Poem for Our 32nd Anniversary

Power of Two

(for Cindy on our 2⁵ Wedding Anniversary)

Two-to-the-fifth years of both weal and woe.

All of those wedding guests, where did they go?

Thirty-two years ago: ring, kiss, and vow.

Where is the face of that company now?

Two for a honeymoon, four till we moved;

Eight for adoption to double our love.

Sixteen for schooling the children God gave.

Thirty-two closer to rest in the grave.

Doubling and doubling again down the years.

Two, four, eight, sixteen, each new power premiers

Doublings of joy, love, and high adoration;

Growing by binary multiplication.

Thus do our marital blessings accrue,

Exponents, both, for the power of two.

--Paul Erlandson, 2017

2nd Annual Shinoda (Slot Car) Reunion!

It's almost time for the 2nd Annual "Shinoda Reunion", to be held at Downriver Speedway in Lincoln Park, Michigan.  Saturday, December 16.  Doors open and Noon.  Racing begins at 5pm.

Here is one of the entries that has been sent in to be raced by proxy.  This is a scratch-built, period-correct "Detroit Slider" style Thingie slot car.  The body is a Shinoda "Bullet" created by Gene Adams.  I've seen this in person, and it is exquisite!  It belongs in an art museum.

Lindsay Shepherd - Canadian University Goons Deny Her Free Speech

This is long, but SUPER important!

Poem - Beatrice Does My Laundry

Beatrice Does My Laundry

More than other men, grief-torn or merry,

That history has thought worthy of note,

I honor and adore great Alighieri,

And not alone for all the poems he wrote,

But for his tears of ecstasy and grief,

Which Dante wept and distilled into verse.

Of sufferers-from-love he was the chief,

His depth of feeling both blessing and curse.

I used to call on Dante, in the past,

For intercession in some special case.

For years, he made no answer, but at last

He spoke as clear as one speaks face to face:

“Look here, my son, what does this madness mean,

That you, the rich, play supplicant to me?

To watch my love, I had to find a ‘screen’,

But you can watch your love completely free!

For you have wife and muse in self-same soul,

And every poem you write her, you can sign.

Your love can both fulfil the Beatrice role,

And kiss you as the clock is striking nine.”

I took his sense, and troubled him no more:

The wealthy must not beg alms of the poor.

© 2017, Paul Erlandson

Eliot Erlandson Interviewed about Thingies and the 2017 Shinoda Reunion!

My son Eliot is becoming a big wig in the sub-sub-subculture of vintage Thingie slot car racing!  Check out this interview with him:

Top 10 Ways My Parents Gave Us the Best Childhood EVER

I was thinking this morning what a great childhood I had.  It made me want to capture some of the things that my parents did well in raising us four kids.  So, here are my Top 10 Reasons my parents gave us the greatest childhood.

1.  Raising us in Champaign, Illinois.  Okay, this one may have been partially just luck.  But I have to say that Champaign was the optimum place to raise kids, because of the diversity of experience it provided.  Just across Duncan Rd to our West was a vast cornfield.  It's still there, in fact.  A few miles to the East was the University of Illinois with all of its rich cultural opportunities.

2.  Books!  Our parents had books all over the house.  It was like living in a library.  I could just wander along a bookshelf until some title captured my imagination, take down the book, and begin reading.  This was how I came to read The Autobiography of Malcolm X at age 9.

3.  Exposure to Dad's work colleagues.  My dad had some interesting, brilliant, and quirky friends at work.  Often they would come and visit our house.  Sometimes, we would visit their homes.  I never felt as if my parents were chasing us away when they had adult company.  We got to be there, and had equal access to these fascinating people.

4.  Music.  Mom and Dad had a pretty decent sized record collection.  It had a fairly wide range, so that we were exposed to multiple styles:  classical, jazz, pop, folk, and country.  They also paid for me and my sister to take piano lessons.  

5.  Hosting missionaries in our home.  Several times, Christian missionaries (mostly ones supported by the local church we attended) were guests in our homes.  This gave us a look at the larger world, and an inside view of the work of Christian missionaries.

