Ring Out, Wild Bells

Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky,
The flying cloud, the frosty light:
The year is dying in the night;
Ring out, wild bells, and let him die.

Ring out the old, ring in the new,
Ring, happy bells, across the snow:
The year is going, let him go;
Ring out the false, ring in the true.

Ring out the grief that saps the mind
For those that here we see no more;
Ring out the feud of rich and poor,
Ring in redress to all mankind.

Ring out a slowly dying cause,
And ancient forms of party strife;
Ring in the nobler modes of life,
With sweeter manners, purer laws.

Ring out the want, the care, the sin,
The faithless coldness of the times;
Ring out, ring out my mournful rhymes
But ring the fuller minstrel in.

Ring out false pride in place and blood,
The civic slander and the spite;
Ring in the love of truth and right,
Ring in the common love of good.

Ring out old shapes of foul disease;
Ring out the narrowing lust of gold;
Ring out the thousand wars of old,
Ring in the thousand years of peace.

Ring in the valiant man and free,
The larger heart, the kindlier hand;
Ring out the darkness of the land,
Ring in the Christ that is to be.

Read in 2019

2019 was not a banner year for reading. I struggled quite a bit. Got a second wind here about a month ago, but I am far short of my 1,000-pages a month goal.

Some of these books were new. And some were slogs. Some I've re-read many times. I love to go back to old favorites.

And No Birds Sang, by Farley Mowat. 250 pages.
Animals in Translation, by Temple Grandin. 359 pages.
Bomb: The Race to Build - and Steal - the World's Most Dangerous Weapon, by Steve Sheinkin. 298 pages.
Boy Scout Handbook, The; by the Boy Scouts of America. 472 pages.
Bridge at Remagen, The; by Ken Hechler. 237 pages.
Cruel Shoes, by Steve Martin. 128 pages.
Daisy Chain, The; by James O'Shea. 374 pages.
Dave Barry is Not Taking this Sitting Down, by Dave Barry. 229 pages.
Dave Barry Turns 50, by Dave Barry. 220 pages.
Demon in the Freezer, The; Richard Preston. 241 pages.
Diary of A Wimpy Kid: Wrecking Ball; by Jeff Kinney. 217 pages.
Feet of Clay, by Terry Pratchett. 249 pages.
Guardians, The; by John Christopher. 214 pages.
Hit or Myth, by Robert Asprin. 170 pages.
John Steinbeck: A Centennial Tribute. Edited by Stephen George, 205 pages.
Life Among the Lava Beds, by Leonard Stephenson. 122 pages.
Lost Race of Mars, by Robert Silverberg. 125 pages.
Man Who Mistook His Wife for A Hat, The; by Oliver Sacks. 242 pages.
Maskerade, by Terry Pratchett. 271 pages.
Men at Arms, by Terry Pratchett. 420 pages.
Monstrous Regiment, by Terry Pratchett. 351 pages.
Myth Directions, by Robert Asprin. 202 pages.
New Testament, The; King James Version, 405 pages.
Pyramids, by Terry Pratchett. 360 pages.
Rich Dad, Poor Dad, by Robert T. Kiyosaki and Sharon Lechter. 208 pages
Something Wicked This Way Comes, by Ray Bradbury. 293 pages.
The Importance of Being Ernest: The Life of the Actor Jim Varney; by Justin Lloyd. 290 pages.
Unseen Academicals, by Terry Pratchett. 399 pages.
Usborne Spy's Guidebook, The; illustrated by Colin King, written by Falcon Travis, et al. 192 pages.
Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art; by Madeline L'Engle. 199 pages.
Western Ghosts, edited by Frank McSherry, Jr., Charles Waugh; and Martin Greenberg. 215 pages.
Where There's A Will, There's A Way, or All I Really Need to Know I Learned from Shakespeare; by Laurie Maguire. 214 pages.
Your New Job Title is Accomplice, by Scott Adams. 127 pages.
Ze Page Total: 8,498

Cooties

I think that’s what it comes down to: There are a lot of people out there frightened of girls.

