Prodigal Returns?

An update on my wandering package: At 10:32 AM today it made it back to Tulsa and now has a reasonable chance of reaching my mailbox. Of course, Tulsa is where it went awry before, so who knows?

In any event, I’m looking forward to hearing about what the New Orleans suburbs are like.

Neither Snow nor Rain nor Sleet...

So on February 8 I ordered a book. It was in a store near Houston. ABEbooks sent me the tracking number, so I could see what our mighty Postal Service was doing with the book. I've looked things up before like this, because sometimes it's interesting to watch them come from distant places.

This time it was very interesting. The book made it's way up through Texas to reach Oklahoma City by February 10. Later that day, it went to Tulsa, and the expected delivery date showed Feb. 11, which was early. The next day it was still in Tulsa and showed a delivery date of Feb 12. Instead, on February 12, my book from near Houston arrived at the United States Postal Service Shipping Center in New Orleans, and the due date disappeared, replaced by a message that my package was "moving through the system" and would be delivered late. All through today it showed "In transit to the next station." It arrived at the next station -- Saint Rose, LA, at 8:58 PM local time. Saint Rose is a suburb a short way west from New Orleans.

So I tried to figured out why my package started heading towards Louisiana, and your guess is as good as mine. The city of Roseland, Louisiana, has a ZIP Code that has the same digits as mine except the second and third digits are switched, which right now is my best guess. Fortunately my exact street address does not exist in Roseland, so there is a chance someone will wake up and send it back to Pawhuska.

There are days when I neither want to send anything through the United States Postal Service nor order from anyone who ships with them. So far, all of the days since the original expected delivery have been those days. And counting.

All Warm and Fuzzy

That feeling you get when you see your preferred football team’s logo painted for the Super Bowl…on the home field of your longtime hated rival.

Lycanthropy!

The condition of the title can be recognized, Johannes Actuarius tells us in his 1340 Therapeutike Methodos, by examining a person and discovering ulcerated feet and legs from nighttime hours spent wandering among tombs.

As recounted in Ask the Past, the afflicted person makes such wanderings as a wolf before returning in the morning in human form. Actuarius describes the condition as a "melancholy," which means something different to him than it does to us, but in any event the people suffering from the condition often remain silent and sad. All the same, one shouldn't try to comfort them in their wolfish form, as no amount of offered treats and "Oh, sad doggie!" are likely to curb their lupine appetite for, ah, fresh food.

Strangely, no mention is made of the clothing worn by sufferers. The snazzy dressing that makes survivors interested in the werewolf's tailor was apparently a later development.

Send the Envoy!

Finland Prime Minister Sanna Marin hosted some friends after they'd all seen some concerts, and a couple of the friends got, um, really friendly while on the wrong end of a camera. The matter has caused another headache for Marin, who has recently reminded the world that politicians don't always have fun by wrestling waitresses half their size into unwanted double gross old guy contact.

Rumors that former president Bill Clinton immediately offered to mediate any dispute, saying, "I'll put myself between the two parties for as long as it takes to get things worked out," are as yet unfounded.

Believe It or Not!

1985: Actress Jackie Swanson lands a role in a Prince music video; she is the girl in the titular "Raspberry Beret" who hands His Royal Badness his guitar at the beginning of the song.

1989: Actress Jackie Swanson begins a four-year stint in a recurring role on Cheers as Kelly Gaines, girlfriend of and eventual wife to dull Indiana-born bartender Woody Boyd.

WOODY BOYD STOLE PRINCE'S GIRL!

It Might Be Just What We Needed!

Gen-X single men who have been exhibiting our generation's well-known slackitude, our time has come!

Our task is before us, gentlemen. I have every expectation we will acquit ourselves with honor and distinction.

Clarity

A pop-culture website that I often read had an item in which the writer worried that the trailer to the upcoming Halloween Kills reveals too much about the movie. Which is a sequel to 2018's sequel to the original 1978 movie that doesn't take into account any of the subsequent sequels and also ignores the rebooted version from "musician" "filmmaker" Rob Zombie and its sequel.

Anyway, the writer thinks the trailer shows too many of the kills by lead psychopath Michael Myers, whose brutal string of slayings is what passes for a plot in all of these movies -- except, of course, for Halloween III: Season of the Witch, which involved cursed Halloween masks.

Halloween (2018) retconned all movies subsequent to the original out of existence, including the original sequel and both alternate timelines that came from it. It "ended" with the unstoppable killer Myers burning in Laurie Strode's (Jamie Lee Curtis) basement. But of course someone who's almost as dumb as the people making these movies unwittingly helps Michael escape to continue killing, and as mentioned above the article worries that too many kills are given away, ruining the movie. When the only appeal of your movie is the supposed inventiveness with which the villain snuffs out human life, you can be certain that you have made a movie that, if karma is real, you will one day be required to answer for.