6.  Hard work, competition, and capitalism.  My dad was an officer in the USMC, so he had very stringent standards about shining shoes and boots.  He set up a competition between us kids.   Every week, one of us shined his left work shoe, and the other one shined the right shoe.  We got paid 10 cents for this.  But it was also a contest.  After we were done, he judged who had done the better job.  That kid got to shine one of the shoes the next week (and thus, keep earning dimes).  The one who didn't win had to step down and make room for another challenger the following week.  This one simple exercise taught us so many life lessons.

7.  The Gospel.  Before all else, our parents were Evangelical Christians.  So they were careful to explain the Gospel to us in ways we could understand.  Their care and concern for our salvation was continuous and obvious.

8.  Anti-Racism.  Our parents had friends of other races.  They were welcome in our home, and we in theirs.  For a while, we drove the kids from a black family across town to Sunday School and Church with us.  I had no idea that this kind of thing was rare in 1967 or 1968.  Once, after dropping this family off at home after church, I made what can be considered a racist remark.  I was about ten years old.  The gravity and almost violence of my father's response against this (as well as his detailed explanation of why I was wrong to say what I did) shaped the entire rest of my life.

9.  Poetry.  For a Marine Corps officer, my dad sure had a lot of poetry memorized.  He understood it, too.  But most of all, he made us know that poetry was not some unmanly pursuit.

10.  They stayed married.  Of course, they had their difficult moment, like any married couple.  But they got through them and stayed together.  They're still together.

Jagged and Smooth

This is the closest account I am able to give of a very complex dream from which I have just awaken.  I know that many details are wrong, but I hope to catch the essence of it.

As soon as I was "in" the dream this morning, I realized that it was a repetition or continuation of the same dream I had had once before.  I don't know how we know that in our dreams, but I knew it.  The rules of the thing were at once familiar to me.

I am sad that I cannot remember the exact two words or phrases used in the dream, so "Jagged" and "Smooth" are only approximate substitutes.   The dream revolved around an anonymous fiction-writing site.  The site was a collection of stories, each published under a pseudonym, and each purporting to illustrate either the principle of Jaggedness or the principle of Smoothness.  I was one of the authors.  I believe that I had authored about three stories (say, Jagged 13, Jagged 37, and Smooth 40).

To try to get your story added to the Jagged and Smooth website, you had to electronically submit your manuscript (from 400 to 10,000 words) and the webmaster decided whether you made the cut or not.  The stories were posted chronologically from oldest to newest.

I couldn't be sure, but I think that at the end of some period of years, there was supposed to be some kind of party at which all the authors could meet each other.  But one of the author's works were so compelling to me that I wanted to meet him without having to wait that long.  It was some of the most amazing writing I had ever seen.

I don't know how I found the author, who turned out to be a woman in her late twenties.  I met her out at her farm in the country, and we spoke outside.  She had a few small creatures (like large insects, but I don't think they were insects) that I had never seen before.  She seemed a little distressed to be talking to me before the date on which the authors were supposed to be revealed.  But she also seemed flattered by the things I said about her writing, and she somewhat excitedly answered my questions about her stories.

So, now I wonder:  Could or should such a site be created?  It wouldn't have to be Jagged/Smooth.  It could be Bitter/Sweet or something similar.  I think the problem would be getting good authors to contribute to it.  And then, even if good authors were to find the site, they'd have to be willing to work on the writing with no immediate accolades.

Electronic Screens, Adventure, and the Cultivation of Intuition

It is all the rage these days to cast aspersions on the ubiquitous electronic screens that seem to rule our lives now.  Often, we write them down and then post them via those same devices, that others may partake of our rants.  But, contrarian that I am, I would like to say some things in defense of the screens.

