Pride of Baltimore
October 19, 2006
More than two years ago I started construction of Pride of Baltimore II, a 1/64 scale model of a fast sailing schooner of the type known as a Baltimore Clipper. The original Pride ruled the waves from 1805 to 1815, the precursor of the Clipper ship era of the 1850s.
An authentic replica of the original Pride was launched in 1977 and sailed on May 1, 1977, from Baltimore. On May 14, 1986, the Pride of Baltimore was lost at sea along with four crew members. A best-selling book, Pride of the Seaby Tom Waldron tells the story of the Pride’s last voyage and survival at sea.
The keel was laid for Pride II in May of 1987, and she put to sea in 1989.
Here is my version with the hull partly painted.
Dave, an armchair sailor not too worried about seasickness.
Five years after
September 9, 2006
As the anniversary of 9/11 approaches, everyone is putting on their wise-retrospective beanies and pontificating about the significance of the twin-towers attack. Now it’s my turn, but first read this:
Five years ago, I cared for little outside my own circle of friends and family. Caring was for fools and patriotism mostly nostalgic in nature. I thought that things would continue as they always had. I was unaware of the existence of our enemies or their plans, and blissfully so.
All of that changed in a white-hot second on the morning of 9/11. Like so many other Americans, I was ripped from my comfortable womb and delivered against my will into a world where complete strangers hate me and would happily sacrifice their lives to kill me. Should I have mourned the loss of my ignorance?
I’m not sure that many had such an epiphany on the morning of 9/11 and after, but the writer makes a good point. Everything did change; the political landscape not the least, as the article points out.
I submit that no one with a Christian worldview should have been totally shocked, as so many around us say they were. The fact that people who will gladly sacrifice their lives to kill us without even knowing us should not come as a surprise. There is ugly evil in the world that we see that is being orchestrated in a world that we cannot see. It’s true. Get used to it.
I think we get our eyes opened to the existence of evil in a number of ways. One is learning to accept as reality events like terrorist attacks. Anyone exposed to TV news cannot avoid seeing what is happening in the world, even though most of the nasty stuff still happens on the other side of the world.
There are also a few books around that do a pretty good job of rubbing our noses in reality.
Here’s a gratuitous plug for a series of novels by Joel C. Rosenberg. One of his latest is The Ezekiel Option. How’s this for opening lines? “Boris Stuchenko would be dead in less than nineteen minutes. And he had no idea why.” Those nineteen minutes took only ten pages to arrive, and I would bet that every person reading them started feverishly reading and flipping pages to see what would happen. I’ve read many-many current events thrillers, but never anything like Rosenberg’s stories. He somehow maintains a frantic pace steadily from the first to the last page. Amazing!
I might add that the books are a good family-read; no sexual episodes, no profanity, no heavy-handed moralizing - just fast-paced action that has the ring of truth.
Okay, where was I?
Oh, yes. Most of us need a wake-up call of some sort, expecially if we live comfy lives in the Western world. Until we come to grips with the fact of evil in the world (and the answer to it), we are pitifully vulnerable to those times, prayerfully few, when evil stares us right in the face. It doesn’t have to be that way.
Dave, pontificating from his own little cocoon of safety.
Reading and thinking: two quotes
August 31, 2006
One of the few devotional periodicals worth reading is Tabletalk from Ligonier Ministries. This month’s issue is about “Proud Mediocrity: Facing the addiction of our culture.” But never mind. All I want to do is to pass on a couple of striking (to me, for obvious reasons,) quotations to those who collect such things.
