Category: Uncategorized

OK, I’m ready to write Book #6 of the Bell Mountain series, as soon as I clear away this mountain of work in front of me.

No, I don’t have a title, not yet. What I do have is the first and last chapters and some new characters. That’s all I need to get the show on the road. My Lord will give me the rest as needed.

A minute or two after I sat down to supper a few nights ago, I received those two chapters as an instantaneous burst to my imagination. Call it inspiration. I can’t begin to explain how it works.

Thank you, Father.

I don’t know about you, but around here we’re all in a dither about that hour of time we lost on Saturday night.  So… we’ve decided we aren’t gonna take it anymore!

I work right here at home, and my wife has retired, so here’s what we’re gonna do next year when it’s time to set the clocks ahead–to wit: we won’t. And I hope it starts a trend.

So as not to be totally contrarian, we’ll set them ahead 10 minutes a day; so in a mere six days, we’ll have caught up to everybody who still lets the government tell them what time it is. We’ll do that until they stop fooling around with the time.

We invite you all to join us.

Sometimes when I look up from work, I notice things in my own neighborhood that I never saw before.

At the neighborhood school, practically next door to me, the American flag hangs from the pole in tatters. The wind has torn it into several flapping pieces. The school never lowers the flag, leaves it out night and day, in all sorts of weather.

When I went to elementary school, the flag was lowered at the end of each school day, folded correctly according to flag etiquette (usually by Boy Scouts), and stored in a special locker until it was run up the pole the next day–unless there was foul weather.

Am I surprised that a public school today would show such flagrant disrespect to America’s flag?

Absolutely not one freakin’ bit!

Tomorrow at 7 p.m., at St. George’s Anglican Church in St. Catherines, Ontario, a group of feminist “priests” will perform The Vagina Monologues from the altar of the church.

I’ll have more to say about this in my column for News With Views this week. For the time being, let Christians pray for the reclamation of this church–before it becomes like the chaff which the wind driveth away.

If you don’t know anything about The Vagina Monologues, look it up on the Internet. You’ll be appalled by what these silly women propose to present from the altar.  I think I would put this on a par with Belshazzar and his concubines drinking out of the vessels from the Lord’s Temple in Jerusalem.

Tomorrow I will join dozens of other Americans in not watching the Super Bowl.

Oh, no! I’ll miss Madonna’s halftime show! Thanks, but I’d rather watch ants crawling in and out of the ant-hill. The Stupid Bowl halftime show is always some boring entertainer that you’ve already seen hundreds of times, whether you wanted to or not. The real trick is avoiding Madonna altogether.

But you’ll miss the six hours’ worth of pre-game coverage! Eh? What can they find to talk about for six hours?

I have banished TV from my home, but I still have to listen to an infinite number of radio ads with Stupid Bowl themes. These are almost indescribably offensive. In most of them, adult males are portrayed as the equivalent of poorly brought-up four-year-olds, who would be almost certain to defecate on the sofa if their long-suffering wives didn’t nag them constantly. And on Stupid Bowl Sunday, the talking heads who nag you all year about healthy eating turn around and exhort you to sit on the couch for 16 hours gobbling snacks and fast food.

Somewhere along the way, they supposedly get around to actually playing a football game–not that you’d notice.

Alas! Is it come to this? Are we Americans become so tame, so lame, so empty-headed, that we can be led around by the nose, and brought to invest so much time, so much passion, so much money in a freakin’ football game? I suppose 150 years of public schooling, with its emphasis on mindless conformity, has truly done its work. If we’re told to do it often enough, by enough voices in the media, who knows what we might not do? How else do you think a community-organizing mystery man, with no more biography than a robot or a lizard-man, gets elected president?

It must be some kind of hypnotism. You are passionately interested in the Super Bowl. You are passionately interested in the Super Bowl…

No, no, no! You shall not tell me what I’m passionate about! I refuse to waste my passion on a stupid football game! (But isn’t that kind of what you’re doing now, old sport?) All right, all right–I have gotten cranked up about it. Maybe football brings out the worst in me.

But really, it’s not about football at all. It’s about cultural slavery, and marching when they tell you to march, and stopping when they tell you to stop, and, finally, drinking the poison Kool-Aid…

Yesterday it was raining cats and dogs (as usual–and I don’t even live in Seattle), and as I was going out the front door, my foot slipped on the wet doorstep, my ankle buckled, and I was launched into a swan-dive to the cement sidewalk.

It could’ve been very nasty, but I escaped with a scraped knee and nothing else. Obviously God was watching over me. But I must also thank my judo instructors of long ago, who drilled us incessantly in the art of taking a fall. After all, if you can’t fall without getting hurt, you really can’t practice judo. Even after all this time, I have retained this skill. I might’ve wound up like Humpty-Dumpty, otherwise. Certainly I would recommend this training to everyone!

Meanwhile, I’m still waiting for the signal to start writing Book #6 of my Bell Mountain Series. Our artist, Kirk Douponce, says he’s ready to start work on the cover of #4, The Last Banquet, and I’m in the process of proofreading it. Hopefully it’ll be ready for publication by the end of this summer; and then we can all get to work on #5, The Fugitive Prince… provided I continue to survive any additional falls I might take.

 

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2011 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

A New York City subway train holds 1,200 people. This blog was viewed about 4,500 times in 2011. If it were a NYC subway train, it would take about 4 trips to carry that many people.

Click here to see the complete report.

Sorry to bring up politics again. But when utter, unadulterated fantasy is repackaged as a political program that people are urged to vote for–and actually do!–it mightily cheeses me off.

This particular fantasy raises anguished howls of protest over “income inequality”–as if there were ever such a thing in the real world, or ever could be, as “income equality.” The message is that if we elect a bunch of really cool Democrats, they’ll get rid of all that inequality and transform America into the land of equal incomes.

Does this mean that a gang of crooks and schnooks in Washington will wave a magic wand, and you and I will suddenly be blessed with incomes equal to Nancy Pelosi’s, or Al Gore’s? I mean, what is this–the Arabian Nights?

The only place in the real world where there is income equality is the cemetery.

I don’t like to do politics on this site, but occasionally some “leader” makes a remark that’s so asinine, it just has to be answered.

Our president says, of the Occupy Wall Street dingbats, “I understand the frustration… People feel separated from their government.”

No, dude–no! You couldn’t be more hopelessly, cluelessly wrong!

We are not separated enough from our accursed government!