A personal almanac for 2022

Lots of publications put end-of-year lists together, but I'm particularly fond of this effort from The Federalist, and don't disagree with staff selections there. Even before finding that particular compendium of "winners and losers," I thought it might be fun to cobble a personal summary into being, so here's my almanac for the Year of Our Lord 2022:

Best surprise:

Finding a Great Pyrenees dog that was being fostered under the auspices of a rescue organization after my sweetie had done a lot of research into the breed. Pearl makes a wonderful companion and a top-notch guard dog. Not for nothing are Pyrenees known for their soulful eyes.

Favorite new movie:

Top Gun: Maverick -- and seeing the film with my Uncle Jim was a bonus. I like this one even better than the original Top Gun movie.

Gone too soon:

Gian Carlo Zollo was a proud Italian prayer buddy and an inspiration who shuffled off this mortal coil at age 70 on 19 October 2022, after having beaten cancer earlier in the year. Pneumonia took him down, although some of us think that with better care it might not have. Carlo was an absolute rock for his family, and those friends he treated like family. We hope he's gone to help "prep the place upstairs for us," as mutual friend Jeff once put it.

Most excellent road trip:

It was heartwarming to be able to attend my sister's wedding in Phoenix AZ on 04 February. Eve and Frank had quite the celebration. Mom danced, and Dad was there in spirit. I got to meet some of Eve's friends, several of whom she's known all her adult life. 

Cheers to these older movies:

I'd forgotten how good Hear My Song (1991) and Secondhand Lions (2003) are. Genuine storytelling seems now to be a lost art. I also enjoyed War for the Planet of the Apes (2017).

Novel that made the strongest impression on me:

American Dirt, by Jeanine Cummins must be reckoned a contemporary classic. It wasn't published this year, but it's on this list because I read it this year.

Most fun to read this year:

My Enemy, My Ally (Star Trek: Rihannsu #1), by Diane Duane. Everything you liked about the original TV series helps make this book a blast to read.

The American Dream onscreen:

If you had to pick three movies from the same year in an effort to understand this country, then 2022 was a good year. Watching Father Stu, Elvis, and Devotion would give anybody a better-than-average introduction to the important aspects of American culture.

I'm not crying; you're crying:

(The best evidence I can vouch for of culture in or near Raleigh, if friends from the Northeast or Western U.S. coasts still think all of the American south is backward):

• The Theatre Raleigh production of City of Angels this past summer
• Bittersweet -- the "chic spot for coffee drinks, desserts, and specialty cocktails" on E. Martin Street.

Ben Franklin spins in his grave:

The American sage known for saying that he and the other founding fathers had bequeathed to their fellow citizens "a republic, if you can keep it" would have been appalled at the FBI's August 7 raid on former president Donald J. Trump's Palm Beach FL home. I'm all for law and order (thanks, Dad!) and I think Trump is an egomaniac, but that was an instance of political thuggery that pharmaceutical companies and other groups with effective lobbyists have learned to count on. 

Hoping to do this again:

Favorite string band The Steel Wheels hosts an annual Red Wing Roots Music Festival near Mount Solon, Virginia. Heavy thunderstorms soaked festival-goers this past June, but the festival was still a good time, and its top-notch live music makes a repeat visit sound worthwhile.

Quotes of the year:

1. "Solar and wind can never be anything more than boutique forms of incremental electricity production, and they will never, ever, be able to keep this country warm on cold winter nights."
   -- Buck Throckmorton at the Ace of Spades blog, December 30.
2. "Angels don't bluff. That's why I never play poker with 'em." 
   -- Carlo Zollo, who said that when he was still with us and may now be doing that very thing.
3. "The key ingredient of groupthink has always been the fear of social isolation, which leads us to be swept up by propaganda. It’s a fear so pervasive that—like fish in water—we are rarely aware of the effect it has on us." 
   -- Stella Morabito, paraphrasing her fascinating new book on "the weaponization of loneliness."
4. "Look who's running our Defense Department -- Obama lackeys put there to degrade our combat readiness and morale, while defining the two greatest threats to American national security as 'climate change' and Republican voters."
   -- J.J. Sefton in a sarcastic but on-point screed for the Ace of Spades blog from 19 May 2022.
5. "The profound crisis that the Church is experiencing in the world and especially in the West is the fruit of the forgetting of God. If our first concern is not God, then everything else collapses. At the root of all crises, anthropological, political, social, cultural, geopolitical, there is the forgetting of the primacy of God."
   -- Cardinal Robert Sarah in an interview about his new book, The Day is Now Far Spent.

