At it again . . .

February 26, 2015

WWWJBP

It’s been awhile, but when someone asked me the other day what The Ambiguities “was supposed to be about,” I found myself saying WWWJBP – What Whimsy Would Jesus Be Percolating? - if Jesus whimsy percolating were.

Here’s some, then, from when he were – not so much the cleansing of the temple but his suggestion he could rebuild it in three days.  The “temple guards” couldn’t believe he meant it, but then he didn’t have to mean it, did he?

 i

Fin

February 22, 2015

Parliamentary Re-cedure

His motion failed for want of a second.

w

omne trium perfectum

February 21, 2015
Two

Everything is intimately, inextricably connected to everything else so that a butterfly* flutters its wings in Fiji and a dog in Brooklyn^† gets diarrhea.

Or, nothing is remotely related to anything else at all except that we wish it were so.

List the Second:

i. The man stands at the flushless urinal – the one in the corner – at the rest stop at mile marker 129 on I-81 north (Virginia) just south of the Dixie Caverns exit. He is recently widowed; he has no children. He is just driving, a 1997 Honda Accord with 262,000 miles on it.

     He grew up in Salem - he went to Andrew Lewis High School – but he left the area long, long ago; he doesn’t know anyone. He is thinking of the old joke – not from high school but elementary school days. It’s visual. A boy with a claw for a hand holds it in front of him, praying, “God make both my hands the same.” He opens his eyes: still a claw. He raises the other, “good” hand: he now has two claws.

ii. The rule of three “suggests that things that come in threes are inherently funnier, more satisfying, or more effective than other numbers of things.” There is created “a progression in which the tension is created, built up, and finally released,” a beginning, a middle, and an end.*

iii.

  

___________________

      * Badamia atrox subflava

      ^† New York

      ** Source: Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_of_three_(writing)

A Theory of Nearly Everything and Next to Nothing at All

February 20, 2015

List the First

Everything is intimately, inextricably connected to everything else so that a butterfly* flutters its wings in Fiji and a dog in Brooklyn^† gets diarrhea.

Or, nothing is remotely related to anything else at all except that we wish that were so.

So, a week of lists.  List the First:

i

Our Lord is not remote
He is even nearer than the jugular vein

- Hamzah Fansuri (d. c. 1590), Malay poet

ii

Summer 1959. Rocco Domenico “Rocky” Colavito, a graduate of Teddy Roosevelt High School in New York City hit 42 home runs and drove in 111 runs for the Cleveland Indians.

iii

 

Over on our political (and dark) side, “Go Around Back,” I get tired of being Mr. Nice Guy. It’s only my misguided opinion anyway. See here.

_______________________

* Badamia atrox subflava

 ^† a dachshund - springer spaniel mix

12/25/0000 - The Day Omniscience Died

Walt Smith, author
"Immortal, Invisible, God Only Wise"

February 15, 2015

Setting the Record Crooked

The way we look at the incarnation shows just how little we really believe in omniscience. How the first can give the second an “edge” is an utter, illogical mystery.  But that seems almost always to be the claim: “Good. Now God has become enfleshed, he knows what it feels like to be human.”

          The problem with our thinking (to state the obvious): What can a God that knows everything learn?

d

Find out why NFL tickets are now free.  On our political blog, “Go Around Back.”

School Daze

February 12, 2015

A Handful of Semi-Related Propositions

I just finished Evelyn Waugh’s riotously funny Decline and Fall, so the matter of academic careers is on my mind. (See Go Around Back on the relevance of Scott Walker’s.)

Eve College, Oxbridge.

I never loved school till it was gone, even when it came 

back ‘round again. I only went back because I was treading water up to my lower lip in the real world – so-called! For what world is real and what world is fuzz depends on who’s lecturing whom.

I mentioned to Uncle Albert what a friend mentioned to 

me that a friend had mentioned to him with regard to his saying he’d never vote for Hillary: “Better the devil you know . . . .” His reply: “Better the devil you know . . . . 

Yes, if the devil weren't in every guise a chameleon.”

There’s a leak in the downstairs bathroom. And,

The Buddha was brought up by his mother’s younger sister, or if you're left-handed, his aunt.

b