Downton Abbey

Advertised as a 4 part Masterpiece Series on PBS, "Downton Abbey" set its hooks quickly into the flesh of our family and we gladly accepted being reeled ashore, knowing that resolve would come in the 4th and final episode. The highly anticipated 4th episode aired last night. When the final scene was coming to an end, my  wife and I began to realized that every relationship and event was in a disastrous web of loose ends and there wasn't enough time to pull it all together. Then the camera froze upon the lead character who just announced to the lawn party that England was at war with Germany. Stunned silence. Shock. Rage. Ungracious words. And this not from the elite English guests, but from Robin and I !!!

Oh, and we're supposed to find joy in the 6pt type, sheepishly sneaking across the screen announcing that PBS was working on the continuing episodes? Are you kidding me?

I think that the series should have been advertised as an incomplete 4 part series — that way none of us would have wasted our time and emotions and even allowed ourselves to be sucked into a 4 week, 6 hour ordeal with no resolve.

To try and quantify the emotional level I've devised a simple 1-10 scale most can identify with:

Sorrow for New Orleans after Katrina:  7 (personally I would never build below sea level)
Sorrow for HaitI:  8
The concern for Cairo:  4
Outrage over Downton Abbey:  9.5

I know this paints me as shallow and that my affections are imbalanced. I may normalize when the miff wears off...

Deion Sanders / Michael Irvin

Deion Sanders and Michael Irvin are part of the NFL Channel's team of analysts. However, they are the best of the best. Would that more pastors had matter-of-fact, in-your-face pronouncements like these guys. They provide a very passionate analysis of the game, both what is bad and who they love and why. Actually these two ARE men of the cloth — the expensive kind that is. Man can they dress!

Colin Farrell / Ondine

I recently watched Ondine starring Colin Farrell, portraying the underdog, recovering alcoholic, Irish fisherman named Syracuse, who pulls up his nets and finds a beautiful woman in his net. The story is well done. A spot on review is here. Some thoughts on the film which have no literary groundings:  Does Colin Farrell insure his eyebrows? How do they keep his hair so greasy looking? Are there any unattractive selkies?

Sandals

Super Glue wasn't holding the techtonic plates of my sandal's souls together anymore. I'm sitting here praying that this isn't some metaphor...Anyway, I went to throw these guys out — tossed one in the trash, went to toss the other (for two points of course) and had just about the same heart-squeezing, cautionary feeling like the time I was told by some higher power strangling me by my conscience, to stop shooting birds with my bb gun. Just couldn't throw 'em away. I retrieved the first, which made a dramatic roll along the rim of the galvanized trash can, before falling to its sure demise. I took them down to Colin Leary, my ol' friend, who owns Boot Country, and he told me, "Bob, I can throw those away for you." You see, I took them to see if they could survive off of life support. No way. Not even a 2-month prognosis. A few years from now, if a cobbler sees shoes with this much abuse, he'll be obliged to report me to a government agency. Anyway, I told Colin, "No, Thanks Colin. I'm going to screw them to my shop wall." Colin knew where I was coming from. He didn't think it weird at all to save this type of historical time capsule of events. He advised me to use a square-bit screw – a bit out of the normal pattern fer you ladies out there, so that unbelievers wouldn't grab any old Phillips screw driver and take them down. Back home we started looking at the marks on the Birks and Adrien and I got some laughs from the dark red paint streaked across them. It's kind of funny, I'll tell you... I was out in the shop with a brand new Wagner airless painter. The airless was needed to blend a beautiful fade from warm brown to red across a four foot by 12 foot area. I had just finished blending the final color, turned around holding the gun, which has a plastic quart paint holder screwed into the bottom of it, and said to Adrien, "That was the hardest thing I've done in my life, hope I don't have to do that again." And the paint holder fell off the gun. It was almost full of paint. When it hit the floor, it splashed across every surface heading due east at roughly 100 feet per second. It was really beautiful if you didn't have to clean it up -- a gorgeous red wave slapping and staining indiscriminately across the shop until it met a dead end in the garage door. Splat. It missed my sign. Unbelievable since it landed inches away...

