He was a Cowboy Billionaire with scars on his heart.

That was the tagline on one of those Kindle ads for a romance novel.  We’ve been laughing about it since.

Last night we had too much milk and too many frozen bananas so we blended them up and sat around the table coming up with our own romantic heroes. (more…)

The tomb is empty.

All tombs will be.

That is their telos.

Say what you hear.

Among other things, I am looking for insight on how to be more than I am and how to lead my family to greatness in time and eternity.

I also hope to spend some time at the foot of the cross with some of the speakers, this being Easter weekend.

The ruler of that land was called the Tiger King.  He lived in great luxury and had utter sway from harvest to harvest.

When the harvest was in, he stepped down.  The time for choosing who would next wear the Tiger Crown came.

The choosing went like this.  They had a certain large field where they held a combat.  The last man standing among all the aspirants took the Tiger Crown for the next year.  But this was no ordinary combat.  Each man had to be mounted on a tiger.  Either his own, or one that would be provided.

More men were laid low by their own tiger then by another’s blows. (more…)

A great bear came out of his winter cave to see the sun rising pink over the still snow-patched fields and meadows.  The bare trees were dark against that brilliant light.  The bear was overwhelmed and had what he felt was a vision of true insight.  “Beauty is good,” he said to himself.

He painstakingly set to etch patterns in each claw using his other claws and gentle patient nibbles with his great jaw.  It took a long time.  The changes were subtle.  But when he was done he was an ordinary bear in all other respects, but each claw was truly beautiful.

In his rejoicing, he lifted a great log and tossed it, and felt the joy and glory of his strength.  “Strength is good,” he said to himself, and then improved his strength in the ways that even bears can do.  When he felt himself to be truly strong, even for a great bear, and with his claws truly beautiful, he went forth slashing and destroying.  He knocked down and ripped and tore and left broken trees and dying animals and dead men and women in his wake and horrible death and corruption.  In that way he became the first ogre and the grandfather of all that kind.

Moral:  Beware isolated beauty.  Beware isolated truth.

As a follow-up to our sensitive, thoughtful post on immunization, more totally-serious medical advice.  By which we mean not serious at all.  I think the part about getting sunlight is good though.  That worked for me.

There once was a man who was born to be a womanizer.  Without trying he grew up tall and remarkably handsome.  He had a natural talent for mixing sympathy and teasing, with a lot of interest and empathy for woman but also had a kind of untouchable and remote inner core–social dynamite.  He had catholic tastes in girls and was attracted to sex.  He even–please don’t judge him, it just happened–had a sort of sixth sense for someone’s inner vulnerabilities that could be exploited.  All in all, he would have been a superlative womanizer and he knew it.  Fortunately for him, he grew up a follower of Christ.  Though he knew he could womanize and saw the appeal of doing something that he was very good at, it didn’t work with the burning vision God gave him of leading a beloved wife and children and grandchildren into the eternities.   A natural talent for womanizing doesn’t just turn into a natural talent for being a husband, it turns out.  There were bumps along the way.  Sometimes when he thought of the great gift he had been born with, he had to laugh.

[Editor’s note:  yes, this is weird even by our standards.  Dunno, it just came to me]

There is a land near an impossibly high mountain.  It is somewhere in a mountain range that goes back and back and up and up. No one knows how high and how far back it goes.  Every year the voice of God comes from the mountain, inviting all people to come up to Him.  None have come so far.  None are able to.  The people of that land usually do not venture into the range at all; they treat it with superstitious awe.

There is a certain group in that land who work hard and live plainly.  They are a religious people.  They pray to God, whose voice comes from the mountain.  They seem  less afraid of the mountains than most, but what they do there is not religious or spiritual or awe-inspiring.  It doesn’t seem worthy of the voice somehow, and so the other people of the land scorn them.  Specifically, they are doing stonework on the mountains.  They have cut very very broad stairs and ramps, that go about a 1000 feet up and a mile or so in.  At the end, there is a valley that they are currently clearing and leveling and terracing into a very large space, large enough for a town and villages and fields.

There was a young man there who grew tired of the daily grind of field and farm and holidays spent working on the stairs and the level space.  He heard the Voice of the mountain and wanted to ascend.  Yes, the stairs his folk made were symbolically about reaching God.  But he wanted to actually reach God.  So he joined a crew of bold men who dared!  They set out into the wastes, up into where the plants and animals were strange, up into the endless snows and silence.  The important thing was to try! Most died.  He barely made it back. (more…)

Any institution will get loaded down with extras over time.  Its people will then have to pare back.

The paring back can go too far.

You can lose redundancy.  You have cored and cored until if the one pillar left in your building falls, the whole thing falls.

You can also lose actual core functions.  No one institution can do anything itself, so any corporate body trying to focus on its ‘core’ will inevitably cut out some things that matter but that in theory should be available from outside.  No sheep rancher puts ‘provide daylight’ on his priority tasks list.  But daylight is a priority.

If there are needful things that cannot be provided outside the institution, they must be provided in some way.  If you are in the desert, irrigation is a core farm function.

* * *

Us: Rites of passage for men aren’t a core function for the Church of Christ, it shouldn’t get in the way of proselyting, which is core.  Let that be provided elsewhere.

Elsewhere:  Howling social wasteland

One way of understanding recent history in the Church is that the institution is no longer doing everything that has to be done, which means members must step in to do them.  If the Church keeps doing it until the members do their own, the members will never do their own.  So the Church just . . . stops.

