A series of sentences on helmets of various kinds

From the (mostly) wonderful Kim Fabricius:
There are some churches that, for their παρρησία, [frankness] should have crash helmets in the pews – and others, for their bullshit, Wellington boots.

And from the equally wonderful Dave Pell:
There is no tantrum like a Put-Down-the-iPad Tantrum.
First I need to prepare. I put on my hazmat suit, helmet, and thick, dark goggles to make it less likely that I too will be pulled into the light. Any parent of an iPad-era child will be familiar with the other tools in my arsenal: Ear plugs, body padding, iron manacles, shock paddles, a straight jacket, an inflatable kayak (speaking in tongues while the head spins exorcist-like 360s can release a significant amount of saliva), WiFi jammers, tear gas, tasers; and for re-entry, candles, classical music, smelling salts, and several black and white paper printouts of familiar places and loved ones.
And even with all that, I give myself about a 50% shot of bringing my son’s attention back to the terrestrial world before the iPad battery runs out.

From my book, Grimhilda! - when I picked up on this paragraph I realised it had a typo in it! Now fixed...
The Sergeant Major marched out accompanied by two of his corporals. His uniform was a resplendent red, with gold braiding - unlike the drab combat kit of his Yankee counterparts. He wore a shiny gold helmet shaped rather like an old-fashioned policeman’s hat, except this one had a spike on top, with a white plume. Under his arm, he carried a pace-stick, which he used to prod people when necessary.

From an essay by Andre Dubus:
Because he and his father could not really talk to each other, this test of manual labour passes between them as a kind of spiritual gift from father to son. The gift is the opportunity to attain manhood, and the older Dubus reflects that "it is time to thank my father for wanting me to work and telling me I had to work and getting the job for me and buying me lunch and a pith helmet instead of taking me home to my mother and sister." If he had quit, Dubus writes, "he would have spent the summer at home, nestled in the love of two women, peering at my father's face, and yearning to be someone I respected, a varsity second baseman, a halfback . . . yearning to be a man among men, and that is where my father sent me with a helmet on my head." "Going home" to the women would have been to settle for passivity, to consign oneself to a world of yearning instead of a world of action.

And lastly, and most recently, a paragraph from an article on the Skully P-1, an upgraded motorcycle helmet that incorporates a digital head-up display, projecting a live feed from a 180-degree rear-facing camera, which eliminates the blind spots that affect other enclosing helmets.  The system can also broadcast turn-by-turn directions and pair with a smartphone to read back text messages, so the rider’s eyes can stay glued to the road.  It could get to be the driver's own cosy little world inside there.

Going nuts

I guess I should have known what check nuts were, but I thought I'd better check up online just to make sure I wasn't on the wrong track.  According to one dictionary they're a secondary nut, screwing down upon the primary nut to secure it or a nut which is screwed up tightly against another nut on the same bolt or screw, in order to prevent accidental unscrewing of the first nut.

I think that's probably a good description of some marriages: the secondary nut secures the primary nut (I don't say which person is which), or else one nut is screwed up tightly against the other nut to prevent accidental unscrewing.  Accidental unscrewing of a person is to be avoided at all costs.  I've come close to accidental unscrewing at times, and have been saved from it by the other nut.  When I use the word nut I mean it in the most complementary sense, of course.  

But in regard to nuts in general, apart from its normal use to signify those hard things we eat and which can sometimes crack our teeth, nuts is used as a way of saying - that's stupid, dopey, how-the-heck-did-you-ever-come-up-with-that-idea?  It can also mean what is virtually the opposite: being nuts about something, extremely enthusiastic, in other words.  

And nuts turns up in one of those innumerable (and untranslateable) English expressions that can mean pretty much whatever you like: elephant’s adenoids, cat’s miaow, ant’s pants, tiger’s spots, bullfrog’s beard, elephant’s instep, caterpillar’s kimono, turtle’s neck, duck’s quack, duck’s nuts, monkey’s eyebrows, gnat’s elbows, oyster’s earrings, snake’s hips, kipper’s knickers, elephant’s manicure, clam’s garter, eel’s ankle, leopard’s stripes, tadpole’s teddies, sardine’s whiskers, canary’s tusks, pig’s wings, cuckoo’s chin, and butterfly’s book. I'm indebted to Michael Quinion's wonderful website, World Wide Worlds (how's that for alliteration) for that list. (It's a site well worth visiting, if you're a word enthusiast, that is, if you're nuts about words.)