When I was seeking my Texas Teacher Certification back around 1984, I took a class in Math Methods from the department head of the School of Mathematics at Texas A&M.  It turned out to be one of the most revolutionary courses I ever took, not only for my teaching career, but for life in general.  The professor spoke convincingly about the efficacy of guessing in Mathematics (though he recommended we use the word conjecture in place of guess, for pragmatic reasons).  Often, the best and fastest way to solve a problem is to adventurously step out into the void with a guess, a first approximation of the answer.  How that approximation stacks up against the constraints of the problem (e.g., governing equations) very often leads to a way to achieve a much better second guess, if not an exact solution.

Later, in my automotive engineering career, it occurred to me that (though powerful computers now did most of the "thinking" for me) nearly 100% of the problems I solved at work were solved through making an initial guess, and then making successively better approximations to the solution.  The world is a complicated place.  Engineering school (even at the graduate level) can give you a false impression of this, because an inordinate amount of time is often spent on one or two of the very few problems which have derive-able, closed-form solutions.  In truth, it is a statistically insignificant number (i.e., basically 0%) of the world's problems for which a closed-form solution may be found.  Almost always, engineering problems are solved by some method of iterative guessing (I mean, conjecture), such as Newton's Method.

In that Math Methods class, our professor emphasized the importance of developing mathematical intuition.  This cuts against the grain of the old, now largely defunct "just show me the exact steps to solve this kind of problem" approach, and you can see this in the obscene anger expressed against (so-called) Common Core math methods on the internet, from people who are apparently too timid to guess, or whose Math teachers a few decades ago told them never to do so.  But intuition is extremely powerful.  It can be developed.  But you have to be brave, to get out of your comfort zone to do so.  You have to have the temerity to experiment, to guess.  You have to risk being "wrong."

If you are old, as I am, did you ever stop to wonder why four-year-olds seem quicker to pick up new technology and more agile at operating electronic devices than we oldsters?  It is often chalked up to the idea that young people have more nimble minds, and I won't try to dispute that.  But I think there is a greater reason:  kids are not afraid to guess.  They are not afraid to push the wrong button and see what happens.  And what happens, eventually, is that they develop very good intuitions about how the electronic world operates.

Or, if you will, consider the opposite end of the spectrum.  Have you ever had occasion to help an elderly relative adapt to a newly-acquired electronic device?  I have a friend whose parents didn't understand where to type an internet address into their internet browser.  Instead, they made Google their home page, and then typed the web address into the Google search field.  It worked often enough that they could usually find what they were looking for.  But any four-year-old could have shown them a better way.  It is even worse if you need to teach a complex, multi-step task, such as:

1.  Go to a certain website.  Fill out the fields there.
2.  Use a button on the website to export your answer to a PDF file on your computer.
3.  Find the PDF file in your Downloads directory (wherever that is!) and move it to another directory.  CTRL-C and CTRL-V may help here.
4.  Rename the file.  Click the current name until the entire name is highlighted and then type in the new name.  Hit "RETURN."
5.  Open Outlook and send the renamed PDF file to two different addresses in your Outlook address book.  (Oh, but you'll have to know how to navigate to the folder where the PDF file now resides.)

Depending on the task at hand, there can be dozens or even hundreds of steps.   If one does not develop an intuition about these things, complex tasks can be very daunting indeed.  And that's for identical, repetitive tasks.  When faced with a brand new task, and without calling someone else in to help, you have nothing but intuition upon which to rely.  Your screen is filled with a few hundred tiny icons, perhaps, some of which may not be visible at first.  Where to begin?  You just have to make a guess.  You have to adventurously click on something, do some poking around, and see what you can find.

I submit to you that all of these electronic screens have done a fabulous job of developing our intuition.  They have made our minds more nimble, more resilient.  They have required us to be better problem-solvers, braver souls, better at guessing.  This leads us to be better thinkers in the final analysis.  It can help us to find a globally optimum solution rather than being satisfied with a locally optimum one.  In some of the Math and Physics classes I taught, I used an exercise that works to do this same thing.  There was a problem.  Say, estimate the height of a tower.  The students were required to come up with the craziest, zaniest ways to do this.  There is the obvious Trigonometric method.  There are Physics-based solutions (e.g., drop a ball from the top of the tower, and time how long it takes to hit the ground).  Maybe you chop down the tower and stack pennies from one the base of the tower to the tip.  Then, you multiply the number of pennies by the diameter of a penny.  There are so, so many ways.  And humanity is greatly enriched by cultivating the kind of imagination that does not stop at the first method found.

