this summer I signed up for a ‘flower CSA’ run by a colleague’s entrepreneurial eleven-year-old daughter. She lives on a farm where there is plenty of space for flower-growing. I think it was a clever business idea, and she is doing a great job. The weekly bouquet has proved a wonderful morale booster. Last week I received this pretty bunch,

and here is the one that I picked up today:

I confess that I cannot identify most of the flowers, and I know that my arranging style is probably best described as chaotic, but I love the way they brighten up a room. Honestly, I’d rather participate in a flower CSA than a vegetable one. We’ve done that before but gave up because we mostly received unidentifiable greens. What can I say? I am not fond of kale.

In other news, I found out that our great aunt and uncles – Dora (age 10), Kenneth (age 9) and Thomas (age 7) Cameron – went from South Africa to the poorhouse in Dundee Scotland, which they entered on July 19th, 1870. Our great-grandfather Daniel ended up in similar straits but in Edinburgh, presumably because he was 13 (I posted about him back in 2013). Here’s the front of the Dundee poorhouse which was a much larger complex of buildings than this photo suggests.

I suspect that the younger children went to Dundee because it’s in Forfar, and that’s where their mother came from. If so, they arrived only to discover that the family couldn’t take them, didn’t live there anymore, or had all died out. At any rate, the children didn’t stay in Dundee for long, for they appear in the 1871 census living in Kilmallie, Argyll with two spinster sisters, Elizabeth and Mary McColl. All of this raises several questions. Thomas was not the son of our great grandfather who died in 1861. What happened to his father, and why did Thomas go by Cameron? Did Ann’s second husband have the same surname as our great grandfather? Was there no second husband? Also, I find it interesting that the children ended up in Kilmaillie, their father’s birthplace. Could the spinster ladies have been related to his mother? Perhaps they were aunts. It’s all an intriguing mystery. I’ll keep digging…

In the meantime, I’ll leave you with some ‘ancestral mathematics’ to consider.

Food for thought… Have a great weekend!

*Thomas Gray, An Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard.

3 Comments
August 18, 2022

A dark mythological river

by chuckofish

Today is National Bad Poetry Day. This seems to me to be a stupid holiday and I will ignore it. I prefer to read some good poetry. Here’s Billy Collins reading his poem “Forgetfulness,” which is a favorite of mine.

(We cannot mention Collins without remembering this classic.)

Here’s Richard Burton reading John Donne…

…Ralph Fiennes reads Kipling’s “The Way Through the Woods”…

…”Two English Poems” by Jorge Luis Borges read by Tom O’Bedlam…

Don’t you feel better…and smarter? (Even if you are losing your memory.)

Here’s an interesting chat with Carl Trueman. And here’s a good reminder. You can do this.

Blessed is the one
    who does not walk in step with the wicked
or stand in the way that sinners take
    or sit in the company of mockers,
2 but whose delight is in the law of the Lord,
    and who meditates on his law day and night.
3 That person is like a tree planted by streams of water,
    which yields its fruit in season
and whose leaf does not wither—
    whatever they do prospers.

–Psalm 1: 1-3
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August 17, 2022

Listen to your life

by chuckofish

Well, now Frederick Buechner, author and Presbyterian minister, has died. He was born the same year as my mother, 1926. He lived a long and fruitful life. He meant a lot to me.

I’m sure in real life we would have disagreed about a lot of things, but we were kindred souls. Like me, I think he cried in church a lot. Things moved him. He loved Jesus. And Saint Paul. He was a fool for Christ.

He was a type of gentleman one rarely encounters anymore. I am glad and grateful I was able to shake his hand once and hear him preach in person. I will miss him, but he has gone home.

Into paradise may the angels lead thee, Freddy, and at thy coming may the martyrs receive thee, and bring thee into the holy city Jerusalem.

P.S. The OM is home and doing well. He has to take it easy and stay home from work for a week. “Count it all joy, my brothers, when you meet trials of various kinds,  for you know that the testing of your faith produces steadfastness.” (James 1:2-3)

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August 15, 2022

Heavy sigh

by chuckofish

Plans were interrupted this weekend when I had to take the OM in to the ER when he thought he was having a heart “event”. Long story short, he is still at the hospital and will have a procedure this morning. He will be okay, but once again, we are reminded that things can change on a dime. I am always so grateful that our hospital is close by, the parking is easy and everyone is always so nice.

Daughter #1 drove back to town to keep me company and the boy has been, as always, supportive too. I had been planning to babysit the wee twins today and daughter #1 will take over that duty. We spent some time yesterday going through boxes of old Legos and washing them, so they can play with them today.

The coping mechanisms we employ–zut alors!

Anyway, blogging may be spotty this week, but we’ll be hanging in there!

For we are glad when we are weak and you are strong. Your restoration is what we pray for.

