Something I Learned About This Week

Safe and easy tombstone cleaning

I Would Be on the Phone All Day Long

2:36 p.m. A Flathead County man called police because his friend has “gone nuts!”

A Quotation Received in An Email

"A media that taught us to mock authority and culture was unprepared for the day when the audience would mock their authority and their culture."

I've noticed that what was once counter-culture has become, in the words of a fellow 8th Grader once upon a time, the "old-fogey generation".

In Other Words, Mainstream Protestantism in the 21st Century

Today’s consciousness-raising on race is less about helping black people than it is about white people seeking grace.

In Other News....

Since the U.S. media are distracted by Trump stuff, readers of The Coracle will be interested to know that the country of Iran is currently in its second week of general strikes, mostly by cargo and transportation workers, in protest of the mullah-run government.

Why Would It Be Otherwise?

Whither Human Dignity in the Secular Age?

Only Politicians Think Science is Ever Settled

3.5 BILLION-YEAR-OLD FOSSILS CHALLENGE IDEAS ABOUT EARTH’S START

Normals know that science is a process of perpetual review.

Mejor tarde que nunca, supongo

My first job in the church was as the bishop's assistant.  This was in a portion of Pennsylvania notorious for its harsh weather, especially in winter.  The morning after a particularly vicious storm, one that flattened farms, left flash frozen livestock in the fields, knocked out power, closed schools for the week, and turned the local hospitals into shelters, the bishop called me just before dawn.

"How soon can you get to diocesan house?"
"Ah, I'm not sure.  Is the Interstate still closed?"
"There's one lane open northbound.  That's plenty of room."
"Okay...maybe forty-five minutes?"
"Make it thirty."
"It'll take me that long to shovel out my car."
"Thirty minutes."

So, for the remainder of that day, from what would have been morning rush hour to almost midnight, in the remnant snow and the gathering ice, slipping and sliding in the bishop's absurd yellow Eldorado, once even winding up in a snow bank and having to be towed out by a passing farmer's tractor, we visited every single parish in the affected area.  We also stopped at the rectories and homes of clergy; praying with the rectors and assisting clergy with the bishop whipping out his diocesan checkbook when needed and, basically, taking care of business.  Like a boss, as the young people say.  Well, like a church boss.  I think I shoveled roughly a ton of snow.  That's what we did in those days.

Very late last night and then later this afternoon, after what I'm sure was at least one very important meeting by those in the upper echelons, now ten days after a microburst and tornado passed through our area, flattening houses, wrecking an impressive number of trees, and leaving power lines strewn all over like my sister's notorious spaghetti disaster of 1974, we received a mass-mailed electronic message of support from the bishops.

If you ask me, as young clergy sometimes do, what's changed the most in the church over the last 36 years, that would be it.

Charles Brush, Philip Hubert Frohman, and Norman Borlaug

I was sitting next to an objectivist the other day, which is far superior than sitting next to an anthroposophist, let me tell you  [I can never keep the number of Jesuses...er, Jesi?...straight with those people], when we started to discuss inventions and inventors.

For those not schooled in philosophical minutiae, Objectivism is the mildly crackpot philosophy formulated by Ayn Rand, who wrote the novels The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged.  Both books outline an economic philosophy based on individual freedom and the power of free enterprise and capitalism.  In the latter novel, the protagonist is a genius inventor who decides, after his invention is stolen from him, to cease to make or maintain his innovations.  He manages to persuade other genius inventors, all of whom have been robbed by politicians, academics, and members of the media, to do the same.

Naturally, the world basically comes to a halt.  Once it does, the inventors offer their services in return for recognition and, particularly...well, let me put it this way, the protagonist at the end of the novel makes the sign of the dollar over the world waiting to be re-built.

I am unsure of the primary motivation for the three innovators whom we profile this week, but there was certainly something that permitted their innovation to transcend to the status of art.

Norman Borlaug

Almost certainly, however, the first essential component of social justice is 

adequate food for all mankind.

Norman Borlaug saved more lives than did anyone else in human history.  Considering that his life-saving efforts are still active in our contemporary age, one day it will be easy to say that he saved more lives than the entire rest of the human race.  Ever.

Borlaug was born on his grandparents' farm in the middle of Iowa in the first year of World War I.  If the reader is hoping for a soul-stirring story of early derring-do and international adventure, suffice it to say you will be disappointed.  Borlaug attended the University of Minnesota on a partial wrestling scholarship and earned degrees in the decidedly non-sexy fields of plant pathology and genetics.  Upon graduation, he went to Mexico to study varieties of...wheat.  Yes, not the most interesting of flora, either.

While south of the border in a climate that permitted him to create a double-yield wheat season, the local farmers were dealing with a plague of plant disease.  As he could study the pathology twice as quickly, Borlaug, remembering his wrestling coaches advice to always give 105%, dedicated himself to preventing the disease's contagion and spread.  Instead of developing a chemical toxin, Borlaug did something much more difficult and much more effective: He would, in effect, re-boot the entire genetic structure of the seeds through rapid cross-breeding and selection, thus making the wheat remarkably disease-resistant.

To quote from an old volume of plant genetics lore:

Because pure line (genotypically identical) plant varieties often only have one or a few major genes for disease resistance, and plant diseases such as rust are continuously producing new races that can overcome a pure line's resistance, multiline varieties were developed. Multiline varieties are mixtures of several phenotypically similar pure lines which each have different genes for disease resistance. By having similar heights, flowering and maturity dates, seed colors, and agronomic characteristics, they remain compatible with each other, and do not reduce yields when grown together on the field.

Technically, Borlaug produced what's known as "semi-dwarf, high-yield, disease-resistant wheat".  In other words, wheat that could grow quickly, strongly, and free from the most common of diseases producing in such a volume that it virtually wiped out starvation, even in the most inhospitable of climates and conditions.  It is estimated the Borlaug's wheat has saved over a billion people.