So, I submit to you that all of these electric "screens" everyone is so distressed about are actually making us better thinkers, and giving us more agile minds.  It is something to be thankful for.

Eminem, Trump, and the Coarsening of American Society

I use the AM radio news station as a morning alarm. I was jolted awake this morning by the newly-minted rap by Eminem, about Trump. It was ugly, inane, self-important, and hypocritical. But, mostly ugly. What a way to wake up!

There is so much to object to, in both form and content, in Marshall Mathers' anti-Trump tirade, it is difficult to know where to begin.  I suppose we can begin at the unseemliness of a white guy thinking he has to come to the rescue of black people.  How patronizing of him.  I mean, not to mention that his entire career as a rap "artist" has been built on a solid foundation of Cultural Appropriation.

There is the fact that much of his content is just factually false.  Donald Trump did not support the Klan -- he explicitly called them out as evil -- and they vilified him for it.  His other "facts" are wrong as well.

Then, too, there is the brutal ugliness of his "art".  He is angry.  He is angry that Donald Trump is President. Angry, one supposes, that rape-enabler Hillary Clinton is not.  And his anger pours out in guttural tones.  I suppose that if his goal is to incite a mob, his rap/rant may strike the correct tone.  But if he ever hopes to appeal to calm, rational, intelligent, people of peace, then it is absolutely wrong.

Compare Eminem's style with that of James Baldwin ("The Fire Next Time"), writing about the racial divide in America, clear back in 1963:

"But I cannot leave it at that; there is more to it than that. In spite of everything, there was in the life I fled a zest and a joy and a capacity for facing and surviving disaster that are very moving and very rare. Perhaps we were, all of us—pimps, whores, racketeers, church members, and children—bound together by the nature of our oppression, the specific and peculiar complex of risks we had to run; if so, within these limits we sometimes achieved with each other a freedom that was close to love. I remember, anyway, church suppers and outings, and, later, after I left the church, rent and waistline parties where rage and sorrow sat in the darkness and did not stir, and we ate and drank and talked and laughed and danced and forgot all about “the man.” We had the liquor, the chicken, the music, and each other, and had no need to pretend to be what we were not. This is the freedom that one hears in some gospel songs, for example, and in jazz. In all jazz, and especially in the blues, there is something tart and ironic, authoritative and double-edged. White Americans seem to feel that happy songs are happy and sad songs are sad, and that, God help us, is exactly the way most white Americans sing them—sounding, in both cases, so helplessly, defenselessly fatuous that one dare not speculate on the temperature of the deep freeze from which issue their brave and sexless little voices. Only people who have been “down the line,” as the song puts it, know what this music is about. I think it was Big Bill Broonzy who used to sing “I Feel So Good,” a really joyful song about a man who is on his way to the railroad station to meet his girl. She’s coming home. It is the singer’s incredibly moving exuberance that makes one realize how leaden the time must have been while she was gone. There is no guarantee that she will stay this time, either, as the singer clearly knows, and, in fact, she has not yet actually arrived. Tonight, or tomorrow, or within the next five minutes, he may very well be singing “Lonesome in My Bedroom,” or insisting, “Ain’t we, ain’t we, going to make it all right? Well, if we don’t today, we will tomorrow night.” White Americans do not understand the depths out of which such an ironic tenacity comes, but they suspect that the force is sensual, and they are terrified of sensuality and do not any longer understand it. The word “sensual” is not intended to bring to mind quivering dusky maidens or priapic black studs. I am referring to something much simpler and much less fanciful. To be sensual, I think, is to respect and rejoice in the force of life, of life itself, and to be present in all that one does, from the effort of loving to the breaking of bread. It will be a great day for America, incidentally, when we begin to eat bread again, instead of the blasphemous and tasteless foam rubber that we have substituted for it And I am not being frivolous now, either. Something very sinister happens to the people of a country when they begin to distrust their own reactions as deeply as they do here, and become as joyless as they have become. It is this individual uncertainty on the part of white American men and women, this inability to renew themselves at the fountain of their own lives, that makes the discussion, let alone elucidation, of any conundrum—that is, any reality—so supremely difficult. The person who distrusts himself has no touchstone for reality—for this touchstone can be only oneself. Such a person interposes between himself and reality nothing less than a labyrinth of attitudes. And these attitudes, furthermore, though the person is usually unaware of it (is unaware of so much!), are historical and public attitudes. They do not relate to the present any more than they relate to the person. Therefore, whatever white people do not know about Negroes reveals, precisely and inexorably, what they do not know about themselves."

