July 4 and we turn the badger loose, whoop and holler, shoot the anvil and fire the rockets. Why? Because 243 years ago 56 white men, 26 to 70 years of age, gathered in a stifling hot room, not much bigger than a two car garage, in; ♫Foul, fetid, fuming, foggy, filthy Philadelphia!♫ and signed […]
Category Archives: Where This Road Goes
Exploring the logical consequences of our choices
GONE
‘The ‘Dying of the light’,
‘the lights go out’,
have
‘gone out’
No
that’s the view from inside
And how would you know?
How would anyone know?
Who returns against so strong a tide?
In this realm we are near sighted
We see close up, not beyond
What we see is
Focus
Gone
what sounds there are
what movement we note,
the ethers of life
seeking an exit.
No purpose, no goal
no desire to drive the machine
An empty glove, a dropped hammer
No sight to gauge the beam
The ones you do not see
You run to the fire the screamers set
To the chaos of those who rage
You film and proclaim how awesome they are
Excuses fill every page
We are the ones who built the town
The jackals are tearing down
We are the people you do not see
But we are still around
Those who hear the tales you tell
Wouldn’t know we even exist
You idealize those who speak with fire
And reason with the fist
We wait ‘till the flames have finished
We clear the ground and rebuild
Sweep up the shattered fragments
And we have not spoken still
The burners, the cursers, the raging mob
May fill your eyes today
But we are the ones who pay the price
And we have not gone away
You’ve stared so long at the worthless
Our words will show you are blind
You only see what’s in front of your face
We see what is standing behind
Tomorrow and tomorrow
Our time to speak will come
And when you hear what we have to say
It will strike you deaf and dumb
So polish up your story
That chaos is the best we can get
We are the ones who built this world
And we have not spoken yet.
by W A Adams
Loose the Kraken
So, you went and let loose the Kraken, in spite of all you were told.
You say that the cause is a good one, the enemy evil and bold
And their finish will be so amusing
A source of laughter and fun
Well laugh as much as you can you fool
For you haven’t a clue what you’ve done
You think the Beast was born in that cage?
His chains are a natural thing?
That his being locked up is such a boon
That it must be how it’s always been?
Have you not noticed the tombstones
That stand up row upon row
By the thousands they cover the field
As thick as new fallen snow
Did you believe if you rake off the leaves
The stones will just naturally grow?
Those are the lives it took to put that beast in his chains
The million hearts broken
The billion tears shed
And you have loosed him again
Christmas Day 2011
I think it’s instructive to remember that when Christ was born in Bethlehem, Judea, the official announcement by Heaven that the greatest event in human history, up to that time, had occurred, was given in a dark field, outside of the cities and towns, to a handful of anonymous shepherds.
While emperors planned, and powerful men and women spun designs for conquest and acquisition; the event that would shape the destiny of all mankind, that would change the face of the entire earth; that would establish forever the point from which time itself would be measured, had played itself out in a forgotten corner of a minor province. And no-one knew except a handful of shepherds.
I’m not certain where shepherds stood on the social scale of Judea, I suspect they were closer to the bottom than the top. But for one glorious night, in an empty field, while all the world slept, they alone knew.
Ichabod
Ichabod
It’s one of those odd, old names from the Bible. The only place I think I have ever seen it used is in Washington Irving’s “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.” The awkward, unlucky school teacher newly arrived in Sleepy Hollow is named Ichabod Crane.
Outside of Irving’s story, I’ve never met or heard of anyone named Ichabod.
It’s as unlikely a name to hear as Judas.
The story, and the reason for the name, is found in The Old Testament, in the book of 1 Samuel; chap 4;
The Philistines had attacked Israel and the two foolish sons of the High Priest, Eli, thought that by carrying the Ark of the Covenant into battle they could force Gods hand. He would not risk the Ark falling into the hands of the heathen Philistines, the reasoning went. God would not allow Israel to lose.
They were wrong.
The Ark was captured and the two sons of Eli killed by the Philistines. When he heard of it, Eli fell backwards and died.