Our local newspaper did a feature story on girl troops in the Boy Scouts of America. It was a positive article.

But because they posted the story on the Web, and because Internet comments are a cesspool of toxicity and negativity, that’s the general kind of comments the story is getting.

Which is fine. People are going to complain about anything. And everything. They probably didn’t much care for the Boy Scouts beforehand, so why should they care now? They don’t have to. It’s their right to be bitter.

But I’d still like them to show up at a Scout meeting. With the girls. And have them spew their bitterness to the girls. In person. I’ll bet good money these Internet warriors haven’t got the guts to do it.

Oh, I’ve heard it. We have a girl troop and heard some negativity when we were selling cookie dough as a fundraiser at storefronts in town. But the warriors there weren’t brave enough to complain in the girls’ faces. They had to make their snide remarks when they thought they were out of earshot. They were not.

But they’re not brave enough to say it in front of the girls. To the girls. In front of the girls, exposed to their cooties, these people are gutless wonders.

Because if they said it to the girls, they’d have to listen to the girls’ rebuttal. Not that they’d all be brave. If they said these hurtful things to my daughter, our senior patrol leader and First Class Scout, she’d probably cry. Because my daughter is a tender-heart. And I love her for it.

And as much as I hate the thought of my daughter's feelings being hurt, I'd love to see the naysayers squirm as they sat there watching. Because that's what it comes down to. It's easy to be a Big Man (or Woman) when you don't have to face the consequences of your flippant comments on the Internet. But face real-world consequences? Nah. Not so much. Although some probably would like it. Because they're that dried up inside.

But my daughter can also likely run circles around half of the boys still in Boy Scouts. This isn’t Dad-bragging. She’s that good. She’s been on camp staff for years. She’s lifeguard certified. She hikes like the wind.

And this is what, I think post people are scared of. These girls are flat out better than most of the boys.

Nevermind all of this about past abuse in the BSA, which some of these gutter-snipes bring up because hey, gotta mention something bad. But mention any organization under the sun and you’ll find people willing to bad-mouth it, and they’ll have truth on their side.

What matters is what’s happening now in these organizations. And in the BSA I see an organization that is better prepared than most others out there, simply because of the crap that’s happened in its past.

So I don’t read the comments. Much. I’m choosing to focus a lot more on the positives, because that’s what I see, working with these Scouts on a weekly basis. There’s a lot of good that can be done, naysayers be damned.

But it is amusing to see how many people out there are scared girl cooties are going to get on them.

UPDATE: I don't care if you approve of what Scouting is doing or not. I'm looking at the results for those who are still in Scouting:

What isn't being accomplished here?

I help run a girl troop in Ammon. One of them is my daughter. She loves Scouting. She also loves ballet, and has performed for years.

One of our other scouts raises cattle for 4H. She also wrestles. She loves camping.

Another girl is working on her Catholic confirmation. She's thrilled that Scouting provides additional opportunities for the service hours she needs to fulfill her religious goals.

What is being accomplished here? Girls are being given an opportunity to do what they want to do in a program that fills their needs.

2019: A Look Back in Indifference

One of the good things in having a scant blogging year is that when you do your “a look back” retrospective, you don’t have all that much to sort through. So let’s get to it.

JANUARY:

A dull month, it seems. I ponder metaphors. And wish to visit Ultima Thule. Which has been renamed.

FEBRUARY:

A cold snap inspires poetry. Photos of the dogs featured in the poem are shared. And I write like Thomas S. Monson speaks.

MARCH:

I wrote something stupid.

APRIL:

Troop 1010 had its first campout. And I read a children’s book that’s a rather neat feat of technical writing.

MAY:

Albertus Mink visited Spoon River. We started replacing the back fence. Our oldest son started a service mission.

JUNE:

I’m boring. Really.

JULY:

Michelle hit a deer. I finished the fence.

AUGUST:

Troop 1010 does Scout Camp.

SEPTEMBER:

We took the dogs (and the kids) to the beach.

OCTOBER:

I was put into Facebook Jail.

