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The Hidden Power I’m Not Doubting

February 6, 2026

Robyn Parnell family life, freethought/humanism, friends, health & wellness, Holy Shit!, Isms (religion), making fun of Norwegians and/or the Irish, Me so happy, Oregon, politics, radio & podcasts, school, science, travel, TV, Wow, Yikes! , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 2 Comments

Department Of First Things First

One of my favorite dates is today.  Happy Birthday, She-Who-Was-Not-Intimidated-By-The-Rope-Swing-On-The-Treehouse-Deck.   [1]

 

 

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Department Of Why I Will Be A Couch Potato (Luger?) For The Next Three Weeks

The Winter Olympics begin today.

 

Bring on the Norwegians!

 

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Department Of Human Interaction Is Sometimes Disguised As
– or Enhanced By – a Non Sequitur

Dateline:  Tuesday morning; circa 10 am; The Dollar Tree Store‘s Birthday greeting cards section.  [2]   Moiself  is picking out birthday cards, a lot of ’em. To an uninformed observer it might seem that I am choosing them at random, dumping them in my handbasket…but this is not so.  There is method to my madness.  As I grab one card two envelopes come with it, and the extra envelope flutters to the floor.  Only when I reach down to retrieve it do I realize that a woman is standing next to me, in front of the Valentine’s Day card section.

“Excuse me,” I say, as I lean over to pick up the miscreant envelope, which has landed just to the right of her right foot.  “I didn’t mean to fling an empty envelope in your direction.”

She smiles, looks at my handbasket, and I expect her to remark on the number of cards in it (which will eventually total 30).  Instead, she replies, “My daughter was unable to have children, so she adopted four dogs.  I get them all cards for every holiday and special occasion.”

 

 

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Department Of Few People Say It Better Than Greta Christina   [3]

“Dear Republicans,

Apparently some of you are having second thoughts. Recent events have led you to question your commitment to Trumpism, and even move away from it. A line has been crossed for you, and you can no longer accept the direction the country is going in.

Am I glad about this? Yes. Do I want you to step away from Trump and the Republican Party, to rethink the path you’ve been on and walk it back? Yes….

But as you walk back this path, you need to realize that it’s not going to be covered with rose petals. A lot of people are extremely angry with you, and we have every right to be. You have done a great deal of harm. The Republican Party has done a great deal of harm — not just in the last month, it’s been doing great harm for a long time — and you’ve been part of that. When you’ve hurt people badly, you need to do more than just say “Oops” and expect to be forgiven. You need to work to fix the harm you’ve done. And the greater the harm, the more work you have to do….

 

 

We warned you this was coming. Even the Republican Party warned you this was coming: the Project 2025 document spelled out their plans in detail. You chose not to listen. Moving forward, you need to be willing to listen. You need to do the kind of listening that involves not talking. You need to not get defensive, not try to justify your actions. You need to stop saying, ‘I didn’t vote for this!’  You absolutely voted for this.”

( excerpts from author, activist, blogger Greta Christina’s
Dear Republicans 1-28-26, my emphases )

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Department Of The Hidden Power Of Doubt

“What do you do when you’re not sure?”
( from opening monologue, Doubt:  A Parable, a play by John Patrick Shanley )

 

Last week the podcast Hidden Brain concluded their You 2.0 series   [4]  with, as per the podcast website’s intro,  “…a look at the hidden power of doubt — not as weakness or indecision, but as a tool that helps us make better choices and navigate an uncertain world.”

The episode opens with the story of the little known letter General Eisenhower wrote on the eve of the allied invasion of Normandy, Operation Overlord, aka, D-Day. There were so many factors at play – including the weather – and an allied victory was far from certain.  Eisenhower drafted what he dreaded, should he have to announce that the mission had failed.  When it became apparent that Operation Overlord was succeeding, Eisenhower crumpled the letter and tossed it in his office trash can.  His military secretary retrieved the letter and kept it, allowing history to see what (IMO) was the true leadership of the man.

“Our landings in the Cherbourg-Havre area have failed to gain a satisfactory foothold and I have withdrawn the troops. My decision to attack at this time and place was based on the best information available. The troops, the air and the Navy did all that bravery and devotion to duty could do. If any blame or fault attaches to the attempt it is mine alone.”   [5]

 

 

Time machine to the present:  can you imagine the so-called leader we have today ( The Tantrum-Throwing-Toddler-in-Chief ) writing something like that – taking responsibility so succinctly and directly?  #47 will go to his corpulent casket carping and whining and kicking, blaming others for the political, moral, financial and cultural devastation he leaves in his wake.

Yet again, I digress.

HB podcast host Shankar Vedantam and his guest go on to talk about the power of doubt, which is something we tend not to associate with the stereotype of leadership (confident; decisive; never wavering; unwilling to back down).

“We don’t think of strong leaders as hesitant, doubtful, or unsure of the right answers.   Confidence and determination are admirable traits.  But they also have drawbacks.  Confidence can lead to overconfidence; decisiveness can make leaders less likely to be tolerant of dissent; determination can blind us to risks.
At the University of Virginia’s Darden College of Business, [Bobby] Parmar studies the value of doubt.  He says that by avoiding uncertainty, we miss out on opportunities for growth.”
(excerpts, You 2.0: Trusting Your Doubt,  Hidden Brain Staff / January 26, 2026  )

It’s a thought-provoking presentation of a compelling subject.  Two thumbs up for podcast listeners.

 

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Department Of Learning To Lie In Another Language

 Ég  skil  íslensku.

Funny how one of the first phrases I learned in my Plimsleur language app, which I’ve been struggling through like a stuttering pig using daily since last Wednesday, is a total lie:   I understand Icelandic.

 

Yeah, fluency is just around the corner.

 

Adding to the hoax is that five minutes after learning how to say,  I do not understand Icelandic, I have forgotten how to say, I do not understand Icelandic.

Just about every Icelander speaks English ( Ninety-eight plus %! English is a compulsory subject in Icelandic schools ), but still, I want to be a gracious visitor when we go there this summer.  I think this trying-to-learn-some-conversational-Icelandic is going to be one of those things where I have to repeat lesson one seven times before moving on. 

About speaking Icelandic. Knowing that fact (that Icelanders speak English), then bothering to learn to say in Icelandic, Excuse me, do you speak English?  while perhaps respectful in intent, could easily come off as, to an Icelander, Why is this doofus butchering my language when it is totally unnessary to do so?  Obviously, if I’ve bothered to learn anything about the country (including from when MH and I were there three summers ago), I should know that any Icelander whom I address will speak far better English than I speak Icelandic. 

I wish the language course would start off by teaching Icelandic cusswords.  That would be more inspiring.  Of course, there is the internet, where I discovered, farðu í rassgat, which you would hurl as an insult when you are in the kind of situation where you want to advise someone to crawl up your own asshole.  Perhaps I’ll save that one for the United States customs agents.

 

“May your urine burn, you cowardly goat,” will be my backup curse.

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Department Of Cool Story, Bro…    [6]

When I recently saw this spot-on summation of Christian theology I was reminded of an acquaintance who, when I came out decades ago as religion-free, resorted to the believers’ last tactic:  when you can’t counter facts and logic and rationality, use fear ( of something only the religious believe in – hellfire/damnation  [7]  ).  He was not amused when moiself, using the following synopsis to do so, laughingly confirmed that I was indeed rejecting his god’s plan for “salvation.”

 

 

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Freethinkers’ Thought Of The Week     [8]

“Is man one of God’s blunders? Or is God one of man’s blunders?   [9]
Faith: not wanting to know what is true.
The Christian resolution to find the world ugly and bad
has made the world ugly and bad.
God is a thought who makes crooked all that is straight.”

(  Friedrich Nietzsche , as quoted in  The Very Best of Friedrich Nietzsche: Quotes from a Great Thinker, by David Graham,)

 

 

*   *   *

May you remember to fix the harm you’ve done when you realize you’ve done harm;
May you, as much as possible, not find yourself in farðu í rassgat situations;
May you resolve not to find the world ugly and bad;
…and may the hijinks ensue.    [10]

Thanks for stopping by.  Au Vendredi!

*   *   *

[1] Belle can still give you the badass, stinkeye look, should the occasion call for it.

[2] Two for $1!

[3] GC is an author, blogger, speaker, LGBTQ and atheist activist.

[4] The podcast does an annual series, at the end of the old/beginning of the new year, exploring the latest in evidence-based understandings offered by behavioral scientists – understandings which may help people improve their lives via establishing good habits/getting rid of bad habits, overcoming emotional, romantic, career-related, and cognitive challenges, etc.

[5] Note that the draft was dated July 5th. In 1966, when the question about this date was put to him, Einsenhower indicated that it was a minor mistake on his part and that he had actually written it on June 5, 1944.  (from D-Day Overlord, Encyclopaedia of the D-Day landings and the Battle of Normandy )

[6] Not.

[7] It’s a knee slapper, when you think about it:  they try to make *you* afraid of something  that is in fact *their* greatest fear, something which you don’t thing about at all, like pissing off Santa claus.

[8] “free-think-er n. A person who forms opinions about religion on the basis of reason, independently of tradition, authority, or established belief. Freethinkers include atheists, agnostics and rationalists.   No one can be a freethinker who demands conformity to a bible, creed, or messiah. To the freethinker, revelation and faith are invalid, and orthodoxy is no guarantee of truth.”  Definition courtesy of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, ffrf.org

[9] This is serious stuff; no need for a footnote.

[10] See previous footnote.

The Literary Classic I’m Not Sanitizing

December 12, 2025

Robyn Parnell annoyances, are we having fun yet? (Women & Men & Feminism), books & magazines, current events, extended family, freethought/humanism, Holidays, Holy Shit!, Isms (religion), Me so happy, movies, music, nature, Oregon, politics, radio & podcasts, school, science, The Write Stuff (literary life), TV, Wow, Yikes! , , , , , , , Comments Off on The Literary Classic I’m Not Sanitizing

It’s that time of the year again. As has become a tradition much maligned anticipated in our neighborhood, moiself  is hosting a different Partridge, every week, in my front yard’s pear tree.   [1]

Can you identify this week’s guest Partridge?

 

 

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Department Of Gender War, Schmender War

Dateline 1:  Late last week. Scrolling through news headlines from the online newspapers moiself  subscribes to   [2], t rying to find something distracting…but instead (of course?) came upon something that frosted my butt.  A headline mentioned the term, *gender wars.*  That set my teeth on edge, until…

Dateline 2:  Monday, circa 8 am.  Scrolling through my one social media outlet, looking for, finding, as one occasionally does, an I-couldn’t-have-put-it-better encapsulation of a manufactured distraction to a real problem:

A “gender war,” like all wars, is a patriarchal construct of male domination.

 

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Department Of A Blast From The Past

Dateline: January 2025. New Year; new project: taking an excerpt from a past blog, from the same time frame (the second Friday of whatever month).  It turned out that moiself  liked this enough that it was a regular blog feature for 2025.  Will it continue throughout 2026?  Time, and my capacity for reruns, will tell.

This journey down memory lane is related to the most convincing reason a YOU-of-all-people-should-write-a-blog-why-aren’t-you-writing-a-blog?!?!?!   [3]   friend gave me, all those years ago,   [4]   as to why I should be writing a blog: a blog would serve as a journal of sorts for my life.  Journal/diary-resistant moiself  would have some sort of a record, or at least a random sampling, of what was on my mind – and possibly what was on the nation’s mind – during a certain period of time.

Now I can, for example, look back to the second Friday of a years-ago January, to see what I was thinking. (or as MH put it, WHAT was I thinking!?!? )

 

 

Here is an excerpt from my blog of 12-8-17 ( The Elbow I’m Not Ignoring ).  This one caught my attention as it is now, technically,   [5]  a memory of a memory:

Department Of Yet Another Blast From The Past
AKA, An Incident I Haven’t Thought About In A Long Time

Specifically, Crazy Bicycle-Riding Man ® .

Dateline: one afternoon, a long time ago in a galaxy at a university far, far away ( UC Davis. )  I was on campus; my first morning class had let out and I had three or so hours before my next class’s midterm exam. Instead of returning to my (off-campus) apartment for lunch I decided to splurge   [6]   and get a sandwich from the campus Coffee House and do my last-minute studying for the exam on the campus Quad.  ‘Twas a glorious spring day; I could have easily spent several hours happily parked by a mini grove of fir trees on the acres of green grass, along with other students studying, eating, napping, or tossing a Frisbee back and forth…

 

 

…but after about 45 minutes I had to move as I just couldn’t take it anymore.

What had begun as a curiosity – what I thought at first was perhaps a stunt or prank – morphed from snarky entertainment into torture by seemingly infinite repetition.

A young man with curly, shoulder-length brown hair was riding a balloon-tire beach bicycle back and forth across the quad length, from north to south and then east to west, all the while singing the Gordon Lightfoot song, If You Could Read My Mind.  He didn’t sing the entire song, only a portion of it:    [7]  

I never knew I could feel this way
And I’ve got to say that I just don’t get it
I don’t know where we went wrong
But the feeling’s gone and I just can’t get it back

That’s it. Thirty-seven words, which he kept repeating singing.  Over and over.  And over.

It was… fascinating, at first. But ultimately tedious.  After about fifteen minutes, Crazy Bicycle-Riding Man’s path took him within a few feet of me and I caught a glimpse of his glassy blue eyes and realized, He is going to keep doing this until he either passes out or someone makes him stop.