Still on the usage of nuts, here's a delightful line from Kim Fabricius, that theological doodler: How did Jesus overcome Satan in the wilderness? By proof-texting a proof-texter. That always drives them nuts.
  
And one other paragraph, from the poet Charles Simic:  When my mother was very old and in a nursing home, she surprised me one day toward the end of her life by asking me if I still wrote poetry. When I blurted out that I still do, she stared at me with incomprehension. I had to repeat what I said, till she sighed and shook her head, probably thinking to herself this son of mine has always been a little nuts. Now that I’m in my seventies, I’m asked that question now and then by people who don’t know me well. Many of them, I suspect, hope to hear me say that I’ve come my senses and given up that foolish passion of my youth and are visibly surprised to hear me confess that I haven’t yet. They seem to think there is something downright unwholesome and even shocking about it, as if I were dating a high school girl, at my age, and going with her roller-skating that night.


 

The fabric of...

It's intriguing how the word fabric is used so often to indicate something abstract as opposed to something material (as in upholstery fabric).  I've just been flicking through the various clippings I have on Evernote and again and again the usage relates to humans within a particular grouping.  I guess you could say that wasn't abstract, in the sense that humans are fairly material on the whole, but the usage is metaphorical rather than realistic, I'd think.

Here are some examples:

we see that the MET is a beautiful place and that the fabric comes from us all.   MET here is an abbreviation for Metropolis, and is used on the site, My Modern Met.

“The cost I feel is a deep unrest and a threat to the fabric of the church,” says one pastor. [Taking Your Church Missional].  Fabric in this instance is used in a quite common sense, but the next one takes the metaphor further: 

...mile upon mile of clogged collector roads [are] the only fabric tying our disassociated lives back together [The Missional Church in Suburbia, byTodd Hiestand]

...the power of a type of "curated membership community" that, while not new, has become an [sic] increasingly central to the fabric of modern professional life.  [Beyond Groups: why curated membership communities are today's most important networks, by Nathaniel Whittemore]  

Here's a slightly different usage: The Church is intrinsic to the vision of the purposes of God and the fabric of salvation.  [Jeremy Begbie on N T Wright and the Emerging Church.]   

And I like this one: Something of God must be woven into the literary fabric, not just embroidered on as decoration.  [Joseph Bottum writing about literary detectives in God and the Detectives.]

Or this line, from Kevin Ward, in a his Inaugural Lecture at Knox College in 2009: Incarnation is a one-off, unique, unrepeatable break in the fabric of creation.

These are enough examples for one post, but I must just mention that when I did a search for fabric in my clippings, I brought up several posts by Kim Fabricius, a writer whose sharp, even mordant, wit is a delight, as is his wisdom.  A few examples of his 'doodlings' - plenty more can be found on the Faith and Theology site.

I reckon that adults should be admitted to the Bible only if they are accompanied by children.

I don’t have a PhD (for me the suggestion to do one was a temptation, not an opportunity), but tell me if I’m wrong in saying that unless it bears fruit in the virtues of gratitude, humility, and friendship, it does indeed amount to poo “piled higher and deeper”.

Enough is enough. Attacking the New Atheists is like shooting a man giving himself a lethal injection.

I like the idea of Liquid Church – as in liquid lunch.  And Messy Church has got to be better than the usual anal retentive one.  But the church patterned on saints I love and admire is Circus Church (William Stringfellow) – a travelling freak show. 

Blankets

There's a great poem by Barbara Hamby called Ode to American English, in which she does a scatter-shot approach to the marvellous way in which English is expressed in the States.   It's very hard to quote from it because it has no stopping point, but here's a sample:

I miss the mongrel plentitude of American English, its fall-guy,
       rat-terrier, dog-pound neologisms, the bomb of it all,
the rushing River Jordan backwoods mutability of it, the low-rider,
       boom-box cruise of it, from New Joisey to Ha-wah-ya
with its sly dog, malasada-scarfing beach blanket lingo
       to the ubiquitous Valley Girl's like-like stuttering...