Luna, See?

So a group of Aussies put together a proposal in line with things that are called declarations of "Nature's rights" that argues for the moon to be given rights.

The "Declaration on the Rights of the Moon" says that the moon is a "sovereign natural entity" in its own right and that it has a right to, among other things, "remain a forever peaceful celestial entity, unmarred by human conflict or warfare." Now, many people will mock these members of the Australian Earth Laws Alliance for suggesting that an inanimate object has anything resembling rights. They may suggest that this is what you get from people who walk around upside down all of the time. But for my money, the problem is not that they have set their minds to describing how rocks, dust and whatnot can assert the same kinds of rights that people can. No, the problem is that they have not gone far enough.

For one, the Moon is not a body separately orbiting the sun but is a satellite of Earth, meaning that it is a part of a total Earth-Moon system. And the Declaration says absolutely nothing about the way that the Earth possesses all of breathable atmosphere available to that system, as well as more than 99 percent of the total atmosphere and more than 90 percent of the water. Furthermore, the Earth uses its mass privilege to force the Moon to orbit it and has even enslaved it to the point that the Moon cannot rotate according to its own desires but must always turn one face to the oppressor planet.

Clearly, no Declaration on the Rights of the Moon that overlooks these astounding inequities can consider itself to be on the side of the oppressed or to have the full flourishing of the moon as its goal. The so-called Declaration makes a mockery of the Moon's rights by failing to address these inequities and the overwhelming privilege the Earth enjoys. I am appalled.

She Don't Lie, She Don't Lie, She Don't Lie...They'rrrre Grrreat!

(With apologies to J.J. Cale.)

Make your play, most important meal of the day...cocaine

Sugar frosting is nice, but take my advice...cocaine

She don't lie, she don't lie, she don't lie...cocaine

Add to your Cap'n Crunch, you'll be flyin' till lunch...cocaine

It's smooth as silk, it's better without the milk...cocaine

She don't lie, she don't lie, she don't lie...cocaine

Protect your nose, just dust your Cheerios...cocaine

Put some more on your flakes, and you bet they're great...cocaine

She don't lie, she don't lie, she don't lie
Cocaine

She don't lie, she don't lie, she don't lie
Cocaine

And if you look at the picture at the link you'll see what actual cocaine-dusted cornflakes look like and they are not at all appetizing.

Error in Judgement

There are several rising tides on Facebook recently -- the eternal upswing of everyone telling everyone else, "You're doing it wrong" when it comes to COVID-19 is just one of them.

Another old familiar friend is the assertion that all of the people who didn't vote like I did didn't just arrive at different conclusions or err in interpreting facts or proceed from mistaken assumptions. They were flat-out stupid (or evil, or racist, or whatever.) I just can't get behind this idea, and not only because I have friends who didn't vote the way I did. It just defies logic to assert that 153 million Americans were not only wrong, they were evil and stupid...

Preservation!

In 2008 some folks in Norway built what's called the Svaldbard Global Seed Vault, a repository for seeds from a wide range of plants. In case of global catastrophe, humanity's remnants can go to the vault and retrieve seeds for most of the plans that now exist on the earth. This could come in handy in re-starting agriculture.

Now the Oreo company has done something similar, just up the road from the Seed Vault, in order to ensure that the potential survivors have not only the supplies needed to bring grains, fruit and vegetables back to a devastated Earth. They will now be able to reintroduce Oreos amidst the devastation. The vault contains not only a supply of the cookies but also the recipe for making more. Such civic-mindedness is definitely to be thanked, and I would encourage all persons to commit the coordinates of the new vault -- 78° 08’ 58.1” N, 16° 01’ 59.7” E -- to memory for their own good.

Hostess was asked about similar plans with the Twinkie, but a company spokesperson pointed out that Twinkies are almost certain to survive any disaster that does not completely annihilate the planet and so a vault is not needed. Another spokesperson assured us of the same durability regarding Keith Richards.

The Purr-fect Game?

So the company Annapurna Interactive has developed a game for Playstation 5 -- Stray -- that will let you navigate the streets of a city as a cat. Yes, you can play a video game in which you are a cat.

Eh, I don't care. D'oh! Looks like I'm already playing...

Head Scratcher

The above photo of a fox that randomly jumped up onto a car windshield of a man who had a camera and the presence of mind to use it won the top prize in the United Kingdom Mammal Society photo contest.

Ol' Reynard has the look of a creature that has seen his distant canine cousins hanging out with these slow and clumsy primates and decides to get a closer look and see what all of the fuss is about. Judging from this photo at least, he seems distinctly underwhelmed.

Now We're Ready for Easter!