So virile was Borlaug's wheat strain that it was shipped, in seed form, to every portion of the world that had been vexed by periods of food shortage or even mass starvation.  As such, he is recognized as the progenitor of what is now known as the Green Revolution, that period beginning in the mid-20th century when agriculture and technology combined to greatly improve human health and life-span.

Borlaug would spend the entirety of his 95 years improving the yield of agricultural products and battling against the causes of hunger.  For his efforts, he would be awarded the Congressional Gold Medal, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and, in 1970, the Nobel Peace Prize.  After all, he managed to wipe out for many, many people the experience of famine which, along with war and disease, is one of the three traditional vexations of the human condition.  Thus, he improved the prospects of future peace by at least one third.

Charles Brush

[Not known for being loquacious, The Coracle was unable to find any quotes from Brush.  

That's a first.]

I feel an odd kinship to Charles F. Brush.  He and I grew up in the same part of Cleveland, Ohio; the eastern portion along Lake Erie that is known as Euclid, so named because the original surveyor was a fan of geometry [no kidding].  It was a township in Brush's day, born as he was in 1849, and became a manufacturing center and city with its own mayor and municipal government by the time I was alive, much of it due to the innovations and efforts of Brush.

Brush was a descendant of the great migration to the Western Reserve from New England, his ancestors desiring farmland that was not only richer but wonderfully free of rocks, boulders, and shelves of shale.  To say Brush was precocious as a child is an understatement when, as a child, he began to build machines powered by static electricity and invented the functional arc light by his final year in high school.  He earned his bachelor's degree from the University of Michigan in just two years, majoring in mining engineering as it was the closest to his area of interest [there were no degrees yet offered in electrical engineering as electricity was too new and largely misunderstood].

By the late 1870's, as he continued to make the arc light more advanced and productive, Brush designed a power source for it such as had never been seen: An electrical generator that Brush called a "dynamo".  It was the forerunner of every generator since and enabled the growth of the industrial age and the economy that it produced.

Brush also experimented in the theoretical side of research, testing his private theories as to the kinetic properties of gravity and the existence of ether as a gas that would regulate it, increasing or decreasing gravity's pull with some electrical manipulation.  While these experiments would prove largely fruitless, they would at least lead to the development of the very first wind generator, a forerunner of the machines that are now common in many parts of the world.

Brush's wind generator, circa 1890

However, Brush saw that with the invention of the dynamo, and the role that generated electrical power and lighting would have on manufacturing and commerce, that population growth might become an issue.  Thus, he established a foundation that would work to remove the 19th century stigma against contraception, so that people might be able to control, in this new non-agrarian economy, the size of their families without violating moral expectations or written law.

As sharp as he was an inventor, Brush was an equally shrewd businessman and amassed a fortune during his lifetime, building a mansion on Cleveland's "Millionaires' Row" with John D. Rockefeller, John Hay, and others as his neighbors.  He was generous with his money, endowing various chairs at the universities and institutes of science that were and are still part of northeastern Ohio's academic life.  The three schools that make up the current Case Western Reserve University, the Cleveland Orchestra [rated one of the best in the world], the superlative Cleveland Museum of Art, the beautiful Trinity Episcopal Cathedral [where this writer was ordained], and many other institutions benefited from his largesse.

Brush would die in 1929 at the age of 80.  In keeping with the stipulation in his will, his mansion and its basement laboratory were razed within the year of his death, so that his more dangerous experiments would not fall into the hands of those with a less moral vision.

[An aside: In my junior year of high school, I was in the cafeteria of a high school in a neighboring community taking my SAT's.  As is common in the springtime in Ohio, a vicious and sudden storm lashed through the area, knocking out the power.  When, ten seconds later, the emergency generator started and the electric lights were restored, I had to smile.  I was hoping the blackout would release us from the SAT's, but I ruefully noted that we were taking them at Charles F. Brush High School, so not a chance.]

The massive wind turbine, a direct descendant of Brush's invention, that adorns the skyline of his hometown of Euclid, Ohio.

Philip Hubert Frohman

Whether it is a chapel, small church or great cathedral or any portion thereof, we should endeavor to enclose space in a manner which will suggest the infinite. 

I feel as if I should have known Philip Frohman, if not for us being separated by time and circumstance, simply because of how often I have interacted with places that were seminal in his life.  I lived around the corner from the place of his birth, served on a committee that restored one of his designs, and have marveled, with much of the world, at his crowning achievement and appreciated its traditional role in the presentation of Anglican theology in the United States.

The Chelsea Hotel, today

Frohman was born in the Chelsea Hotel [aka Hotel Chelsea], that landmark in Manhattan's lower west side that was, during my lifetime, the place where poets such as Dylan Thomas and Brendan Behan, and musicians such as Bob Dylan, Janice Joplin, Leonard Cohen, and Sid Vicious, would spend some time.  Frohman, born in 1887, simply thought of it as the home designed by his grandfather, a noted architect of the Gilded Age, that was at the time the tallest building in Manhattan.

It has always surprised me that one born in such a flamboyant family, not only with a famous grandfather, but a father who was a theatrical impresario and a mother who was a stage actress, would be so submerged by his work that it is all but impossible to find a photograph of him.  A photograph, often thought to be of him, of a child standing next to his grandfather while in Paris, is actually that of his younger brother.  The grand building that serves, among other purposes, as his burial site also lacks any photographic evidence of his existence.

