We'll be staying at the Westin Tabor Center at Lawrence and 17th, which is a few blocks from the Convention Center, but not a bad walk. (I've done it before.) Haven't checked in yet, and won't be there until tomorrow afternoon, staying until Saturday.
Back in Time for Worldcon
Well, we're not hobbits but we're back—having returned late yesterday afternoon, a whole week later than we thought we would, but we just didn't get as much done out in Chicago as we had to in the four weeks we'd allowed. The trip was hot, but dry; we saw no rain all the way across a route we now would know blindfolded. The weather broke a little by the time we got to Ogallala, and so we decided to take a day to recuperate on the clean sand shores of Lake McConaughy. It was a little hotter than I'd like, but the water in the shallows of the south shore was 83°, and even out up to my neck my little Kodak photography thermometer showed 74° down off my right hip.
We started out on the north shore, but the flies were out in force, and after less than an hour we packed the puppies and the chairs back into the car and drove around to the south shore. We stayed there most of the rest of the day. I flew my supposedly cranky parafoil kite, but in the strong breeze off the lake it performed flawlessly, almost skyhook-style, sitting stock still at 200' while pulling my 80-pound test line so hard the line was humming loud enough to hear above the racket from the ubiquitous jet skis. Carol and I swam while QBit and Aero watched, distressed, from the shore. They were willing to frolic in the water if we frolicked with them, but when we went out to deeper water for some simple swimming, they sat on the sand, dodged waves, and whimpered.
While filling up at the local Shell station for the last stretch home, I spotted the item at left used as a traffic barrier. It was about waist high. I've seen these before, mostly larger and piled up on shorelines as breakwaters, but I've never been able to determine what they're properly called. They're not exactly caltrops (they have two points too many) but they're clearly related, at least structurally.
There was high overcast our last day on the road, and even though the temps were in the mid-90s, the lack of glare made the driving a great deal easier. We got back just in time to dinner with Laurraine Tutihasi and her husband Mike Weasner, who were on their way to Worldcon in Denver from Tucson. We knew Laurraine from our Rochester NY days 25+ years ago, and Mike is the Web's leading authority on Meade ETX telescopes.
About an hour after parting with Laurraine and Mike, a carload of friends also on their way to Worldcon arrived, this time from Chicago, to spend the night and then head up to set up Steve Salaba's huckster table early this morning. Now, I'm a black belt car packer, but I have met my match, and then some: There wasn't a wasted cubic centimeter in that minivan. There was just enough room in the back seat for one person, blocked in on all sides by coolers and shelves and boxes of plush puppets and stuffed animals. (Note the “Bambi butt” that worked its way out of an overstuffed box toward the left.) It's not how I would have chosen to travel to Worldcon, but Steve, Bonnie (shown), and Eloise are all Worldcon pros from way back, and rotated positions in the vehicle often enough so the person in back didn't get suicidal.
We were away from Colorado Springs during the worst heat spell in several years, and when we got in the front door the temperature was 85 degrees, and the air rich with plasticisers and solvents still being driven from the woodwork. It was hot for awhile while we cranked open every window to get some less toxic air through the place, but it had to be done. I'll willingly admit that I'm still exhausted from our trip, but we're recuperating, and one more good night's sleep should do it. Then, probably Thursday morning, we're off to Worldcon ourselves, if not for the whole stretch then at least long enough to see Nancy Kress again (along with numerous other friends we used to see every Worldcon) and get a sense for what the SF convention scene is like these days. We used to go to Worldcon almost every year, but eventually real life intervened. I have a soft spot for Denver Worldcons; at Denvention 2 in 1981 I had two stories on the Hugo ballot. I lost, of course, but wow: What a rush that was!
Becalmed in…Nebraska
It really is Nebraska. It just feels like Hell. As we pulled into North Platte about an hour ago, the 4Runner's outside thermometer read 108°. And outside, well, we're reminded of a mild summer's day in Scottsdale, except with three times the humidity. In short, uggh.
