Neanderpundit

Mr Poretto posts a piece of poetry that I read for the first time when I was in my early teens. I loved Kipling, longed to roam the Indian continent in khakis, to hunt and stalk the most dangerous of game, to immerse myself in the cultures. I still feel that longing, still want to see those places, do those things. “City of Brass” is not about the adventure but about the theft of freedom, among other things, go read and see.

Mr Poretto speaks to the idea that Poetry is not the playground of pansies, that Real Men read poetry too. He’s right. Not all poetry is flowers and butterflies, and a lot of poetry is as manly as it comes. Read the iliad and the oddysey; poetry about war and betrayal and murder and death is as manly as it gets.
My favorite poem is about cows and stones and apple orchards and firs.

Mending Wall
Robert Frost

SOMETHING there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun;
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
The work of hunters is another thing:
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on a stone,
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,
No one has seen them made or heard them made,
But at spring mending-time we find them there.
I let my neighbour know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go.
To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
We have to use a spell to make them balance:
“Stay where you are until our backs are turned!”
We wear our fingers rough with handling them.
Oh, just another kind of out-door game,
One on a side. It comes to little more:
There where it is we do not need the wall:
He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, “Good fences make good neighbors.”
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
“Why do they make good neighbors? Isn’t it
Where there are cows? But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I’d ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That wants it down.” I could say “Elves” to him,
But it’s not elves exactly, and I’d rather
He said it for himself. I see him there
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me,
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father’s saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, “Good fences make good neighbors.”

That’s from memory.

When I was nineteen I read that poem and loved it so well I wrote it down, word for word, I used to carry paper with me and copy the poem over and over again until i had committed it to memory.

Real men read poetry. Damned sure real men wrote it.

mrs Du Toit had an excellent essay up a couple months ago about Atheism.

More recently, this moron has taken it upon himself to try to remove the prayers from the Inaugural ceremony.

Listen, Mikey: the tinfoil you are wearing to keep out the cosmic rays isn’t working.

If you follow the links around, and look at the “First Amendmist Church of True Science “, you will find what can only be the product of a group of deeply disturbed minds. People who need to be on either MAO inhibitors or lithium.

Mrs D handles the subject clearly, so I’m going to just take my spin on this:

If you choose not to pray during the inaugural, Nobody’s stopping you. Or forcing you. This isn’t Iran, nobody’s gonna state-sponsor any religion.

Which is the whole point. Removing prayer from the inaugural is by definition, placing atheism as the state sponsored religion. Wtih the prayer, you can choose to participate, or not, or pray to God, or Baal, or a piece of plywood, or a rock. Without the prayer, you’re specifically stating that prayer is not welcome.

Sorry, Mikey, you lose.

Here’s a couple of facts for you.
1: The universe is beyond your comprehension. Even without MAO inhibitors. If you choose to believe the universe came to being by cosmic accident, you are free to believe so.

2: Prayer harms nobody, and it does a great number of people a great deal of good. Even if only out of what an atheist might consider self delusion. if you don’t believe prayer has any effect, then you should not have concerns about it’s use.

Newdow speaks to the idea that on the one hand there is ‘god” and on the other hand, there is “science”. I’m amazed that someone can be so horribly wrong and not know it; (of course, a lot of people voted for kerry too) Anyone who has even done the most cursory examination of science has a feeling for the scale of creation. If that examination does not give you the specific feeling that the universe has a creator with a specific plan, frankly, I feel for you. Having had some brilliant theology professors in my life, I can safely say that the examination of the natural world with a faith based perspective is actually thrilling. My senior year philosophy professor didn’t drag out the work of other people, he invited us to look for evidence of the creator’s handiwork.

One of the ways I found this evidence was in math. Long before the Da Vinci code and any of that crap, there were mathematicians who figured out some fairly incredible things. Pi, for instance, the ratio of a circle’s circumference to it’s diameter: it’s a number we can not “know”, in other words, it’s an irrational number, but it can be calculated by a simple formula that a sixth grader can do:

p/4 = 1 – 1/3 + 1/5 – 1/7 + …

and so on.

How is it that pi should work this way? How is it that there is such a simple way of expressing such a complex number? How is it that this method “happens’ to work in base 10 numbers, and not base 7? Is it coincidence that in Base 10, a pattern which would naturally be adopted by 10 digit creatures, works so well with this and so many other numbers? Pure mathematics is a difficult study; however, if you just look into the Pi formulas, the Fibonacci numbers, you begin to see the order in the complexity.

My professors believed that math and science were windows into the mind of the creator, and that science was the intelligence test that our Creator expected us to pass, to fully know him. When I saw that tiny glimpse, I believed it too.

I pity anyone who hasn’t had that moment of epiphany, I really do. I don”t judge them, I don’t care what they believe, I don’t think they are bad people for not believeing, and I don’t have any intention of ‘converting” them or even trying. I feel badly that they haven’t had the extra fulfillment that I’ve received from life by believing.

Like to play pinball? like arcade games? Have the reflexes of a bat? you should check out these folks then.

Chicago Gaming is a company I have been familiar with for a very long time; it’s owners have become my friends. The products are robust, fun to play, and made in America from predominantly American parts. The games are just as you remember them, and yes, you can buy those games for your PC, but you don’t get the “real” arcade quality controls.

No, I don’t get any discounts. No, I don’t get any kickbacks, no, I don’t get paid to plug them here. They’re good people and their products are awesome.

One product, in particular, is a pinball machine. Pinball is cool, and the machines are awesome, but if you buy one, especially an old one, it;’s likely to go to shit in your family room. The contacts wear out or get corroded, and the game might just stop in the middle of play. This pinball is an extremely well made piece of equipment, and all of the pieces that can fail have been replaced by user-serviceable printed circuit boards. All the mechanical switches that were subject to failure have been replaced by photoeyes. Unlike a “classic” game, you can play this until you tire of it, then ignore it in a damp basement for a couple years, then go back to it and play it again, and it’ll WORK, because there are no contacts to corrode in the dampness. I’ve played these games, and even though they’re not hugeley complex like some of the ‘classic” games, it’s still a riot to play, and again, it’ll run and run and run. The game is dissassembled here for you to see that it’s cleanly built, and the article about Doug and the guy who helped design the game, Harold Washington, is telling of the type of equipment it is.

Go check the stuff out. It’ll be available at places like Costco, so you can go see them and play them for yourself, the Nicktoons racing is a lot of fun for kids.

These items are not cheap, but neither are they cheaply made; the cabinets are tough as nails and the components have been selected for long durability. I don’t talk about products that are crap, and these aren’t. If you have some disposable income, get one of the arcade legends games and throw it in your rec room- they make a standup and also a table version which can be made to fit any room. If you don’t have the disposable income, watch for the Nicktoons Racing at your local shopping center, sit down, and drop a quarter in in support of an American Company which is making it in today’s business climate.