I felt a brief twinge of sorrow for the guy’s obvious…disturbance. But whether or not the man’s break from reality was drug-induced or the result of a mental health crisis, I (like the other students I saw leaving the Quad in droves) was young and impatient, and my sympathy eventually dissolved into annoyance. I lasted another half hour before I gave up and took my books to the library to finish studying.

After all these years, I remember what Crazy Bicycle Riding Man was singing but haven’t a clue as to how I did on the midterm for which I was studying.  Which is perhaps the healthiest way to pass through this world,  n’est ce pas?   [8]

 

This is what the bicycle looked like. Unfortunately, this is not what Crazy Bicycle Riding Man ® looked like.

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Department Of A Good Read Spoiled
Sub Department Of Censorious Scrooge Podcast

Dateline: Monday; throughout the day, listening to a podcast while doing various chores.  Moiself  was delighted to find out that the podcast The Allusionist was doing a special episode: a reading of A Christmas Carol.  [9] 

Charles Dickens’ beloved novella was published in 1843.  Up until about a decade ago, for a period of over 20 years I would reread A Christmas Carol every year, one stave  [10]  a night, starting on December 20.  The Allusionist podcast host Helen Zaltzman read the story with occasional/select verbal annotations – using quick,  sotto voce asides to explain Olde English terms, items, concepts or words ( e.g. bedlam; lugubrious; brazier; workhouse/poorhouse ) – which might be unfamiliar to contemporary listeners.

 

 

I’m very familiar with the story, and without thinking about it started reciting some of the dialog from memory, until moiself  was astonished to hear Zaltzman censoring a crucial piece of the story’s dialog.

It happened when Zaltzman was reading Stave Three; specifically, the scene when Ebenezer Scrooge and The Ghost of Christmas Present are watching the Christmas Eve gathering at the humble abode of Scrooge’s clerk, Bob Cratchit.  Cratchit’s wife and children are awaiting the return of Bob and the youngest child, Tiny Tim, who’ve gone to a church service.  Frail Tiny Tim has an unnamed debility; he needs leg braces and a crutch to walk.  When Bob and Tiny Tim arrive home they are joyously greeted by the other children, who whisk him off to another room to see the Christmas pudding cooking, while Mrs. Cratchit asks her husband how their beloved Tim behaved during the outing.

“As good as gold,” said Bob, “and better. Somehow he gets thoughtful, sitting by himself so much, and thinks the strangest things you ever heard. He told me, coming home, that he hoped the people saw him in the church, because he was a cripple, and it might be pleasant to them to remember upon Christmas Day, who made lame beggars walk, and blind men see.”

 

 

That is how Dickens wrote the  dialog.  Here is how the podcast host read it (my emphases re her censorship and insertion):

“…he hoped the people saw him in the church, because he was  ‘disabled – sanitizing a word’ – and it might be pleasant to them to remember upon Christmas Day, who made disabled beggars walk, and blind men see.”

 

 

Really.

It floored me.  I was already on the floor (exercising), which was a good thing because I might otherwise have fallen over, first from the surprise, and then the indignation.

 

 

She didn’t just do what I just heard her do…right?  I’ve listened to The Allusionist podcast long enough to know that its host (Zaltzman) has sanctimonious speech constable tendencies…even so, it smacked my gob.

 

 

What kind of a  self-crippling, blue-nosed, censorious, patronizing mindset led Zaltzman to decide that we in the 21st century cannot interpret or handle the 18th century vocabulary employed by the 18th century author of a classic, beloved story, and that she must protect us from such vocabulary?

And, justifying her censorship, she notes that she is sanitizing a word.

Sanitizing.

 

 

Who told Zaltzman that cripple/crippled/lame are dirty words, in need of disinfection?  Also, as to her substitution, the term disabled was not used until the late nineteenth/early twentieth century.  And, as MH said, that evening when I told him why my happy-all-day mood ( “I’m getting to listen to A Christmas Carol!” ) had been sullied, “Who decided crippled was unacceptable?”

Evidently Zaltzman decided that word is a pejorative.  But crippled can be – used to be – simply descriptive.  The terms handicapped or disabled cover an incredible spectrum – describing Tiny Tim as disabled tells you little about his condition.  Tim could have been disabled by poor eyesight, or hearing loss, or cognitive or emotional difficulties or a speech impediment or a seizure disorder or….  Crippled is more specific: the reader knows that Tim’s mobility has been compromised.  Dickens used the words that were in use, for those who had difficulty walking/couldn’t walk at all, at the time he wrote the book (and Zaltzman managed to annotate many other of Dickens’ words, without *censoring* them).

Many years ago I listened to several interviews with/retrospetives about the fiction writer Andre Dubus, who had recently died.  Years before his death, Dubus had been hit by a car and crippled – *his* description.  When Dubus was asked by interviewers (and he often was) why he chooses to refer to himself as a cripple or someone who had been crippled, Dubus explained that, as a writer, he appreciated the simple and utilitarian descriptiveness of the term.  He was, in fact, crippled – he could no longer walk.  The term provided factual, useful information, and was in no way critical or insulting to him.

Oy vey.  As Tiny Tim might say, God Bless us, every one (and flaming atheist moiself  would not attempt to censor that character, or put other words in his mouth).  But I could not finish listening to the podcast.  Helen Zaltzman, bah humbug.

And by bah humbug, I mean, “What the fuck?!?!?!?”

 

 

*   *   *

Freethinkers’ Thought Of The Week     [12]

 

 

*   *   *

May you not be plagued by the humbug of censorship;
May you realize that grown-ass adults to not need you to sanitize
words that *you* find objectionable;
May you have, or one day obtain, fond memories of a bicycle-riding troubadour;
…and may the hijinks ensue.

Thanks for stopping by.  Au Vendredi!

*   *   *

[1] Specifically, in the pear tree daughter Belle purchased and (with the help of MH) planted many years ago

[2] The Oregonian; The LA Times, The NY Times; The Washington Post…at least one of which may be cancelled by the timme you read this.

[3] I was adamant about not writing a blog…thus, the title of the blog I eventually decided to write.

[4] Was it really over twelve years ago?

[5] Due to the fact that I’m re-running it.

[6] Working at the school library to put myself through school, any non-home procured food – even a simple sandwich – was (or felt like) a splurge.

[7] The chorus? Verse? Bridge? Root canal? Help me out, musically literate people.

[8] Not to show off in front of Gallic illiterates, but n’est ce pas? is French for, “The birdhouse smells like stinky feet, does it not?”

[9] specifically, the novelization of the script for The Muppet Christmas Carol, which followed the book almost word for word.

[10] The word Dickens used for chapter.

[11] Via (NPR; other online literary and newscasts)

[12] “free-think-er n. A person who forms opinions about religion on the basis of reason, independently of tradition, authority, or established belief. Freethinkers include atheists, agnostics and rationalists.   No one can be a freethinker who demands conformity to a bible, creed, or messiah. To the freethinker, revelation and faith are invalid, and orthodoxy is no guarantee of truth.”  Definition courtesy of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, ffrf.org

The Home I’m Not Going Back To

October 10, 2025

Robyn Parnell community, extended family, freethought/humanism, friends, Holy Shit!, Isms (religion), Me so happy, Oregon, Recreation, school, travel, Wow, YEE HAW!, Yikes!, Zoo , , , , , , , , , , , 2 Comments

Department Of You Can’t Go Home Again

Perhaps not.  But – with all apologies to novelist Thomas Wolfe, who perhaps didn’t realize this – you *can* go to your high school reunion, in your hometown.

Some of us may remember Wolfe’s admonition/advice, from discussing the themes of his novel Look Homeward, Angel in our high school or college literature classes:

The house, the town, the schools, even the people you remember from your youth and then left in your adulthood – they’ll never be the same, or make you feel the same, as you did when you were young.   [1]   They have all changed…as (of course), have you.  Life moves forward; the only constant is change; the home you left behind can never be reclaimed…but it can constantly be remade in the present.

So yeah, well then.  Dateline:  Saturday October 4.  My high school reunion.

 

Second semester Senior Class Officers:  President AG, Secretary GR, and VEEP (yours truly) in the middle…apparently goosing AG (where is my other hand?).

 

Moiself’s  pre-reunion fears:  That I might be unable to stifle my kneejerk exclamation/observation upon entering the reunion venue ( “Holy déjà vu-ew – who are all these old/gray/fat/balding people – oh, that’s right, they are *us*!” )

Moiself’s  Reality:  “Who are all these happy, well-adjusted, warmhearted, engaging, kind, generous, witty people – oh, how lovely, they’re *us*!”

*   *   *

Department Of The Morning After The Reunion Reflections

This person is so warm, kind,  funny, observant – why didn’t I know him/her better,
and/or hang around her/him more in high school?

Well, simply and most likely because it was a large high school (some 550+ in our senior class) and we were in different classes/activities/friend groups.  Also, people change. Perhaps our respective personalities wouldn’t have been a good fit at the time, like the proverbial clashing combinations of oil and water, cats and dogs, pickled herring and crème fraîche…

 

 

Reunion activities included a tour of the high school campus Friday afternoon followed by dinner at a BBQ joint; the “official” reunion  Saturday evening; an anyone-who’s still-in-town-and-would-like-to-do-so lunch meet-up at a downtown foodcourt mall on Sunday.

My flight arrived Friday eve, too late for the tour…which I’d no interest in, anyway.   [2]   I’d last checked out the campus seven years ago, when I went down to So Cal after my mother died.  While it was nice to see that the school had some kind a sign up referencing one of its name-drop-worthy alums ( Diane Keaton…street?  Sidewalk? Lamppost? Library book return drop? ), I only recognized one or two of the buildings, and felt no positive – or negative – connection.  Which seemed logical, to moiself.  After all, the school (to me) was the people, not the buildings.  It just…wasn’t my school anymore.  Such is The Nature of Things®.  

 

 

I’d left much free time in my trip planning, by both design and circumstances ( I was going to meet up with family who, due to ongoing health issues, could not say when they were available until last minute).  Thus it turned out that I had plenty o’ free time on Saturday before the reunion, and decided to check out some old hangouts:  the Santa Ana Zoo, Norm’s restaurant, and Bowers Museum.

The Santa Ana Zoo – initially known as Prentice Park, was vastly different than I’d remembered, which was a good thing, as the zoo’s animal enclosures from decades ago were PETA-protest worthy.   Although much-improved (and, like most if not all zoological parks today, very conservation-focused), the SAZ is still not an AZA member.  [3]  Even so, I had a good time observing the wildlife.  And the animals were interesting, as well.

 

I had a nice interaction with this ocelot, who seemed to like looking at my hat.

Three of my visit’s highlights included what surrounded me after I’d ordered lunch at the zoo’s café and ate it on a table by the children’s play area/sandpit:

* A tiny boy, picking up pinecones under the trees by an outdoor eating area, toddled over to my table and solemnly presented me with one of his treasures.  His mother was both proud of and astonished by her son’s generosity: “Oh, this is a first!” she gushed.  “He’s so shy, he *never* approaches or even makes eye contact with strangers!”  I reassured her, “Yes, well, I have that effect on men.”

* I overheard (then watched) two different parents – each trying to remain The Reasonable One ® despite their respective, escalating irritation – discussing what had happened and what then should happen re an altercation between their children. Dad A wanted Mom B’s son to apologize to Dad A’s toddler daughter, whom Mom B’s toddler son had pushed over in the sand pit by the swings.  Mom B’s boy wandered off after the encounter (with Dad B chasing after him);  Dad A was not pleased with Mom & Dad Bs’ reluctance to get their toddler to apologize.  “Oh, he’s very young,” was their excuse, which Dad A countered with, “This is how they learn…“, adding,  “Good luck with that,” when Mom B indicated that no apology would be forthcoming ( “They’re just kids; you don’t have to be snippy about it…”  [4]   )

* A family of four – two young men and two older women – sitting two tables away from me, played a game of Uno while they waited for their café food order.  They conversed loud enough so that I didn’t have to eavesdrop to hear the some of the details.  Moiself  surmised that the two young men were, patiently and with good humor, “defending” their sister (yay!), who was somehow a concern for the two older women (who didn’t like the young woman’s…boyfriend?  Job? General life direction?).  Also of interest  to moiself  was how smoothly all four family members switched from Spanish to English and back again, sometimes two or three times within the same sentence.  Not being bilingual moiself   [5],   I couldn’t help but wonder, what is the cause/trigger for them to switch?

 

 

And what a surprise the Bowers Museum turned out to be.  One of the city’s few “cultural” attractions, I remembered Bowers as the bane of Santa Ana schoolchildren, who had to do the obligatory (read: eyeball-evisceratingly boring) field trip to Bowers at least once in their elementary school career.   [6]    While Bower’s original (and beautiful) Spanish mission-style main building was still there, the museum had expanded.  I remembered a few of the old/permanent exhibits, but there were many more, including the featured World of the Terracotta Warriors: New Archaeological Discoveries in Shaanxi in the 21st Century, an impressive traveling exhibit I’d actually read about  [7]  before making the trip to SoCal.