NOVEMBER:

I thought a bit about Mr. Rogers, and how his words are being used as weapons these days. He wouldn’t like that.

DECEMBER:

We discovered our investment in solar panels might not be for nothing. And CNN did a really weird story on Dawn dish detergent.

"God Bless all of You, all of You on the Good Earth"

William Anders

We are now approaching lunar sunrise, and for all the people back on Earth, the crew of Apollo 8 has a message that we would like to send to you.

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.

And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.

And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.

And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.

James Lovell

And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.

And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters.

And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so.

And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day.[5]

Frank Borman

And God said, Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so.

And God called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the waters called he Seas: and God saw that it was good.

And from the crew of Apollo 8, we close with good night, good luck, a Merry Christmas – and God bless all of you, all of you on the good Earth.

Good News (Maybe) about Net Metering in East Idaho

The news from Boise bodes well for those of us who have our own solar panels in Rocky Mountain Power territory.

The Idaho Public Utilities Commission denied a request from Idaho Power to lower the amount the utility pays residential solar power generators for their excess power – and, more importantly, grandfathers existing residential solar customers into their current net metering program no matter what further action Idaho Power may want to take on residential solar.

I’ll be interested to see what the commission decides on a similar request from Rocky Mountain Power, which I’ve written about before.

I don’t know how similar the situations are, particularly on whether Rocky Mountain adequately notified existing net metering customers. The utility commission faulted Idaho Power for not giving net metering customers adequate notice that the changes would adversely impact them. I’d have to look to see what advance notice Idaho Power gave their customers and compare it to what we got from Rocky Mountain. We might be on shakier ground there, because as I recall Rocky Mountain gave us a lot of information.

The grandfathering, however, is what gives me the most hope in this situation. That bodes well for us in Rocky Mountain Power territory, regardless of whether we were adequately notified or not. This grandfathering puts about 4,000 customers on the list. That’s a lot – probably more than what Rocky Mountain has in its Idaho service area.

Here’s to hoping the IPUC treats Rocky Mountain Power’s net-metering customers in the same manner.

[Click-baity Headline Goes Here]

The headline tells me I’m washing my dishes wrong.

But the story is – incredibly – that Procter & Gamble has developed a variant of packaging for Dawn dish detergent meant to be sprayed on dishes as they’re washed, rather than glooped into water to be turned into suds.

Yes, it’s a commercial for Dawn dish detergent. And now you’re reading a whiny critique of said commercial.

But it’s given a patina of newsworthiness by CNN business as they investigate – probably regurgitate – that Americans have changed the way they wash dishes, cleaning a few here and there as they’re cooking or whatnot, rather than washing a big round of dirty dishes all at once.*

Who does CNN business quote in this story?

Morgan Brashear, a home care senior scientist at P&G.

Kristine Decker, dish care director at P&G.

Khaled Samirah, research analyst at Euromonitor International, for, again, a patina of newsworthiness. I suppose. Though the quote comes in an odd context of analyzing why dish soap sales increased only 0.4% over the previous year. Because we should be buying MOAR SOAP every year to prop these companies up, I guess, rather than just spending about the same amount every year on cleaning supplies. You’ll be surprised to learn that this new Dawn iteration costs more than the regular stuff, so you’re really helping P&G out if you buy it. But lucky for you, you can get less expensive refills for the special spray bottle until you remember Dawn has a high viscosity and nobody has the kind of time on their hands it takes to refill the special bottle from the refill, so you just buy the special bottle at a higher cost over and over and over and over again.

Nowhere in this 894-word bylined story** is it said this is sponsored content – paid for by the company whose product is being discussed. And maybe nobody paid for it in cash. But the phrase quid pro quo is popular as of late. Maybe there’s a lot of P&G advertising about? I don’t know, as my browsers block advertising. Or at least try to. Nothing they can do with the ad comes looking like a story.

Full disclosure: We do have Dawn dish detergent in the house. It’s great as a clothing pre-wash (and Procter & Gamble, maker of Dawn, controls 46% of the dishwashing liquid market in the United States, the story tells me). But we use Palmolive (a mere 17% of the market, by the way) in the dish sink. And for this endorsement, neither Procter & Gamble nor Colgate-Palmolive have paid me a cent.



