Galatians 2:6-10
August 18, 2005
2:6 But from those who were influential (whatever they were makes no difference to me; God shows no favoritism between people)–those influential leaders added nothing to my message. 2:7 On the contrary, when they saw that I was entrusted with the gospel to the uncircumcised just as Peter was to the circumcised 2:8 (for he who empowered Peter for his apostleship to the circumcised also empowered me for my apostleship to the Gentiles) 2:9 and when James, Cephas, and John, who had a reputation as pillars, recognized the grace that had been given to me, they gave to Barnabas and me the right hand of fellowship, agreeing that we would go to the Gentiles and they to the circumcised. 2:10 They requested only that we remember the poor, the very thing I also was eager to do.
I think Paul carried a wee chip on his shoulder. Those who accepted the original disciples of Jesus as trustworthy weren’t too sure of Paul, who came along later, and he may have suspected that the church leaders in Jerusalem weren’t behind him. Maybe Paul was wrong in taking the gospel message to the Gentiles (meaning anyone not a Jew). So he headed for headquarters to have it out with James, Peter, and John.
As we see here, the problem melted away when the Jerusalem leaders heard directly from Paul what was happening with him among the Gentiles. So the infant church continued to spread and grow. -sdg-
Vile clench
August 18, 2005
Spotted this morning on The Gunroom mail list (Patrick O’Brian):
No time to punctuate further. Must dash.
Dave
Pampered Generation
August 18, 2005
In case you think your life is sometimes rough and raw, turn the clock back a couple of centuries and consider the following. I ran across it while reading about the battle of Trafalgar.
On the Brest Blockade
Although strenuous efforts were made to restock ships with fresh food at every opportunity, and the rottenness of the food has been exaggerated, there were occasions when it was anything but appetizing. Very few seamen wrote describing their life. A rare exception was a young boy of eleven called Bernard Coleridge who wrote home to his parents while on blockade duty off Brest in 1804. Despite the conditions, he seemed happy with his lot.
Indeed we live on beef which has been ten or eleven years in corn and on biscuit which quite makes your throat cold in eating it owing to the maggots which are very cold when you eat them, like calves-foot jelly or blomonge being very fat indeed. Indeed, I do like this life very much, but I cannot help laughing heartily when I think of sculling about the old cider tub in the pond, and Mary Anne Cosserat capsizing into the pond just by the mulberry bush. I often think what I would give for two or three quarendons [apples] off the tree on the lawn with their rosy cheeks! We drink water the colour of the bark of the pear tree with plenty of little maggots and weavils in it and wine which is exactly like bullock’s blood and sawdust mixed together. I hope I shall not learn to swear, and by God’s assistance I hope I shall not.
His parents had good reason to keep and treasure his letters, as he died from a fall from the rigging when only fourteen - by no means an uncommon way of being killed.
Dave, wondering what has happened to the human gene pool since then…
Dentists
August 17, 2005
Yesterday I found myself thinking my deep thoughts from the reclined comfort of a dentist’s chair. In less than an hour, my friendly dentist (is he really such a jolly fellow?) took two high-tech sets of X-rays, did a bit of creative carving on my gums, tried to excavate some cavities, communed with his Dentist Handbook (I suspect), shook his head woefully and opined that things were too far gone and that perhaps I should consider dental implants. Pep talk followed.
While waiting for the X-ray images to be processed so they could be displayed on the shiny, new digital display for my dentist’s edification and my amazement, I recalled the first stop on my long dental repair journey.
It was back in the sixties that I first learned that I had an advanced case of periodontal disease. I was also told that I could get low cost treatment if I drove south from Cedar Rapids to the University of Iowa dental clinic in Iowa City. I’ll never forget the first time I walked into that cavernous room lined with long rows of dental chairs and populated with dental students and their mentors. Low moans and an occasional shriek emitted from the hapless patients experiencing “the practice” of dentistry.
To make a long and gruesome story mercifully shorter, I probably sat in one of those public chairs a dozen times, as the dentists tried to deal with the results of the dental sins of my past. By today’s standards it was pretty crude, accomplished without comfortable chairs, attractive young assistants, soft background music, high-tech tools, and smiles all around.
