Raising Abbott & Costello

After viewing the preceding video and a number of similar videos, my suspicions have been confirmed: this summer, we are raising Abbott and Costello....

This occurred to me after this past weekend. As we drove to the home of some friends, Ab and AA bantered about in the backseat. And it was the same kind of back and forth that is typical to most Abbott and Costello routines. AA is definitely Lou Costello, in stature and demeanor (though not as plump); Ab - tall, lean and usually strictly business -plays the straight man, Bud Abbott.

It's so funny from the front seat, because they don't realize that they are teaming up to create comedy. Now AA for one, has as his motivation, either creating laughter or just aggravating his big sister; so he "plays dumb" or acts as if he doesn't hear correctly what his sister is saying. Ab, who on the other hand, just likes for everything to be correct - grows increasing angry with his every quip. As the volume and intensity of her voice reaches new levels, his creative ad libs seem to increase. Just yesterday Ab cast a barb his way stating that he was just trying to be silly! to this he calmly replied that he was trying to be funny; he liked being funny because it made people laugh and they would become his friends.

I am usually annoyed by these antics and just tell them to stop bickering, but as I said, on a couple of times this past weekend, I just listened and grinned.

Annoying antics from the back seat are notorious in my family - for my older brother and sister, on long trips from Griffin, Georgia to Sarasota, Florida (Griffin, being where my maternal grandparents lived; Sarasota being our home) they sang the almost eternal ballad, "Found a Pea-Nut". As my Dad tells it, they sang it without end.

So I understand and appreciate that the need to annoy is prevalent when two or more children are gathered together in tight quarters.

Perhaps it is a rite of passage.

I love my kids, but so often I stray from just enjoying them, to worrying about what others think of them. Humor -especially classic humor -is definitely a characteristic that I want to see cultivated in my children. It may not take them far, but it will certainly smooth out many of the bumps in the road. We need some classic humor around here!

From this day forward, I am going to try to view this backseat banter no longer as a point of contention, but rather as entertainment.

The Lesson of the Liriope

Liriope - better know around here as "Monkey Grass" is one of my favorite plants because it is extremely low maintenance and will practically grow on concrete. As a kid, one of my friends had variegated liriope bordering their driveway and I remember that when we accidentally veered off the pavement and into the monkey grass we didn't get into trouble.

My mother-in-law has endowed me with numerous contributions of liriope from her excess over the years. In our former home, we bordered, sidewalks, flower beds, woodland walkways, and play areas with the stuff. When we moved a few years back, I had hoped to bring some with me, but we literally had no yard when we moved into our current home.

Her son - my brother-in-law - lives near us and spends a lot of time in his yard. He also donates liriope (and day lilies) to me each time he clears our an area of landscaping. So they both feed my habit - and it is something of an addiction - I just can't seem to resist an offer of Monkey Grass.

Anyway, all this is sort of beside the point. Yesterday I was pulling weeds from one of my liriope borders, this particular row has been "high maintenance" over the past couple years. But I noticed that the liriope has grown much more dense and as it has, my weeds are fewer.

Now I have heard this about lawns: a healthy lawn is the best deterrent to weeds because the "good" grass does not allow weeds to grow.

As a Christian, I deal with "weeds" in my own life. These are habits or attitudes or out-and-out sins that hamper my spiritual health as well as my relationship with God and others; and so it is necessary for me to spend time in "weeding" or sin-maintenance.

The lush green liriope seemed to be telling me that an offensive approach might be better than defense; if I will focus more of my time and attention on building my spiritual health - deepening my roots, basking in the light and drinking in all the nourishment I can find - then the "weeds" may not be such a problem.

Oh that I will allow God to so fill me that there would be no voids left for the weeds of sin to take root.

"Just Words"

Our recent trip to Williamsburg was very enlightening, many things spoke to my heart like the struggle of those early settlers and the devotion of our founders; I noticed the sometimes harsh, but common sense of their justice in the courts and also among people dealing with people.

One thing I had not expected to learn about was origins. Much of the common phraseology we use today, found its birth among those early Americans. Here are a few:

"approaching the bench" - this is a term we use in courtroom settings referring to an attorney drawing near to the judge to discuss some procedural issue or the like. You remember on those old Perry Mason reruns ...

In colonial days, and even prior to that, there was not a single judge but rather a number of justices that would hear a case and they sat - not behind a desk but at on a bench.

"passing the bar" - the second legal term I learned about from the courthouse in Williamsburg. A fence or "bar" separated the counselors from the common folks only those individuals studied in law could step pass the bar.

{in the picture to the right, you can see both the "bar" and the "bench"}

earmark - Okay, I overheard a colorful guide tell his group about these stocks ... he said that the point of the punishment was humiliation and so the perpetrator would be forced to face the

crowd, they would nail his ear to the side of the stocks. When he was released- sometimes days later- he had the choice of removing himself by working his earlobe over the nail head or someone could clip his ear - at which point he would be "earmarked".