 

 

Alas, I never made it to Norm’s  (I got hungry and lunched at the zoo before heading to Bowers)  I’d intended to send photographic proof of my being there to my older sister and her high school bestie, for whom  Norm’s was a personal/in-joke, involving the less-than-stellar meals (with regard to the food’s taste and quality ) we’d had at that SoCal institution.  The restaurant’s motto was, “Norm’s – We Never Close” ( which I appended with, “No Matter What The Health Department says!” ).

 

“Okay, so the food is meh, but you can get it 24/7!”

 

All of these (and more) trips involved moiself  taking Uber or Lyft , as I’d decided to forgo the hassle of car rental (and navigation of SoCal freeways).  And that was entertainment in its own right.  Really and truly, as I told several friends and family members, for my next trip I might be satisfied just booking different Uber or Lyft rides all day, to…wherever.  Moiself  so enjoyed the conversations I had with the drivers, all of whom were from a variety of different backgrounds and life experiences and who were friendly and eager to share their stories with me and hear mine in return, and who included:

* Jose and Raymundo, both of whom are getting married next week!      [8]

* John, who’s off to Colorado to visit his daughter, who is expecting baby#1 next month!

* Zheng, who lives at the beach even though he can’t afford to, but it’s the beach!

* Michael, who is retired ( “big mistake”) and misses having something to do!

* Abdul, who’s only getting $4 for this fare (so he says) and wants me to know!  [9]

 

Not one of my Uber drivers (but just as friendly).

*   *   *

Department Of Priorities

Dateline: Sunday, 8:15 am, the 61 Hundred Bread bakery in Santa Ana. I arrive early as advised and snagged a couple of loaves of their blue masa sourdough ( “Best sourdough in the universe” ), one to take to my older sister and her husband when I visit them later this afternoon, and one to take back with on the plane, for MH, when I return to Oregon.

 

 

Later in the morning, as I’m doing some prepacking for tomorrow’s flight, I realize I don’t have enough room in my carryon luggage to add the bread, unless I make some sacrifices.  And so, the sparkly black *bling* sneakers I wore to the reunion will stay behind in the hotel room.   [10]

 

*   *   *

The reunion committee, as wonderful as they were for all the details they had to plan and juggle, got my name wrong on the preprinted name tag they provided for attendees.  They had me as “Robyn Parnell Wagnell,” which was one surname too many.  The latter surname belongs to MH’s and my offspring (and is part of my email address; thus, the nametag mixup, I’m assuming).  Not to worry; due to the facts that…

(a) this has happened before with nametags; and
(b) I don’t like premade nametags,

…I’d brought along my own, custom name badge.

There is a story behind why I decided to have my own name tag made.

 

 

Story Dateline: many, many years ago; attending an event wherein people were provided with sharpie pens and those HELLO  MY  NAME  IS stickers.  I am gob smacked by the number of people (and by people I mean, men) who have written their professional credentials after their name, and who are introducing themselves to me ala:

Introduction:
“Hello, I’m Dr. Austin Tayshus.”
 ( Name tag reads:  Austin Tayshus, Ph.D. or M.D. )

This event is neither a medical nor scientific conference, nor a professional gathering of any sort; it’s purely social.  After the fifth or sixth time I encounter what moiself  considers to be this boorish, status-signalling behavior,   [11]   I return to the party check-in table, grab a sharpie, and append my nametag to read,  Robyn Parnell, N.a.D.

Which I have to explain to the next please-be-impressed-by-me Doc who introduces himself, then pretends, for a moment, that he recognizes my credential.

Pretensious Party Person:
“Hello, I’m Dr. Igor Maniac.
And I see you are……uh…’Na.D.”  Yes, oh…Naturo…Allopathic….?

Moiself:
“Robyn Parnell; Not A Doctor.”

Just want to make sure there’s no confusion about that.

 

 

*   *   *

Freethinkers’ Thought Of The Week     [12]

 

Harold: “You sure have a way with people.”
Maude: “Well, they’re my species.”

 

*   *   *

May you have entertaining encounters with ride service drivers;
May you make any sacrifice necessary to include the sourdough;
May you not need to have the Harold and Maude reference explained to you ; [13]

…and may the hijinks ensue.

Thanks for stopping by.  Au Vendredi!

*   *   *

 

[1] And sometimes, that’s a really good thing.

[2] And as for the bbq joint meetup, by the time I’d Ubered to my hotel and checked in, I could have shown up later, but I checked out its menu on line.  Yikes.  Nothing a plant-eater such as moiself  would be interested in eating.  Or even smelling.

[3] I wonder if that’s due to it’s size, or quality of animal exhibits/care, or….?

[4] Oh, the joy of watching that interaction and thinking about how I don’t have to navigate that world anymore.

[5] Being able to curse, insult, and critique the bathroom supplies in several languages doesn’t count as language fluency…I think.

[6] Or whenever we had the city and/or county history/social studies blocks.

[7] But didn’t know it would be at the Bowers Museum.

[8] Not to each other.

[9] His sympathy trolling for a bigger tip – which he didn’t get – was obvious.

[10] Not to worry; they were quite inexpensive.

[11] It’s okay to be proud of your profession, and/or the education you received to get it, but other people also work hard and take pride in their professions sans trumpet-blaring – I couldn’t think of a reason why a person would do that at a social gathering, other than they wanted to accrue some kind of special treatment/elevated status points for being “a doctor” of…whatever.

[12] “free-think-er n. A person who forms opinions about religion on the basis of reason, independently of tradition, authority, or established belief. Freethinkers include atheists, agnostics and rationalists.  No one can be a freethinker who demands conformity to a bible, creed, or messiah. To the freethinker, revelation and faith are invalid, and orthodoxy is no guarantee of truth.”  Definition courtesy of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, ffrf.org

[13] And if you do, may the first thing you do after reading this is find some way to see that movie.

The Blog Post I’m Not Completing

June 27, 2025

Robyn Parnell are we having fun yet? (Women & Men & Feminism), books & magazines, community, current events, family life, foodie, freethought/humanism, friends, health & wellness, Holy Shit!, Isms (religion), movies, nature, Oregon, politics, school, science, Wow, YEE HAW!, Yikes! , , , , , , Comments Off on The Blog Post I’m Not Completing

As in, this is not the post that was intended for today.   [1]   But first, this breaking news:

Dateline:  Monday eve, 6-23-25.  Scott Harris joined us for dinner.

 

 

Several years back, when people were starting to post pictures of meals they’d eaten and/or dishes they’d prepared on social media, moiself  decided to do so, as a kind of joke.  The first time that I posted a picture  [2]  of a meal MH and I were enjoying, my friend Scott Harris   [3]  commented on the post with something like, “Oh, not, you’re not going to turn into one of those people who posts pictures of food, are you?”

Moiself  picked up that gauntlet he’d thrown down, and ran with it.

 

Here’s the gauntlet I picked up.  I’d assumed it was thrown by Scott.

 

From that time onward, every week or so I post a picture of a dinner I’ve prepared, along with a caption containing variants of, “MH and I would be delighted to share our stir fry with Indonesian peanut sauce with Scott Harris, were he in town;”  “If only Scott Harris could be here to help us finish off this grilled steelhead with lemony garlic greens, spice-roasted butternut squash, and MH’s homemade sourdough…”

 

 

 

It became a long-running joke, with several of my FB friends wondering/asking moiself  if there actually is such a person as Scott Harris?  Indeed there is, I assured them, but Harris and his family have lived abroad for many years (first Hanoi, currently Hong Kong).  He occasionally gets stateside to visit family in So Cal; we’ve tried to arrange get-togethers but nothing has worked out…until three weeks ago Scott messaged me with the news that, due to his youngest son’s participation in a touring baseball team tournament comprised of expat kids, he and his son would be in the Portland area,  and:

“…if you are around, I demand to be fed.”

We were, and he was.  Photographic evidence (yeah, I know, it could be AI-faked) is available, privately, for doubters.

 

 

 

*   *   *

Department Of If You See One Movie This Summer…
( You Need To Get Out More Often )

Dateline:  Tuesday.  Coincidently, the day after a long-time friend   [4]   visits – the kind of friend where you can both catch up on each other’s respective lives and discuss the state of/meaning to the universe in the same paragraph – I met my dear buddy and fellow Movie Buff® CC at a theater to see  The Life of Chuck.  This is the incident which made the title of this week’s blog appropriate.  Translation:  I’m not writing the blog installment I’d intended, because moiself  can’t get the movie’s themes from careening through my frontal lobe and my amygdala like a drunken sailor.

I felt odd, driving home from the movie theater, and actually wondered at one point if I should pull the car over and strip off my clothing and run into traffic whooping and yelping in both despair and delight  catch my breath, because my mind, and possibly body, felt… elsewhere.   After the movie was over I told CC, when we were both stumbling for words outside the theatre, that “…when I get home tonight MH will ask me how the movie was, and I’ll have no good answer, and then he’ll ask what was the movie  about, and I’ll say something like ‘it was about living life with the knowledge of the inevitable obliteration of the cosmos, whether physically or philosophically/personally…and I can’t explain it any more than that.’ ”

And then I’ll have to sit in one of our Comfy Chairs ® and stream a movie about dinosaurs or King Kong or something.

 

 

*   *   *

Department Of…Or Something

The next day I saw one version of  Or Something: The Phoenician Scheme,   [5]   which, for moiself, is the existential opposite of The Life of Chuck.

I won’t bother to give even a rudimentary summary of The Phoenician Scheme’s plot line, because it doesn’t matter.  It was a Wes Anderson movie, in all its Wes Anderson-osity, with its plethora of *name* actors eager to play a part in his highly stylized eccentricity: Look at us – as actors we’re all individually and collectively capable of emoting our spleens off, but here we are in Wes Anderson ®  mode, so enjoy us being deadpan and quirky amidst the symmetrical, bright-vintage and hyperrealistic, Andersonesque set design!   [6]

 

 

*   *   *

Department Of In Three Days My Mother Would Have Had Her Ninety-Seventh Birthday

To honor that, moiself  will be excerpting a blog from three years ago (  The Holiday I’m Not Renaming ), in which I shared one of my favorite memories of my mother:

Dateline: earlier this week.   A FB friend posts pictures of his grandchild‘s visit to what looks to be an amusement park, and a picture shows the child playing that classic arcade game, Whac-a-mole. Seeing this picture prompts a lovely flashback for moiself – a memory I’ve not thought of in decades.

Dateline of memory: A long time in a galaxy far far away (Southern California).  I am visiting my parents at their home in Santa Ana.  It’s summertime, and the County Fair is on.  My parents tell me they haven’t been to a state or county fair in ages, and suggest we go.  And so we do.  As we walk past the various cheesy games and merchandise and food booths, nothing catches our interest, until we come to an arcade. I espy a Whac-A-Mole game, and instantly am obsessed with getting my mother to play it.

 

 

My mother is hesitant, despite my enthusiastic recommendation. She knows nothing about it, she says  ( Even better!!!, moiself  thinks to moiself  ).  I assure her that it’s a straightforward game, no complicated strategy or levels or scenarios: she simply must hold the mallet and whack the heads of the moles as they pop up from the console.

“Why?” she asks me.

“There’s no time to get existential right now,” I reply.  I put my two quarters in the slot, press the game’s start button and put the mallet in my mother’s hand.  “You don’t want me to waste fifty cents, right, Mom? Look – there’s one!  Pretend it’s digging up your rosebushes!”

…my mother is exquisitely awful at Whac-A-Mole.  Her timing is atrocious; even so, she soon gets into it in her own way, emitting a high-pitched,  “Oh!”  whenever a mole head appears, followed by her delayed whack at its head. My father and I, standing to the side of the game console, are doubled over with laughter as we watch my mild-mannered mother, with an increasing maniacal look in her eyes, pursue those pesky moles:

“Oh!”
(whack)

“Oh!”
(whack)

“Oh!” (whack) “Oh!” (whack)

“Oh oh oh oh oh oh!”
(whack whack whack whack whack whack)

It is one of my favorite memories of her.

 

This is another one.

 

 

*   *   *

Freethinkers’ Thought Of The Week     [7]

“For small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable only through love.”

( Carl Sagan, the late, great, American astronomer, planetary scientist, teacher,
author, science communicator…. )

 

 

*   *   *

May you realize that we’re all living  The Life of Chuck
May you have a favorite memory of your mother;
May your life never resemble a Wes Anderson movie;
…and may the hijinks ensue.

Thanks for stopping by.  Au Vendredi!

*   *   *

[1] Some musings on “special ed” programs.

[2] on Facebook, my only social media outlet.

[3] I’m making an exception here (in my blog) to identify a real person with his real name (and not an acronym or initials).  He deserves it, and also, being a journalist for years, he kind of qualifies as a person in “the public eye.”

[4] We’ve known each other since junior high ( I was in the 7th grade, and Scott the 8th).  Can you imagine the hideous (as in, embarrassingly adolescent) stories we could tell?

[5] Yep, I returned to the movie theater.  I’m trying to get back into watching a movie a week in the theater…which shouldn’t be so difficult given the plethora of summer releases but which in fact is difficult for moiself  when the majority of the releases are the seventeenth in a series of I Know What You Did/How You Screamed  Fast and Furioiusly Last Summer – Marvel Super Hero, Inside Out of Training Your Despicable Me’s Dragon, Mission Impossible: The Final Squeezing Of Blood From A  Movie Ticket Turnip…

[6] At least I didn’t pay for it…directly.  I have a movie club membership, and have amassed many free tickets.