We're on our way back to Colorado Springs from almost five weeks in Chicago. We got our new niece Juliana baptized and almost everything else on our substantial do-it list done, but it took more time and energy than we thought.
Just like, well, always.
We spent last night in Newton, Iowa, the former home of Maytag, back when there still was a Maytag. The hotel we stayed in was awful enough that I will issue an all-points avoidance notice: Whatever else you may do to abuse your body, mind, or soul, do not stay at the Newton, Iowa Holiday Inn Express on 4th Street. Unless, of course, you wish to confront:
- Mold growing on the walls. Not the bathroom walls, either. The walls in the main room.
- A hole in the ceiling. It was too dark to see where it went, but it was about 1 1/2″ in diameter and looked like it had been poked with a piece of pipe. (This makes you wonder what the ceiling was made out of.)
- Wireless Internet that did not work, would not connect, and kept giving me weird error messages. At least it was free.
- Carpeting that smelled like dead fish or ocean bilge. Or both.
- Stale Raisin Bran at the breakfast bar.
- Coffee (again, at the breakfast bar) so bad I couldn't force a second cup down.
You've been warned.
Now, we like Nebraska and have been here a lot. However, there is a local weirdness I'm seeing that I don't entirely understand: Mid-grade gas is cheaper than regular. Gas is generally a bargain here, especially compared to Illinois. Why Plus should be 15c a gallon cheaper than the low-octane mix remains a puzzle.
We're going to stop at Lake McConaughy tomorrow morning (it's about fifty miles west along I-80) but if the heat remains as bad as it was today, we may dunk and run the final 275 miles to the Springs rather than spend the day. There's no shade there, and at some point I just can't deal with long periods in that kind of heat, lake or no lake. We won't know until we get there. I'll keep you posted.
Alox Kites and Toys
I've had a little time to look at and photograph the material I received from Nancy Frier a few days ago. (See yesterday's entry.) I've begun work on a new Web article on Alox products and especially Alox kites, but I can post some early photos.
At left is the “Rocket Ship” kite design, but it's not printed from the plate I showed you yesterday. The text and the spaceship are in different colors, indicating that they had separate plates at some point for two-color printing. The kite is 30″ high and 24″ wide, the same as Hi-Flier's Playmates of the Clouds. The Rocket Ship kites were printed on four different colors of paper, in either a single color or a two-color design. The catalog number of this size of kite was #324. As best I can tell (and I will ask Nancy about this) there was no specific SKU number for a given design in a given size. Kites in this size were printed two-up on sheets of paper 30″ X 50″ and then cut and trimmed to the final diamond shape. The kite shown here is post-1964 because the Alox patent #3,330,511 is printed on it. Alox did a big business in promotional kites in this size. I have a few, and will photograph them when we get back to Colorado.
Later on Alox sold a larger kite in a form factor I don't think Hi-Flier or any other contemporary firm used: 40″ X 40″. The one I have is in plastic, with a more modern Rocket Ship design. This is size #420, and was sold in this design and an American Eagle design, in several colors of plastic and ink. Most diamond kites are a little taller than they are wide for stability (useful given that most kids have no idea how to fly kites and learn by painful experience) but bow kites in this proportion or even wider than they are tall can be flown with only a little more skill. These are called Malay kites, presumably because their design originated in Malaya.
Alox also sold barn door kites and box kites. I have a couple of the box kites and will post photos once I get back home and can (carefully) assemble them for display. (One will need some careful repair to the paper sail.) As best I know, Alox was unique in selling a plastic box kite, which was dimensionally similar to the Hi-Flier paper box kite—and probably a lot more durable.
Alox sold kite string pre-wound on hardwood dowels rather than on cardboard tubes, as Hi-Flier did. Lengths included 200 feet, 250 feet and 700 feet. Early kite cord was the familiar cotton twine, but in later years Alox sold a polyester fiber cord called “American Eagle twine” that was much stronger than cotton, and similar to Hi-Flier's Megalon. Other toys in the Alox line included yo-yos of various designs (called “Flying Disks” to avoid the Duncan trademark on “yo-yo”), whistles, sound-effects whips, “carnival canes,” jacks sets, Chinese checkers boards, and many kinds of marbles. Their sales sheets are fascinating, and once I scan them I will incorporate them in my upcoming article on Alox.