The news reached the wife of one of the sons and she went into labour and delivered a boy .
She named him Ichabod; “For the Glory of God has departed from Israel.”
A lot of people believe that’s where We are, The United States.
The Glory of God has departed from us.
If that’s so, the solution to our troubles won’t be found in the assembly lines at Lockheed or Boeing.
It isn’t being built on the slipways at General Dynamics.
It isn’t being trained at Camp Pendleton or Fort Benning.
No piece of legislature will solve it.
No Executive Order will cure it.
No politician ever born, no representative, senator, or president can end this trouble.
The Glory of God has departed from us.
How do we persuade it to return?
‘Racking’
It’s a ‘Backyard Engineering’ term, or principle I guess you’d say. It applies to many areas of human endeavor.
A good example is a fence post you want to get out of the ground; you grab the post and push it as far as you can in one direction, then yank it back as fast and hard in the opposite direction. You are loosening the grounds grip on it with every back and forth.
Or, take a wooden crate, drop it on one corner. The fasteners that hold all the pieces together will stretch in that direction. Turn the crate around, drop it on the opposite corner, they will stretch even farther. Keep this up and without a hammer or crowbar or any tool at all, you can ‘Rack’ something apart with your bare hands; crates, furniture, doors, sheds, barns, houses, boats, ships, airplanes, buildings or people.
Get anything moving in one direction, then slam it into another direction, keep repeating this process, and eventually it will come apart.
Today, Nov. 18th, 2013, the Health Care Insurance industry is being ‘Racked’ one way then the other.
I don’t know if this is by design or from incompetence.
I do know that it will come apart if this keeps up.
There are people who think they are clever enough to rebuild something they didn’t make in the first place.
I don’t know about that.
I do know that it takes skill, training and experience to build anything of value, and that any fool will do to take it apart.
What You Have Done.
Oct 8
Mr. President; I write this, my first letter to an elected official, in the hope that you are not fully aware of the ramifications of using the National Park Service as a tool, indeed, a weapon, against your political opponents. If there is any small corner left in our Government that people from all parties […]
What Did You Watch in the War, Daddy?
Sep 27
Ever taken a picture of something, a person or group of people; and noticed five or ten or twenty years later, that there is something in the background; a car, house, building, an old barn, uncle Fred mowing the lawn, a 59 Chevy Impala Convertible; that you’d really like to remember better, but it’s out […]
How Old Am I?
Sep 15
UPDATED 07/13/2015 I’m old enough to have put a quarter and two dimes my father gave me into a cigarette machine, asked the man at the gas station to help me pull the very stiff lever to dispense a pack of my father’s brand, thanked the man, and carried my purchase home to dad. I’m old enough to […]
Reflections on Beatrice Arthurs Bosom
In the news lately was the tempest-in-a-teapot over a twenty year old painting of actress Bea Arthur topless, when she was in her sixties.
Of all the ills our era suffers from, we have been spared the horrors of a shortage of images of womens breasts . Civic minded ‘artists’, relentless photographers, and desperate editors, strive tirelessly to insure that no one can travel from stoop to curb without being smacked in the face with the newest proof that Ms._______ does indeed have a BOSOM, as do three and a half Billion of her sisters on this sad, old Earth. Having seen countless thousands of these proofs over my lifetime, I can state authoritively that they look remarkably similar to each other.
In the early sixties, there was a movie, the title escapes me, about a man married to the worlds foremost Bikini model. He never saw her fully clothed; she was either in a bikini for a photo shoot or lounging around the house nude or nearly so.
He was the envy of every man.
He spent his time daydreaming of her dressed in long flowing gowns, or bright sun dresses, once I think dressed as a Nun.
It is the ancient curse of Man that he yearns for what he does not have, and tires of what he does.
There is an odd passage in the Bible, Proverbs I think;
“Be content with the breasts of the wife of your youth.”
To the great relief of artists, photographers and desperate editors, people don’t read the Bible much anymore.