*Not at our house. We’re still warehousing dirty dishes to be washed in massive dishwashing sessions once they are gathered from the four corners of our house. If you’re not afraid the pile of clean dishes in the drainer is going to topple over and kill you, you have not washed enough dishes.

**This critique comes in at only 514 words, including footnotes.

Big Events, Little Moments

I’m currently re-reading Farley Mowat’s “And No Birds Sang,” one of my favorite memoirs of World War II.

I don’t have to tell you that World War II was huge, as the name implies. And even individual operations, individual battles, are much larger than a single person can tell.

But it’s done. Time and again.

And as I deconstruct Mowat’s story – and have done with many similar stories on topics ranging from World War II to the creation of the atomic bomb to the impeachment of Richard Nixon, I see the most effective way to tell big stories is to tell the little stories that make up the large.

I hope as you tell your stories in your personal essays that you can apply what I’m about to teach.

Mowat, for example, participated in Operation Husky, the invasion of Sicily by allied forces that started on July 10, 1943.

Wikipedia gives us the big picture. The invasion eventually involved more than 467,000 Allied troops battling against a combined force of 312,000 Italian and German troops.

That’s a big battle – and Mowat tells us successfully of his part of it, not by trying to wow us with numbers, but by telling us the little bits that happened to him.

While moving through the town of Piazza Amerina, they happened upon a public water faucet.

Says Mowat:

I nipped out of the cab to see if [the water] was drinkable; for it we hard learned one solid lesson sofar in Sicilty, it was never to miss a chance to fill one’s water bottle. When a Royal engineer sergeant assured me the water had been tested and was potable, I yelled at my section corporals to grab some water bottles form their men.

The four of us were crowded around the ornate cast-iron spigot when I became aware of the presence of a tall, dignified officer in serge dress uniform, complete with shining brass buttons and gleaming Sam Browne belt. He was as remarkable an apparition in that outfit, time and place, as a king in a chicken coop. Assuming that he must be some very senior variety of staff officer, I glanced at him nervously, expecting a reprimand for having let my men leave the truck; but when he spoke it was to quite a different point.

“I say, old man, would you mind awfully if I took your photograph?”

The question seemed so out of place that even Mitchuk grinned, and I heard Hill ask under his breath: “Have we got ourselves a movie star?” I was too nonplussed to reply, and our driver was gunning his engine as a signal that the convoy was moving on, but I must have nodded acquiescence. In any case, a picture of me, dust-caked and clad in stained and torn shorts and bush shirt that had not been changed since leaving Derbyshire, eventually graded the august pages of the London Illustrated News.

I have labored long and hard to find a copy of this photo, to no avail.

But in this short passage from his book, Mowat tells us a lot with an instance that others might not regard as important: A photo taken at a drinking fountain. Nevertheless, it’s with a series of events like this, some pedestrian, some much more Hollywood-war-movielike, that Mowat tells his story. Little things writ large make for a bigger picture than we think.

And he packs a lot of detail here too. We’re left to imagine why it’s important to have a full water bottle, unless, of course, we’ve been on long hikes, or worked in the heat, and experienced what it’s like to be doggedly thirsty.

And he contrasts his own appearance, dusty and in torn clothing, with the snappy outfit of the photographer’s.

If he were to write a shorter piece, say, like the personal essay you’re writing, he would obviously have to include more information here so you’d understand more of what’s going on, and how it fit into the bigger picture (per my announcement last week). But as this is part of a larger work, he has the luxury of leaving some information unrepeated here, since he has mentioned it earlier.

Nevertheless, we get the urgency of the moment, with the gunning engine. The war must go on, photographer or not.

Little details add up in little moments.

And little moments add up in the big picture.

Don't Put Your Readers into A Coma

Any kind of writing demands clarity. That's something we tend to forget when we move from something stodgy, like the argumentative synthesis, to something more fun, like our personal essay.

Nevertheless, the personal essay calls for the same kind of clarity that the argumentative synthesis calls for.