It didn't really feel like Lent yet, in the same way that for many people it doesn't feel like Christmas if there's no snow on the ground (these people all live in the Northern Hemisphere, by the way). But comes now Candida Moss writing for The Daily Beast, who having perused at least one biblical studies journal brings forth in deathless prose our annual assurance that Easter is on its way with her March 9 article "Everyone's Favorite Gospel Is a Forgery." Because you see, we just can't have Easter without some clueless uncovering of the kind of research nearly every seminary or religious studies student has seen just under a million times about how Everything You Ever Believed About the Bible Is Wrong, You Credulous Uneducated Simpletons.

Dr. Moss reports on a March 2020 Journal of New Testament Studies article by Dr. Hugo Mendez, an assistant professor of religious studies at the University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill. In it, Dr. Mendez suggests that a long-held belief of New Testament scholars -- that the gospel of John and the three letters that bear the Apostle's name come from a community of believers perhaps originally founded by the Apostle himself -- is untrue.

Beginning in the 19th century Biblical scholars began to seriously question whether any of the gospels were written by their named authors. The ancient world was not nearly as persnickety about actual authorship and accepted the practice that followers of a particular teacher might publish work under that teacher's name even if he didn't actually write it. Mark, it seemed, was written first. Matthew and Luke seemed to have drawn on Mark and an additional document, as well as their own sources. Since much of these studies were being done by German scholars, the letter Q came to be the shorthand name for this theorized shared source as the German world translated "source" is Quelle.

John, on the other hand, was clearly recognized as the product of an entirely different set of source material. Scholars skeptical of the claim that the author was the actual Apostle himself suggested that it may have come from a religious community he founded and which gathered up sayings and stories he had related about Jesus into the gospel and then the three "Johannine Letters." Dr. Mendez, though, thinks that this community didn't exist.

The actual journal article is behind a paywall. Though Dr. Moss is herself a New Testament professor (at the University of Birmingham in England), her work for The Daily Beast includes articles such as one linking modern Peloton use with the ancient practices of mortification of the body by Christian hermits and martyrs. So color me reluctant to lean heavily on the kind of analysis she produces for TDB. But my guess is that Dr. Mendez breaks no new ground and offers evidence that suggests his conclusion may be accurate, nothing more. At least, the little that I can glean from the article abstract at the JNTS site hints he's not saying anything I didn't hear more than once while at seminary myself.

In any event, Dr. Mendez is a piker when it comes to fiddling with the gospel of John. German theologian Rudolf Bultmann, beginning with his early 1941 monograph Das Evangelium des Johannes (published in English in 1971 as The Gospel of John) suggested that John contains a specific Signs Gospel within its accounts and he actually re-arranged large chunks of the book to better suit his interpretation.

Bultmann's radical transformation of the gospel was so extensive that few New Testament scholars are willing to accept it, even when they approve of other conclusions he made in this work and elsewhere. When a friend posted a link to the DB story on his Facebook page, I commented that Bultmann, reading this work, would have said simply, "Halten Sie mein Bier."

Squirrel

In honor of Squirrel Day, the good folk at Mental Floss have assembled 16 interesting facts about the arboreal little rodents.

According to my parents' dog Hud, the sole interesting fact about squirrels is that they sometimes have the audacity to be on the ground in his yard. And yes, it is his yard, since he has urinated on it and everything.

Wishful Thinking

Recently Prince Harry of England and his wife Meghan Markle said they would like to step away from the bulk of their official roles in the royal family and make their own way. This has caused some upset in Ye Merrie Olde, since they made the announcement before actually speaking with family members about the decision and what it might entail. Unlike the abdication of King Edward VIII, Harry's backing off would do little to ruffle the succession, since he stands behind his father, his older brother and his brother's three children in line for the throne.

Is it wrong of me to wish that part of this "summit" meeting between Queen Elizabeth, her son Prince Charles and his sons Princes William and Harry included Her Majesty addressing her grandson thusly: "Listen to me, you gangly ginger punk. I am 93 years old. I repaired and drove jeeps in World War II, I survived the Battle of Britain and was evacuated from my home so I wouldn't get killed by bombs. At 18 I was named one of the Counsellors of State who could serve in case my father was out of the country. I've listened to Winston Churchill in person with my own ears and watched the Berlin Wall go up and be knocked down. You want to leave, go ahead. You and your goofball Hollywood wife skedaddle to Vancouver and hug all the trees and recycle all the banana peels you want. But you do not do it without running it by me first. And don't forget to put in pictures of the kids when you write."

Huh?

As we near the end of 2019 we may expect lists of the best and worst things of this or that category that have happened since January 1. The New York Times lets us know which books its editors consider the ten best of the year here.