It doesn't really matter, though, as Frohman is best known through his designs.  Following in his grandfather's vocation, Frohman became an architect, not originally of grand buildings or hotels, but of simple shelters for the U.S. Army at the Aberdeen Proving Grounds in Maryland during World War I.  A graduate of what is now known as the California Institute of Technology, or Cal Tech, these chores were a bit below Frohman's talents, but there was a particularly fortuitous moment when he met an Episcopal priest who would eventually become dean of the cathedral in Washington, D.C. and, later, the bishop of that diocese.

Finding churches to be of his taste professionally, Frohman made a name for himself in their design.  Over fifty churches and chapels in the United States were designed by Frohman, among them the Cathedral of the Incarnation [Episcopal] in Baltimore,  the chapel of Trinity College in Hartford [on whose restoration committee I once served], and...well, that's where his story really may be found.

The original Episcopal cathedral in Washington was, like much of the town in 1912, plain, low, and simple.  Yet it was, certainly in the eyes of Frohman, rather beautiful.  He just had one or two ideas as to how to improve it, so much so that he scrawled a small, touching prayer in the visitor's book, written in a code known only to him.  All it begged of the Almighty was a chance to use his talents to design an offering worthy of God's grandeur as revealed in a country on the cusp of greatness.

In 1921, his prayer was answered as Frohman, due to his friendship with the bishop, became the chief architect of the new Cathedral Church of Sts. Peter and Paul, better known these days as the National Cathedral.  It's design and construction would take up the remainder of his life.

Frohman was what is nowadays called "hands on" in his approach to construction, maintaining a level of personal fitness that permitted him, even in his senior years, to access the catwalks and scaffolding of his designs, ensuring the they would be followed to the letter and attending to all of the details. This was wise, as Frohman took an existent plan, already approved by the chapter [a cathedral's version of a parish's vestry] and engaged in a seemingly perpetual series of improvements, some that required just a fraction of change in dimension.

 

The cathedral, first envisioned in the 1890's, is a work of art in perpetual construction, with some of the workers now the third generation of their families to find their vocation among the Gothic sweep, the flying buttresses, the 200+ stained glass windows, and the 112 gargoyles.  While we could detail everything from the "space window", which contains an actual moon rock, to the "yuppie gargoyle", the cathedral maintains a helpful and informative website that informs the viewer of many of the fascinating aspects of its construction and architecture.

While there would be other projects, it was the cathedral that would be the most dear of Frohman's life, and the one place where he was given absolute free reign to innovate and create, all for the sake a making a grand work of art that celebrated divine inspiration and human endeavor.  In 1972, while walking to the cathedral to once again admire his creation and observe the ongoing work, Frohman would be struck and killed by a car in Washington's notoriously pedestrian unfriendly streets.  He was 84.  He is interred in the cathedral's chapel.

Christian structures in the 21st century have many enemies, mostly those of indifference and misguided intention, and the National Cathedral is no different.  During the first decade of this century much of the endowment and other gifts were diverted from maintenance to programming that was mostly of benefit to the egos of the clergy, ignoring a building that was, in and of itself, a far greater proclamation of the Gospel than any virtue-signaling priest or dean could ever realize.  Such misuse is having its effect, and a sacred space is in danger because of it.  Fortunately there are, for now, those unwilling to permit a great structure to perish.

Such as it is with innovators, especially those like Borlaug, Brush, and Frohman.  Each added something of value to the human race, furthering and enriching our physical, mental, and spiritual lives, and enabling us to live the rich, varied, and generally happy world we enjoy.  They may be all but unknown to general history these days, but their endeavors and intelligence are still felt and, to the few who know of them, still celebrated.

Ah, No

Is cow cuddling set to be the next big wellness trend?

All Stringed Instruments Do

The World’s Best Violins Sing Like Humans

It Takes Until the Fourth Paragraph to Learn Her Name

Openly gay, Hispanic ex-sheriff wins nomination

This is the problem with Identity politics.  Her actual name seems far less important than the boxes she ticks.

What Will They Think Of Next?

“Bowl food” is hot new trend where you eat food out of a bowl

Photo File Clean-Out, Part VII

Ernest Shackleton's library aboard the Endeavor

Cousin Rafer [left] with a couple of friends in North Africa, 1941.

Could be.

That pile of rubber and carbon fiber was, moments before, a Formula One racing car.  The driver got out, walked away, and was giving interviews about fifteen minutes later.
The safety features developed in auto racing eventually make their way to passenger cars.

Ah, the late, very lamented card catalog.  No one under the age of forty knows how to use one.

The Intoxication of Willful Ignorance

PUBLIX REFUSED TO WRITE 'SUMMA CUM LAUDE' ON CAKE

An Obituary of Note: The Last Good Church Bureaucrat

George Edward Councell, 11th Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of New Jersey, dies at 68

He was a decent man who fixed broken places, more than anyone should have ever had to in a Christian organization.  The preacher at his funeral will do his legacy justice.

Woman Given Permission to Fight for Feminism! Wait, What?

Meghan Markle to fight for feminism: New Duchess of Sussex given palace blessing to champion women's rights

The University of Michigan has 93 Diversity Officers

It costs the full tuition of over 750 students to pay for these bureaucrats.

"Postmodernism and the Decline of the Liberal Arts"

The ‘liberal arts’ were so named for their orientation towards free thought, and the foundational claim that they existed to enrich the lives of free people. They are, in other words, dependent on the open-mindedness of individuals wishing to develop their knowledge and understanding by exploring thousands of years of history and literature produced by human civilisation. Despite this, universities in recent years have seen a rapid decline in the reputation and value of liberal arts degrees. Whereas once an education in literature and philosophy was highly revered in academia, setting the world at its students’ feet, today a liberal arts education is widely regarded as a useless endeavour for aimless students, which offers no clear path for the future. This development can, in large part, be laid at the feet of the ever-increasing influence of postmodernism, a superficially attractive philosophy often used to promulgate political and cultural ideas. Courses that have embraced a postmodern viewpoint tend to harshly ostracise any conflicting perspective, thereby eroding the intellectual freedom upon which the liberal arts had hitherto relied.