We know the story we want to tell well. And when we know a story well, we sometimes take shortcuts in telling it. Sometimes those shortcuts work, when we're talking to an audience that knows us, and can generally fill in the unintentional blanks we leave in the tales we tell.

Sometimes, however, we forget who we're talking to. And the shortcuts we take make no sense to our audience, because they don't know enough about us to fill in the blanks.

For example, I could tell the following story:

Down the street about half a block, the traffic light was red.

“We’re going through,” Joe said.

“You’ll have to slow down,” I told him.

“A little bit. They’ll just have to get out of the way.”

Joe swung the vehicle wide, around the lineup of left-turning traffic. A lady driving a mini-van in cross traffic saw him coming and gunned it. Joe stomped on the brakes, but when she passed, he immediately plowed out into traffic, most of which saw him coming and stopped or quickly got out of the way.

I could feel my heart pounding against the seatbelt.

“Thirteen more stoplights to go,” Joe said, “and we’re there.”

It’s difficult to contrive a story to illustrate the problem of clarity. It’s probably obvious what details I left out?

Or is it?

Are Joe and I driving a police car, a fire engine? Are our lights blazing, and are we legally allowed to run a red light, even cautiously?

Or are Joe and I criminals, or thrill-seekers, who just don’t want to stop at those stoplights?

Given the context I’ve offered, it could go either way.

So as you tell your stories, be aware of what details you need to include to help your readers understand the situation. The blanks you leave in your writing may not be as obvious as this – most are much more subtle than this scenario allows.

Don’t leave your readers wondering if you’re a saint or a devil.

Deconstructing Terry Pratchett: Maskerade

In my next life, I want to be Terry Pratchett. Until then, the best I can do is read and re-read the books he’s written, and marvel at them.

Today, I finished re-reading, for I don’t know how many times, his novel “Maskerade,” which on the surface appears to be a parody of “The Phantom of the Opera.” Mostly it parodies the musical. But it also parodies the book. And it parodies opera. And operatic tropes and so many other damn things re-reading it is like peeling an onion: You never quite get to the end of it and end up with fingers that smell good for days afterward.

On this reading, I learned this*:

When Greebo**, anticipating chasing the Opera Ghost, throws his bowl of fish eggs out of the box, Pratchett writes its falling resulted in someone in the stalls having a “Fortean experience.” Finally looked that up, and it let me here.

And I should have suspected it was something like this, as Pratchett spends a little time in this same book with the Almanack, where rains of curry and fish and other whatnots are predicted in a book most people use in the privy because the pages are nice and thin.

And I also connected the dot between the highly operatic discovery by Mrs. Angeline Lawsey that her long-lost lover, and father to son Henry – was indeed the famous Enrico Basilica, swearing off the stage and opera to re-become Henry Slugg of Ankh-Morpork at the end of the book, right after Mr. Salzella criticizes the loopy logic of operas that often brings long-lost lovers back together.

And DAMMIT if the character of Walter Plinge isn’t modeled after a character played by Michael Crawford. Just how much stuff did Pratchett have crammed into that glorious head of his?



So it’s parody wrapped in parody, smothered in secret sauce. And dripping with irony and the seemingly inexhaustible knowledge of trivia from the author’s head.

He writes what he knows, apparently.

I could do that.

And he’s following the advice of another excellent writer:



So the rules are, or appear to be:

1. Put a lot of stuff in your head.
2. Figure out some way to get all the stuff in your head to connect and eventually come out when needed. Some kind of journaling or note-taking is probably involved.
3. Write your brains out.

Part of me is happy that Mr. Pratchett blessed us with his work.

Another part of me is upset that this amount of writing talent couldn’t be shared with other writers. Notably me.

But I could get there, the voices say, if I’d actually write, not write about another person’s writing.

That seems grossly unfair. And also accurately operatic.

*Ironically, it came as I was reading about the hapless Henry Lawsey, who has to pause his own reading about the opera to look up words in his dictionary.

**Not going to explain all the characters. Look them up. Or better yet, read the book.