Should We Have Dropped the Bomb on Hiroshima?
May 5
“Every one talks about the weather, but no one does anything about it.” – Mark Twain? Every one talks about history and a lot of folks like to do something about it. They spin fanciful theories saying, with a certainty anyone who deals with real life day in and out can never feel, that if […]
Report From The Front
May 2
For the last several months I have been commenting at several different websites on various topics; mostly religious themes; Creation vs. Evolution, Abortion, Same Sex Marriage; that sort of thing. I comment from the perspective of a life-long Christian raised in the Baptist church, mainstream Protestant. Some of the people I engage in a lively […]
Three Marys
Three Marys
by W A Adams
Three Marys on the road going to a tomb
One old one younger one in bloom
Hurrying thru a world changing as they sped
The dark of the first new day
‘The sun is coming’ the oldest said
She carried frankincense to anoint the dead
The shadows grew lighter on the road they trod
The pre light of the first new day
“Who will move the stone” the younger cried
She had fine myrrh for the one who died
The light was touching the tops of the trees
In the dawn of the first new day
“The stones been moved” sang the bloom
They knelt and gazed in the empty tomb
The sheet lay flat on the stone inside
In the full light of the first new day
Where Did All the Blood Go?
A ditch, six feet wide, two feet deep and a mile long, ran alongside the runway at Soc Trang. At one end, across the ditch from the runway, our ten OH-6As were parked on PSP [pierced steel plating]
When it rained the ditch overflowed; the water racing past our area, under the concertina wire, through a screen of tall bamboo, past a ruined Buddhist Temple and into the jungle beyond.
When it wasn’t raining, the dew from the runway trickled into the ditch and filled it enough to keep the water moving slowly past our aircraft.
Once, the water took on a pink cast as it moved by us. If you followed the pink upstream you would find where it flowed, a little redder, into the ditch. The water got redder as you followed it to the skids of one of our ships, up the side and onto the cargo deck where it bloomed to a deep crimson. A jellied mass of blood, about the size of a pillow, lay a half-inch deep on the deck . In the heat, it turned to a jello like consistency that took a stiff brush and countless buckets of water from the ditch to wash out of the aircraft.
The blood came from a hole where a mans arm used to be. The hole came from an RPG fired by an NVA regular. The RPG came from the Soviet Union. The NVA regular came from the Democratic Republic of Vietnam-N. Viet Nam
The Democratic Republic of Vietnam came from a vision in the mind of Ho Chi Minh. The vision followed a very crooked road from his birthplace in North Viet Nam to where the blood sluiced into the ditch at Soc Trang. Every inch of that long, long road was soaked in blood; French, American, Australian, Korean, New Zealand, Cambodian, Laotian, Thai, Russian, Chinese and Vietnamese blood. A lot of Vietnamese blood.
Was it worth it?
Depends on who you ask. You can’t ask Ho Chi Minh, he died a few months before the blood went into the ditch at Soc Trang. His heirs must have thought it was worth the spilling; after their victorious march into Saigon they decided that not enough Vietnamese blood had soaked into the ground, so they kept at it for a few more years.
It was all forty years ago. The ‘Great Red Beast’ has moved on to a score of other wars and drunk deeply of human life. Why think about it now?
I don’t think about it much, and when I do time seems to have worn the sharp edges off my memory and it doesn’t cut the way it used to. But, I dream about it, now and then; dipping the bucket in the water, one foot in the ditch, scrubbing at the bloody mess with that useless stiff bristle brush. And then the gorge rising in my throat so that I have to step away for a moment, breathe the fresh air, watch the water flow under the wire, through the bamboo, past the temple ruins and into the jungle where it disappears. You can’t see far in the jungle, so I don’t know where all the blood goes.
If I were a more clever man I would weave an analogy of the blood spilled then and the blood spilling now, and work it all into an insightful metaphor of the wire and bamboo, the temple, the jungle and the ditch.
But I’m not that clever, and I have no great insight. All I have is a fading memory and an occasional dream. And a deep, abiding distrust of the visions of men, no matter how glorious they may seem.