The majority, though they are sometimes frequent readers, do not set much store by reading. They turn to it as a last resource. They abandon it with alacrity as soon as any alternate pastime turns up. It is kept for railway journeys, illnesses, odd moments of enforced solitude, or for the process called readiing oneself to sleep. …but literary people are always looking for leisure and silence in which to read and do so with their whole attention. –C.S. Lewis in An Experiment in Criticism
And then there was this gem from the acerbic pen of G.K. Chesterton:
The great intellectual tradition that comes down to us from the past was never interrupted or lost through such trifles as the sack of Rome, the triumph of Attila, or all the barbarian invasions of the Dark Ages. It was lost after the introduction of printing, the discovery of America, the coming of the marvels of technology, the establishment of universal education, and all the enlightenment of the modern world. It was there, if anywhere, that there was lost or impatiently snapped the long thin delicate thread that had descended from distant antiquity; the thread of that unusual human hobby: the habit of thinking.
Dave, hanging on by a thread.
Okay, what’s an orlop?
August 8, 2006
Some years ago my imagination was captured by reading about the short Age of Sail, when Napoleon was the Bad Guy du jour, and the Royal Navy ruled the seas. In particular it was the Aubrey-Maturin novels written by Patrick O’Brian, full of authentic detail about frigates and ships of the line that interested me. The lowest partial deck on those ships, just above the hold, was called “the orlop deck,” the safest place aboard ship during a sea battle, well below the waterline.
The condo where Marilyn and I live doesn’t much resemble a three-masted sailing ship, but I think of my basement office, where I do my blogging, as the orlop.
Dave, as he writes these words in the orlop.
Liberals and Babies and Trust Cues
July 5, 2006
My interest in the Christian vs. Darwinian worldviews led me to this interesting review of a book by Nicholas Wade, Before the Dawn.
Wade tells his readers other disturbing facts. Genetic analysis strongly suggests that all men are descended from a single male, and all women from a single female. On top of that, race is clearly genetic in origin, and not a “social construct” as the American Sociological Association insists.
With all this unwelcome news to print, Wade and his publisher did the sensible thing. They put a Darwinian devotional at the top of every chapter. They knew that even though their readers proudly read The New York Times Science Tuesday every week, they really don’t like science once it moves out of the tenured university laboratory into reality. They are all for science until it interferes with their politics. But they all believe in Darwin.
How can we demand peace and justice if every man living has the instinctive need to conduct a nice little border raid next week? How can we stamp out racism if race is imprinted in the genes? And how can we justify tossing pushy Jews like Larry Summers out of their Harvard presidencies if there really are physical, measurable brain differences between men and women?
These are inconvenient truths, and good reasons to put comforting “trust cues” into Before the Dawn to remind readers that you are really on their side.
After talking about “trust cues” and “the rational calculation to have a baby,” the review ends with this thought:
Nicholas Wade writes:
“Human societies long ago devised an antidote to the freeloader problem… It is religion.”
Now it’s a curious thing, is it not, that in our current secular society, in particular at the epicenter of secularity, Western Europe, we are having a real problem persuading people to have babies. Why would that be, do you think?
Perhaps in the low-trust society of secular Europe people just don’t get the trust cues they need before they will take the risk of having children.
Dave, for whom Christianity is the rational choice.
Clipper ships in the sky
June 17, 2006
Here’s a fascinating survey article from the Economist. During the Age of Sail, the world’s goods moved in slow motion in the holds of clipper ships. Today, goods speed around the world in the cargo containers of giant MD-11 freighter-jets.
The physical internet | Economist.com
21st-century clippers
Frederick Smith, FedEx’s chief executive, compares his company’s jets to clippers, the sailing ships that once carried cargoes on the trade winds. Mr Smith pioneered the air-express business in the early 1970s by delivering a few hundred parcels overnight to a handful of American cities using Falcon aircraft the size of an executive jet. At Memphis airport, the parcels were sorted on a table. Many of his contemporaries thought he was mad: who would pay to send packages by air? He almost went bust. But now FedEx has ordered a fleet of double-deck Airbus A380s to help cope with demand. Rival UPS has also placed orders for the huge new Airbus. Neither company wants any seats inside, just space for lots of cargo. If they were passenger airlines, UPS and FedEx would now rank among the world’s biggest carriers.