That is the way you communicate to rational people, not with the feral grunts of an Eminem.  James Baldwin is worth ten-thousand of Marshall Mathers, if not ten-million.  May God, in his infinite mercy, raise up a hundred or a thousand new James Baldwins for America to (Yes!  I dare say it!) intelligently rebuke White America, where necessary.

But I was going to write about the "coarsening of American society", wasn't I?  And I must make it clear at the outset that I understand President Trump to be as problematically coarse as Mr. Mathers.  The polite, civil American citizen has nothing to choose between these two.  I do not expect Donald Trump's inevitable tweet in response to Eminem's free-style hit job (which certainly must have already been tweeted?) to be any less coarse or self-serving than the rap which was its occasion.

What I do ask us to consider is this:  Why do we care so much about the opinions of wealthy, successful entertainers?  We have had multiple cases of motion picture actors testifying before Congress, because they played parts in movies related to the subject at hand.  We do this sort of thing all the time.  We elevate our entertainments to God status.  Would anyone even care what happens before the start of an NFL game had we not already deified sports in America?  To those who would qualify Eminem as some qualified cultural prophet, at the same time attacking Trump, I would say:

"Do you want an entertainer as President?  Because, that's how you get an entertainer as President!"

This is not a left-right thing, nor a black-white thing, nor a young-old thing.  It's all of us.  We have all, to one degree or another, idolized entertainment and entertainers.

Let us heed the words of St. Paul to the Corinthians:

"Now these things were our examples, to the intent we should not lust after evil things, as they also lusted. Neither be ye idolaters, as were some of them; as it is written, The people sat down to eat and drink, and rose up to play."

Rules For My Son

A lot of my social media friends have been posting this list of "Rules For My Son" compiled by someone named Aaron Conrad.  As he notes in the post, he compiled them from here.

Although I agree with some of the sentiments expressed, I thought I would take a few moments to craft a list more in keeping with my own fatherhood style.  Here they are:


1. Be humble.

2. Let another praise you, and not your own mouth; a stranger, and not your own lips.     (Proverbs 27:2)

3. Enter a pool any damn way you please. Only those insecure in their manhood worry    about such things.

4. Stand in the presence of the aged. (Leviticus 19:32)

5. Never be afraid to ask out the smartest girl in the room.

6. Carry 3 handkerchiefs, especially in allergy season.

7. Inconvenience yourself before others.

8. The right word, at the right time, is worth 1000 sport coats.

9. Don’t waste time debating what is adiaphorous.

10. Admit it when you are wrong.

11. Cover an offense. (Proverbs 17:9)

12. Why not rather be wronged? (1 Corinthians 6:7)

13. Music on the beach is amazingly cool (e.g. Dick Dale in “Muscle Beach Party”).

14. Only weak men fear strong women.

15. Never lose your sense of humor.

16. Merge early.

17. Forsake electronic games – learn to weld instead.

18. The borrower is slave to the lender. (Proverbs 22:7)

19. Be a creator of things more than a consumer of entertainments.

20. Be careful with a fool (Johnny Winter). Go from the presence of a foolish man, when   thou perceivest not in him the lips of knowledge (Proverbs 14:7)

21. Sometimes “nothing” is a real cool hand.

22. Do the onerous job first, then the more pleasant tasks.

23. Find out what mindless men do, then avoid these things.

24. Love driving as much as Jim Hurtubise.

25. Don’t fear risk; manage it.

Another Crazy Church Dream

I just woke up from another crazy church dream. This one was set some 20 years in the future.