Really? You Never Heard of Albert Speer? This Isn't New, Bubba.

Even Architecture Has Been Overrun by Politically Correct Babbling

Hint: Stop Using Facebook and Twitter

Man Reports Police Visitation After Posting Pictures of Morel Mushrooms on Facebook

Also, know that the role of the police in the 21st is not to protect and serve, but to sit at a desk and scour social media to see if you are in compliance with the law.  Big Brother is now watching, and he's too puzzle-witted to tell the difference between a psychedelic mushroom and a morel.  It also means that Johnny Law doesn't vary his appetite much.

How About We Do What We Want, Earn as Much as We Can, and You Can Get Stuffed?

Men should work less to close gender pay gap, says thinktank

The Continuing Adventures of Ohio Man

Ohio man calls police to report he's being followed by a pig

Secular Institutions Don't Have "Moral Authority", So No Worries

The steady drumbeat of sexual scandal is eroding the Left’s moral authority.

I truly don’t think the Left understands how the relentless drumbeat of sexual scandal looks to Americans outside the progressive bubble. Left-dominated quarters of American life — Hollywood, the media, progressive politics — have been revealed to be havens for the worst sort of ghouls, and each scandal seems to be accompanied by two words that deepen American cynicism and make legions of conservative Americans roll their eyes at the Left’s moral arguments: “Everyone knew.”

So Withers Individual Moral Agency

Freedom means being free even to make dumb decisions, too.

It’s good to see that for all their bickering over Brexit and war of words over austerity, the Tories and Labour are firmly united on one point of view: that the poor must be saved from themselves. That the wretched are incapable of making sensible choices and therefore their betters must step in and make choices on their behalf. Behold the great bipartisan belief of 21st-century British politics: paternalism.

How else do we explain the cross-party effort to reduce the maximum bet one can place on a fixed-odds betting terminal — or FOBT — from £100 to £2? The government unveiled this state-mandated reduction in how much of our own money we can put inside a fruit machine this morning. The language ministers are using to justify these bureaucratic controls on dumb people’s desire to gamble is deeply patrician. These machines ‘prey on some of the most vulnerable in society’, said culture secretary Matt Hancock, as if the machines were monsters and ordinary people unthinking creatures easily sucked into a vortex of dependency.

"A Long Strange Trip"

The seminal 1968 chronicle of the counterculture is Wolfe’s account of living and traveling with the writer Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters, in a day-glo bus equipped with loads of LSD. In today’s Los Angeles, 50 years after the book was published, that metaphorical bus is still rolling, but it looks very different: corporate-sponsored music festivals, luxury cannabis dispensaries, micro-dosing as a productivity hack, Goop-endorsed crystal healing, and the artfully staged Instagrams of #vanlife.

Harry "Sweets" Edison

"See, music is about style. Like if I were to play with Frank Sinatra, I would play the way he sings, or do something complementary to the way he sings. But I wouldn't go and play with Frank Sinatra at breakneck speed. (...) So, the way you play behind a singer is like the way Harry "Sweets" Edison did with Frank. When Frank Stopped singing, then Harry played. A little before and a little afterwards, but not ever over him; you never play over a singer. You play between." - Miles Davis 

I have played the bass and sung backup with a number of bands through the years.  They were named "Zen Maniacs of the Orient", "The 98 Decibel Freaks", "The Auto Glaziers" [yeah, that wasn't my idea], "Botch and the McCools", the "Son 5 Blues Band",  and a number of others that I've forgotten, mostly on purpose.  The first to enjoy local success was named "Meetings With Remarkable Men", improbably made up of a collection of theology and philosophy graduate students who were reading a book by that title at the time.

Some offered purely instrumental music and others featured a singer, sometimes called the "front man".  As tricky as it can be to learn to play in ensemble, it can be even trickier when the band backs a singer.  If the singer is good, he or she knows how to blend their voice with the other instruments and sing with the band; if the singer is limited or egomaniacal, they try to get the band to play with them, rather the other way around.  They never even attempt to blend.  Those bands, or at least those singers, tend not to last very long.

As prominent as the singer can be, they are rarely recognized unless they have some true talent backing them up.  When they find musicians with whom they can synchronize during a performance, the singer becomes famous and the musician...well, he or she can make a living.  Within the odd community of musicians, though, they can have a status that approaches canonization.

Harry Edison, born in Columbus, Ohio in 1915, was one of those musicians with whom a number of singers, composers, and other musicians found that magic synchronization.  As there wasn't much in Columbus in the early 20th century, Edison lived with relatives in Louisville for a time, where there was a very hot early jazz scene of which his uncle was a part.  That introduced Edison to the trumpet and what would become the remainder of his long life.

After returning to Ohio, and realizing that if one wants to be a real jazz musician in the decade before World War II one must do so in Cleveland, Edison moved north to play with the well-known Jeters-Piller Orchestra, a band popular not only in the pre- and post-Prohibition nightclub scene, but also featured on Saturday night radio.  As their popularity grew, they moved from Cleveland to St. Louis, but without Edison.  Instead, he wisely moved to New York City, eventually gaining a seat with the Count Basie Orchestra in 1937.

Lester Young, the famous saxophonist, was his band mate and the one to give Edison his nickname of "Sweets".  In public, Young said it was because he played like a "sweetie-pie".  In private, he said it was because Edison was attractive enough to command the attention of the women in the audience who would often proclaim, "That man sure looks sweet."  Either way, "Sweets" Edison became a recognized musician in the tight world of jazz trumpeters, mainly for his solos with Count Basie.