Watching a visionary like Frederick Smith create such a change in the world of commerce is fascinating to me. Maybe I dream about life in the Age of Sail, but what’s happening in my own age is much more exciting.
Dave, dreamer.
Cow’s thumb
May 30, 2006
If you happen to see a copy of A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, Capt. Francis Grose, 1796, in a used bookstore, grab it. According to my Forgotten English Calendar, Grose (1731-1791) was an English antiquarian, classically trained painter, and collector of unusual words and phrases, sounding like an all-around interesting guy. “His wickedly amusing dictionary encompassing English dialect, rogue’s cant, and street slang has become a classic reference.” I’m guessing that the dialog in Patrick O’Brian’s sea novels may be salted with phrases from that dictionary.
Wonder how Grose came across his words? He started out at midnight from the King’s Arms in search of adventure, exploring places like the back slums of St. Giles, making himself as affable and jolly as the rest of the motley crew among beggars, cadgers, thieves who at that time infested that district. All in the interest of research, of course.
Oh, yes. Cow’s thumb: Done to a cow’s thumb, done exactly. Remember this as you attend to your outdoor grill this summer.
Dave, wishing he had a better ear for colorful expressions but not eager to do the research.
Do Stories Matter?
May 13, 2006
Another take on “the baddest book.”
Kruse Kronicle: Emergent Conversation and the Da Vinci Code: Do Stories Matter?
Keith Demko, in his a comment to Kruse’s article said, “There is an old adage that says that the Word of God is an anvil that has broken many hammers. God doesn’t need my defense, just my witness. Fortunately, that is all he asks.”
Well said.
Dave
The baddest book
May 12, 2006
Christians and churches all over the country are making a terrible noise about a certain book and a movie by the same name. Because why? Because it misrepresents Christian history, that’s why, and we gotta do something about it! We gotta defend God’s honor!
Since when does the sovereign God need help in defending himself? I say that if you think it’s a bad book, don’t read it. Surely you can find a good book to read.
But what about all those people who may read it and believe it? To this I say that our responsibility as Christians is to proclaim the gospel of Jesus Christ, to raise up Jesus and let the power of the gospel transform minds and hearts. Why should we dignify a bad book by defending ourselves against it? Someone once said that the best defense is a good offense, which suggests that our response to bad books should be to herald the Truth of God in a way that makes it is clear what is true and what is not.
For example, our baddest book might suggest something off the wall, like that Jesus was involved in a sexual affair. We are tempted to react in righteous indignation, saying, “Did not!” (which always elicits a righteous “Did too”).
“So what are we to do about this baddest book and movie that will be read and seen by millons? What if people belief that stuff?” you say. Good question and one that somehow brought to mind a book gathering dust in my library. It’s Heralds of God by James S. Stewart, a book that was written for preachers, not the likes of me. I read it many years ago when my preacher wasn’t watching, and it taught me a lot about the tension between world and gospel.
Why not just call it a bad book and then direct our sermons and conversations to holding up the real Jesus for all to see? Preacher or not, we can all be “heralds of God.”
Dave, not very worried about just another bad book.
Reinventing Jesus
April 26, 2006
Go to this link for a review of Reinventing Jesus: What the Da Vinci Code and Other Novel Speculations Don’t Tell You by Komoszewski, Sawyer, and Wallace.
Kruse Kronicle: “Reinventing Jesus” Book Review
I have stayed pretty aloof from the recent spate of books that tell all about the “real” Jesus, like The Bible Code, The DaVinci Code, Misquoting Jesus, and The Gospel of Jesus, and I am not impressed by most of the efforts to debunk the debunkers that have been coming from orthodox Christian circles. In his review, Kruse says,
It is clear that an unprecedented number of people are asking who Jesus was and what do we really know about him. Where did scripture come from and how did it come to be in its present form? Is it reliable? What are Christians to make of all this?
Good question. Read the review to discover the six sensible conclusions of the authors.
Dave, about to add yet another book to his reading stack.