MASTER of ALL I SURVEY
Feb 22
MASTER of ALL I SURVEY W.A. Adams Don’t want to be hurt by Jihadist Don’t want to be scared anymore You say it will cost me my freedoms Well, I’ll leave them outside by the door Take all the ones you have to Leave me the ones I can keep But please, don’t take my cable […]
Why do the innocent suffer?
Jan 31
Why do the innocent suffer? Why does evil go unpunished? Far better men than me have chewed on these questions for eons. I have read and listened to a few of them and most have answers or solutions that don’t really satisfy, they don’t close the circle. The answers I have been taught and have […]
Falling Gracefully
Jan 20
Many there are that can fall, but few can arrive at the felicity of falling gracefully. Alexander Pope ‘He’s going to the dirt’ – – expression used by tower hands when someone falls from a 1,000 ft. radio tower When you first begin to fall, from a tree, a ladder, a cliff, for the first […]
Where Have all the Young Men Gone?
Jan 1
Where have all the young men gone? Long time passing Where have all the young men gone Long time ago?” The correct answer to the songs question is; they haven’t gone anywhere, they are still here , for the most part, among us. Young men become mature men in the natural order of things. Then […]
The Slaughter of the Innocent; It’s Time to Try Another Way
Dec 15
As I write this, another horror has been visited upon us; a madman has walked through an elementary school in Connecticut, killing twenty children as young as five years old, and seven adults before turning a gun on himself. The survivors, teachers and staff present during the shooting, and the parents of the children killed have […]
Where Have all the Young Girls Gone?
Dec 10
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“Where have all the young girls gone Long time passing? Where have all the young girls gone Long time ago?” Girls used to dress for school. Of course they did. I mean – they used to dress for school as though it was someplace special. If you saw a group of girls from 1965 on […]
Where Have All the Flowers Gone?
Dec 2
‘Where have all the flowers gone Long time passing? Where have all the flowers gone Long time ago?’ We went through a lot of flowers, my generation did, a lot of flowers. We planted them and watered them from Aquarius’ pitcher. We picked and scattered them across the land, around the world. Wove them into […]
Don’t You Worry at All
Nov 10
Business everywhere is slowing down to a crawl, like a big rig truck that has run out of gas and is coasting down the road on momentum alone. Eventually it will come to a dead stop. But you shouldn’t worry at all. Your Congressman won’t suffer the least little bit. His salary will be deposited […]
The Ghosts of Benghazi; Lost in Libya
Nov 3
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“The Things you do come back to you, as though they knew the way” – Lorenz Hart It’s funny how places that figure in our history pop up again as though they’re not quite finished with us; we were through with Benghazi long ago, but it isn’t through with us. There are eighty and ninety year […]
Judith Durham Never Had a Wardrobe Malfunction
Oct 21
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Judith Durham, Linda Ronstadt, Judith Durham Never Had a Wardrobe Malfunction That’s what the title to this little soiree was supposed to look like, but I still can’t get this *~%/{|=&%< word processor to see things my way. Judith Durham was my first choice to represent what I remember from my youth that was good , talented […]
The Faith of Our Fathers
I’ve been getting a lot of hits on my pieces about evolution.
This is my thoughts on the subject in ryme
The Faith of Our fathers
by Walter A Adams
What is the faith of our fathers
If we are come up from the mud
Are we close kin to the dog and the rat
Does our stomach compel us to blood
Do we rip what we need from whoever is near
And count any feeding as good
What is the faith of our fathers
If we are come up from the mud
Who is the god in our temple
Who tells us we’re born of the slime
Who bids us bow down to the “fittest”
And the devil take him that’s behind
Counting the corpses we claw our way over
To be sure that we’re not left behind
Who is the god in our temple
Who tells us we’re born of the slime
And what is the hymn that we dance to
That drones in our ears day and night
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Why Nador is Smiling
Oct 8
There is a picture taken by a U.S. Army Signal Corps photographer at the end of World War II, of a woman who has just come out of a German concentration camp. Her name is given as Nador Livia. Her self composure and her inexplicable smile have always held a fascination for me; most images of […]
Defusing Muslim Rage
Sep 21
It’s late summer in the Northern Hemisphere and signs of the season are everywhere. In wheat fields the stalks are bending under the load of ripened grain, ready to harvest; trees are dropping the last of their fruit; hives are full of honey; and the Muslims are rioting. In cities, towns, and villages all over […]
A Little More Room
Sep 17
This gallery contains 4 photos.