With the changes brought forth in the post-war era of Be-Bop, the Count Basie Orchestra re-formed in 1950, but without Edison.  After playing for a variety of bands, including one or two bearing his name, Edison was invited to the sweet life in southern California in the 1950's to become a studio musician.  As his reputation was great, he was sought to enrich the vocals of performers as differentiated as Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, and Redd Foxx.  However, it was the impression that he made on Nelson Riddle that brought "Sweets" into the court of Frank Sinatra.

Riddle was a master at arranging music for small bands that had the impact and complexity of a larger orchestra.  His sound became the one preferred in this era of jazz and American standards, yet required a certain talent and instrumental intelligence to attain.  Riddle found that in Edison, for whom he did not even bother to compose parts in the ensemble, instead just letting him find his way between the intonations of the singer.  Sinatra, too, found an easy interplay with Sweets that enriched every recording they made together.  In fact, while the other musicians would see their specific notations in the sheet music, the section for the trumpet solo would only bear the name "Sweets" scribbled across the lined page. 

Here is a short list of recognizable Edison solos; I'm confident that readers will be able to immediately recognize at least a few:

Angel Eyes - 1966
Best Is Yet To Come - 1964
Come Fly With Me - 1966
End Of A Love Affair - 1956
Get Happy - 1954
Good Life - 1964
Hello Dolly - 1964
How Could You Do A thing Like That To Me - 1955
I Can't Stop Loving You - 1964
I Got Plenty O' Nuttin' - 1956
I Guess I'll Have To Change My Plan - 1956
I Thought About You - 1956
I Wanna Be Around - 1964
Ill Wind - 1955
It Happened In Monterrey - 1956
Jeepers Creepers - 1954
Lonesome Road - 1956
Love Is Here To Stay - 1955
Mood Indigo 1955
Old Devil Moon - 1956
One For My Baby - 1966
Shadow Of Your Smile - 1966
Sunday - 1954
Swingin' Down The Lane - 1956
We'll Be Together Again 1956
Wives And Lovers - 1964
Wrap Your Troubles In Dreams - 1954
You Brought A New Kind Of Love To Me - 1956
You Forgot All The Words - 1955
You Make Me Feel So Young - 1966
You'd Be So Nice To Come Home To - 1956
Your Cheatin' Yourself - 1957

Sweets would play until the very end, his "lip" never weakening, and even after he left the West Coast to return to the simplicity and quiet of his hometown in Ohio.  He would surrender mortality in 1999 at the age of 83.

Since I began this reminiscence because I wanted to listen to some late-era orchestra jazz, I leave the reader with Edison's discography, in case you, too, find yourself in the mood for this style and era of music, and with this perfect collaboration between Nelson Riddle, Frank Sinatra, and the man known as Sweets.

Liberation

So, on Tuesday, I realized that the birds had stopped singing and the other animal sounds that are a natural part of the environment, so natural that they aren't noticed until they stop, had ceased as well.  The air was heavy and still and I started to become alert.

You see, I'm not native to the Nutmeg State.  I'm from this town.

When the sky turned green, I knew it was time to find the three-day survival bag.  When I heard the freight train sound and saw that the sudden rain was horizontal, seen blowing to the east from the front windows of the house and to the west from the rear windows, it was time to get in the basement.

The worst thing about this?  The weather-dweeb on the local news with his Sears and Roebuck tie and painted-on hair telling me that this wasn't "technically" a tornado.  Uh-huh.  Just admit that you didn't call it correctly, weather-dweeb.

NOAA has now informed us that it was an F1.  No kidding, Sherlock.  Just look at my cemetery.  "A severe thunderstorm", huh?

Anyway, the power's back on.

Outage Protocol

This is an automatic message. If posted, it means that power, Internet, and telecommunications are offline (or whatever tech euphemism applies).

So, unless we are at war, we'll return once things are restored.

An Obituary of Note: Tom Wolfe

Author Tom Wolfe dies aged 88 after illustrious career penning works including Bonfire of the Vanities and The Right Stuff

Unsurprising as Human Nature Doesn't Change with Age

‘It’s like Mean Girls’: Inside the bullying epidemic sweeping senior centers

More News from the Bughouse

The U.S. Department of Education has launched a Title IX investigation into Yale University amid allegations that the institution offers educational programs and scholarship opportunities that exclude men. 

According to a letter dated April 26, the department’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) is investigating seven Yale initiatives, including the Yale Women Faculty Forum, the Working Women’s Network, the Yale University Women’s Organization, and the Yale Women’s Campaign School. 

This is the logical and natural extension of academia's teaching on gender.  If gender is non-binary, equal in all things, and self-defined, there can no longer be gender separation in programming.

Well, It was Florida

Popcorn machine mistaken for gunshots, prompts theater evacuation

This is a Harrowing Story

How The Congressional Baseball Shooting Didn't Become The Deadliest Political Assassination In American History

I'm Glad the Bible is Still Considered Dangerous

When a U-Va. alumnus read his Bible on the steps of the Rotunda, the school called police

As we have noted many times before, there is no need for a "Free speech zone" on a university campus or anywhere else as THE ENTIRE UNITED STATES IS A FREE SPEECH ZONE.

It's in that Constitution thingy.

The Liminal Beauty of the Post-Christian Age

Rise of women backing out of divorces as court settlements shrink

The Ministry of Truth Should Have Blocked This

Associated Press: Most black teenagers say racism has little effect on day-to-day lives

I Was Wondering When This Would Start

Woman sued by men for discrimination at empowerment events

If we are now to be taught that all gender roles are non-binary and, as we say in The Episcopal Church, "live into" that reality, then this was inevitable.

Aiding Those in Need is Hard, Pragmatic Work

San Francisco’s streets are littered with free syringes

When such overtures are merely political virtue signalling, they don't provide for reality.