2 Corinthians 13:9
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August 12, 2022

Someone had blundered

by chuckofish

I’ve been watching quite a few movies lately, and my choices have oscillated wildly between recent releases (e.g., Belfast, Prey, and Thirteen Lives) and classics like To Be or Not to Be (1942), Objective Burma (1945) and last night’s The Charge of the Light Brigade (1936). Few of these films were great but most were eminently watchable. The Charge of the Light Brigade was not. It had a great director (Michael Curtiz of the Adventures of Robin Hood fame) and a stellar cast, including Errol Flynn, Olivia DeHavilland, Patric Knowles, David Niven, Donald Crisp, Nigel Bruce and other stalwarts. But let me tell you, not even that cast could save this train wreck of a movie.

False advertising!

Recognizing the movie’s flaws, Curtiz includes a disclaimer admitting that it takes liberties with history. That should have warned me. Most of the movie – everything except the last fifteen minutes – takes place in India and involves the machinations of a perfidious local raja named Surat Khan, a love triangle involving Errol, Olivia and Patric, and several interminable sequences of cavalry maneuvers to loud martial music.

Poor Olivia looks pained throughout

The idea that Olivia would prefer Patric to Errol is absurd, as indeed is the whole Indian plot. At the beginning Errol saves Surat Khan from a leopard, so that Khan owes him his life. A few months later, Khan attacks the British fort where Errol is stationed. British incompetence allows Khan to lure a major portion of the cavalry away from the fort which he duly attacks. Eventually, Errol meets Khan to negotiate terms and nobly rejects Khan’s offer of free passage out of the war zone. After Khan attacks again, and Errol and Olivia manage to escape (Patric being elsewhere), everyone else, including the post’s women and children, gets slaughtered. Errol returns with help only to find the carnage. He and his men vow revenge, forcing Khan to flee India and take refuge with – you guessed it – the Russians. After Errol faces the fact that his fiancée Olivia loves his brother Patric, and his unit is transferred to the Crimea, he falsifies their orders so they can charge the Russian position and kill Surat Khan who is there watching. Have you got all that?

Let’s just review our history for a minute. The charge of the Light Brigade occurred at the Battle of Balaclava in 1854. Due to Lord Lucan’s misunderstanding of Lord Raglan’s vague order, the Light Brigade attacked the Russian artillery position and got blown to bits. It was a disaster, but the media (remember Russell’s Dispatches from the Crimea?) put a good face on it, and then Alfred Lord Tennyson immortalized the action in poetry. What made it worthy of celebrating was that the men knew the order would get them all killed, but they obeyed anyway. There was no Surat Khan and no revenge story. Why anyone thought that muddling history in such a way would be a good idea remains a mystery.

I can’t help feeling that Curtiz started out making a movie about British India, but partway through decided that he needed some hook to get people into the theater, so he added a voiceover at the beginning and a bit at the end, and voilà, we get The Charge of the Light Brigade.

All of this goes to show that bad movies have always been made, and while The Charge of the Light Brigade is far, far from the bottom of the heap, I did hate myself a little for watching the whole thing. Watch something else this weekend!

5 Comments
August 11, 2022

“I will sing of the steadfast love of the LORD forever”*

by chuckofish

I was sad to hear that author Melissa Bank has died at age 61. She published just two books during her career, “The Girls’ Guide To Hunting And Fishing,” in 1999, and “The Wonder Spot,” in 2005, but I really liked both of them.

I discovered her during a difficult summer and her book made me laugh out loud. She was funny like people I grew up with, but she was kind too. The cultural elites dismissed her work as “Chick lit” but isn’t that par for the course? Rest in peace, Melissa.

Are you watching the second season of Only Murders in the Building on Hulu? I love that two out of the three leads are old guys who are over the hill and detached, but keep getting pulled back into the world by weird circumstances and their new friend Selena Gomez.

Its tone is unusually sweet and the humor is not spiteful and/or political. It has a lot to say about loneliness. They make fun of their own progressive plot twists. I watch every episode twice! Once to see what happens and a second time to enjoy the dialogue. Is that weird? I don’t care. Here is an interview with one of the stars, Steve Martin.

Well, I continue to be amazed by the fact that I still, nearly a year and a half into worshipping at my new church, am unable to get through a service without crying. Even if I make it through the hymns, the doxology, sung by an inspired congregation at the end of the service, gets me every time. This says something important about singing. “When we make a habit of singing every day, whether we’re up to our necks in mud or not, God is praised and we’ll be encouraged.”

Even to your old age, I am He,
And even to gray hairs I will carry you!
I have made, and I will bear;
Even I will carry, and will deliver you.

Isaiah 46:4

Go in peace to love and serve the Lord.

*Psalm 89:1

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