"knock on wood" - Finally, in Yorktown as we toured a Continental Army Encampment, we learned about food. They made these sort of dehydrated biscuits that were hard as a rock. The good thing about them is that they could be stored in a barrel for two years (not unlike our refrigerator at times). When they were removed from the barrel, the hungry recipient would tap them against the side of the barrel in order to knock the weevils off (I guess it was considered unlucky to eat weevils).

Now this information won't likely get you into one of our institutes of higher learning, but it might just come in handy when their is a lull in the conversation at the next gathering you attend.

We Choose to go to the Moon

What a challenge! And Americans were up for it.
Below is the beginning of a recurring series on Great America!
I hope you find it worth your time.

Great America Series! "American Know-How"

I thought John McCain had hit upon a pretty good idea the other day: Offering a prize of $300 Million for someone to create a better battery. . . then I remembered that this was the guy offering to pay $50 per hour for lettuce pickers a couple years ago. I don't think he ever came across with the cash on that deal so I didn't even bother to go out to my garage and attempt anything.

The premise seemed good - it made me think that at least one contender for the presidency recognized that Americans are problem SOLVERS. But we don't need taxpayer funded prizes to incentivize solution-producers... that's what our glorious free market system does. It's called "profit" and it is the built-in, God-given reward for risk, hard work, blood, sweat and tears!

And that's the point of this post - to celebrate and remember "American know-how" - that national tendency toward fixing things.

As I mentioned a couple weeks ago, I hope to produce a recurring series I'll call Great America. In it, I will examine single words or phrases that have characterized this nation through the centuries. Characteristics that are sadly languishing in neglect these days. This is my first installment.

Good ole American know-how is one of those neglected characteristics.

In one of his books on the heroic "citizen-soldiers" of WWII, Stephen Ambrose pointed out that one thing that kept U.S. troops moving was their ingenuity. A soldier who back home had often spent Saturday afternoons under the hood of his car - would think nothing of ducking under the hood of a troubled tank (if tanks have "hoods") and get it running again. Their Axis army counterparts might bog down as they waited for experts to be called in or just abandon the tank altogether.

There exists an innate desire in Americans to do-it themselves. Something wells up inside and we say "I can do this!" or at least we have to try. It stems from our sense of self-reliance which is a Great America Series topic for another day.

In the past when faced with challenges, Americans didn't wait for someone else to bail them out. In fact in the very early days, there wasn't anyone to bail them out; so they pulled together and did what needed to be done to get the problem solved.

So American know-how is born of adversity.

Thomas Edison, an icon of American know-how, said "I haven't failed once. I've just found 10,000 ways that didn't work". In G. Glenwood Clark's, 1950 biography of Edison ("Thomas Alva Edison", Berkley Publishing Corp. New York, NY), he describes one of the inventor's numerous demonstrations of American know-how: Edison took a job with the Western Union office in Boston. Shortly after arriving he learned that the office was overrun with roaches. Edison pulled out his "roach exterminator", a couple of strips of tin foil pasted to the wall and attached to a battery, and soon the first victim was zapped!

There was a problem and he believed he could come up with a solution so he just did it. Over a century later others applied their own "know-how", improved his device and marketed his bug-zapper.

In doing a little internet research for this topic, I came across a comment posted on soldierant.net (I know nothing about this site - it just popped up on Google). It was about modern day soldiers trying to find a way to deal with IED's in the War on Terror. Someone had a toy radio-controlled car sent over. When troops saw a suspicious object, they'd just send the car to bump it. If it moved easily that indicated it was light and therefore not explosive - if it was heavy, they called in help.

Ben Franklin may be the father of American Know-How. The man was always wondering, figuring, thinking and apparently enjoying himself all the while. He came up with ideas for streetscapes and city designs, lightning rods to prevent house fires; designed a better street lamp and with his 14 Points he even tried to improve himself - he was a true Renaissance man!

So how come it's "American" know-how - why not "planet" know-how or "multicultural" know-how?

Though I truly believe in what Rush Limbaugh refers to as American Exceptionalism, I do not believe American "know-how" stemmed from some greater intelligence that we possessed. We weren't American "know-it-alls"; no, it emerged because of our system. In America there was LIBERTY to seek answers, the FREEDOM to fail and the OPPORTUNITY to try again. This was possible because our system of government and our economic structure were all bent toward staying out of the way. Sometimes that meant that Americans didn't have as many safeguards, they weren't as protected. There was no one standing over your shoulder to be sure you didn't harm yourself or some endangered species.