Alox closed in good part because a lot of their bread-and-butter items, especially toys, began coming in from China in huge quantities in the 1980s. Anybody who gets the Oriental Trading Company catalogs will know just what I mean here. You can get plastic kites from China (I have a few, and they're in the Oriental Trading catalog every spring) but they are lousy kites, and diabolically difficult to fly. I still think that nothing has ever beaten the 36″ paper diamond kite in stability and “getting up to speed” in young, inexperienced hands. Even with a sail badly glued from newspaper, such kites went up enthusiastically and practically flew themselves. It's a bit of a tragedy that diamond kites have become rare (the ubiquitous deltas are cranky and in my opinion hugely overrated) and a serious tragedy that paper kites as a whole have become extinct.
They don't have to be. The sticks can be had at Hobby Lobby or Michael's. The newspaper is in the recycle bin. Cotton twine is at Home Depot, and Elmer's Glue will stand in for mucilege. What are you waiting for?
John Frier: American Inventor
I have a very popular Web page devoted to Hi-Flier kites, and it generates more mail than anything else on my site except Contra. A few weeks ago, I got an email from Nancy Frier, introducing herself as the granddaughter of John Frier, founder of Alox Manufacturing Co. of St. Louis. Alox was one of three companies that mass-produced paper kites for the toy market in the 20th century, the others being Crunden-Martin (TopFlite) and Hi-Flier. I flew a few Alox kites when I was a kid, but they were not available at Bud's Hardware, so I could only get them when I was somehow at farther stores like Walgreen's or Kresge's. Nancy had seen my Hi-Flier page (which mentions Alox kites briefly) and offered to provide more information on Alox and the remarkable man behind it. Earlier this week, I took advantage of a fluky chance to meet her while she was traveling from Wisconsin to St. Louis, and we lunched outside of Rockford.
Whoa. I've been at some interesting lunch meetings in my time (and I've had breakfast with Isaac Asimov and dinner with Steve Ballmer) but this one was amazing. Almost all my information about Hi-Flier is second or third hand. Nancy was there. She had worked at Alox since she was a teenager. She actually made the kites, and by “made” I mean that literally: She fed sheets of paper and plastic into the special printing presses, and pushed the buttons. She worked the jig that stretched out a diamond of waxed string over the cut kite sails, and then folded and glued the edge tabs of the sails over the string. (This last machine was Frier's own invention, and he held patent #3,330,511 on it.) She worked for Alox until the company folded in 1989. She still has the copper letterpress plates from which Alox kites were printed, and she had one in the back seat to show me. (Below; photographed on her car window sun-screen.) And before she continued on to St. Louis, she handed me an armful of Alox kites, some of which dated back to the early 1950s. The kites were much appreciated—and I'm working on an article about Alox kites—but what really made the meeting was hearing about John Frier himself.
Born in 1896, Frier had a restless mind, of the sort that demands to know how things work and constantly tries to figure out better ways to go about them. He was fascinated by things that flew, and in 1912, when he was 17, he built an airframe with a wingspan of about 20 feet in his parents' shed outside of St. Louis. He called it a glider, but it was clearly built to accept an engine (she showed me photos) and it was certainly large enough to carry a pilot. Way cool—but then she pulled something else out of her briefcase: A letter to John from the chief counsel of the Curtiss Aeroplane Company, which threatened poor teenaged John with a patent lawsuit unless he ceased making flying machines that infringed on several unspecified Curtiss patents. Frier ignored the letter, but the following year the shed caught fire under mysterious circumstances and took the plane with it, all before John and one of his friends could complete and launch it.