Audels Country House For you who liked my earlier piece of small cottages from the classic Builders Guide, https://thelastminstrel.wordpress.com/2012/07/30/a-little-cottage-of-your-own/ here is a larger example of early Twentieth Century residential architecture. The ten foot Piazza, or porch, circling both floors has me at first sight before even looking at the floor plan, but if you must […]
Lately, I seem to have kicked over a hornets nest with an earlier blog; “Evolution; the Work That Doesn’t”
In keeping with my belief that if you accidentaly kick a hornets nest, you should back off a few feet and chunk a rock at it, here is another earlier post to fuel the fire.
Try this simple experiment; go out to your car and open the hood. Take a pair of wire cutters. Look around at all the wires under there. Pick one and cut it. Get in the car and start it up and drive around the block. Does the car function better or worse?
You have just performed the mechanical equivalent of a genetic mutation, what I would call a vertical mutation – i.e. – the loss or gain of information.
Let’s try a horizontal mutation – i.e. – the rearrangement of information. Turn off your computer and open the case. Pick out two wires, any two will do. Unplug them and swap them out; plug the first wire into the second wires connection and the second into the firsts. Put the cover back on and boot the computer up. Does it work better or worse, does it work at all?
“Oh come…
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Clever Chaps
Sep 10
Reuters; The European Central Bank and the U.S. Federal Reserve will take measures to support struggling economies. —– U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and Germany’s finance minister, Wolfgang Schaeuble, in a joint statement issued after their meeting on Monday, emphasized “the need for policymakers to adopt and implement all reform steps required to deal with the […]
R-E-S-P-E-C-T
Sep 10
At the conventions for the Republican and Democratic parties, we were treated to a sight that, if I were a feminist, I would do every thing in my power to cover up and suppress any mention of in the press. A group of about a dozen women paraded up and down in front of the […]
A Little Cottage of Your Own
Jul 30
This gallery contains 7 photos.
Here are a few plans for modest little cottages from AUDELS GUIDE to CARPENTRY – circa 1906. Audels is a series of guide books for almost every ‘mechanical, engineering, and building trade’ These pictures are from my fathers four volume set ‘Carpenters and Builders Guide’ published in 1906. The books cover every aspect of the […]
Why James Holmes is Alive
Jul 24
James Holmes walked into a theatre in Aurora, Colorado with a shotgun, semi-automatic rifle, and a semi-automatic pistol. In a matter of minutes, he killed twelve movie goers, wounded more than fifty, and then walked back out the door and was later arrested in the parking lot by police without a so much as a […]
New Cabinet Post
Jul 20
I’d like to make a serious proposal that could bring a better perspective to those tasked with executing the laws of our fair land. A new Cabinet Officer , appointed by congress, to serve in the executive branch as a liaison between the Legislature and the Executive. Its title would be – ” The Department of History” – […]
Changing the World
Jul 18
If you were brought up in the Baptist Church, you were probably taught that one of the most important duties of a Christian was to Witness to your fellow-man; to share the ‘Hope that is in your heart’. There are basically two ways to accomplish this sacred duty. One way is highly effective, very difficult, […]
The Foolish End of the Board
Jul 14
When I was twelve or so, I started working summers on my fathers construction jobs. I think he paid me ten dollars a day, which, for a twelve-year-old kid in 1962, was a fortune. [ He subtracted the dollar or two a day he advanced me for lunch; there’s no free lunch. ] Most of my […]
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