You can see the whole poem on Hamby's site.

This post is about blankets, specifically personalized baby blankets like those on the left, but let's also celebrate whatever we can find out of my digital cuttings that relates to the subject. One of the writers I catch up with occasionally is Kim Fabricius, a somewhat anarchistic Christian pastor with a wicked sense of humour (and I mean 'wicked' in its current sense of outstanding, but also in the sense of very cheeky). He wrote a Good Friday sermon in 2008 which was posted on the Faith and Theology site this year.   (Fabricius doesn't seem to have a site of his own; most of his material that I've come across has appeared on F&T)

Fabricius is as hard as Hamby to quote briefly, so here's a decent chunk near the beginning of the sermon (in which our theme 'blanket' briefly appears):

This sermon doesn’t have three points, it’s got three words: Lose your faith! (I warned you I would be sacrilegious.) Yes, lose your faith. Lose your faith in God. For as the French mystic Simone Weil insisted, there is a kind of atheism that is purifying, cleansing us of idols. Lose your faith in the god that the cross exposes as a no-god, a sham god. Lose your faith in the god who is but the product of your projections, fantasies, wishes, and needs, a security blanket or good-luck charm god. Lose your faith in the god who is there to hold your hand, solve your problems, rescue you from your trials and tribulations, the deus ex machina, literally the “machine god”, wheeled out onto the stage in ancient Greek drama, introduced to the plot artificially to resolve its complications and secure a happy ending. Lose your faith in the god who confers upon you a privileged status that is safe and secure. Lose your faith in the god who promises you health, wealth, fulfilment, and success, who pulls rabbits out of hats. Lose your faith in the god with whom your conscience can be at ease with itself. Lose your faith in the god who, in Dennis Potter’s words, is the bandage, not the wound. Lose your faith in the god who always answers when you pray and comes when you call. Lose your faith in the god who is never hidden, absent, dead, entombed. For the “Father who art in heaven” – this week he is to be found in hell – with his Son.

Phew!  Imagine hearing that piece of fire coming at you from a pulpit...!

Here's another radical person: Tamie Fields Harkin, an Episcopalian minister from Alaska.   She presented a list of things to do if your really wanted to attract young people to your church - and they don't include any of the usual bumpf that's regarded as youth ministry.   Her 19th point is:
19.  Make some part of the church building accessible for people to pray in 24/7.  Put some blankets there too, in case someone has nowhere else to go for the night.
Sounds like she was anticipating the Occupy movement, and the way in which some churches are suggesting they open their doors to those who'd be sleeping in tents on very cold nights.  

Okay, I know this post is very loose in terms of how it's using it thematic material, but just go with the flow and enjoy the contrasts.  

Here's an extract from an email one of the Presbyterian ministers wrote shortly after the devastating February earthquake in Christchurch, NZ: 

I walked home from what remained of Knox [his church] yesterday afternoon surrounded by scenes of devastation far worse than on 4 September.  Whilst visiting a parishioner I spoke with one of his neighbours, whose husband was at that time unaccounted for in the Pyne Gould Guinness building in town. I walked for a while with a barefoot young woman whose workplace in the city had collapsed, and who told me of seeing a woman giving birth on the footpath. Later I passed others heading on foot with blankets and little else for Hagley Park, and wondered how they fared when the rain began to fall a couple of hours after that. Dinner was sausages cooked on the outdoor barbeque;  I've drained the leaking hot water cylinder upstairs into several large water containers so can probably manage with that, whatever food there is in the fridge and a bucket toilet for several days. 

There's a sense of just getting on with things, of having to; but the quiet desperation is apparent.  How do you start to deal with the enormity of the problem.  Christchurch is still dealing with it, and has another major earthquake since this date.  

Finally, an example of those church bulletin bloopers that appear in emails every so often:

This evening at 7 PM there will be a hymn singing in the park across from the Church. Bring a blanket and come prepared to sin.