John Frier served in WWI, and when he got home he returned to his main business of having ideas. One of them was a way to keep shoelaces from unraveling at the ends. Although other things had been tried, Frier's method looks a great deal like the stiff plastic ends you see to this day. (His were made of thin metal.) He obtained patent #1,318,745 in 1919, and created a company to manufacture and sell shoelaces. He named the company Alox because it was different from all other local manufacturing concerns in St. Louis—and would be right at the front of the phone book, which at that time was more of a phone pamphlet. Alox cranked out shoelaces for decades, and at least until WWII it was their core product line.
Soon after founding Alox, Frier began manufacturing and selling paper and later plastic kites for children. Nancy gave me a great deal of information and photos concerning Alox kites, but I don't have a scanner here with me and can't show you anything right now. I'll be doing a detailed article on Alox kites once I get back to Colorado, so stay tuned.
Alox is actually better known among marble collectors than kite collectors. Frier liked making toys, and in addition to kites Alox manufactured yoyos, jacks sets, jump ropes (which, after all, are basically large shoelaces with wooden ends) and Chinese checkers sets. At first he bought the marbles for Chinese checkers on an OEM basis from other companies whose sole business was marble manufacturing, but the common practice of bringing a box of marbles “up to weight” by throwing in pieces of broken glass enraged him. He bought several marble-making machines from one of his former suppliers and began making the marbles himself, at first for his Chinese checkers and Tit Tat Toe games, and later as a separate product line. The marble machines were crude (and incorporated mechanical oddities like transmissions from 1920s Hupmobiles) but John and his staffers slowly improved them, and he soon pretty much owned the US marble market. He bought cullet glass from glass manufacturers to melt into marbles, but also bought empty glass bottles in various colors on the scrap market and melted those as well. (Alox's blue marbles had mostly been Milk of Magnesia bottles.) The machines ran 24/7 because it took several days and a lot of fuel oil to bring a batch of glass to full melt, and when John Frier shut down marble production in the late 1940s, it was mostly because keeping a marble factory running all the time was a nuisance. He was the CEO, but he was also the only guy who could troubleshoot the cranky marble machines, and he liked to sleep at night undisturbed by frantic calls from his foremen.
Nancy's final revelation about the Alox product line was the most fun of all: John Frier and Alox made UFOs. Shortly after WWII, Alox got the contract to construct balloon-borne radar targets for the Army Signal Corps. Alox had built thousands of ML307C/AP target devices, starting in early 1947. One of the most famous late-40's “UFO debris” photos clearly shows an ML307, as vehemently as the UFO gang has tried to deny it. Nancy had an Alox-built ML307 target in the back seat, and it was a difficult thing to photograph well, especially in a parking lot. It has a lot in common with a box kite, in that it's a corner reflector designed to fold flat.
I'm running on longer than I generally allow myself in this space, but it was great fun and a wonderful look at a period in American history when almost anything was possible. Nancy handed me a lot of material, and once I get home and get an article put together, I'll link to it here. The kites are much too old to fly (obviously) but they will take a place of honor on my workshop wall, along with the Hi-Fliers already hanging there. Nancy is considering printing and making reproduction Alox kites from the original copper plates, if she can find suitable paper and a press that can do the job. (I know very little about letterpress printing and can't help much there; if you have suggestions I think we'd both like to hear them.) I've been hoping for years that someone would begin making paper kites for the nostalgia market, and with any luck we may still get there. More as I learn it.
LOLMonsters
We were just BSing a couple of nights ago over wine and beers at Julie's christening, and LOLCats came up. I'm not a regular reader of LOLCats, but I've seen it enough to get a sense for the genre, and the addition of a little zinfandel reminded me that this is not a new thing.
Nossir. I remember Monster Cards.
Back in 1961 or 1962, a fad was raging in my corner of the Immaculate Conception grade school playground: Monster cards. These were a little like baseball cards (and about the same size) but instead of sports heroes, they had stills from old monster movies, with a silly caption at the bottom. This was in plain English and not LOLCats-speak (which itself is a parody of IM shorthand) else the card at left would be captioned PUT ME ON UR FRENZ LIST? On the flipside was a drawing of a ghost over a joke calculated to make fourth-graders laugh. (As you might imagine, the bar was not very high.) The whole thing was wrapped up in plastic with a card-sized rectangle of some tepid and invariably stale bubble gum. My friends were all collecting them, and even though I spent my money on Hi-Flier kites and Tom Swift books rather than monster cards or comics, I flipped through my friends' stacks, grinning at some and rolling my eyes at others.