[7] “free-think-er n. A person who forms opinions about religion on the basis of reason, independently of tradition, authority, or established belief. Freethinkers include atheists, agnostics and rationalists.   No one can be a freethinker who demands conformity to a bible, creed, or messiah. To the freethinker, revelation and faith are invalid, and orthodoxy is no guarantee of truth.”  Definition courtesy of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, ffrf.org

The Consciousness I’m Not Lowering

May 16, 2025

Robyn Parnell annoyances, are we having fun yet? (Women & Men & Feminism), books & magazines, current events, freethought/humanism, friends, general ruminations, health & wellness, Isms (religion), nature, Oregon, politics, radio & podcasts, reproductive rights, science, travel, TV, Wow, YEE HAW!, Yikes! , , , , , , , , , , , , , Comments Off on The Consciousness I’m Not Lowering

“Keep our nation on the track/one step forward two steps back!”
( Ladies Against Women slogan )

 

 

I love Stephen Colbert’s work wherein he used his conservative commentator alter ego ( a “well-intentioned, poorly informed, high-status idiot”) to lampoon conservative politics.  However, Colbert was no pioneer in that strategy.  Almost three decades before The Colbert Report, The Plutonium Players, a feminist guerilla theatre troupe, used satire to illuminate and mock the anti-feminist politics of Reagan-era conservatives.   [1]

Do any of my older (ahem) readers remember the Bay Area comedy group, Ladies Against Women (LAW)?  I attended several of their rallies and performances during LAW’s heyday in the 1980s.  The LAW (an offshoot of The Plutonium Players) riffed on the sexist, anti-gay and anti-civil rights values espoused by the Right Wing, holding “Evenings of Consciousness-Lowering” events, which included cooking demonstrations (to encourage Ladies to make Twinkies ® from scratch), exercise routines to help Ladies look and feel helpless,  [2]   lessons on how Ladies could reduce stress via apathy, presentations on the insidious truth behind the ERA ( “the Equal *Restrooms* Amendment” ), and a wimp test for males in the audience.

The Plutonium Players gained notoriety for their Reagan For Shah campaign, and for showing up dressed as their LAW characters at airports and political rallies, where they greeted political VIPs – from POTUS Reagan to anti-feminist campaigner Phyllis Schlafly ( who also was parodied by LAW as the character, Phyllis LeShaft ), to televangelist Jerry Falwell, et al –  holding posters which read, “Ban Books Not Bombs”, Poverty Is So Tasteless,” “Born To Clean,” “Ban the Poor, ” “Push Us Back, Push Us Back, Waaaay Back.”

 

Two of the LAW Ladies, “Virginia Cholesterol” and “Mrs. T. “Bill” Banks,” demonstrating at the Democratic National Convention, Atlanta, Georgia, 1988 (Photo by Atlanta Journal-Constitution).

 

LAW worked tirelessly to “keep women safe from the 20th century,” as evidenced by excerpts from their  Ladies Against Women’s manifesto Ladyfesto:

We Truly Tasteful Ladies Do Hereby Demand Request:

 Repeal the Ladies’ vote. It is suffering and not suffrage that keeps us up on our pedestals.  And if God hadn’t wanted us up on pedestals, He wouldn’t have made us shorter than our husbands.

 Abolish the environment. It takes up too much space,
and is almost impossible to keep clean!

 Free Ladies from wage slavery. The 70-odd cents we earn for every manly dollar
is entirely too much. It is unladylike to accept money for your work.

 Maintain illiteracy as a high school graduation requirement. An uninformed populace
is an obedient populace, and a self-censoring one, too. After all, ignorance is a virtue: what you can’t read, can’t hurt you!

Procreation, not recreation. Where did so many gals get the idea that s_x is supposed
to be f_n?  True ladies, it’s time to close your eyes and do your duty!

 

 

LAW’s perspective is sorely needed in these times (and, sadly, sorely applicable as to the targets of their satire).  On a related note….

*   *   *

Department Of You Can’t Make Up This Shit

I refer to the POTUS and his festering turd allies/advisors minions wanting to offer a $5000 bait bribe  Baby bonus offer to entice women (read: young white women) to be fruitful and multiply.

 

Speaking as someone who was once a young white woman, had I been in my mid-20s and such an offer was made to me by anyone connected with a governmental agency, the only enticement it would have provided would have been to get moiself  to the nearest medical facility and lie about my age/medical condition to fit the criteria for having a hysterectomy.

I’m not the only woman of a certain age who had that gut response.  For one example, read WaPo opinion columnist Kathleen Parker’s take on the subject.  She starts out expressing similar sentiments (pokes fun at the baby bonus).  However, in a refreshing sidenote on the demographic concern re declining birthrates in the “developed world,” Parker goes on to express something which is not often mentioned when the talk turns to why women choose to have or not have children.  Parker, who like moiself   chose to become a mother later in life,   [3]    discovered something for herself when she did so –  something which isn’t mentioned as much as it might be, but which is described by a word that should be used more often in conjunction with the experience of voluntary parenthood:

JOY.

 

Circa 20 years ago, son K and daughter Belle, bringing moiself  much delight in their interpretation of their parents’ request to pose for “A nice picture we can send to your grandparents for Christmas…”

 

*   *   *

Department Of, As Opposed To Live Shorter, Worser?

Moiself  was bemused to hear the title of a recent Clear + Vivid Podcast: Eric Topol: Live Longer, Better.  I got past that and was treated to yet another thought-provoking C+V dialog between host Alan Alda and an interesting, articulate and intelligent guest.

Eric Topol is an American is an American doctor (cardiology), scientist, professor of  Molecular Medicine and the founder and director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute.  Their discussion revolved around the captivating concept of how can you live, what can you do, to increase your odds of being one of the wellderly and not one of the illderly (i.e., the elderly set by chronic conditions and diseases).

“While promises of extending the human lifespan to 125 and beyond are premature, recent breakthroughs in the early detection of killer diseases of the major organs and brain offer a healthier old age – especially when paired with behavioral changes that Dr Topol calls Lifestyle+ .”
( episode summary, Clear + Vivid Podcast: Eric Topol: Live Longer, Better. )

 

 

Episode content poiler alert:  you are not a prisoner of your genes:

Alda:
“A lot of people live by the joke, ‘If you want to live a long time, choose old parents.’  How much of healthy, long living is attributed to the genome and how much to things like nutrition and exercise?”

Topol:
“Yeah, and this is I think one of the most important things we’ve learned, and all the evidence backs it up: The genes are *far less* important than we had suspected….”

Topol notes that far more important factors are not just the familiar pair,  diet-and-exercise, but “all these other lifestyle factors,” including

* quality (and quantity) of sleep

* physical activity (“absolutely vital”)

* environmental exposures (air pollution; microplastics)

* social interactions/loneliness/isolation   [4]

* Nature – as in, how much time do you spend in nature/outdoors

The one (and in some cases, seeminngly the only) thing we as humans have in common is that unless we die RIGHT NOW we are going to continue to age.  Moiself  sez it’s a two-hamster-thumbs-up subject, so check it out.

 

 

*   *   *

Freethinkers’ Thought Of The Week     [5]

“People who are most strongly attached to a belief in an afterlife are more likely to try to delay death when it’s clearly imminent. That doesn’t make any logical sense.
If people believe in a blissful afterlife, then logically, you’d think they’d accept their death gracefully, and would even welcome it. But it makes perfect sense when you think of religion, not as a way of genuinely coping with the fear of death, but as a way of putting it on the back burner.”

( Greta Christina, American author and activist, from her book,
Comforting Thoughts About Death That Have Nothing to Do with God )

 

 

*   *   *

May you consider composing your own Ladyfesto list;
May never be on the receiving end of a bribery to reproduce;
May you aim to be one of the wellderly;
…and may the hijinks ensue.

Thanks for stopping by.  Au Vendredi!

*   *   *

[1] Ronald Reagan supported the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) when he was governor of California, and even offered to help women’s groups achieve its ratification.  Then when he ran for POTUS he withdrew his support for the ERA.

[2] And thus increase their appeal to manly men.

[3] In obstetrical terms, that is. ( You are labeled “advanced maternal age” when you are pregnant at age 35 or older).  It’s not like we waited until we were 52 and said, “Hey, might be time to have kids!”

[4] Isn’t it time for another footnote?

[5] “free-think-er n. A person who forms opinions about religion on the basis of reason, independently of tradition, authority, or established belief. Freethinkers include atheists, agnostics and rationalists.   No one can be a freethinker who demands conformity to a bible, creed, or messiah. To the freethinker, revelation and faith are invalid, and orthodoxy is no guarantee of truth.”  Definition courtesy of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, ffrf.org

The Mental Gymnastics I’m Not Doing

March 21, 2025

Robyn Parnell annoyances, are we having fun yet? (Women & Men & Feminism), books & magazines, community, current events, family life, foodie, freethought/humanism, friends, general ruminations, health & wellness, Holy Shit!, Isms (religion), Me so happy, nature, politics, radio & podcasts, reproductive rights, science, TV, Wow, YEE HAW!, Yikes! , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Comments Off on The Mental Gymnastics I’m Not Doing

Department Of Good News First
Warning: Entering Parental Bragging Zone

 

 

On Tuesday I found out that daughter Belle, who works as Quality Assurance Manager for Schilling Cider,  passed the exam  [1]  (which was given during the  2025’s CiderCon convention ) to become certified as a professional Pommolier. 

My heart soars like a hawk.   [2]   Ya, hoo!!

 

 

A pommolier is the hard cider industry’s analog to a sommelier.  This, from from the American Cider Association website’s “Meet Our Certified Pommoliers ®  (where Belle will soon be listed):

“Becoming a Certified Pommelier is a remarkable achievement that celebrates dedication, perseverance, and a deep passion for the art and science of cider. It requires hours of rigorous study, sensory analysis practice, and a commitment to mastering the intricacies of cider. From learning about different apple varieties to understanding the complex flavors and aromas of ciders, Certified Pommeliers have honed their skills to expert levels. Their hard work and preparation not only showcase their knowledge and expertise but also exemplify their love for all things cider-related. Cheers to all Certified Pommeliers for their dedication and commitment to the craft!”

MH and I were impressed and also intimidated by the length and breadth of the knowledge Belle would be tested on, from the chemistry of brewing and fermentation to knowledge of/ability to identify obscure European apple varieties.  The test was given in February; she was told results would take (at least)  six weeks.  As we neared the results deadline I was a teensy bit anxious for her (the test is designed to fail at least 80% of those who take it).

Monday noontime I was at my favorite sushi restaurant here in Hillsboro, waiting to meet a friend for lunch, when I got Belle’s text.  I knew that she was at a local (Pacific Northwest) cider conference in Tacoma, and figured that, as she’d done earlier in the day, she was texting between symposiums to share conference stories.  Apparently the involuntary squeal of delight I emitted when I read Belle’s text (“ HUGE ANNOUNCEMENT:  I  DID ITTTTTTTT ”) was loud enough for the two sushi chefs to hear, as they both looked up from slicing saki and maguro, nodded across the sushi bar at me, and said, “Congratulations.”

I thanked them (and the people sitting at the two tables on either side of moiself, who also smiled at/congratulated me), and explained that there indeed was good news, but it was about my daughter….and would you like to know what a pommolier is?

 

 

*   *   *

Department Of Seasonal News Second

Happy Vernal Equinox, y’all. 

Hope you yogis were inspired to do 108 Sun salutations to mark the turning of the season.

 

 

*   *   *

Department Of Yet Another Sign Of The Impending Apocalypse

Dateline: Sunday 9:55-ish: MH and moiself  are sitting in our respective Norwegian “stressless” recliner chairs, after having watched  Ordinary People.  Despite the admittedly comfy chairs’ claim to fame, we are actually stressed – as in, under emotional duress – as each of us has forgotten how achingly devastating the movie is.  We exchange comments about that, then MH grows silent, looks out at his feet resting on his chair’s ottoman, and asks, “Do these socks make my feet look really long?”

 

 

*   *   *

Department Of Ugly Americans  [3]   Down Under
Sub-Department  Of One Of The More Stupid Attempts At Self-Redemption/Justification Moiself  Has Read In A Long Time…

…the source of which would be the story about an American “social media influencer” (Instagram handle,  Sam Jones from Montana )   [4]   who was visiting Australia.  One evening while traveling on a remote road this influencer spotted a mother and baby wombat off the side of the road.  Instead of acting like a normal/respectful person and taking a photograph of the animals, she exited her vehicle, snatched the baby from its mother and ran back to her car (where she apparently had a camera/phone mounted).  She held the wriggling baby wombat up to record its distress, which she narrated, while both baby and mama wombat squealed their displeasure:

“ ‘Mama’s right there, and she’s pissed, ’ the woman said in a video posted online. She went on to release the joey   [5]   on the roadside in the darkness, illuminated only by her car’s headlights….

The indignation was bipartisan…Tony Burke, said officials would review the woman’s visa to see if any immigration laws had been breached, and that any future applications from her would receive intense scrutiny. The government did not release her name but Australian news media identified her as Samantha Strable.

The drumbeat of criticism included calls to deport the woman. On Friday morning, ABC Australia, the national broadcaster, sent out a news alert saying she had left Australia….

Mark Heinz, a reporter for the Wyoming-based Cowboy State Daily, said he believed the woman in question was…Ms. Strable, whom he had interviewed in 2023 about her enthusiasm for hunting….