My Thanksgiving cooking playlist

My sweetheart spent last night making a pumpkin pie while listening to Christmas music. Contrarian that I sometimes am, I still insist that Christmas music before Thanksgiving is premature, That said, her example inspired. 

We were doing meal prep in two different states, so I kept track of what was playing while I made deviled eggs from a proven recipe in The Deplorable Gourmet.

Directions in that crowd-sourced cookbook are, for the most part, spot on, but there's no way that prep time for deviled eggs is only 30 minutes -- at least not for me! My tripling the recipe didn't shorten prep time, but that's alright. Thanksgiving, y'all.

The playlist is eclectic because Dad had an influential hand in forming my musical ears. I miss him.

Pro tip: Slice the eggs on the longitude, not on the latitude. And I think they peel a little easier if you go pole to pole, north to south, after denting the egg to give your thumb some purchase.

Music to peel hard-boiled eggs

• Honky Tonk Woman -- Rolling Stones
• End of the World Again -- The Steel Wheels
• Good Hearted Man -- Fats Domino
• Call Me -- Blondie

Egg slicing

• Something so Feminine About a Mandolin -- Jimmy Buffet
• Mirabeau Bridge -- James Keelaghan

Scooping and grating

• You Ain't Going Nowhere -- Nitty Gritty Dirt Band
• When Silence Was Golden -- David Schnaufer
• Brighter Than the Sun -- Colbie Caillet
• The New Jerusalem -- Dan Wheetman

Mix and measure

• When a Cowboy Trades His Spurs for Wings -- Willie Watson and Tim Blake Nelson
• Worried About You -- Rolling Stones
• Fat-Bottomed Girls -- Queen

Using the "Poor Man's Pastry Bag"

• Some Nights -- Fun.
• Si Lo Hice y Que -- Carin Leon
• Into the Mystic -- Van Morrison
• Be Thou My Vision -- Martha Bassett
• More Than a Feeling -- Boston
• How Great Thou Art -- Home Free

Decorating with Paprika

• Find a New Home -- Will Banister
• Yellow Ledbetter -- Pearl Jam
• The Load-Out -- Jackson Browne

The recipe doesn't include a dash of Frank's Red Hot, but my deviled eggs do. That's how I roll.

More of the underrated

These actors and actresses have more range than many people seem to give them credit for having:

• Kathryn Erbe
• Katheryn Winnick
• Jack Black
• Ana de la Reguera
• Mary McDonnell
  (Truth to tell, however, when you successfully play characters in both Dances With Wolves and Battlestar Galactica, people know you've got game)

Among poets, on the evidence of When Earth's Last Picture is Painted, I think Rudyard Kipling is underrated.

Among brewers, don't sleep on the Benedictine monks of Birra Nursia.

Underrated musicians (lauded but not as well-known as they should be, given their talent):

• David Mason, the trumpeter on the Beatles' song, "Penny Lane"
• Laith Al-Saadi, dark horse Voice contestant and Michigan music legend
• Evelyn Glennie, deaf but extremely accomplished percussionist

Poetry (and fur) in motion

"Pink" the Border Collie defended her title in the Agility championships (16" class) at the Westminster Dog Show held less than a week ago. Big kudos also to her dedicated "mom" and handler, Jennifer Crank. Both the canine and the human make Ohio proud. Their example of elite competition-level zoomies is beautiful in every sense of the word:

Favorite answers on Quora

In no particular order (although chronological comes close), here are my favorite answers to questions on Quora:

1. What is the definition of "covfefe"?
2. What [are] the criteria to be considered Christian?
3. When was the last time America had a candid discussion with itself?
4. What was the wisest thing Jesus ever said?
5. What is the difference between out of pocket and off the cuff?
6. How does Mathew 20:6 square with Paul's ministry?
7. Is Amy Coney Barrett too religious for the Supreme Court?
8. What is the 'soul of the nation,' and what would it mean to save it?
9. Is there a difference between Christianity and Catholicism?

Yahoo needs editors

The screen grab is from Yahoo yesterday. Malapropism though this is, it almost fits the context, because Penn's penchant might well affect any pension he has.

 

Kudos to grammarians at Pep Boys

"We go further to help you go farther" seems to be their new slogan. The distinction between those two adjectives is often missed, but those purveyors of after-market automotive equipment did not miss it. Well played!