These days, San Francisco seems to have a general problem with things left in the street: Human waste street map.

Great, and I'm Stuck at Work This Week

Massive wave is southern hemisphere record, scientists believe

Suggestion: Seek "Public Service" Rather Than "Power" Next Time

Hillary Clinton: A ‘Very Large Portion’ of the US Population Feels ‘Uneasy’ About Women Seeking Power

Just Like Our Politicians and Academics, Then

We read every one of the 3,517 Facebook ads bought by Russians. Their dominant strategy: Sowing racial discord

Seems to me there would be an opportunity for Christian organizations to counter this narrative.  I'll think about it after I return from my diocesan workshop on white privilege.

Vernon Johns

 If you see a good fight, get in it.

When I was first ordained, the search process for new clergy was a little different from what it became.  The parish in need of a rector or vicar would notify the bishop who would then look at the names of clergy made available by the national church office, choose three and give them to the parish for them to decide which they wanted.  It was simple, quick, and functional.  Naturally, The Episcopal Church decided to spend decades re-making the process complicated, slow, and almost useless.  Not surprisingly, we're beginning to return to that original system.

There were variations, of course.  For example, my bishop, when two neighboring parishes were  each in need of a part-time clergyman, sent them just one name, mine, and said, "Here's your new vicar.  Make him welcome."  Ah, those were the days.

So, having never set foot in either parish, and not entirely sure where one of them was located, I decided to arrive the afternoon before my first Sunday and check out the scene by taking a leisurely ride through the rural roads on my venerable BMW motorcycle, clad in the standard gear of helmet and leather jacket.  It took me awhile to find the church, as the signage was poor and there were no such things as GPS or cell phones in those days, but when I did I had a moments pause.  It was small, unassuming, and caused me to realize that, whatever happened, this is where the productive portion of my life would begin.

Full of hope and wonder, I walked into the church [churches were unlocked in those days] and immediately frightened the members of the altar guild, who weren't sure who this large, scary-looking man with the helmet was and tried either to ignore me or guide me to the local shelter.  Welcome to parish ministry.

It reminded me of how The Rev. Dr. Vernon Johns was introduced to what would be the final parish of his career.  The deacons of the congregation were waiting for their new pastor when a scrubby farmer in overalls, carrying nothing other than a paper grocery sack that contained his good shoes and Sunday suit, walked down the dusty road to the church and, to the surprise of the very middle-class membership, was discovered to be he for whom they waited.  They had tried to ignore and deflect him, too.

As he knew, and as I discovered, when one arrives unawares, one may learn a lot of what a congregation is really like.

Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in the 1970's

They were certainly expecting someone different at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama.  It was 1947, the war had ended, and this black neighborhood was more prosperous than it had ever been.  In their search for a pastor, they had settled on one who, on paper at least, satisfied their middle-class expectations.  Vernon Johns, while older than some [he was 55 at the time], was a graduate of Oberlin College in Ohio, an award-winning preacher, and a noted scholar of the classics.

However, when not on paper he was confrontational, passionate in his proclamation of the Gospel, and devoted to the advancement of the African-American community.  That they would learn about over time; it was certainly foreshadowed by his uncommon arrival, necessitated since he owned no car and refused to sit in the back of the city bus as "Negroes" in the 1940's and '50's were supposed to do.

So, in addition to re-introducing praise music to the liturgy, creating a farm on church property so that they could model a black-owned business, and pushing for a greater voice in local politics, Johns reminded the membership that, while there is a time to celebrate a place in a spiritual Promised Land, there is always the struggle that is both behind it and to come.  Neither Slavery nor the Wilderness are ever very far off.

Johns in his most natural environment: The pulpit

When not in the pulpit, Johns would attempt to sit where he pleased on buses, order a meal at the counter of a white diner, and seek justice for those abused by a racially unbalanced legal system.  He was aggressive, outspoken, and usually the smartest person in the room.  He could be demanding with his congregation, pushing them not to be complacent with nor blind to the inequality that was always on the edges of suburban life.  [Perhaps I should have mentioned that his middle name was Napoleon.]

After five years, the congregation decided that they had experienced enough of Vernon Johns' style of Christian witness and sent him back down that road in his overalls with his brown paper grocery bag.  They thought his successor would be a much safer choice for a pastoral leader as he was young, held a northeastern education, wore a proper suit, and had a father who was a legendary preacher.  Vernon Johns was replaced by Martin Luther King, Jr., so the history of confrontational Christian witness at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church would continue.

While he would never serve as an administrative leader in the civil rights movement, Johns would be recognized by many as its early voice, especially when one considers how Christianity fueled the campaign for civil rights in the United States.  Every seminal moment in witness has its herald, as Jesus had the brief and dramatic work of John the Baptist, and so Vernon Johns served that role in what was the greatest cultural shift of the 20th century.

He would succumb to heart failure in 1965 at the age of 73, while supervising a nation-wide version of that simple farm in the church yard, thus enabling a model for black-owned businesses throughout the country.

Meetings with Remarkable Men

This is what it looks like when five philosophers form a band, circa 1979.  Absurd, by any definition.

The fellow second from left died this morning.  I will ponder mortality for a bit, say the appropriate prayers, then celebrate his memory.  I may play the bass for awhile, too, and recall the halcyon days of youth.

The book we were reading that summer.

For those wondering, or for readers who remember, the locale for this photo was the now-gone Auto Glass Saloon in Cleveland, which had once been, hence its name, an automobile window replacement shop.

Charitable Work = Free Money for the Government

She saved thousands to open a medical clinic in Nigeria. US Customs took all of it at the airport.