In the interview with Mr. Heinz, Ms. Strable, then a resident of Pinedale, Wyo., recounted her adventures of having hunted red stag in Chile with a bow and killed pigs and wallabies in New Zealand. ….

Detailing her pig hunting experience in New Zealand, in which dogs corner wild pigs allowing for the hunter to plunge a knife into the animal’s heart, she said it was ‘intense.’

‘Honestly, I cried,’ she said in the interview. ‘I don’t like killing. I like the hunting, I like the chase. It’s not fun to see anything die.’ “

( excerpts, my emphases, from “Outrage in Australia After American Woman Grabs a Baby Wombat,” by Victoria Kim, NY Times, 3-14-25 )

 

 

No surprise ( to moiself ) that this self-aggrandizing, social media slut influencer who terrified and stressed an infant animal and its mother, is a hunter.  And what a bummer to read that, after all the effort Strable put into her “adventures,” the hunter claims not to enjoy the end result of the hunt.  What a shock, that it wasn’t  fun for Ms. Strable to see the wild pig die – the living creature whom she’d sought out and terrorized by siccing dogs to chase and corner it – the living creature into whose heart she’d then plunged a knife ?!

 

Poor baby.

 

Yo, Strable: None of the animals you killed had to die.  The wild pig didn’t have to die, Ms. Strable. You could have just left it alone.  Or enjoyed the challenge – without using tracking dogs to terrorize the poor creature –  of getting close enough to the pig to take a picture of it.  Or enjoyed the “chase” by chasing a living being (a fellow homo sapiens?) who voluntarily agreed to participate in it.

 

 

*   *   *

Department Of I Wanted Distraction While On The Elliptical;
What I Got Was An Aha Moment

I’ve been doing my pre-breakfast workout for the past few weeks while re-watching some Grey’s Anatomy seasons that I don’t have much memory of.  Dateline: last Friday morning I’m on Season 11; it’s the heart-rending episode where Dr. April Kepper gives birth to her and her husband Dr. Jackson Avery’s doomed/premature baby.  Relevant character background: April is a fervent evangelical Christian;    [6]   Jackson is an atheist.

April is distraught after an ultrasound at 24 weeks gestation gives bad news about her pregnancy.  Further testing reveals that her fetus has the most severe form of a devastating genetic disorder,    [7]  which will cause it to die either before birth or shortly thereafter.  April is gutted by the news, and after learning that her baby’s bones are already starting to break in utero, she opts for what her supportive husband and their OBs and pediatricians recommend as the least awful choice: to induce labor, and thus be able to hold their baby before it dies.

At one point, when April and Jackson are discussing their options, she is a walking open wound, ranting about how unfair it all is.  She’s believed in her god all of her life; she has followed what she thought was her calling, from her god, to be a doctor and to heal the sick; she is a believer; she has tried to do good; she has prayed; she’s done everything right and this is so unfair, so unfair….  She rages on about the unfairness, then adds….

“…and it’s *cruel.”

All her husband can do is listen in supportive agony.  And I found moiself  wondering if    [8]   he was thinking what I was thinking:   that while what has happened is certainly awful, it’s only *cruel* if you believe in (a) god.

It is only cruel because April believes in a god that made this world, and that she believes her god can and does act in this world, which leaves her with only cruel options:

*  either her so-called loving god gave her baby this horrible death sentence, or

* seeing as how April has expressed how she believes her god is all-powerful and all loving and that all over the world, “miracles do happen,” that when no miracle happens it is because her god is choosing not to fix what it could fix.

 

 

Translation:  What is cruel, actually, are her beliefs; what is cruel is her religious faith, which has filled her heart and mind with cruel, supernatural nonsense.

When people experience such tragedies they go through pain and mourning, the what-ifs, the sorrow, the frustration, the anger… This is true for people who hold any religious faith, as well as for people who are religion-free.  All of us suffer when tragedy strikes.

But Humanists, Atheist, Freethinkers, Skeptics – we who are religion-free – do not have the added burden of the gut-twisting sense of betrayal, of second-guessing of what we could have or should have done re our faith-based rituals, of agonizing over what our supposedly all-powerful god did or did not choose to do.  When tragedy strikes, we whose worldviews are free from superstition/religion/theology also suffer the same emotions of grief and loss, *except* for that huge one, because we acknowledge the truth of the natural world.

We know that we are neither punished/cursed by tragedy nor rewarded/blessed by prosperity; we know that when our loved one dies that there is no supernatural cause of, nor relief from, our suffering.  We know that sometimes, shit just happens…which means that a core part of being human is to wade through the shit, relying on and accepting the comfort and support of our fellow human beings.

 

 

*   *   *

*   *   *

Department Of Things That Never Get Old   [9]

Welcome to yet another new feature of the new year, which may continue on the third Friday of each month.  Or…not.

When was the last time you rewatched Airplane!    [10] 

 

 

*   *   *

Freethinkers’ Thought Of The Week     [11]

“So I’m not really interested in the mental gymnastics that allow a person to believe
in both a loving god and baby cancer. Over and out.”

( anonymous poster on online religious debate bulletin board )

*   *   *

May you have reasons to be audibly delighted in sushi bars;
May you be free from the gut-twisting mental gymnastics of theism;
May you enjoy a joke/scene/song that never gets old;
…and may the hijinks ensue.

Thanks for stopping by.  Au Vendredi!

*   *   *

[1] given by the American Cider Association, to cider professionals qualified/nominated to take it.

[2] Little Big Man.

[3] The pejorative “Ugly American” originates from a 1958 novel of the same name.  The book portrayed Americans’ attitudes ( be they tourists or business tycoons wishing to do business with/in foreign countries) toward non-Americans as those of ignorance, arrogance, and condescension.  The term has come to mean a stereotype of loud, ill-mannered, insensitive American tourists who offend the citizens of the countries they travel to.

[4] There is a “title” or job description that has had its 15 minutes of bullshit fame and needs to go the way of leech collectors, phrenologists, caddy butchers, and other obsolete professions.

[5] A baby wombat.  Yep, the same term is used for a baby kangaroo.

[6] Which doesn’t stop her from having fervent premarital sex with Jackson in hospital on call rooms – but this seems to be part of the contract those doctors working in Seattle have to sign.

[7]   osteogenesis imperfecta II (aka “brittle bone disease”)

[8] Well, if that character were real….but, although that was fiction, thousands of people face such dilemmas every day, around the world.

[9] At least, to ever-youthful moiself.

[10] Best disaster film parody ever.  In fact, I recall reading a comment from one film historian about how studios stopped making disaster films for a time after that movie’s release, because no one would take them seriously.  

[11] “free-think-er n. A person who forms opinions about religion on the basis of reason, independently of tradition, authority, or established belief. Freethinkers include atheists, agnostics and rationalists.   No one can be a freethinker who demands conformity to a bible, creed, or messiah. To the freethinker, revelation and faith are invalid, and orthodoxy is no guarantee of truth.”  Definition courtesy of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, ffrf.org

The Federal Agency I’m Not Diversifying

March 7, 2025

Robyn Parnell annoyances, community, current events, exercise & fitness, freethought/humanism, general ruminations, Holy Shit!, Isms (religion), Me so happy, Oregon, politics, radio & podcasts, Wow, YEE HAW!, Yikes! , , , , , , , , , Comments Off on The Federal Agency I’m Not Diversifying

Department Of Chattin’ Up The Feds

Dateline:  yesterday; circa 7:45 a.m.; on morning walk; heading back toward my neighborhood.  Context: previous evening MH mentioned reading on a Hillsboro community news FB group where someone was wondering about a “raid” (the someone speculated) that was going on near 28th  street.

As part of my walk, I turned off the afore-mentioned street, walking on the north side of the block.  Less than halfway down the block my attention was drawn to a house on the south side of the street, with its front window busted in and the window blinds broken and hanging akimbo from the window frame.  About a dozen people, a mixture of young men and women, were milling about on the house’s front lawn, porch, and sidewalk. All were wearing the distinctive, dark blue, FBI field agent jackets.

 

One of the female agents even had her hair in a pony tail, like…this

 

Standing by an Official-looking Vehicle® parked on the street in front of the next door neighbor’s house was another agent…doing neighborhood point duty? He was the only agent with a visible firearm – a rifle of some sort.  I crossed the street and asked if I could talk with him.  He said yes, and I waved toward his comrades and asked if a training exercise was going on, because, well, maybe the older I get, the younger the agents look?  He gave me a smile which would have qualified him for the Officer Friendly calendar…

 

 

…and said, nope, these are actual agents, who had been executing a search warrant.  To which I replied, “Through the front room window, apparently.”

I began to wonder aloud to him why this would be a federal thing…hmm, drugs?  But the local (city and state police) can handle your garden variety drug case – why the Feds involved? Officer Friendly laughed and told me what I already knew that – that he couldn’t give specifics.  “Oh, of course, But then you know that’s why we,” I pointed around the ‘hood, “have to start rumors, and it’s fun to speculate.”  I told him I lived a few blocks away and walked on this street on a regular basis.  He assured me that, other than the broken window, there was “no violent crime involved,” and that the neighborhood was safe. I remarked that it was nice to see that the officers included both men and women (and not all white); he seemed happy that I noticed, and said that the FBI is quite “inclusive” and that “we need everybody” to “…help keep us safe.”

It was my turn to laugh. “I agree.  You and I may know that, but if a certain president has his way, that’s gonna end…oh, let me guess – you can’t comment on that either.”  He laughed again, stuck out his hand and introduced himself.  I shook his hand, introduced moiself, and thanked him and his comrades for (“hopefully”) keeping us safe. With that, he beamed his 1000 watt smile at me, wished me a great day, and I went on my way, thinking to moiself,

I don’t exactly know why, but this *was* a great way to start the day.

 

 

*   *    *

Department Of Science Needs You To Manage Your Shit

Dateline:  Last Sunday (March 2); reading an article about the uninhabited Icelandic island of Surtsey.     [1]   Surtsey, created by an undersea eruption off the southern coast of Iceland (in 1963 – 1967), has been declared a nature reserve and UNESCO World Heritage Site for its scientific value.  No humans, except for a limited number scientists studying the process of biocolonisation, are allowed on the island.

From the Wikipedia entry for the Icelandic island of Surtsey, heading biology/human impact  (my emphases ):

The only significant human impact is a small, prefabricated hut which is used by researchers while staying on the island….All visitors check themselves and belongings to ensure no seeds are accidentally introduced by humans to the island’s developing ecosystem. It is believed that some boys who sneaked over from Heimaey    [2]   by rowboat planted potatoes, which were promptly dug up once discovered.  An improperly managed human defecation resulted in a tomato plant taking root, which was also destroyed….

 

 

*   *   *

Department Of Rational Articles On An Irrationally Contentious Subject

As readers of this blog may have surmised, moiself  has been in a mood since the election.  This mood often vacillates between white hot anger and cold blue despair, due in great part to the certain left-leaning, political zeitgeist   moiself observed both before the election, which, IMO, portended the abyssal election results.

 

Poor baby.

 

I’m written about this several times, most howlingly right after the election:

I loathe the use of wedge issues and exploitation of those on the lower end of the power totem to provoke the fear response.  I despise the fact that such tactics are often effective, which is why the ethically-deficient Right uses them.  And as I watched that ad,    [3] thinking of the wide audience it was playing to, I thought to moiself, re the election:  if Harris (and therefore the USA)  loses, it will be because of things like this.

 Things as in, not necessarily that particular issue, but because too many of my well-meaning liberal brethren and sisterthren have shot themselves in the foot with their psychological tone-deafness…and Those People ® who feel lectured to and put upon are exacting some kind of social revenge….

How many times have people (usually but not always from the lower economic and education strata) felt silenced or intimidated because they didn’t toe the “progressive” political and cultural lines?  Maybe they have questions about certain social issues; maybe there are things they just don’t understand and therefore, instinctively, tend to fear.

Maybe they don’t actually *hate* people of different genders and sexual orientations and ethnicities and religions and social classes and political opinions.  But that’s what they get labeled as ( haters; ___ -phobics ), and then they don’t feel as if they can even voice their questions and concerns in certain situations and when speaking with certain people, because if they don’t use the *correct* terminology of the moment, the focus will be on *how* they asked their questions/offered their opinions, rather than on the content of those questions and opinions.  They will be shamed and lectured to if they “misgender” or “dead-name” or “mis-pronoun;” they will be condescended to and corrected when they reference a person’s “race” or ethnicity and use the terms black and white instead of Black and White, or Latino/Latina instead of Latinx….

And if the actions and attitudes of aggressive Lefties pushes some centrists or moderates more to the Right, then those Lefties dismiss the migration with their purity-testing mantra:  “Well, it’s no loss, they weren’t really allies in the first place.”

( excerpts The Country I’m Not Loving, 11-6-24 )

 

 

Now, to the afore-mentioned, rational articles that are going to solve all this:

The current (February/March) issue of Free Inquiry   [4]   has a special feature on Transgender Controversies.

