Wheels Down
My last flight has landed at Asheville. No more flying for a while! I’ve crossed the international date line twice in a week and spent long days working in time zones 12 hours off of each other. I’m glad to be back to my mountains.
My Second Favorite* Anglican Priest Gets Interviewed by My Favorite** Orthodox Iconographer
The Rev. Dr. Malcolm Guite has just published the first volume of an "Arthuriad," a projected 4-volume ballad that retells the Arthurian stories. It's made a bit of a splash.
If you're interested in Arthur, Tolkein, CS Lewis, poetry, fiction, history, the role of imagination in modern life, Christianity, or just hearing two interesting people talk about storytelling, you might enjoy this interview.
* My favorite Anglican priest will always be Fr. Terry, who was a kind and generous pastor when I was asking whether Christianity might be the right path or not.
** To be fair, he's the only iconographer I can name of any denomination, so it's not as impressive as I've made it sound in the title. His Symbolic World podcast / YouTube channel is what he's famous for, but "... Interviewed by a Podcaster" was a less-interesting title.
Back in the USA
I did hear a David Allan Coe song in a bar in Taipei, but this still feels more like home. I won’t actually be home until late tomorrow night.
Rest in Peace, Wendell Berry
Wendell Berry passed away yesterday.
Some advice he gave to himself, but which seems to profit others as well:
How to Be a Poet
(To remind myself)
i
Make a place to sit down.
Sit down. Be quiet.
You must depend upon
affection, reading, knowledge,
skill -- more of each
than you have -- inspiration,
work, growing older, patience,
for patience joins time
to eternity. Any readers
who like your poems,
doubt their judgment.
Make a place to sit down.
Sit down. Be quiet.
You must depend upon
affection, reading, knowledge,
skill -- more of each
than you have -- inspiration,
work, growing older, patience,
for patience joins time
to eternity. Any readers
who like your poems,
doubt their judgment.
ii
Breathe with unconditional breath
the unconditioned air.
Shun electric wire.
Communicate slowly. Live
a three-dimensioned life;
stay away from screens.
Stay away from anything
that obscures the place it is in.
There are no unsacred places;
there are only sacred places
and desecrated places.
iii
Accept what comes from silence.
Make the best you can of it.
Of the little words that come
out of the silence, like prayers
prayed back to the one who prays,
make a poem that does not disturb
the silence from which it came.
Taipei
Downtown, with Taipei 101 on the skyline
Closer to 101.
An unexpected angel. It’s mostly Buddhist here; I saw many Buddhist monks and a few nuns, but no other signs of Christianity except that in the hotel room there was both a New Testament and a Teachings of the Buddha.
The Formosan Bear is, unofficially, the national animal of Taiwan (of old called Formosa Isle).
Taipei Main Station. I caught the High Speed Railway from here. Recommended.
The Most Important Store. Only very recently is it legal to buy a Harley in Taiwan. Until late, large displacement motorcycles were banned by law.
Tetraphobia
A lot of American skyscrapers don’t have a 13th floor, in the sense of a floor with that designation, because the number was thought to be bad luck.
In East Asia, the number omitted is four. The word for four and the word for death are the same syllable with only a slightly different pronunciation.
Fare Thee Well, Dolly
Dolly Parton and Carol Burnett
Dolly Parton giving an impromptu performance in Paídi Ó Sé's Pub
(I've started this video just a bit before she starts singing, skipping over several minutes of people milling about, a t-shirt being given, mic testing and so forth.)
Merle Haggard talks about falling in love with Dolly
Probably my favorite of her songs, recorded with Chet Atkins
What a joy she was.
No Pictures Today
All day exercises from before dawn until well into the dark today. Tomorrow we resume early again, but will end a little earlier. Perhaps I’ll have time for something I can post then.
Our Taiwanese allies are very enthusiastic, disciplined, and intelligent. I won’t say more about it, but you should have a warm place in your heart for Taiwan.
Robots on the March
This one is a waiter who brings your dinner from the kitchen to your table. It is very polite about not bumping into people; they seemed to pay it no mind, trusting its sensors to stop it running into them.
UPDATE: At another restaurant on another night, I saw a robot come out to ‘sing’ Happy Birthday to a patron. This one displayed an appropriate light show on its monitors while doing so.
7-Eleven in Taipei
For some reason my 10-year-old niece in Idaho had strong opinions about the superiority of 7-Elevens in Taiwan. I went by one to get pictures for her. I don’t know where this is coming from, but she likes Korean boy bands too. No account for taste.
Past the jump, more pictures of shelves of stuff. They also sell hard liquor.
Yay, fungus ramen.
Seaweed flavored potato chips!
What is a century egg, you ask? You shouldn’t.
Soybean paste noodles with chili sauce and a Snickers bar.
