Wednesday Randomness

You gotta love this guy.

I actually feel pretty good about the fact that I had never heard of Nora Ephron until yesterday.

So with Good Hater published*, now is the time to find all the mistakes.  While removing the page numbers from the table of contents** I somehow managed to delete the heading of the introduction, so you jump right from the TOC into the text. Not a big deal, and I'll update it in a week or so. At least I caught the "1959" that should have been "1859" in the caption of the very first picture.

Charlie Rangel looks and talks a lot like my grandfather. It's creepy.

The Wall Street Journal asketh, "What's the point of electing Republicans like Mr. Rehberg if they're going to vote like Democrats and block reform in the 113th Congress?" WSJ could promote conservation of electrons by replacing the phrase "like Mr. Rehberg if " with "since."  I doubt the party that is re-electing Orrin Hatch to the Senate as they have since the Vikings' last Super Bowl appearance*** is particularly interested in reform. The best we can hope for is partisan bickering.

Bloomberg notes that, "The benefits of aviation rules are calculated primarily on how many deaths they may prevent, so the safest decade in modern airline history is making it harder to justify the cost of new requirements."  Only in government could the absence of a problem be considered a problem.

* and with a fan page, to boot!
** I still have chapters and chapter titles, but Kindle books don't have a set number of pages, nor do they have page numbers. So numbers in the table of contents are as useful as tits on a bull.
***  "What do you call a Senator who’s served in office for 18 years? You call him home." - Orrin Hatch, in his first Senate race, in 1976. To be fair, he has not been in the senate for 18 years, but for 35.

Number 49 in Civil War

Probably not going to catch Bill O'Reilly today, though...

Clarkhouse Creek is back

So anyway, I mentioned in years past a little creek that I used to sled down in the cold winters of the 1970s. That creek, called "Clark House" or "Clarkhouse"*, used to flow through Cascade Park**, but was run underground due to a street expansion in the 70s.

As of yesterday, it's back above ground, at least for a little while.

* The origin of which name I finally discovered. There was a luxury hotel in Duluth in the 1880s called the Clark House, which sat at 1st Avenue West and Superior Street and probably got its water from this creek. Had the hotel not burned down only a few years after its opening, Clarkhouse Creek would probably be flowing right through it today. 

** Cascade park was named for the cascade created by Clarkhouse Creek.

Good Hater

Barring some unforeseen misfortune, Good Hater will be on Kindle about this time next week. I got a final "fact check" back from one of the other two experts* on George Hoyt and he found two unforced errors. Lysander Spooner, it appears, studied law in a Worcester office, not a Boston one. And his abortive relationship with Mary Booth took place in the late 1850s, not late 1840s as I had claimed.

Now that those bugs are fixed and a few pics have found their way in, this beastie is all but ready to go. I'm working with a gal to improve my cover art, and once that's done, it'll be online.  I will have a few promotions where you Kindlers will be able to download it for free**. Next up, a new edition of Samuel Penhallow's Indian Wars, updated for modern readers.

Then maybe I'll add Col. Hoyt to Wikipedia, since he'll be all famous and stuff.

UPDATE: It's online now. Just click the cover on the left side of the page.

* Archie is a Boston lawyer who passed the bar in 1954 and has studied Good Hater's early life for many years. The other expert, whose specialty is the Red Legs, offered no comment. So I'll take that as a win.
** Or if you want a .PDF copy of the original thesis, you can drop me a note at billhoyt at inbox dot com and I'll get you one. It's pretty much the same piece, sans pics.

Just making crap up

I'm not sure how to describe the above pic, which I have seen in any number of places about the net, usually surrounded by smarmy, fauxphisticated, historically-ignorant atheists. It's actually part of a larger pic which includes similar frames for Dionysus, Mithra, and Horus, and finishes with a pic of Y U No Guy asking Christians why they can't be original. I have to ask instead why atheists can't be accurate.

Jesus, of course, is a well-known figure, so well-known that lots of people actually think he was born on December 25th. While the date is traditional, it's neither accurate nor inaccurate - the Bible simply does not say when he was born*. But we'll take the rest as read: Jesus was born of a virgin, had a star in the East, had 12 disciples, performed miracles. He was crucified, died, and was buried. On the third day he rose again in fulfillment of the scriptures.

But what of Krishna? If what this graphic says is true, it might be an example of what CS Lewis called "good dreams" that God sent humanity to point to the Savior.  It could be a counterfeit sent by Satan to confuse, like dinosaur bones buried in the crust of ancient literature. It could be damning proof that Christianity was simply a mystery religion that stole its doctrines from other mystery religions, like Mormonism stole its temple rites from Freemasonry.  It could be something else altogether. That's what we're here to find out, kids.

So, did Krishna also rise again in fulfillment of the scriptures? Not so much. This might sound odd, but this list of Krishna facts don't look much like Krishna at all. According to the Devi Bhagavatam (4/1), Krishna was born as the sixth son of an imprisoned couple, and his father was a prince** rather than a carpenter. And if mom has had six kids, the Virgin argument would be harder to pull off than this one, I suspect. According to the hyper-accurate Wikipedia***, Krishna was born July 18, 3228bc rather than Christmas, 900bc.  He was not crucified, but killed by a hunter's arrow while he was meditating in a forest. He was not resurrected, but rather his soul ascended to Heaven while his body was cremated by Ajuna, a warrior hero friend who found it. He performed the miracle of lifting Govardhana Hill and holding it over the heads of a bunch of villagers to protect them from rain****. And just like Jesus, he had 16,108 wives. 

The scholarship, such as it is, seems to be a summary of The World's Sixteen Crucified Saviors, a nineteenth century study so laughably inept that even the folks at Infidels.org had the good taste to disclaim it. But it does make you wonder why this sort of demonstrably false drivel swirls around the toilet bowl of human consciousness that is the internet, yet never goes down.  Could it be that some people simply pass it on as fact because they want it to be true?

Nah, that would be irrational. And if there's one thing we know about people who so desperately want Christianity to be false, it's that they are rational.

* If my birthday was in December, I'd move his to July 18 to avoid those disappointing "combination" birthday/Christmas presents.
** He was "the pious and illustrious Vasudeva... the incarnation of the God Hari Himself," and married to the sister of King Herod.
*** Which is at least easier to read than the Devi Bhagavatam, I'll give it that.
**** Mark 11:23, FTW.

A bible study to sink your teeth into

So anyway, now that school is over and my blood pressure has dropped 20 points, I'm looking at getting back into some serious Bible study/teaching*. One of the things I think is really missing in contemporary Christianity, and especially in mens' studies, is, well, actual study.  We have tons and tons and tons of Bible studies that address love and relationships and apply modern psychobabble to modern problems, using the Bible as a gloss.  We have lots of cotton candy.  Any 10-year Christian with a triple-digit IQ should be long past cotton candy.**

We have lots and lots of studies on God's love. But I've never seen a Bible study that sought to answer the question of why God ordered the wholesale slaughter of the Amalekites.  I've never seen one that addresses the various endings of Mark, or the various interpretations of the Sons of God in Gen 6 and their relation to the flood.  What about contradictions and codes? Is evil an argument against Christianity?  In what ways can our our primary loyalty to Christ be undercut by the Red, White, and Blue?

So if you were going to create a Red Meat for Men bible study, what would be in it?  What parts of the Bible get short shrift, why do you think that is, and why do you think it ought to be different?

* Good Hater will get published as soon as I figure out a painless way to make an index, plus I'm working on some other stuff, but it's all hobby now. 118/70, FTW!
** That's Heb 5:12-14 for those following along at home.