UPDATE: I'm also partial to mondegreens.

Art smarts

School Teacher / Jon Havickszoon Steen (circa 1668).
Favorite comments:
"So THIS is the 1619 Project" / 

"Cupcake Mommy is late today" /
"He's about to pop that kid in the head with the Great Spoon of Knowledge" / 
"We don't need no education; we don't need no thought control." /
"No one is writing with their left hand. Where are all the sinister children?" /

"No, no! It's I before E except after C." /

"You can write a story about every character there." /

"Homeschooling?"

Marcus on Shakespeare

David Marcus, writing in The Federalist, sheds some welcome light on William Shakespeare while defending him:

"One question Winkler brings up is worth exploring a bit: How did Shakespeare write women characters so effectively and honestly at a time when this was exceedingly rare? In today's intersectional age, it's easy to see why some would jump to the conclusion that a woman must have written these parts, but there is a simpler explanation. Shakespeare wrote better women characters than his contemporaries because he wrote better characters of every kind than did his contemporaries. Women, kings, soldiers, Jews, Moors, fairies, and a fountain of other characters flowed from his pen, all revealing a new style and substance in English writing.

How did Shakepeare do this? How was he able to create all of these characters with humor and speech so much more naturalistic than came from the other writers of the time? As is usually the case with the Bard, the clues are in the plays themselves."

Impactful reads this month

I like essayists who value history, and there's evidence of that in Why Federalist Paper Number Ten remains important and perceptive.

On the current events side of the ledger, Representative Devin Nunes explains the end of the Russian Collusion hoax.

Meanwhile, Brian Joondeph does a yeoman job of chronicling progressive overreach on abortion.

We're in Holy Week and sliding toward Easter (hence the "camouflaged rabbit" that I used as a hook for this blog entry). I was pleased to see Father Z share his take on the devastating fire at the Notre Dame Cathedral and how to respond to it properly. Thinking about that event in Paris, wildfire survivor Gerard Vanderleun chips in with a perceptive thought from G.K. Chesterton. Padre Pio would approve the tenor of that discussion, I think.

David Warren unleashes his dry wit to write about the problem with spiritualizing politics. But John Daniel Davidson doesn't need that reminder, because he has already taken the long view.

Anyone familiar with my own writing knows that language use and misuse is something I'm passionate about, so it was fun to find a kindred spirit in Stephanie's diagnosis of "communication disorders" on the American Left. Neo noticed some of the same behavior. I wondered about the apparent lapse in professional standards at a publishing house.

Lastly: Troll-bait headlines about what you can't do notwithstanding, it's a relief to know that you're never too old to learn how to play the guitar. In a related post, here are David Wallander's choices for "the best guitar solo in the history of recorded rock and roll music" -- because I agree with his trifecta of song solos played by Gilmour, Prince, and Knopfler. Happy reading! Happy listening!

Summer-ish fun

The Blue Dash dragonfly above is one symbol of warm weather. Late last night, I had a few others: I played frisbee catch with a German Shepherd while fireflies drifted erratically through the humid darkness around us like yellow-green embers and distant lightning strobed the sky to the southwest. Good times!

Genius marketing

It was not from Ghirardelli or Lindt or Toblerone or even Hershey, and I should probably not have eaten the whole thing at one sitting last night. Nevertheless, the Raspberry Chocolate bar from an off-brand in the grocery store (Chocolove? really?) also had this going for it -- a poem inside the outer wrapper, tucked next to the gold foil that wrapped the chocolate itself. And we're not talking about some 8-year-old's variation on "Roses are red; Violets are blue," either:

If You're Ever Going to Love Me

If you're ever going to love me, love me now while I can know
All the sweet and tender feelings from which real affection flow.
Love me now, while I am living; do not wait till I am gone
And then chisel it in marble -- warm love words on ice-cold stone.
If you've dear, sweet thoughts about me, why not whisper them to me?
Don't you know 'twould make me happy, and as glad as glad could be?
If you wait till I am sleeping, ne'er to waken here again,
There'll be walls of earth between us and I coudn't hear you then.
If you knew someone was thirsting for a drop of water sweet,
Would you be so slow to bring it? Would you step with laggard feet?
There are tender hearts all round us who are thirsting for our love;
Why withhold from them what nature makes them crave all else above?
I won't need your kind caresses when the grass grows o'er my face;
I won't crave your love or kisses in my last low resting place.
So, then, if you love me any, if it's but a little bit,
Let me know it now while living; I can own and treasure it.