Did I receive good dental care? I don’t know, but I’m glad I’m now living in urban comfort in the twenty-first century and not on shipboard during the eighteenth century. A toothache then would mean being strapped in a plain chair, a shipmate banging on a kettle alongside my ear to distract me from the pain while the ship’s ’surgeon’ wrenched the offending tooth out of my jaw using dirty hammer, chisel, and pliers.
Dave
On being a fiduciary
August 16, 2005
Just past the crack of dawn this morning I elbowed my way into a conference room crowded with suits. Billed as the quarterly meeting of the Investment Committee of Quincy’s favorite health care institution, I have come to rather look forward to these meetings, more for their entertainment value than anything else.
There are usually about a couple dozen of us there, and we fall roughly into three groups. First are the institution’s financial executives, whose tough jobs depend on keeping the ship financially afloat in an uncertain and increasingly regulated environment. Next are the professional money managers, there to rationalize why our investments gained or slipped (more on that later). The third bunch of us are the trustees of the not-for-profit institution. We are there primarily to cover our collective asses in case good people get hurt by clumsy money-handling.
This is more politely called discharging our fiduciary responsibility.
But back to the money managers, who are there for their quarterly road-show. This is the situation as I see it; we have the money, enough to let the accountants throw away the last three aughts and still leave several significant digits. Our hired financial execs are understandably not too comfortable herding that many dollars, so we outsource the actual investment process and performance tracking to one or more hired guns.
Think a bit about what a money management firm sells. It promises to do better than the average money manager, measured by comparing how our dollars in their care do alongside one or more market averages, like the S&P 500 or one of its brethren. In the nature of things, to be “above average” means some must, perforce, be “below average,” regardless of what Garrison Keillor might say.
I really like these cowboys. First, they are young and very bright. Second, they are obviously having fun walking the tightrope. They have figured out some very creative ways to say, “Your fund has gained a little against the average over the last quarter, and we believe that this trend will continue, but if it doesn’t it will likely be because of exogenous factors, but not to worry, we will quickly adjust your portfolio to run with whatever trend follows, and do it better than that firm you have in the wings in case we stumble.”
In English: “We don’t have the foggiest idea of what the future will bring, but we’ll make a few shrewd guesses and scramble to recover if we guess wrong. Trust us.” What a way to earn a living!
When my eyes start to glaze over, I just picture The Mogambo Guru sitting at the table. I have a pretty good idea of what he would say.
Trustee Dave, busy being fiduciarily responsible…
What’s an orlop?
August 15, 2005
An eighteenth century sailing ship has several layered decks. The bottom-most deck, just over the hold of the ship, is called the orlop deck.
This deck was a working deck, safely below the waterline. The surgeon’s hacking room, the spirit room, the bread room, the powder room, and the cable tier were usually accessible from the orlop deck.
In this phantom blog-ship, it is the working area of itinerant wordsmiths, safe from stray cannonballs.
Dave
Learning curves
August 15, 2005
Even though WordPress allows publishing a blog with little effort, it still leaves me scrambling up Yet Another Learning Curve (YALC). It wearies me thinking of all the technological learning mountains I have struggled to climb over the past half-century.
Starting, perhaps, with Ohm’s Law, there were a number of electronic design skills, programming languages, punch cards, and what seems like an unending list of successive learning challenges. My head hurts.
Now, as I prepare to retire my antique web site, I am struggling to learn WordPress. I hope my ageing brain cells are up to the task.
Dave, feeling older every day but hanging on…
New beginnings
August 14, 2005
One of the delights of being a certain age is being able to observe several waves of technology. Somewhere in the dim nineteen-eighties I got caught up in the world-wide web, and it wasn’t long before I did a little HTML coding and put up my very own web site. As that wave ebbed the blog wave broke, and now it is time for me to retire the old web site and learn a little about the new web; PHP and databases and all that stuff.
Why the nautical theme? Does Patrick O’Brian ring a bell? No? How about Aubrey/Maturin? O’Brian’s twenty sea novels are not only extremely well-written but describe the technology of the sailing ships of the eighteenth century in a way that I find captivating. I’ll try not to run it into the ground.
Thus the Orlop is born, and so long as the internet gods continue to smile, the only thing I need to do is write. Over time I plan to transfer the best of the old web site, dayers.net, to the Orlop.
Dave