Americans had "know-how" because they were free to TRY. They were free to fail and try again and again. In America today it seems that all the powers that be are always trying to protect us from something. Whether it be radon, nuclear holocaust, greenhouse gases, CO2 emission, bicycle crashes, second hand smoke, chlorofluorocarbons, too much free speech in politics, mono sodium-glutamate, or peanuts they are always trying to save us - and built into every protection is a reduction in freedom. With every diminished liberty - we see a decrease in that precious commodity, know-how.

Everyone can probably remember someone in your childhood that exemplified this anomaly. Remember, that pathetic, over-protected child who - like Henry Fussy in "Charlotte's Web" - was forced to stay indoors and couldn't risk a head cold or a skinned knee?

Is that our plight? To become a nation of Henry Fussy's? Perhaps not. Perhaps liberty will come back into vogue.

Once we trumpeted American know-how, in John F. Kennedy's Rice University Speech (the lead- in You Tube video) in 1962 - he talked about how our scientific knowledge was growing at a remarkable pace, he talked about the advances of the 20th century and then he laid out a challenge: "We choose to go to the moon in this decade and to do the other things, not because they are easy but because they are hard!"

He promoted the advances - bragged about them and then established a new challenge. He called upon a nation of problem-solvers to jump in there and meet that challenge.

National pride has its place. And that brings me to the last point.

In back of all our advances throughout the centuries; underneath every example of good ole' American know-how, there was a belief that our place, our benefits, even our abilities came - not from within - but from above.

There was a national recognition that God was our source.

He provided the means for us to accomplish great things. And because our founders recognized God's gift of liberty - they established a system of government that would provide opportunities for men and women to discover, to create, to improve, to innovate... to fix things.

Good ole American know how is God's endowment to us. Let's not fling it away too easily, but rather, let's cherish it.

scene from Apollo 13 illustrating American Know-How

Historic Triangle Vacation

Brand New Day!

I ran across an Associated Press story on The Drudge Report that set me thinking. It was entitled: "Everything Seemingly Spinning Out of Control" by Alan Fram and Eileen Putnam (http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080621/ap_on_re_us/out_of_control). I ignored the headline the first couple times I saw it, and finally decided to check it out. I really don't look for stories of "doom and gloom" and "the world is coming to an end". Aside from a couple of refreshing references to Horatio Alger,Jr. the story pretty much reaches the typical conclusions - we are in a malaise and our future is, at best, uncertain.

With that story as a launching pad, my mind sprang to a Biblical story as I drove in to work this morning. In 2 Kings 6 the Syrians had built a siege against a portion of Israel and the king of Israel was blaming Elisha - God's man.

The purpose of a siege is to cut of supplies from entering the city. Eventually the folks inside give up or die of starvation. So things got pretty desperate. You think $4 per gallon gas prices are bad... that's nothing! These folks were spending all their money for anything that even resembled food - "donkey-heads", bird droppings and the like. At one point, many resorted to cannibalism. I'll stop there - you can read the details for yourself - the Bible doesn't pull any punches.

Now, for a moment put yourself in that situation. We are pretty upset when our grocery bill escalates a little; this was true destitution.

Our concerns today about "everything spinning out of control" are nothing compared to the plight of these people.

What if, in the midst of all that filth and starvation, someone with authority and good sense stood up and said... "this will all be over tomorrow - food in abundance and prices will return to normal".

Yeah, right.

Well that's just what happened. Elisha, the man of God mentioned earlier, stood up and said something just like that. (see 2 Kings 7).

An official of the king mouthed off (that's Southern for "replied")- "If the windows of heaven opened up it wouldn't be enough to get us out of this mess!"

Now that sounds not unlike the arguments spouted today by those against exploring for more oil here in the U.S. and near our shores. You know they mockingly say (read with mocking voice) "well even if we found oil - and we don't know that we will - it would be years before it would affect our fuel prices!!"

One thing is for sure... if we don't search for it, we will not find it.

Okay back to my story.

It happened just like the man of God said it would. You should read the story for yourself but it involved four completely hopeless outcasts who decided to get up and do something - even if they failed, they would go down trying.

These four diseased derelicts - despondent and destitute - stood up on trembling knees and determined to give themselves up to the enemy; prisoners of war get bread and water don't they? And even if they didn't get fed, perhaps they could infect a few of them on their way to the gallows.

It was those four disenfranchised ones that discovered that God had scared off the enemy and those Syrians had left all their stuff behind.

Now if we are not careful, we may get the idea that the only message of this little comparative story is that we should get up and do something.

Hardly.

The point is that Someone had it all under control. He chose when to end the desperation and those four outsiders took action in His time.

Maybe someone should be asking, what God is thinking about all this "spinning out of control".
Is it really out of control or does He still hold it all in His hands?

Maybe I should be asking what role He wants me to take?

A crazy man on the inside saying crazy things, standing up against the majority; or a crazy man on the outside doing crazy things and having little to lose -risking it all to take action.