Unknown Author

Stealth poetry

Remember Jeff Foxworthy's old comedy routine, "You might be a redneck"?

He'd sift through circumstantial evidence for which that sentence was the always the punchline ("If you've ever taken a six-pack of beer to a funeral, you might be a redneck...If your daughter's Barbie Dream House has a clothesline in the front of it, you might be a redneck.")

Foxworthy says his definition of "redneck" is "someone with a glorious lack of sophistication," and I like that.

His follow-the-anecdote-to-its-wry-conclusion formula can be applied to other kinds of identification, also. There are probably more poets out there than most of us realize, even if comparatively few people think of themselves as poets, and even fewer people make a living that way.

I think you can tell "stealth poets" by their markings. I don't know of any comprehensive field guide to identifying that species, but here are a few utterly subjective and improvised clues:

If you've ever woken up to a day when a thin scrim of cloud filters sunlight that is partially diffused but wholly beautiful, you might be a poet.

If you've ever made a U-turn just to take a photo of crepe myrtle flowering in red and purple near the road, you might be a poet.

If you deliberately wear your heart on your sleeve around people whom you trust, because the emotionally reserved alternative seems like a recipe for missed opportunity, you might be a poet.

If the song "You Don't Know Me" still seems especially poignant, then you know why Elvis Presley, Ray Charles, and Michael Buble all covered it, and you might be a poet.

If while singing hymns, you sometimes substitute words to improve scansion, you might be a poet.

If you talk to wild rabbits even when you're sober, you might be a third-order Franciscan -- or a poet.

If you've ever actually watched clouds for more than a few seconds, you might be a poet.

I do not think it means what you think it means

I saw a news clip today of the First Lady telling Girl Scouts that they were "making history" by being "the first to camp out on the South Lawn of the White House."

Newscasters also said that a severe thunderstorm soon forced those Girl Scouts to seek shelter in the Executive Office Building, but I'm more interested in what Michelle Obama calls "historic," because the action she praised seems trivial.

Doesn't something have to be significant before it can be called historic?

Etymology is not something I have any particular expertise in, but I've always thought of "historic" and "heroic" as sibling words.

Was spotlighting the White House in multi-colored light to celebrate a Supreme Court ruling also "historic"? I hope not, because it's easier to make a case for calling that stunt "ill-advised" or "juvenile."

Let me put the question a little differently: The  boys in my senior class were, as far as I know, the first to wear turquoise tuxedos and ruffled shirts for our high school yearbook photos, but that does not make our wardrobe choice "historic." What it means is that someone in school administration at the time got a superlative discount from a local formal wear shop whose proprietor was nostalgic for the Seventies.

A distant bell of memory sent me to Wikipedia to see what it had to say about Andrew Jackson's first inauguration. While accounts of the debauchery around that event seem inconclusive, there is evidence to suggest that Mrs. Obama may have been wrong not only for confusing the mundane with the historic (her husband does that, too), but also for ignoring what happened 1829. Ten thousand people came to Washington, D.C. that March to see Andrew Jackson sworn in as president, and a good number of them seem to have partied all over the place, very possibly camping on the White House lawn. In a few well-documented cases, they passed out on that lawn.

When Somewhere meets "Somewhither"

John C. Wright and one of his readers have a fascinating dialog when the reader explains why he is tired of "faith-based" defense against vampires that is often described by inexperienced authors in the horror genre.

Short version of the objection: if you meet a vampire and need emergency protection from evil, but your faith is strong enough to compensate for the MacGyver-like improvisation you'll have to do when you want a crucifix but settle for a can of Spaghetti-Os, then almost any implement answers to your need, because it's incidental to the contest of wills that you're having.

Fortunately, nobody in the conversation seems ready to abandon the idea that "well begun is half done." Tools matter. In this instance, they speculate, it's not either faith or crucifix that you should arm yourself with, but both faith and crucifix.

Mr. Wright adds an excerpt from a forthcoming novel (Somewhither) to the proceedings, and the excerpt fits. 

Other fantasy novelists have wrestled with the same question, of course. Interestingly, the consensus view of the people chatting at Mr. Wright's blog seems to be that Larry Correia's Monster Hunter International books are weak on this point, whereas Jim Butcher's novels about Chicago wizard Harry Dresden are well-educated. Based on what I've read of those authors, I agree with that consensus.