There were two types that I remember, both available from Perlen Drugs at the corner of Canfield and Talcott. The larger cards had “Spook Stories” printed on the back and were copyrighted by Universal Films. These had the most famous and recognizable monsters: Frankenstein, the Mummy, the Creature from the Black Lagoon, and the Wolfman. The jokes on the back were sometimes even clever. The smaller cards had “Monster Laffs” printed on the back over the jokes (which were invariably stupid and rarely funny) and were printed in sheets of three with bad perfs between them. My duller friends who didn't catch on to folding at the perfs before separating them often had to Scotch tape their cards back together after inadvertently ripping them in half. These smaller cards (which collectors have dubbed “Monster Midgees”) were copyrighted by cheapo fright house American International Films, and apart from the several incarnations of the She Creature and the memorable Colossal Beast, showed monsters that few of us had ever seen, even with Chicago Channel 7's perpetual scraping of the bottom of the monster movie barrel. Mostly they were hokey-looking paper mache alien things or brains with eyes, over even hokier (and generally un-funny) captions.
I'm surprised at how little there is online today about monster cards, at least the ones that I recall. The genre continued long after I left grade school, mutating as it went, but I ignored them because they dropped the humor. The legendary Mars Attacks! cards were in no way funny; in fact, they were a gruesome comic book presented one frame at a time. (I wonder sometimes if they were a poke in the eye of the Comics Code Authority.) Cards from mid-60s TV series like The Outer Limits and Star Trek had stills from the shows but no funny captions and no jokes—and sheesh, guys, I had already seen the TV shows. I half-expected full indices of the cards and their captions online, but apart from a few fan pages and pictures of cards for sale on eBay, they've mostly been forgotten. “Caption humor” seemed to go into eclipse for forty years, not to emerge until the Internet Age and LOLCats. I guess everything comes back eventually. I used to wear purple bell-bottoms and worse in the late 60s and early 70s. Are they next?
Juliana’s Christening
After much planning and preparation, our new niece Juliana Leigh Roper officially joined the Catholic community last night, as all of the immediate family we have left gathered around Bill and Gretchen's huge dining room table for the Mass and baptism. Rev. Mary of the Old Catholic Church presided, as she did back in December 2006 for Julie's older sister Katie Beth. Once again, Gretchen hand-made a christening dress for Julie, and Carol gave Julie the little christening shoes that she herself had worn back at her own baptism in 1953. Again as for Katie Beth, Carol and I promised to keep her on the path as best we can. Godparents don't have to be theologians; what they have to be are good examples and good cheering sections. Carol and I had excellent godparents, and the example was not wasted on us. And yes, words are my thing and I am going to attempt a simple catechism for small children, but we're a couple of years off on that yet. (Which doesn't absolve me from starting to take notes right away. Kids grow up fast.) Theology for ten-year-olds can start very simply, and I will begin with what I learned from Juliana's namesake: Lady Julian of Norwich, who taught that God is infinitely loving and forgiving, and that all manner of thing would ultimately be made well in God's own time. Sooner or later, children must also learn that that there is death and suffering and injustice, but those lessons must be learned from a platform of solid belief in the goodness of creation and God's ultimate victory over all evil and suffering.
The goodness of that creation and God's affection for his creatures was the subject of Mary's short homily from the head of the dining room table. Partway through, Julie began to fuss a little, in the time-honored tradition of infants making a ruckus in church. Without missing a beat, Mary scooped little Julie up in her arms and calmed her down as only a mother (and grandmother) can, continuing to preach her sermon with a baby on her shoulder. (This is something you don't generally see in Catholic churches.) Julie soon returned to sleep, and barely stirred when Mary took the seashell and poured the (warm) blessed water over her forehead, baptising her in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.