“In this issue, we have a section presenting some contrasting views on transgender-related issues. Consistent with our respect for personal autonomy, I don’t see how a humanist could oppose an adult transitioning; it’s that person’s life. Similarly, we should support laws prohibiting employment or housing discrimination against transgender individuals. But that respect for personal autonomy does not resolve whether, in biological terms, sex is binary or whether or under what conditions puberty blockers and hormone treatment should be made available to children. Reasonable people, reasonable humanists, can differ on these and other matters, and this journal will present these differences of opinion, leaving it to you, the reader, to evaluate the competing arguments.”
(Excerpts, my emphases,  Humanism Is Not a Creed, editorial, by Ronald A. Lindsay )

This Free Inquiry special feature consists of an introduction, followed by four articles:

*Transgender Rights: A Framework for Resolving the Controversy, by Gary L. Francione

* In the Toilet with J. K. Rowling:  Reason vs. Emotion in the Transgender Bathroom Debate, by Tilda Storey-Law

* Parental Rights: A Casualty of Anti-Transgender Legislation, by Robert Pokorski

*Get Gender Ideology out of Biology! by Nathan H. Lents

 

Trust us, after reading these articles you may have a better understanding of the issues…our just feel as fabulous as we look.

 

“There are several biological differences between men and women, which, of course, become most obvious following puberty and its cascade of hormones. Men, on average, develop broader shoulders and larger hands and feet, more upper body muscles, more fast twitch muscles, lower body fat, greater height, and so on. The key hormone is testosterone. Men have more testosterone, on average, than women. Testosterone provides a very significant advantage in many athletic competitions, as indicated by, among other things, the fact that doping with testosterone and its synthetic analogs is banned by almost all athletic associations. Given these biological differences, there is, understandably, a performance gap between men and women in many sports.

The relevance of these biological facts was accepted by nearly everyone until the advent of transgender athletes, in particular transgender women. Then for some, ideology took precedence over facts.

‘Trans women are women. Period.’  This is the battle cry of the transgender ideologues. And the message is clear: no debate allowed. If one questions the right of transgender women to compete in women’s sport, one is transphobic. Can’t be any other explanation. And the distinct biological development of men and women? Not relevant. Greatly exaggerated.

One of the bizarre aspects of the ideologues’ position is that the very same people who deny that testosterone has any meaningful effect on one’s competitive ability are also the ones who argue that hormone therapy is essential for those with gender dysphoria. For one issue, hormones might as well be water, but for the other issue, hormones are a critical component of transitioning. Only dogma can magically transform a substance from inert to potent.

So, should transgender women be banned from women’s sports? Not necessarily. Reality is messier than the extreme positions staked out by partisans on both sides of this issue. How much of an advantage a formerly male individual may have over biologically female competitors depends on when and how the person’s transition took place and the skills involved in the sport. There may not be one right answer to this problem; weightlifting may require different guidelines than gymnastics.”

(  excerpts from Introduction To Special Section On Transgender Controversies, By Ronald A. Lindsay, my emphases)

 

 

Although moiself  cares not for the seeming obsession with sports vis-à-vis the Transgender Controversies ®,  I’m including Lindsay’s intro comments on one aspect of the controversies – transgender women’s participation in women’s sports – because of two comments he makes which, IMO, get glossed over in all the hoopla…probably because they are so calmly rational.  One statement is a general guide, the other applies specifics:

* Reality is messier than the extreme positions
staked out by partisans on both sides of this issue;

* (as an example of specifics) weightlifting may require different guidelines
than gymnastics.

That last one holds a host of implications in seven simple words.  The idea/fact that one context may have different requirements than another – that’s almost anathema, in this world of hyperbole.  That approach seems to be asking too much from our lazy ideologies.  We want blanket statements; we want one-size-fits-all, when comes to both questions and solutions.   The idea of coolly and logically looking at/analyzing each situation separately – where’s the nasty soundbite opportunity in that?!   

*   *   *

Freethinkers’ Thought Of The Week     [5]

“I want an avowed atheist in the White House.  When time comes to push that button, I want whoever’s making the decision to understand that once it’s pushed, it’s over.  Finito.  They’re not gonna have lunch with Jesus.”
( Quentin Bufogle )

 

*   *   *

May you grapple with the messiness of reality;
May you have a cheerful chat with a friendly Fed;
May your defecations be properly managed so as not to disturb scientific studies of an uninhabited island’s developing ecosystem…or anything else;
…and may the hijinks ensue.

Thanks for stopping by.  Au Vendredi!

*   *   *

[1] Whaddya mean, Why?

[2] The largest island of Iceland’s Westman Islands and the only one that is inhabited.

[3] The tR___ campaign’s anti-Harris ad, which ran several times during the World Series, which took issue with Harris’ past support for taxpayer funds being spent on providing gender-affirming surgeries for prisoners.  The ad ended with the  tag line: “Kamala is for they/them; President Trump is for you.”

[4] Free Inquiry is a bimonthly journal of secular humanist opinion and commentary published by the Council for Secular Humanism, a program of the Center for Inquiry.

[5] “free-think-er n. A person who forms opinions about religion on the basis of reason, independently of tradition, authority, or established belief. Freethinkers include atheists, agnostics and rationalists.  No one can be a freethinker who demands conformity to a bible, creed, or messiah. To the freethinker, revelation and faith are invalid, and orthodoxy is no guarantee of truth.”  Definition courtesy of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, ffrf.org

The Extraordinary Claims I’m Not Making

August 2, 2024

Robyn Parnell annoyances, current events, freethought/humanism, friends, Holy Shit!, Isms (religion), nature, politics, radio & podcasts, Recreation, sports, TV, Wow, YEE HAW!, Yikes! , , , , , , , , , , , Comments Off on The Extraordinary Claims I’m Not Making

Department Of Wishful (Wistful?) Thinking

Dateline: one week ago tonight, watching the Olympic Games opening ceremony.  As mentioned previously in this space, moiself  looooooooves to watch the Olympics Games; however, I almost never watch the opening or closing ceremonies.  I’m glad I did this time; I thought the French did an excellent job, despite the rain and the attempts at sabotage diversions.  If you missed the ceremony, try to find some footage of that beautifully strange and mesmerizing metal horse galloping down the Seine to deliver the Olympic flag.   [1]

 

 

I actually, embarrassingly, found my eyes tearing up at some points, during the speeches by the French Olympic organizers – words of encouragement and welcome to the athletes and spectators – wherein the hope for peace and the ability to set aside differences and come together for games and camaraderie was lauded.  Somehow, if only for a moment, those sentiments sounded more…plausible?…when spoken with French accent.

Reality of course reared its cynical head, when I recalled the Parade of Nations. The Parade of Nations is the main part of the opening ceremony where the participating countries’ teams enter the host country’s stadium in alphabetical order (as determined by the host country’s language).  The French did it differently, and more creatively IMO: instead of marching around a stadium, the over 10,000 athletes from 204 nations cruised in a flotilla of 94 boats down Paris’ Seine River.  Most of the boats carried the Olympic team members of at least two countries (and sometimes more, for the smaller nations).   I found that to be a cool idea, and it was great fun to see the teams mingling and rejoicing…until the narrator reminded us of the fact that Iraq and Iran should have been sharing a boat, seeing as how their respective countries’ names share 75% of their alphabet (even in the French language)…but nope, couldn’t do that.  And the Russian athletes were absent, their participation banned due to their dickhead of a dictator’s invasion of Ukraine.

 

“Dah, comrades, I am why we can’t have nice things.”

 

Moiself  is fairly certain that in Some Ancient Someone’s mythology, wars and other inter-tribal differences were settled via sporting events.  So, I’ll do the sit back relax and enjoy thing (confession: although I almost never watch daytime TV, for the next two weeks my TV will be on almost continually, tuned to the coverage of the you-know-what).  And maybe, just maybe, I’ll dream of a future mythology shared by all, in which disputes are settled by a heartfelt Women’s Rugby Sevens match, capped off with a haka.   [2]

 

 

 

*   *   *

Department Of Another Reason To Be Optimistic

Have you ever heard multilingual Rhodes Scholar, army veteran, former mayor and presidential candidate and current Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg speak?  I get a wee twinge of hope whenever I hear him talk, on any issue.

Perhaps you saw him during the 2019 Democratic nominees debates, but have you heard him interviewed (as in his recent interview with the NY Times series, The Interview) , or at a press conference?  Did you know that Buttigieg accepts invitations to appear on Fox News to be interviewed by their shamelessly partisan hacks “journalists”?  He will accept invitations to speak in such a hostile environment, where many of his fellow politicians would say, “What’s the point?”, precisely because, as Buttigieg points out, the Fox News type of audience is not even going to *hear* the Democratic party message if no one is willing to take it to them.  He stays calm, remains rational, makes his points – which includes something I’d previously given little thought to:  remember, there is the possibility that person who controls the TV remote does not necessarily speak or think for his   [3]  entire household.  Translation:  just because the household TV is tuned to Fox News that doesn’t mean that every mind in the household is closed off to anything but the Fox News POV…but that’s all they will hear if no rational person is willing to speak to them.

I admire Buttigieg’s composure, intellect, ethics, ideas, and presentation.  And while this year is not yet his time for The Big Chair®, I’m looking forward to seeing Buttigieg serve in the Kamala Harris cabinet, and to having the opportunity to vote for him for president, four to eight to however many years from now.   [4]

*   *   *

Department Of, And Yet…

 

 

“Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”
(Carl Sagan, in ITAL Broca’s Brain   [5])

You may be familiar with British mathematician, philosopher, author, and activist Bertrand  Burton Russell’s “china teapot argument.”  Russell used the argument-by-analogy to illustrate that the philosophic burden of proof lies upon a person making empirically unfalsifiable claims, as opposed to the burden of disproof being upon a person hearing such claims.

In the example of religion, Russell wrote that if he were to claim, sans offering verifiable evidence, that a teapot orbits the Sun somewhere between the Earth and Mars, he could not expect anyone to believe him solely because it would be difficult if not impossible to prove his assertion to be wrong.   [6]

“I ought to call myself an agnostic; but, for all practical purposes, I am an atheist. I do not think the existence of the Christian God any more probable than the existence of the Gods of Olympus or Valhalla. To take another illustration: nobody can prove that there is *not* between the Earth and Mars a china teapot revolving in an elliptical orbit, but nobody thinks this sufficiently likely to be taken into account in practice. I think the Christian God just as unlikely.”
( Absence of Evidence, Evidence of Absence, and the Atheist’s Teapot.  1958 Ars Disputandi. 10 (1): 9–22. doi:10.1080/15665399.2010.10820011. S2CID 37528278 )

Got it; absolutely agree.    [7]   I have no desire to even quasi-seriously entertain the idea that the natural world is the way it is because of the supernatural world (this is the tenets of all religions and spiritual beliefs in a nutshell    [8]  ),  and/or that there are supernatural beings which are capable of intervening in the affairs of the natural world (but evidently choose not to do so, or do so with an almost violent capriciousness   [9] ).

Given the evidence and statistical probabilities,   [10]   I can confidently assert that I do not “believe” there is a china or porcelain teapot – or a warm beverage-holding kettle of any composition – orbiting any celestial object in our solar system.  However, what with all the junk humanity has dumped/let escape into space in the past 70 years, it wouldn’t surprise moiself  if some alert amateur astronomer spots a rogue astronaut’s diaper (excuse me, Maximum Absorbency Garment   eeewwwwww) circling a satellite or even the International Space Station.

That said, moiself  can understand the appeal, if only from the point of view of a fiction writer, for holding on to such flights of fancy. There is much art to be made – many incredible flights of the imagination, from the whimsical to the grotesque, with which to entertain ourselves – in an orbiting-china-teapot world.

 

Remember, boys and girls, your tin foil hat will protect you should the teapot’s orbit disintegrate.

 

*   *   *

Department of Employee Of The Month

 

 

It’s that time, to bestow that prestigious award upon moiself.  Again. The need for which I wrote about here.   [11] 

*   *   *

Freethinkers’ Thought Of The Week     [12]

“As established in the Constitution of The United States,
there are three branches of government.
Your religion is not one of them.”
( as per the legions of us often referred to as Anonymous )

 

 

*   *   *

Parting Shot:  I love it when/I hate it when…

I hate it when I have to think about something that makes me want to quote nonsense to combat nonsense…which is something I try to avoid in this space because it takes me to dark places I’d rather not spend time and brain cells mucking through….

Such dark places include the sadly undeniable fact that some people who identify as Christians support a certain, carroty-tinged candidate. 

 

*   *   *

May you find hope in the existence of some young(er), sane, idealistic politician;
May you consider using a haka to celebrate your victories,
acknowledge your defeats, and settle your disputes;
May you enjoy the occasional foray into an orbiting teapot cosmos;

…and may the hijinks ensue.

Thanks for stopping by.  Au Vendredi!

 

*   *   *

[1] Not a very good description…you just have to see it for it to make sense.

[2]  There are a variety of hakas (ceremonial dances and shout-chants, usually performed by a group) Māori culture.   “The haka is commonly known as a war dance used to fire up warriors on the battlefield, but it’s also a customary way to celebrate, entertain, welcome, and challenge visiting tribes….it’s also a customary way to celebrate, entertain, welcome, and challenge visiting tribes. The very first New Zealand representative rugby team, known as The Natives, performed a haka during a tour of Britain and Australia in 1888-89. The haka performed then, Ka Mate, is still performed by the All Blacks (NZ rugby team) today.”  (History of Haka, experienceallblacks.com )

[3] “…or her”…nah.  It’s usually a he.

[4] He’s young – just 42!