Marriage is a core function.  It is indispensable.  Which means that getting the man-woman thing right is needful.  Without it, down we go.

That’s why we spend so much time working at the man-woman thing here.  Not because its so much fun.  Because its so important.  We try out different ideas, kick them around, try to work a bit in the space that the Church isn ‘t.  Some of you don’t like it.  Let me ask you: if not us, who?

There were two brothers who had ambition.  Once their parents died, they set out through means fair and only a little bit foul to acquire as much power and possessions as they could.

It was a hard struggle.

They made enemies.

At last they owned all that they could see and were the men in their community whose decisions mattered.  There were limits to what they possessed, of course.  Two men can only manage so much.  And there were limits to their authority–they had enemies, they could only push so far without provoking a reaction.  But they had all the reasonable targets for their ambition and as much property and power as they could reasonably expect to hold.  They could at last relax a little.  They held a great feast to mark the completion of their aims.

A few days after, the lean brother came to the stout one.

“Brother,” he said, “I am giving it all up.  I am leaving everything behind.  I am going to go to a far country with only the clothes on my back, where no one knows me, where I have no credit nor reputation.  I am going to start with nothing there.  Everything here is yours unless you want to come with me.”

“What? Of course not”

The stouter brother was appalled.  It would be extremely difficult to hold his position with just him.  It could be done, just barely, but it would require unremitting toil.  And he would miss his brother.  He brooded for a bit and then burst out in an exclamation.

But his leaner brother had been brooding too, because he also burst out in an exclamation.  It was the same exclamation, and at the same time.

“How can you be satisfied with so little?”

For no real reason, I wrote a silly rhyming word on my whiteboard at work.

“Boogie woogie”

Some coworkers added to it.  “Loosie-goosie”  “humbug” “hankie-pankie”

Another colleague came by and wrote “hysteron proteron.”  It was awkward, because this colleague thinks I’m literate and expected me to know the term.  Whereas I’d never seen it before.  His explanation was cursory, we were both embarrassed, so I looked it up more after he left.

It’s a rhetorical figure where you invert a sequence to emphasize the more important latter part of the sequence or just to add a flourish.

Born and bred

The article I read translated it (pretty loosely, I think) as “first last.”

This was earlier this week.

That night, I read a Nevil Shute book where one guy gets a cold.  Why?  Well, he sheepishly admits, he joined a great club called the Hysteron Proteron where they live one day backwards.  They start with a formal dinner early in the morning and end with a little breakfast and he ended up outside in the damp at an unusual hour.

OK.  That wouldn’t be the first time I learn a new word and start seeing it everywhere.  Though its a highly unusual new word.

The next morning we read D&C 29 which spends verses and verses on the gospel saying that the first shall be last, and the last first.

I don’t understand why.  I am already the kind of person who is going to think a verse about the first being last is important because I have a taste for the mysterious and for paradox.  I don’t need any supernatural highlighting.

I sometimes think that reality is just kinda filled with meaning and connection and some of it is directed from above with a purpose and some of it is just kinda there.

***

I dreamed and it felt like a significant dream about a man who went online as ‘nurnin.’  But I don’t known any nurnins.

Satan said, give me thine honor, which is my power.

-D&C 29.

Honor is power.

There is an overwhelming amount of pointers in scripture towards a metaphysics which is based on honor, glory, and power, which is almost completely ignored.  The few people who do address it have silly reductionist things to say about it.

And the righteous shall be gathered on my right hand unto eternal life; and the wicked on my left hand will I be ashamed to own before the Father;

28 Wherefore I will say unto them—Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels.

29 And now, behold, I say unto you, never at any time have I declared from mine own mouth that they should return, for where I am they cannot come, for they have no power.

30 But remember that all my judgments are not given unto men; and as the words have gone forth out of my mouth even so shall they be fulfilled, that the first shall be last, and that the last shall be first in

That “but” looks like its going to be a qualification on the apparent eternal state of the damned.  But the revelation launches into a discussion of spiritual and temporal creation and never addresses damnation again.  I don’t know what to make of it.

31 For by the power of my Spirit created I them; yea, all things both spiritual and temporal—

32 First spiritual, secondly temporal, which is the beginning of my work; and again, first temporal, and secondly spiritual, which is the last of my work

Creation is first spiritual, then temporal.  Easy enough.  But what is the inverse part at the last mean?  First resurrection, then the sanctification of the soul?  First the millennium and then the celestial earth?

Bruce Charlton summarizes the body-size difference between men and women.  It is doughty.

The sex difference in upper-body muscle mass in humans is similar in magnitude to the sex difference in lean body mass in gorillas, the most sexually dimorphic primate

…

In overall body weight comparisons, a female advantage in fat mass largely counterbalances a male advantage in muscle mass, making the sexes appear quite similar. But this gross similarity masks very different tissue investment strategies by males and females

More here.

What strikes me, as always, is how much Team Evil rejects actual science and actual evolution while loudly using them as a stick to beat up their opponents.  Consciously and thoroughly rejecting them and all their doctrines doesn’t make you anti-science or anti-rational any more than hating Moloch makes you anti-God.

The nibs down at the Drones Club assevere that shots and jabs are a sovereign specific against the virus thinggummy.

The Woosters are known for their manly fortitude, practically bathing in the stuff don’t you know, but all the same I meet the invitation to be poked in the snoot with a hearty n., dash it!  Jabs are right out.  So liquor it is.