Christian Story Denuded of Christian Themes = Negative $100,000,000

Despite the presence of the some of the biggest stars in the world (Oprah Winfrey, Reese Witherspoon, Chris Pine), despite coming from a children’s novel beloved for decades, despite the second-to-none marketing machine that is the Magic Kingdom, the movie was an economic catastrophe. 

Globally, not just here in North America, but worldwide, Wrinkle grossed just $127 million.

So, That Whole "Carbon Footprint" Stuff is Pretty Much Over Now, Eh?

JetBlue will seriously deliver NYC pizza to Los Angeles for less than $20

As a Number of "Persons of Color" Have Been Saying for Some Time

“The idea that minority groups need protection from certain words and ideas is just neo-Victorian racial paternalism. The PC outlook treats non-white people as incapable of being free, adult citizens.”

Brendan O’Neill interviewed in The Oxford Student

https://t.co/v0opKR0FGd

— spiked (@spikedonline) May 9, 2018

My Generation was Right, Just Like About the Double-Space After Periods

Yes, Pluto is a planet

Worth Reading

"Critical Surf Studies"?  Really?

Critical Theory is a methodology developed by a group of Marxian social scientists during the early-to-mid 20th century, motivated by the belief that traditional scientific methodology—which concerns itself with describing, explaining, and predicting the world—is ineffective at producing societal change. Instead, they defined a purpose for their science: to liberate people from oppression. This idea can be traced back to Karl Marx’s famous statement that “Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it”.

Initially, the focus of Critical Theory was on the oppressive nature of mass consumerism—which is closely linked to capitalism—but it gradually expanded to cover almost every area of human relations: language, social institutions, family structure, pedagogy, gender, race, and health, to name a few. There is virtually no area that can’t be studied through Critical Theory....

Scotland the Unrecognizable

How did Adam Smith’s homeland come to elect the most intrusive and nannying government in Europe?

I am invited to lecture in Edinburgh this fall and have already been sent a list of preferred pronouns for gender, euphemisms for sexual definitions, and topics to avoid in any academic presentation.  I have also received a list of things that are not permitted in academic housing and it's enough to make me want to start smoking, drinking, and playing loud music on the Wurlitzer.

Either I'm going to stay in a hotel at my own expense or bag the whole trip and head on down to Key West for those two weeks.

Maybe Because the Men in Their Political/Ideological Circle are So Awful?

Why Are So Many Campus Feminists Anti-Male?

Seriously, look are their male supporters and fellow travelers: Anthony Weiner, Eliot Spitzer, Harvey Weinstein, and now Eric Schneiderman.

The whole article is worth reading as it's mostly about the need to address the issues of boys and men in our culture.

Two Spaces is the Only Correct Way of Doing It. End of Discussion.

One space between each sentence, they said. Science just proved them wrong.

"Third floor baby shoes motor oil lingerie"

He Makes a Joke. She Isn't Laughing: ‘Lingerie’ Comment in Elevator Leads to Uproar Among Scholars

"Third floor baby shoes motor oil lingerie" is a familiar verse from a British sitcom's opening jingle.  I can't see how anyone could be harmed by it.

Honestly, I don't get third-wave feminism at all.  I'm told that women are strong and independent, yet also desire the government or their professional organization to protect them as would a parent.

By the way, in the ultra-sensitive world of clergy conferences, I've taken on two rules:
1.  Never speak to colleagues you haven't known for at least twenty years. 
2.  Never wear a name tag.

Alternative Diplomacy was the Most Effective

'Jazz Ambassadors' Tells Story of American Diplomacy Through Music

Post-Modern Art is Dull and It Keeps Getting Shoved at Us

It’s that time again. Time for ruling class apparatchiks to announce the latest slate of non-artists to be nominated for what is advertised as a prestigious award for art....

Everything You Know is Wrong

How Big Government Backed Bad Science and Made Americans Fat

More News from the Bughouse

A jury acquitted him of rape in less than four hours. Now Yale has the chance to quietly railroad him.

This is So Sublime That I May Never Post Anything Ever Again

Please read it all the way through to the final sentence.  You won't regret it.

Or One Could Teach Kids How to Read Them...Nah

British schools are removing analog clocks from classrooms because kids can't read them

"Saudi Arabia Inks Deal with Vatican to Build Christian Churches"

In wake of wide Saudi Arabian cultural and social global openness, for the first time in the country’s history it has signed a cooperative agreement with the Vatican to build churches for Christian citizens to advocate the important role of religions and cultures in renouncing violence, extremism, terrorism and achieving security and stability in the world.

Seriously, this is huge.

I share this because all that interests our media is Trump, Russians, and some aged-out "adult film" star with Sears and Roebuck enhancements.

And Another Institution Collapses Under It's Own Pretentions

No 2018 Nobel Prize in Literature, Panel Says Amid Sex Scandal

Really, there are no easily recognizable works of fiction and non-fiction that can be chosen because the membership of the committee is forced to recognize misconduct they've known about?

Suddenly, this isn't an important prize any longer.  This may be a healthy change as our world is in need of some reformation.  After all, the Noble Peace Prize folks de-legitimized themselves when they awarded it to a former American president who had yet to accomplish anything in office.

Forget Skippy, 'Roos Can Be Jerks

Kangaroos at this tourist spot are violently addicted to carrots

Frederick Law Olmsted

The possession of arbitrary power has always, the world over, tended irresistibly to destroy humane sensibility, magnanimity, and truth. 

While many of those profiled on Fridays have a broad range of talents, Captain Sir Richard Burton, Gertrude Bell, and Hiram Bingham come to mind, offhand I cannot think of another person who has achieved as much in two very different fields as did Frederick Law Olmsted.