A friend of mine uses her husband's old shop boots for planters in the summer. Now that is pure poetry if you ask me – to see beautiful colored flowers coming up out of an dead old boot.

Music / Mark Twain

Before Leaving the House

Fortunately for me, before leaving for an appointment, I had to make a quick trip to the privy. Upon glancing at my visage in the mirror I was horror-struck with the thought of what I was about to share with the world! I had twin eyebrow hairs, thick, white ones, arching out over my glasses frames and curving back down toward my lenses. A conservative guess put these hairs easily within reach of Boone and Crocket records. And I had just kissed my wife goodbye! I came back to her and asked her if she really minded me leaving the house like this. "Like wha... Oh my!" As she stepped back with her hand covering her mouth. This type of thing has happened before, manifesting itself in creative and compromising situations. It prompted me to design this little "Remember" sign. If you want a copy of it to paste on your door just holler. I got your back, you just be sure and get your nose.

Mark Twain / Joan of Arc

After reading Mr. God, This is Anna, and writing a blurb about it associating it with Joan of Arc, I decided to reread Mark Twain's  Joan of Arc and I have been richly rewarded. Twain is dead serious in bringing all his skill as a writer into this narrative. He spent 12 years in research and two years in writing it. Reading descriptive accounts of the ever-cursing, war-torn general La Hire reveals poetry on par with Shakespeare:

"...Why, she has sent for Satan himself — that is to say, La Hire—that military hurricane, that godless swashbuckler, that lurid conflagration of blasphemy, that Vesuvius of profanity, forever in eruption." 

Later,  when that saint, Joan of Arc met La Hire and demanded that the prostitutes be ejected from his camp and that the men attend mass twice a day, La Hire — "...went on, pouring out a most pathetic stream of arguments and blaspemy, which broke Joan all up, and made her laugh as she had not laughed since she played in the Domremy pastures." 

The love of  base creatures and how they were transformed by Joan's graciousness, reminds me of the verse in scripture when Jesus says, "If I be lifted up, I will draw all manner of men to me." allow me to paraphrase, "If I be properly portrayed— my character adequately witnessed to, people will come to me naturally."  And this is the crux of the book! Twain himself is La Hire. Twain is the man used to living on his own dogma. Twain the Protestant skeptic meets the Catholic Joan of Arc, and falls in love with the woman and the God she represents. A God who's purpose was to bring and end to a 100 years of demonic war, with the fewest amounts of casualties and with a woman child of 17 years of age — not unlike the fragile Christmas story of salvation by a mere baby.

France was a total mess at the time. Their uncrowned King had just enough money to skirt out of the country and was surrounded by cowardly advisors. This passage of Joan's confrontation with the King's prime minister, La Tremouille, sums up a lot:

La Tremouille:  My judgement is to wait (and not strike the English before they are reinforced)

Joan:  Wait for what?

La Tremouille: (after waiting...) Matters of state are not proper matters for public discussion.

Joan:  I have to beg your pardon. My trespass came of ignorance. I did not know that matters connected with your department of the government were matters of state.

La Tremouille: I am the  King's chief minister, and yet you had the impression that matters connected with my department are not matters of state: Pray how is that?

Joan:  Because there is no state.

La Tremouille:  No state!

Joan:  No, sir, there is no state, and no use for a minister. France is shrunk to a couple of acres of ground: a sheriff's constable could take care of it; its affairs are not matters of state. The term is too large.

The long and short of it is this: There is hope for this world not because some great person will be lifted up to deliver us, but because there is an omipotent and omniscient God taking personal interest in the mess we make of things. And if tears don't stream down your face when you read of her courage and what was instilled in others, then I really feel sorry for you. I really do. I cannot recommend this book highly enough.

Toothpaste Ideas

Sorry if the dental hygene theme is a bit worn out here, but I had a great idea. You know how brushing your teeth can just ruin the flavor of any food or drink that comes after the deed? Well, how about brushing your teeth with a compatible flavor of what you expect to indulge in? Here's a few flavors that I might keep on hand. How about you?