Afterward there was time for good talk, good wine (we had a Frey organic zinfandel and a Bartenura moscato) and Bill's superb grilling skills, with fresh Polish sausage and hamburgers, Hawaiian salad, baked beans, and various small sides. QBit and Aero ran around in circles in the back yard while Katie watched, laughing with delight, and even though the evening was muggy and drippy, Carol and I called it a complete and unvarnished success. Come 9:30 we packed up the puppies and headed for the door, but Katie cried and kept reaching for Carol, who had read her One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish several times. Earlier, she had been brushing what's left of my hair with her new hairbrush. She is beginning to learn about godparents and their uses, heh.
After a pretty grim ten years or so on the family front, family is happy and growing again. For many years Gretchen and I thought that our part of the Duntemann line ended with us, but God sometimes answers prayers, and midevening, when our two little prayers sat together in the big chair for pictures, somehow we knew that All Manner of Thing will be well—in fact, as far as we're concerned, we're most of the way there right now.
Odd Lots
- I'm not quite as ga-ga as the reporter, but make no mistake: This is one of the most startling deep-space videos ever taken, of the Moon making a transit across the Earth, seen from a distance of fifty million kilometers. Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the link.
- My nephew Brian just bought a Blackberry cellphone and is trying to find a software package that will allow him to sync his Google Calendar data with the phone. This is something I've never had to do (I do not currently have a PDA nor a smartphone) and so I'm looking for suggestions.
- Eat kohlrabi, Dean Ornish: A long-term study published in the New England Journal of Medicine indicates that low-carb diets are significantly better at helping people lose weight and lower cholesterol than low-fat diets. As complex as the obesity issue is, I speak to people again and again and again who have found what we've found in their own lives: Lowering fat does not help much. Lowering carbs, and especially lowering sugar, helps a lot.
- Carol and I were down in Lincoln Park the other day, and saw saturation advertising for a wind-powered condo complex that intrigued me enough to write the Web address down across Heath Ledger's late face on the Red Eye. Take a look and read the fine print. Those well-hidden wind turbines on the roof generate up to 2% of the building's electricity. And so wind power takes its place as a techno-fetish among the terminally hip and the gorgeously clueless. Larger turbines could generate significantly more of the building's power, but the neighbors might complain—and that's not hip at all, is it?
Odd Lots
- A reader wrote to tell me that I am “MSG blind,” (see my entry for July 14, 2008) which means that MSG does not affect my taste chemistry—and that people who are MSG blind are generally the people who react badly to the chemical. Alas, I can't find anything about this online, but it's an interesting idea.
- Screw the polar bears. The big downside to Global Warming™ is now kidney stones. Ouch.
- I hadn't heard much about the Casimir Effect recently, but courtesy Frank Glover, here's a good article on modifying nanoscale structures to minimize “stiction” due to Casimir forces. More speculative but lots more fun are some links at the end describing projects attempting to harness Casimir forces in various ways, many or most of which still seem a little whiffy. (I made enthusiastic use of vacuum energy in my novel, The Cunning Blood.)
- The Washington Post suggests that we strap engines on the ISS and send it to the Moon, to act as an orbital station to help stage travel to a lunar base. Maybe a little far fetched, but only a little—and we're not doing much with the damned thing where it's sitting right now.
- And as if NASA didn't have enough to worry about, now, well, scientists are telling them that they had better establish an officially sanctioned 200-mile-high club.
- The acronym is unfortunate, but Sandisk's write-once read-many (WORM) SD card has an application that isn't even mentioned in the press release: A unit for mounting a hack-proof operating system instance. No mention what the access time is (I'm guessing slowwwww) but it's an approach that many people have been calling for for some years.
- Finally, as a proud godfather of two nieces who are big for their ages but still very small, this video made me cringe a little. (Don't parents have enough to worry about?) Quick, how long would it take you mechanical engineer types to devise a sheet-metal flap valve to fix this problem?