I don't know if I have any quarrel with any of the inclusions -- I haven't read a one of them -- and I might in fact peek at one or two. The Club sounds interesting, for one. But each entry boasts a quote from the original NYT review, and accompanying Ben Lerner's The Topeka School is this sentence:

Lerner’s exhilarating third novel, after “Leaving the Atocha Station” and “10:04,” rocks an emphatically American amplitude, ranging freely from parenthood to childhood, from toxic masculinity to the niceties of cunnilingus, from Freud’s Oedipus complex to Tupac’s “All Eyez on Me.”

After reading this from Garth Risk Hallberg's review originally published in October, I realized that not only do I not know if I want to read this book, I don't even know what the bleep Hallberg is talking about. I know several of the items he refers to, but he's combined them in ways that make no sense.

You may be thinking that, because I sometimes write little book reviews in this space I might somehow be comparing my work to Mr. Hallberg's. By no means. He writes impenetrable word salad and I riff on airport novels, but ain't no one cuttin' ya boy any checks for this stuff.

Clearly, I am doing it wrong.

Mebs! Mebs!

Researchers working on newly-discovered ancient Egyptian graves think they may have discovered actual evidence of small cone-shaped headgear frequently shown in Egyptian art.

The cones were initially believed to be symbolic, the way that halos are often shown around Christian figures in medieval artwork. But a group of scholars working in modern-day Amarna have examined graves in a mostly-untouched cemetery and found several of the bodies are topped with cones that match those shown in the artwork.

Some mysteries remain to be solved, though. One inscription under a family shown with the cones was recently translated to read, "These people are from France." Scientists are not exactly sure what this means, given that people living in what is today's France during the the time period in question would not have given themselves or their region that name.

Election Shruggery

1. Montana governor Steve Bullock ended his campaign for the Democratic nomination for the presidency today. Part of his statement: "...it has become clear that in this moment, I won’t be able to break through to the top tier of this still-crowded field of candidates." No offense intended, Steve, but that became clear to the rest of the country on May 14.

2. Former Pennsylvania representative Joe Sestak did the same a day earlier, saying that his inability to get media attention hamstrung his fundraising and thus hampered his campaign. I'm tempted to say that's a sort of tautology: I couldn't get any attention so I couldn't get any money, and because I didn't have any money I couldn't get any attention. But it's hard to feel sorry for Sestak about that, since he entered the race on June 23, even later than Bullock did, and became the 25th official candidate for the Democratic nomination. In what world does he think that the last guy in a crowded, exhausting field of people rarely heard of outside their own state lines will get substantial press coverage?

3. Senator Elizabeth Warren has said that she intends to be the last president ever elected by the Electoral College. Although she plans to win the old-fashioned way in 2020, she wants her second election to come from direct popular vote. Aside from the fundamental unfairness this plan makes clear -- if successful she would probably also become the last president to ever visit Wyoming or Idaho, since their combined populations don't quite equal that of Brooklyn -- it's another instance of Senator Warren having at best a pen-pal relationship with whatever she happens to be talking about. The Electoral College is in Article 2, Section 1 of the Constitution of the United States of America.

As I describe the two ways by which Article 2, Section 1 can be changed, see if you can spot the HUMONGOUS GLARING FRICKIN' FLAW in Senator Warren's plan to eliminate it once she becomes president so that her second election comes via direct ballot. 1) A new Constitutional Convention is called for by two-thirds of the state legislatures, and then approved by Congress. Any and all legal challenges to this unprecedented action are overturned. The new convention does not include an Electoral College in its revisions, and this new one is ratified by the states. 2) Congress, by a two-thirds majority of both houses, calls for a Constitutional amendment to eliminate the Electoral College. This call is in no way slowed or otherwise interfered with by legal challenges. Three-fourths of the state legislatures approve it. In both of these hypotheticals, all of these things happen between January 21, 2021 and November 5, 2024.

Now, of course you noticed that time frame is, in the eyes and minds of anyone who lives on this planet, science fiction. And you noticed that Senator Warren assumes she will win the nomination and the general election in 2020. And you noticed that she also assumes she will win them in 2024. But none of those things are the capitalized flaw I mentioned above. No, that flaw is reserved for the halibut-smack-in-the-face fact that the President has absolutely no role in any of the steps above. In either scenario, the President is simply another citizen of the United States, who may ask Congress or state legislatures to begin the process but who may be swiftly told "No" and shown the door. So what we could see play out would be this:

(Hypothetical)President Warren: "Mr./Madam Speaker, I ask Congress to request the states approve amending the Constitution to remove the electoral college."

Speaker of the House/House Minority Leader, depending on which party holds the majority, or the Senate Majority Leader or Minority Leader, or possibly the leaders of 17 state legislatures: "Buzz off."

The End.