[5]  Sagan’s dictum is related to Occam’s razor and other scientific and philosophical principles on how the weight of evidence for an extraordinary claim must be proportioned to the extraordinariness of the claim)

[6] Because the teapot is too small to be seen by our telescopes, for example, but really, it *could* be there, you just can’t see it.

[7] With minor quibbles as to the varying definitions for what one person may find “extraordinary.”

[8] Which is where most of them belong.

[9] and the causes of/reasons for these sporadic interventions vary among the various supernatural theologies (read: religions)….

[10] I’m not going to quote those here; I just wanted another footnote.

[11] Several years ago, MH received a particularly glowing performance review from his workplace. As happy as I was for him when he shared the news, it left me with a certain melancholy I couldn’t quite peg.  Until I did.

One of the many “things” about being a writer (or any occupation working freelance at/from home) is that although you avoid the petty bureaucratic policies, bungling bosses, mean girls’ and boys’ cliques, office politics and other irritations inherent in going to a workplace, you also lack the camaraderie and other social perks that come with being surrounded by your fellow homo sapiens.  No one praises me for fixing the paper jam in the copy machine, or thanks me for staying late and helping the new guy with a special project, or otherwise says, Good on you, sister. Once I realized the source of the left-out feelings, I came up with a small way to lighten them.

[12] “free-think-er n. A person who forms opinions about religion on the basis of reason, independently of tradition, authority, or established belief. Freethinkers include atheists, agnostics and rationalists.  No one can be a freethinker who demands conformity to a bible, creed, or messiah. To the freethinker, revelation and faith are invalid, and orthodoxy is no guarantee of truth.”  Definition courtesy of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, ffrf.org

The Parade I’m Not Saving From Inanity

July 5, 2024

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Department Of Belated Holiday Greetings

 Moiself  be typing this on July 4.  [1]   And I am typiing this at a time when most if not all of my fellow villagers are heading to procure their seats for Manzanita’s annual 4th of July parade.  As close friends and family know, I am a notorious Parade Loather. ®   Even as a child, I found parades boring, not to mention downright confusing.  Why are a bunch of people sitting on either side of a street, watching other people walk down the middle of the street?  But the small-town-ness of Manzanita’s parade has a certain charm, I was told.  Still, after watching it once to confirm that bit o’charm, I found that once was enough.

In 2018 I devised a way to tolerate the parade, and that was by walking in it.   [2]   Since I find parades to be nonsensical, a non sequitur outfit and ITAL raison d’etre seemed appropriate, and the legend of Orange Hat Woman With Spatulas ® was born.

 

 

For the years after that, when the pandemic forced the cancellation of the parade, on the 4th of July 4 I donned my OHWWS outfit and accoutrements, and marched in a circle in the street outside our house while MH played Stars and Stripes Forever     [3]   from our house’s stereo speakers and neighbors tossed paper airplanes across the street.   [4]

Someone who knows I was in the 2018 parade asked if I was going to this year’s parade. I told them the unvarnished truth:  “(IMO), parades are still inane; they’re only not inane when I’m marching in them; thus, this year’s parade will, once again, be inane.”

 

 

*   *   *

Department Of Quote Of The Week

“When people are in a mindless state, they’re typically in error but rarely in doubt.”

That quote comes from a recent People I Mostly Admire podcast, wherein host Steve Levitt says about his guest, “I cannot think of an academic whose research findings have more consistently surprised me than my guest today.”

That guest (from PIMA’s episode, Pay Attention! (your body will thank you)  was Ellen Langer, the psychologist and researcher who studies the mind-body connection.  As per the Harvard Department of Psychology’s website, Langer “…is considered the mother of mindfulness…

 

Listen to your mother.

 

…and has written five books on the topic…. The Langer Lab conducts research on health, happiness, decision- making, education, business and culture all through the lens of mindfulness.”

Langer told the following story while talking with Levitt about the studies involving the alignment of Western scientific perspective with the eastern Buddhist perspective

Langer:
“Someone once called me, someone doing her PhD, and wanted to know, was mindfulness a fad?… I said, ‘OK, let’s say you burn your toast every morning. And then somebody comes along and shows you that all you need to do is turn the dial down a slight bit and then the toast is no longer going to burn. Is it a fad?’ I mean you’re not going to go back to burning your toast unless you prefer it that way.

It (mindfulness) is not just paying attention.  Because although attention is necessary, it’s not sufficient. There has to be the activity of coming to understand something that is novel, something that is new.

When I started to paint, prior to that, if someone had asked me what color are leaves, I would have said – mindlessly forgetting about the fall when leaves change colors – that leaves are green. Then I start painting, and I start seeing more. You look at trees, and there are hundreds of different color greens that change as the sun changes in the sky, changes in the seasons and so on. Once you wake up, there’s just so much more. Everything feels new and potentially exciting.”

Moiself  loves that sentiment.  A long-time Oregonian, I thought I knew green colors.  Then I traveled to Ireland, and saw in the land and flora a panoply of greens I didn’t know existed.

 

No picture can do it justice.

 

Even more thought-provoking was Langer’s response to Levitt’s question about the process of opening people up to the state of taking a mindfulness approach to life.  She listed three key steps:

(1) The respect for uncertainty ( as in, nobody knows everything for certain
 thus, everything is there to be found out);
(2) Noticing new things, particularly regarding surroundings and people you think
you are familiar with (e.g., notice three new things about the person you live with;
three different ways of doing whatever you’re doing. Look for multiple answers
to any question that you’re asked….)

Langer’s third suggestion is the most intriguing, and most problematic for all of us, I’d guess. It has to do with trying to learn conditionally and to *not* learn how we have been taught to learn – with absolutes, and with memorizing what we are told are unalterable facts.  The “fact” is that even facts are context dependent.  Any first grader will tell you that one plus one equals two.  Langer points out (my emphases) that one and one may be two, but if you’re using a base-two number system one plus one is written as 10. And if you have one pile of sand and add all of that pile of sand to another pile of sand, you don’t have two piles of sand, you have one.

Langer:
“How much is one plus one?… If you add one wad of chewing gum plus one wad of chewing gum, one plus one equals one. So now you have one plus one can be one, can be two, can be 10. ….
Imagine a teacher asks young students, ‘How much is one plus one?’ And little Stevie says, ‘One.’ What’s going to happen? In most classrooms, a teacher is going to try not to look at you like you’re stupid.  You’re going to feel uncomfortable, and possibly set the stage for a lifetime of feeling stupid. Where if the teacher were mindful, the teacher would say, ‘Little Stevie, how did you come to that?’ And then you’d say, ‘If you add one pile of sand to one pile of sand, one plus one is one.’ And now everybody would have learned something.
So everything we’re learning as absolutes makes us think we know, and we don’t know. And when you think you know, you no longer pay any attention. It makes us evaluative of other people who may see a different world.

 

Wait; if I combine these two bowls of guacamole I end up with only one bowl of guacamole?

 

*   *   *

Department Of More Podcast Jewels
Sub-Department Of You’re Not The Only One This Happens To

In the most recent Hidden Brain podcast, Befriending Your Inner Voice, host Shankar Vedantam discusses with his guest, Psychologist Ethan Kross, that most human of conditions:  the annoying, negative voice that goes round and round in your head.  That voice, which Kross calls chatter, is the one that keeps you up and night and makes it difficult to think of anything else once it gets switched on

Vedantam:
“…the phenomenon of self-doubt (which) in some ways that is also connected to chatter, the ways in which people who are actually very good at doing some things can start to  second guess themselves.  You tell the story of Mr. Rogers, on TV  he came across as serenely self-confident, but behind the scenes it was another picture altogether?”

Kross:
“Yeah, there’s this wonderful chatter artifact of sorts that the New York times published several years ago.  Fred Rogers had gone on a sabbatical a while from his show, and when he came back, he was filled with self-doubt, about whether he’d be able to perform at the same level that he did prior to taking this break.  And in this letter he writes to himself, he very, very candidly expresses that vulnerability.  He writes, ‘Am I kidding myself that I am able to write a script again?  I wonder.  Why don’t I trust myself?  After all these years, it is just as bad as ever.  I wonder if every creative artist goes through the torture of the damned trying to create?  Oh well; the hour cometh, and now *is* when I’ve got to do it.  Get to it, Fred; get to it.’

So, this is really remarkable to me…we’re talking about Mr. Rogers.  Mr. Rogers helped teach *me,* and countless other kids and adults too, how to manage my emotions growing up…and yet here we see him admitting to struggling with his own self-doubt at times…. This is such an important message to convey…it really says, ‘Hey, if you’ve ever experienced chatter; if you’ve ever experienced self-doubt, welcome to the human condition.’ “

 

“Please won’t you be my human condition neighbors, boys and girls?”

 

*   *   *

Department of Employee Of The Month

 

 

It’s that time, to bestow that prestigious award upon moiself.  Again. The need for which I wrote about here.   [5] 

*   *   *

Freethinkers’ Thought Of The Week     [6]

 

*   *   *

Parting Shot:  I love it when/I hate it when…

I hate it when those whose rhetoric and actions indicate that they know almost nothing   [7]   convince their followers that they know everything.

 

*   *   *

May we recognize when one plus one equals something other than two;
May you pay attention to that which you think you know all about;
May you appreciate the piccolos’ part in arguably the best march ever written;   [8]

…and may the hijinks ensue.

Thanks for stopping by.  Au Vendredi!

 

*   *   *

[1] y’all be reading this on the 5th or later. Thus, belated.

[2] Manzanita allows basically anyone to walk in the parade, by showing up at an assembly point for walkers (as opposed to those riding in vehicles or performing with groups)

[3] I hate parades, but I LOVE Stars and Stripes Forever.

[4] the latter in place of the Oregon Air National Guard, which, on that day, does a flyby over as many of Oregon’s July 4 parade towns as they can.

[5] Several years ago, MH received a particularly glowing performance review from his workplace. As happy as I was for him when he shared the news, it left me with a certain melancholy I couldn’t quite peg.  Until I did.

One of the many “things” about being a writer (or any occupation working freelance at/from home) is that although you avoid the petty bureaucratic policies, bungling bosses, mean girls’ and boys’ cliques, office politics and other irritations inherent in going to a workplace, you also lack the camaraderie and other social perks that come with being surrounded by your fellow homo sapiens.  No one praises me for fixing the paper jam in the copy machine, or thanks me for staying late and helping the new guy with a special project, or otherwise says, Good on you, sister. Once I realized the source of the left-out feelings, I came up with a small way to lighten them.

[6] “free-think-er n. A person who forms opinions about religion on the basis of reason, independently of tradition, authority, or established belief. Freethinkers include atheists, agnostics and rationalists.   No one can be a freethinker who demands conformity to a bible, creed, or messiah. To the freethinker, revelation and faith are invalid, and orthodoxy is no guarantee of truth.”  Definition courtesy of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, ffrf.org

[7] Or that if they don’t know something, that something must not be worth knowing.

[8] All together now:  in Stars and Stripes Forever!

The Dream I’m Not Interpreting

June 28, 2024

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*   *   *

Department Of Referencing Moiself

The post is a part two, meant to be read as companion piece to part one, my post of 4-7-23 ( The Upbringing I’m Not Regretting ).  Cliff notes preview:  the subject for part two is my leaving “the church” – specifically, how I told my pastor (but first told moiself ) that I was doing so, via a dream that I’d had.

My dreams range from pastiches of images/seemingly random blurbs from the previous day’s events, to straightforward narratives of events or scenarios realized, to Cecil B. DeMille    [1] style, cast-of-thousands epics, with the occasional/random celebrity cameo.  I think that the scenarios and images contained in my dreams can be

*  both profound and significant, with my unconscious mind using my dreams to work on puzzles, or try to message my conscious mind;

*  due to the random firing of neurons stimulating the brain’s centers of memory and creativity;

* everything above and beyond and in between.

 

 

I had a class in college wherein dream interpretation was mentioned and briefly discussed, [2]   and for a couple of months after that, I kept a dream journal. Upon waking in the morning – or sometimes in the middle of the night, when one of my dreams was either so intense or ludicrous that my brain decided to rouse me from sleep with a what the hell was that? –  I wrote down whatever dreams I could remember. I wrote what I wrote and put that journal away until the next dream; I purposefully did not read the journal entries until several months had passed.  My idea was to try to view what I’d dreamed with new (or newer) eyes and perspective.

When I did go back and read them, I was astonished.  Employing images and scenarios that were in turns realistic, fanciful, or outrageous, my brain apparently was using my dreams to work out/try to identify ongoing dilemmas relating to my school studies, my job, my boyfriend(s), my relationships with my apartment mates, my past, present, and future…  Yeah, like, that would be, My Life ® .

My subconscious mind – likely the hippocampus, an area in the temporal lobe which is believed to be key in dreaming and imagination, and not to be confused with the part of a college where large semiaquatic mammals native to sub-Saharan Africa hang out….

 

“Are you sure this is the way to the dining commons?”

 

I’ll try that again.

My subconscious mind – likely the hippocampus, an area in the temporal lobe which is believed to be key in dreaming and imagination – knew things that my conscious mind was apparently unable or unwilling to deal with.  And in that sense, my dreams were my attempt to send a message to moiself.

Although I was fascinated (and at times embarrassed)  to read my dreams, I was busy with work and classes, and fell out of the habit of writing them down.  Then,

 

 

As in, Hillsboro, OR, one winter weekend morning almost twenty years ago.