Olmsted was born in Hartford, Connecticut in 1822 into a prosperous merchant family.  While his parents intended for him to be a legacy student at Yale College, he felt that his eyes were too weak for all of that reading.  Personally, I think this was just an excuse as he clearly was attracted to a more adventurous life than that of a Yale undergrad.  Instead, he spent those formative years working as a merchant seaman, farmer, and eventually as a reporter for what would become The New York Times.  It was in this latter vocation that he would first have significant social impact.

Sent by the newspaper to tour the South and observe how the economy was shaped by the practice of slavery [this was in the 1850's when the nation's social conscience could no longer avoid addressing it], Olmsted sent back enough dispatches to be bound in a three-volume collection.  These books, published on the verge of the Civil War, framed slavery not just as legally and morally abhorrent, but also as economically illogical.

Olmsted observed that free people who are granted dignity in their work are happier, healthier, and more productive than those who are owned by others and gain nothing from their labors.  While hardly a perspicacious observation, this wisdom sealed for many their opposition to slavery and their encouragement of eventual emancipation.  Histories of this decade inevitably credit Olmsted's reporting, presented as it was through a practical merchant's perspective, as part of what changed conventional thinking.

That was only one portion of Olmsted's contribution; it was by no means his greatest.

As part of his reporting, Olmsted spent some time in England, where slavery had already ceased to be practiced a generation before, and was hosted by many of those interested in furthering the cause of emancipation.  As that collection of Olmsted's contemporaries shared his education and background, he made the pleasant social rounds of concerts, lectures, and tours of England's historic places.

Of all of the sites and splendor to which he was privy, it was a walk through a park that Olmsted found the most inspiring.  Birkenhead Park in Liverpool, opened to the public in 1847, was at the time the prime example of municipal planned landscaping.  Graced with architectural structures, terraced gardens, winding paths, and a boating area along the Mersey River, as a public work funded by public money, the park also served as an example of hopeful egalitarianism.

Given what Olmsted had seen of slavery and its ill effects, enabled by the worst of government planning, it was refreshing for him to see what the best of government planning could provide.

The Roman boathouse at Birkenhead Park

Upon his return to New York, and in the midst of producing his multi-volume collection, Olmsted would share his observations of Birkenhead Park with his family, friends, and anyone else who would listen.  By coincidence, a city committee had recently been formed to ensure that a large portion of the rapidly growing Borough of Manhattan would serve a shared, public purpose and celebrate the natural beauty of the island.  With a couple of friends, both of whom were landscape architects, Olmsted submitted plans for a park based on Birkenhead, except on a grander scale.

Despite much more experienced competition, and as a bit of a surprise, Olmsted and his partners would be charged with constructing what would become Central Park.

As we have seen with others whose lives we've appreciated, Olmsted was so focused on this project that it became for him a work of art not to be bound by obstacles such as an insufficient budget or the fact that 1600 people lived on the land that would be the park.  In one of the first uses of eminent domain on an urban scale, the residents were re-located and the land purchased for $5,000,000, an amount already double the project's budget, even without construction having begun.

This lead to what would become a common experience in the remainder of Olmsted's career: He would be deposed from his position and replaced by someone more responsible with budgets.  Olmsted's plan was retained, however, even with its expansive expenses.  His name would forever be attached to the project and its reality.

Not that it mattered as the outbreak of the Civil War delayed construction and pulled the participants away to other types of service.  Olmsted would spend the war as the executive in charge of the U.S. Sanitary Commission, the government organization charged with disease-control and treatment of the war's sick, wounded, and dying.  So complete and useful was the structure that he established, the Sanitary Commission would become the foundation for the American Red Cross, while also helping to fund three regiments of freed slaves to serve in the Union army and create an organization that promoted the values of emancipation.

At the war's conclusion, his federal service satisfied, Olmsted moved to the west with the intention of managing a mining concern in the Sierra Nevada mountains.  Instead, still convinced that the best exercise of government is to provide space and beauty for all of the citizenry, he formed a landscape design firm that would take his avocation to a much greater level.

Building upon the ideas he developed for Central Park, Olmsted's company would gain the contracts to design Brooklyn's Prospect Park, Chicago's Riverside Park, the area surrounding the New York portion of Niagara Falls, and many, many other municipal and public parks and green spaces.  Olmsted, now joined by his sons, who would carry the business into the next century, would also design the landscaping for many academic institutions, including Trinity College in Hartford, Bryn Mawr in Pennsylvania, Groton School and Phillips Academy in Massachusetts, and Stanford University in California.

A full list of the Olmsted parks may be found at this link.  The work is so prodigious that even in our century one may drive across the length of the United States and visit an Olmsted-designed park almost every day of the journey.

Louisville, Kentucky

Boston to Brookline, Massachusetts 

Buffalo, New York

Hartford, Connecticut

As with any landscape designer, Olmsted was interested in the preservation and conservation of America's natural beauty.  Using his considerable influence and inside connections, he encouraged Congress to officially designate portions of the Western United States as protectorates.  Thus began what would be known as the U.S. Park System.

Frederick Law Olmsted would retire, mainly due to failing health, and surrender his business to his sons.  Upon the occasion of his retirement, one of Olmsted's proteges, writing in particular of the work that Olmsted performed designing the landscape for the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago [the "alabaster city" that is celebrated in the verses of "America, the Beautiful"], he would observe, "An artist, he paints with lakes and wooded slopes; with lawns and banks and forest covered hills; with mountain sides and ocean views."

Olmsted would die in 1903, having enabled both the general support for emancipation and the ability for all of our nation's citizens to have access to natural beauty, even when in the midst of a cluttered urban landscape.  It is a marvelous, and particularly American, legacy.

For those interested in further reading, there is a dedicated website, the National Association for Olmsted Parks, that includes maps and stories of the individual park's histories; and, among other works, the best-seller, The Devil in the White City, that details the inspiration, planning, and design of the Chicago World's Fair.