Wheels Down Taipei
I didn’t make it Friday. It was quite a journey.
I did get to spend many, many hours in the San Francisco airport. On the international terminal there is an outdoor terrace with a sculpture garden.
Melting clocks are also common features in prison tattoos, where they also symbolize the distorted nature of time when you are trapped in one place by unhappy circumstances.
No idea about this one.
Lovely succulents.
That California minimum wage? Fully robotic coffee bars.
Before I left DC I had a “half smoke,” a locally famous sort of chili dog. They aren’t great. DC isn’t known for its food or culture.
Taiwan pictures after the sun comes up.
Eight Slapping Pistons
Up the Privateers
US to revive prize courts.
Once you have prize courts in place, there’s no reason not to revive letters of marque and reprisal.
L’adventure Commence
I’m starting for the other side of the world this morning. Taipei by Friday — local time.
Requiescat in Pace, Dolly Parton
A very young Dolly singing in Fountain City, Tennessee.
Dolly Parton will be missed here in Appalachia. I don't doubt that such a forward-thinking and cunning operator -- for she was that, as much as she was a darling of everyone and a much-beloved singer and songwriter -- will have set up all the proper contingencies to keep her charity for the poor children of her home running long into the future. She will still be missed for her example.
Dolly was the same age as my mother, who is still alive. As such mom, who grew up in nearby Bearden, Tennessee, got to watch Dolly from a very young age and all her long career. That show whose (silent) video opens this post was a Cas Walker show, a local politician and shopkeeper to the Knoxville area who used country music and his radio show to advance his position (and thus was a sponsor of such events).*
From her beginnings from the age of 10 as an extra on a local politician's radio show, she progressed to real success as a songwriter first. She then got on with Porter Waggoner's show -- he is usually though incorrectly credited with having the first all-female backup band in country music (in fact it was David Allan Coe who did that first, but he wasn't famous enough yet to be remarked for it). From 1967 to 1974, when she left the show and broke with Waggoner professionally, her duets with him were some of her biggest successes. In 1973 she had a real independent hit with the famous "Jolene" -- thus the name of one of my second cousins' only daughter -- and then went off on her own. The song she wrote about that departure is "I Will Always Love You," a song later more famously covered by another female vocalist.
She had a long and varied career, but what I always keep coming back to in my mind is all the good she did for those growing up poor in the place where she once did. Music has the ability to last forever; some songs are so old that we don't really know when or where they came from. Some of hers may, if not exactly as she wrote them than in the manner of folk songs. Yet her good deeds for the poor of the mountains, that is what I will always remember about her and her life's work.
Rest in peace.
* Cas Walker was a noted character. Dad's favorite Cas Walker story was from the radio show, The Farm and Home Hour. Shortly after radar guns became a thing that the state police were using, Cas gave an editorial against them on the show. "Some of our best citizens," he said, "are being caught in these traps."
UPDATE: Widespread mourning.
The Commancheros
In American history, the Comancheros were a group of Europeans who traded with Comancheria, the Comanche Empire, during its period of dominance in the Southwest. In the John Wayne movie of that name, these traders deal especially in weapons, making them enemies of the Texas Rangers.
In Australia, for some reason it's the name of a Motorcycle Club. Like the Texas Rangers before them, the Australian police are hot enemies of theirs for reasons chiefly related to firearms (though the press release mentions seizing large amounts of tobacco as well as cannabis and meth).
All of this explains, if it does not quite make sense of, the current Kafka-like attempt to send a biker down for 15 years because he played Duck Hunt at a carnival shooting gallery to try to win his daughter a teddy bear.
During the festival, the Comanchero outlaw motorcycle gang member allegedly tried his luck at a sideshow game where players use an air rifle to shoot plastic ducks and win prizes.Footage obtained by 7News showed Simpson loading and firing the rifle while attempting to win something for his daughter.... Detectives from the South Australia Police Crime Gangs Task Force launched an investigation after learning about the alleged incident. Simpson was arrested in Adelaide on August 21....The firearm order charge carries a maximum penalty of 15 years behind bars or an AU $75,000 fine. Being unlawfully present at a shooting gallery can result in up to 10 years in prison or an AU$50,000 fineIt is not the first unusual object to trigger weapon rules. A six-year-old was suspended for biting a sandwich into the shape of a gun, while another child faced punishment after bringing a tiny LEGO gun to school.In another incident, this time from the UK, a man was sentenced to four months in prison for carrying a six-inch Master Sword replica from The Legend of Zelda.
As a general rule, any time a police agency starts giving its task forces hardcore names like the the Raptor Squad or the Scorpion Units, you should probably disband them and start over with a fresh crop. They've already lost the plot, and are no longer conceiving of themselves as peace officers but as some sort of commando operation targeting members of the public.
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