Moiself  awoke in a state of some agitation.  As MH and I packed up the car and kids for our day trip to Mt. Hood, I asked if he would mind driving  as I needed to “…write something down.”  Once we were on the road I opened the blank spiral notebook I’d grabbed at the last minute and wrote down the source of my agitation: the early morning dream I’d had.

I hadn’t consistently written down my dreams since college. This time after writing down my dream I did not set the notebook aside, but read through it again…and again…and again.  Later that day, after we’d returned to Hillsboro, I told MH about my dream.  I told MH that my brain was sending me a gigantamous, face-palm of a message:

You.  Have.  To.  Leave.

You have to leave “the church;” as in, religious attendance and affiliation.

Your involvement has served its purposes (see 4-7-23 post for what that was).

Continued involvement, even in the liberal/progressive UCC, will not only give you
an increasingly severe case of cognitive and ethical dissonance but will
actually be harmful to the children you are trying to educate and raise with integrity.

I stopped going to church.

The pastor of the church (“Pastor D____”) our family attended was a person I liked and admired, as well as being one of the most well-read people I have ever met.  A month or so after I’d had the dream she called to ask me if she could take me to lunch to discuss why I had left the church.  Sure, I said, then asked if I could email her the narrative of my dream, so that she could read it before we met up.   [3]    Pastor D____ agreed, which probably accounted for the pleasant lunch that we had.

D____ in no way tried to refute or chastise me, or convince me that my decision was wrong.  In fact, she told me that after reading my account of my dream she’d realized that, “Yes, it’s true, you don’t belong in the church.”

 

 

Yup; really.

And we enjoyed our chai teas and the Indian restaurant’s ample lunch buffet, and talked about…other stuff.

Over the years I’d shared my perspectives on Christian theology with D____, and through my participation in the weekly nonfiction book   [4]  group that she led, she was aware that I was not a “true believer,” even when it came into the UCC’s liberal theological/social gospel interpretations.  What she was not aware of was that when it became my turn to serve as a deacon   [5]   and I was setting up for a church service, I would perform my own little acts of dissension, such as (but not limited to) the following.

In our church there was an enormous King James Bible kept on a platform behind the altar (the hefty tome had been donated by two church member in honor of their late son; the UCC is not a King James-ish denomination when it comes to bible translations ).   It was customary to have that bible open to the pages of whatever Old Testament reading had been chosen for that particular Sunday’s service (even though, with extremely rare exceptions, the laypersons doing the scripture readings did not read from that KJ bible).  When doing my Deacon set-up tasks, instead of opening that bible to the page(s) featuring the morning reading I would find a nearby page which contained a particularly odious passage, such as the Psalm which lauds dashing the infants of one’s enemies upon rocks ( Psalm 137) , or the Hebrew god’s directions of how and when to kidnap and rape women (Judges 21:10-24; Numbers 31:7-18, ad nauseum….) or the story of Yaweh sending bears to maul boys who had teased a prophet about his baldness (2 Kings 2:23)….

 


I hadn’t told Pastor D____ about that little petty prank of mine.   I had told her other things, and she’s always assured me that those beliefs/disbeliefs of mine, those “arguments” I had with the tents of religion, were exactly why my presence and perspective was needed in church.  Thus, during our lunch, after having read my dream, D____ apparently felt no need to discuss my reasons with me. She did say at one point that while it came as a disappointment to her that I was leaving (the church), it did *not* come as a surprise, considering how I’d “…made many close friendships with __________”  (she named several people who had attended the church at one point, and then left).

Much like writing down a dream, setting it aside and thinking about it later, that remark of Pastor D___’s came back to me.  When I shared it with MH, he reached the same conclusion about/interpretation of it, as moiself:

“In a way it’s like she *wants* you to go,
before you stay longer and influence others to leave as well.”

And now, the dream (followed by my thoughts about it, written later that same day, after I’d reread what I’d written):

*   *   *

The Dream ® :  early Wednesday morning, April 20, 2005

I am looking at an old house that is for sale.  Design or style-wise, it is a combination Victorian and what I call “Grandma house,” with many classic features, from the glass & brass doorknobs to hardwood floors, moldings, built-ins, and exceptional woodwork.

Pastor D___ is showing me the house.  I’m unclear as to whether she is selling it; i.e., whether it is her house that is for sale, or whether she is acting as an agent for another party.  The house has been newly remodeled and upgraded; I glance out a window and see workmen, their trucks parked in front of the house, packing up ladders and painting supplies.  D___ tells me about the new plumbing and points out the fresh paint in many of the rooms and talks about the upgrades, which are very eye-catching.

Then I see the basement/first floor (I’m not sure which it was; we seemed to start touring the house in the middle floor, and the house had at least three floors), and I am astonished.  The basement/ground floor is an absolute disaster.  Its wooden flooring is old and rotting; paint has been randomly flung on the walls; floorboards and moldings are missing or pulled out and splintered, light fixtures are missing or damaged, woodchips and sawdust litter the floors….  I ask D____ if the remodeling will be finished soon, possibly by the workmen I’d seen outside?  No, she tells me, they are packing up and not returning – they’re finished with this particular house.

D____ senses my disappointment, and points out that I can finish the job myself or hire another remodeling crew…and then she offers to lower the price to $305,000. (I can’t remember the asking price, but it was a good deal higher).  I know that 305k would be a good price – a great deal, really – for that kind of house, if the house was in top condition, but its ground floor needs BIU extensive work, and I have neither the time, the skills, nor the desire to do it myself.  I add up the time, materials and labor costs, estimating what it would take to get the floor in shape (I’ve been looking at similar style houses for some time and have comparison prices in my head) and am quite discouraged, as it would be less costly to just tear the place down and start over.

I tell D____ that I appreciate her showing me the house, and while it may be a good price for what it is, I just can’t buy it.

*    *    *   

I just can’t buy it.

How obvious can my subconscious get?!?!  The last line of my dream, not-so-subtly screaming out what’s been eating at me.

(And it is about what’s eating me.  Despite K’s and Belle’s discussing their objections to bible-religion/”church stuff” with me over the years, they were not in the dream, nor was MH.)

I like many things about the UCC Hillsboro congregation in particular and the UCC denomination in general.  But, for all our/their remodeling, they are still a Christian church in a Christian denomination, and the ground floor — Christian theology in particular, religion in general — is, to me, a mess:  archaic, in shambles, needing to be replaced or simply razed.  I also love, respect and admire Pastor D____ for what she is, and for what she does and tries to do.  I appreciate the “deal” she has made for (people like) me, but I can’t buy it.  I can’t buy Christianity – even the laissez-faire, UCC brand – for what it is.

I’m certain that there have been several recent triggers for this dream, including the Sunday when a family from our kids’ school attended our church.  There was a baptism, and I remembered experiencing discomfort and even embarrassment on their behalf (or mine?)  when I listened to – actually paid attention to –  the baptism liturgy and thought, yet again, I don’t believe this stuff.   That the “waters of baptism” confer any special blessing or standing – that’s voodoo/chicken bones talk.  Much if not all of it is symbolic and/or metaphorical, I realize, but that’s not what was said (and then, what’s the point for using the symbols and metaphors?).  The new member class I attended (as a longtime member who was there to meet potential new members) also brought uncomfortable issues to mind, as does almost any meeting where church policy related to theology is discussed.  The new member attendees were all pleasant people, but listening to their experiences and ideas of what a church is or should be was awkward for me.  When ZM mentioned how she was unfamiliar with the Bible, having grown up in a Hindu household, and was learning about it through the children’s sermon and her daughter’s children’s Bible, I found myself wanting to blurt out, RUN FOR THE HILLS!!!, or at least, “Don’t go any further than the kiddie version, or you might not like what you find.”

These feelings are nothing new to me.  Participating in a “worship” service of any kind has always been a matter of toleration, as I find the whole concept itself to be silly at best.  I don’t know what this means in terms of practical application; it’s not like I feel I must Leave The Church ®  this very moment.***  I think they/we are mostly trying to do good in the world, and I enjoy the community.  But the intensity of my concerns has increased…and it’s not just a social club, it’s a church.  The community, as nice as I may find the members, is based on and organized around the false premises of religion, and I’m not good at pretending to not know what I know.

The intellectual dishonesty of the rationale for continuing to participate in church stuff – to support a more liberal group to help counter the Right/conservative religious voice (aka the  “voting for moderates” justification, as per MH’s reason for why he remains registered as a Republican) –  is no longer enough, for me.  By being part of a religion, even a relatively progressive one, I lend credence to ideas that, in their application, are dangerous and just plain wrong, including

(1)  the standards of reason, judgment and evidence I apply to every other facet of life may be set aside for matters of “faith;”

(2)  extraordinary propositions can be believed without evidence;

(3)  that, by applying interpretation and razor’s edge scholarship (read: by rationalizing myth, fallacy, ignorance and atrocity) the Christian bible – or anyone’s bible –  is an appropriate and even a good lens through which humanity may view present day circumstances.

 

*   *   *

*   *   *

 

Freethinkers’ Thought Of The Week     [6]

When I became convinced that the Universe is natural – that all the ghosts and gods are myths, there entered into my brain, into my soul, into every drop of my blood, the sense, the feeling, the joy of freedom. The walls of my prison crumbled and fell, the dungeon was flooded with light and all the bolts, and bars, and manacles became dust. I was no longer a servant, a serf or a slave. There was for me no master in all the wide world – not even in infinite space.
I was free – free to think, to express my thoughts – free to live to my own ideal – free to live for myself and those I loved — free to use all my faculties, all my senses – free to spread imagination’s wings – free to investigate, to guess and dream and hope – free to judge and determine for myself –  free to reject all ignorant and cruel creeds, all the “inspired” books that savages have produced, and all the barbarous legends of the past – free from popes and priests – free from all the “called” and “set apart” – free from sanctified mistakes and holy lies – free from the fear of eternal pain – free from the winged monsters of the night – free from devils, ghosts and gods. For the first time I was free.

(as quoted, in Leaving Christianity, from Why I Am Agnostic, by Robert Green Ingersoll.  Ingersoll [1833-1899], nicknamed “the great agnostic,” was American politician and orator, humanistic and scientific rationalism philosopher during the Golden Age of Freethought    [7]  )

 

*   *   *

Parting Shot:  I love it when/I hate it when…

I love it when my dreams are stylishly consistent.

Example: Godzilla once had a cameo in a dream of mine.  The dream had started in color, switched to black and white during Godzilla’s scene, then went back to color when Godzilla left.  Up until then, the only Godzilla movies I’d seen were filmed in B & W.

 

 

*   *   *

May you remember the dreams that are worth remembering;
May you remember that any dream you remember is worth remembering;
May you pay attention to what your subconscious is telling you;
…and may the hijinks ensue.

Thanks for stopping by.  Au Vendredi!

*   *   *

*** Even though I did.

[1] Am I dating moiself  with that reference? Should I use Spielberg, or Nolan, or Cameron, or the casts-of-thousands directors of today?  But then, today’s cast of thousands are maybe a cast of 6 actual actors with 1,974 CGIs….

[2] The jist of the discussion being that no dream can “mean” anything out of context for the one doing the dreaming – no object in th dream “represents” any thing or idea for all people.  Or as that influential but misogynistic man of his times/founder of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud once admitted, Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

[3] I made no formal proclamation of dissociation or anything like that; I didn’t even really tell anyone. I just stopped going.  MH was not ready to do the same, so he continued for a few weeks, taking the kids at first.  When our offspring realized they had a choice, they elected to stay home with me.  We were all still in the habit of having a certain amount of hours set aside on Sunday, and used that time to go to nearby city park, taking our trigger-handled trash grabbers and large trash bags.  We’d roam the grounds of the park,  picking up the plethora of garbage (fast food wrappers, beer bottle caps, etc.) which the park users somehow neglected to escort to the park’s many and ample trash bins. 

[4] Subjects ranging from science and theology, comparative religion, religious history, critiques of religion….

[5] Duties vary widely between denominations and congregations, but generally a deacon is a church member who helps out the pastor and/or church members with, for example, setting up the sanctuary for the church service and then cleaning up afterward.

[6] “free-think-er n. A person who forms opinions about religion on the basis of reason, independently of tradition, authority, or established belief. Freethinkers include atheists, agnostics and rationalists.   No one can be a freethinker who demands conformity to a bible, creed, or messiah. To the freethinker, revelation and faith are invalid, and orthodoxy is no guarantee of truth.”  Definition courtesy of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, ffrf.org

[7]  “The Golden Age of Freethought is the mid-19th-century period in United States history which saw the development of the socio-political movement promoting freethought. Anti-authoritarian and intellectually liberating historical eras had existed many times in history, notably in eighteenth century France. But the period roughly from 1875 to 1914 is referred to by at least one contemporary writer as “the high-water mark of freethought as an influential movement in American society”….   Freethought is a philosophical position that holds that ideas and opinions should be based on science and reason, and not restricted by authority, tradition, or religion. It is characteristic of the 18th century Enlightenment but hardly confined to any one epoch or place. The late nineteenth century American Golden Age was encouraged by the lectures of the extremely popular agnostic orator Robert Green Ingersoll, the popularization of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, the push for women’s suffrage, and other political, scientific, and social trends that clashed with religious orthodoxy and caused people to question the traditional ideas about the world that they encountered in received opinion.”  (excerpts, Wikipedia, The Golden Age of Freethought )

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