With government backing, a hostile group of LGBTQ Feminists had taken over the Mary altar at Mariners' Church, and had decided to conduct their "services" at exactly the same time as our 11:00 am Holy Communion service. In the event, their congregation turned out to be all middle-aged women (that is, younger than myself), with hair hacked clumsily off at the neck, and screeching loudly so that our prayers could not be heard. As a break from the screeching and howling, they sometimes broke into the cadence of a Leftist style protest chant (e.g., "Stuff your old, tired Litur-gee; give us sweet cacopho-nee!").

The first instinct of the faithful was to have our organist give them a long blast of Buxtehude from our mighty Pilzecker organ. And, indeed, this did appear be efficacious: they could be seen fleeing the premises in terror, thumbs firmly over their ears.
But they returned the following Sunday with a court injunction from a federal judge, prohibiting us from using the organ during their "services." So that morning was nothing but screeching and howling again.

So, I thought and thought was to do, and back at home I made notes for a Collect prayer to be composed for them to find mysteriously on the side altar and hopefully (with unintended consequences) to be read by them. This is the prayer which I composed:

"O Almighty Parent, we come proudly before thee, beseeching that thou wouldest be pleased to rid this place of all falsehood. Judge between us and our foes. May the teeth be broken out of the mouths of the wicked, and every lying tongue silenced. May the marzipan and herbal tea offered at this altar be a constant reminder of thy vaunted and cunning Social Justice, by which all disquietude is put forcibly to rest. Amen"

Then I went to Fedex-Kinko's to get it printed in a swooping and effusively non-binary font, in all the colors of God's rainbow. Then, I had it laminated for good measure and set it upon the Mary altar for them to discover.

Sadly, the dream ended there, and so I do not know if my plan worked or not.

Glitter Ash Wednesday?

This is about the most theologically corrupt thing I've ever seen.

"Ashes are a reminder that we're all gonna die.   You put glitter in there, and suddenly you're witnessing to hope that is gritty and real!"

NO.

We ARE all going to die.  That's KIND OF THE POINT of Ash Wednesday.

Secondly, your hope is supposed to come from the Gospel, and specifically the passion, death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus Christ.  If your hope comes from glitter, it is no hope at all.

(Fit) Girl at the Mirror - My Norman Rockwell Tribute Painting

I had the idea for this painting about 3 years back.  I wanted to base it as closely (in a visual sense) as possible on Norman Rockwell's famous "Girl at the Mirror" painting.  I was able to learn the dimensions of the Rockwell original, and I stretched my own canvas over stretchers of that same size.

     

Norman Rockwell - Girl at the Mirror (1954)

Various people find different meanings in the Rockwell original, but I think at its root, it is about the inevitable move away from the trappings of childhood (cf, 1 Corinthians 13:11) toward the beginnings of adulthood.  It is about blossoming.  But it is also about the doubts that can accompany such a metamorphosis.

In Rockwell's painting, the girl (depicted by his young model Mary Whalen Leonard) shows a good bit of skepticism in this regard, perhaps intimidated by the visage of movie actress Jane Russell staring up at her from a magazine page.

My idea was to show a young woman (older than Rockwell's girl) on the brink of transforming her body to the next level, probably in anticipation of competing in physique competitions.  In place of the discarded doll of Rockwell's painting are the pink 2-pound dumbbells with which she started her bodybuilding journey.  They have been displaced by a more massive dumbbell and the ubiquitous 1-gallon water jug of the serious bodybuilder.

   



















Paul Erlandson - Fit Girl at the Mirror (2017)

Prints of this painting will be available very soon for purchase.

Slot Car Racing Song!!

From Australia comes this fine musical tribute to one of the greatest hobbies ever:  slot car racing!