Crackergate, Mon Dieu
I elbowed a bit of a wasp's nest yesterday, in briefly recounting the story of Paul Z. “PZ” Myers, the biology professor who put out a call for Catholics to mail him consecrated hosts for public desecration. There's backstory that fairness requires me to relate: Webster Cook, a student at the University of Florida, went to Mass at a Catholic Ministries liturgy held on campus, took Communion, and went back to his pew without consuming the host. Why he did this is unclear—I had a great deal of trouble sifting facts from hearsay in this case, which exists mostly in the blogosphere—but he took the host out of the building even though some of the people from Campus Ministries noisily demanded that he either swallow it or give it back. He refused, and the host went home with him in his pocket. Thus began…Crackergate.
I may catch some flack here from my Catholic readers for saying this: The church should have left it at that. But no, the well-known William Donohue, head of the Catholic League, got into the act, and suddenly it's a category 5 barroom brawl. Donohue has made a career of jumping on anybody and everybody who says something that puts Catholicism in a bad light. How effective he's been is open to debate. He was certainly instrumental in getting ABC's warm-hearted but liberal-slanted Catholic sitcom Nothing Sacred canceled back in 1997; beyond that it's hard to tell. He's gone after solid milk-chocolate statues of Jesus and tried to organize a boycott of the film version of The Golden Compass. I'd suggest that there are other, better places where that sort of energy might be spent, but let it pass. Most moderate Catholics would love to find another village that would take him.
Webster Cook returned the undamaged host to the church about a week later, but not before the Catholic lunatic fringe had begun sending him death threats. And then Prof. Myers jumped into the game, eager to play the dozens and keep the pot at a full boil. Here are his exact words, posted on his blog:
I have an idea. Can anyone out there score me some consecrated communion wafers? There's no way I can personally get them — my local churches have stakes prepared for me, I'm sure — but if any of you would be willing to do what it takes to get me some, or even one, and mail it to me, I'll show you sacrilege, gladly, and with much fanfare. I won't be tempted to hold it hostage (no, not even if I have a choice between returning the Eucharist and watching Bill Donohue kick the pope in the balls, which would apparently be a more humane act than desecrating a goddamned cracker), but will instead treat it with profound disrespect and heinous cracker abuse, all photographed and presented here on the web. I shall do so joyfully and with laughter in my heart. If you can smuggle some out from under the armed guards and grim nuns hovering over your local communion ceremony, just write to me and I'll send you my home address.
Here's the full post on Pharyngula.
Ok. Does any of this sound to you like a pack of seventh graders mixing it up on the playground? It sure does to me. The detailed facts seem to change depending on whom you read, but Cook is claiming that he was “restrained” by a woman who turns out to be about half his physical size. He is now filing charges against the Campus Ministries for violating university hazing rules that prohibit forced eating. And Bill Donohue is trying to get PZ Myers fired. So far, as best we can tell, no desecrations have taken place.
My primary comments on all this:
- Genuine death threats are illegal and actionable. If you get one, don't just bitch. Go to the cops. That's what laws are for.
- If your opponents are insulting you, meeting them insult-for-insult is precisely the wrong thing to do if you want the moral high ground, or to simply avoid looking stupid.
- Respect is an inner virtue; less something you show than something you are. Desecration happens in the man (or woman) and not to the host, flag, book, shrine, or image.
- Allowing people to make you angry gives them power over you.
Atheists who are cheering on Myers seem blind to the fact that Myers is making atheism look bad. Which leads me to ask: What is atheism actually for? If its goal is to win people away from religion, making sane arguments in a respectful manner would seem more effective than insults and ridicule. If (as seems to me at times) it's a sort of tribal venting society, then go for it, keeping in mind that few people recognize therapeutic venting for what it is, and you won't get a lot of converts from ordinary folks who are not axe-grinders by temperament. You'll just look churlish.
I'm sure I've already given this more attention than it really deserves. I've begun wondering if Webster Cook was challenged over a drink to come up with the college prank to end all college pranks (judged by the ratio of effort required to publicity generated) and he may have succeeded. I've also heard that PZ Myers is considering desecrating a copy of the Qur'an as well. I'll believe that when I see it.
