Lift Up Your Hearts!

Casting the Net is where I post various items I find interesting but about which I choose to limit my commentary—because otherwise my  backlog would be even more unendurable than it is, and you'd never see them.

Jennifer at Conversion Diary alerted me to the article she wrote for Inside Catholic, entitled Eight Responses to the Pro-Choice Mindset.   Some of her arguments simply won't fly with ardent supporters of the right to abortion, because they come down to recognizing the unborn baby as a person, which of course is the core issue.

Or is it?

I once said that I'd die to keep abortion legal and easily accessible, and I meant it. I was vehemently pro-choice, as were most of the women in my social circles. We believed abortion was a critical right for women and could not imagine how anyone could be pro-life. We were products of a culture in which human sexuality had been severed from its inherent connection to the creation of human life. Our generation had been taught in our public school sex-ed classes not that sex creates babies, but that unprotected sex creates babies. We were assured that the creation of new human life was tangential to sexual activity, something that was not only optional but completely controllable. In fact, babies were considered downright antithetical to sex.

"Sex is primarily for pleasure."  This deep misunderstanding about the nature of human sexuality is one of the key driving forces behind the modern abortion movement. When women accept the "truth" that sex only has as much meaning as they want it to, that it is not inherently a sacred and tremendously powerful act, they are set up for disaster. This is like saying that loaded guns can be used as toys so long as you put blanks in the chamber: To misunderstand such a significant act on such a fundamental level is a recipe for catastrophe.

As long as people believe that it is perfectly acceptable to engage in sexual activity even when they think a baby would ruin their lives, the temptation to dehumanize and disregard new life will win out. In order to foster a pro-life culture we must help women see that it is not the new life that traps them, but the lie that sex can be severed from its life-giving potential in the first place.

If our society is ever to respect the unborn, we must first respect and fully understand the nature of the act that creates those unborn lives in the first place. As long as the connection between sexual activity and its life-giving potential is severed, the temptation to devalue human life will win out.

Reading this brought to mind a seemingly unrelated post (hat tip to Jon):   Grace for Gays at Following Judah's Lion.  The author, a Baptist minister, meditates on the nature of a truly Christian response to homosexual people.

I completely admit that the Scriptures and the obvious physiological distinctions make it clear that God’s design was between a man and a woman. But what is not so clear to me is how we as the recipients and sharers of God’s grace should interact and reach out to those who cannot deny what they feel.

Have we no compassion, and can we show no sympathy for their situation or are our theological positions enough to insulate us from experiencing their pain? And exactly what requirements are necessary before one can believe on Christ for redemption? How many sins do we have to forsake before we can approach Him, and must we be aware of how God views the entire catalogue of our sins before we can become a legitimate believer?

[A]re grace, mercy, and love incongruent to our Biblical beliefs about sin? I do not mean just informing a gay person about his sin, but exhibiting those spiritual fruits to someone in spite of their lifestyle.

No one should practice sin as a believer and follower of Jesus Christ. But I have come to this conclusion, only practicing sinners will enter eternity under the grace of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. My heart grieves to watch a 20 year old young man leap to his death because he has been rejected by almost everyone he loves and within that experience he has come to violently hate himself.

That surely cannot be New Testament Christianity.

I quote extensively from the article because I believe it is worthwhile, and I know a number of my readers lack time, inclination, or both to read the original.  But what triggered the connection with Jennifer's article was this paragraph:

I have no idea why [the homosexual] lifestyle seems to have become more prevalent in today’s world. Perhaps it is because most had to suppress it in former generations, or maybe it is because the continuing revelations of Adam’s sin are becoming more pronounced in these last days. I do not know, and neither does anyone else.

I do not know, either, but I have a strong suspicion that a major factor might be Jennifer's point about the change in our understanding of the nature and purposes of sexual behavior. coupled with the sex-saturated nature of modern culture and an increasing belief that we are entitled to pursue our pleasures without hindrance.  To renounce one good—be it sex, food, wine, television, or any other pleasant thing—for a greater good is difficult, a discipline rarely taught and almost never expected.

A bout of illness a few weeks ago taught me that I could go several days without eating—without suffering (except for missing out of some great Swiss food), and feeling all the better for the fast (except when I tried to run through the Frankfort airport and noticed the lack of fuel).  And yet at home I still find turning down the second (or third, or fourth) cookie exceedingly difficult.  Teaching this kind of discipline to our children, and providing for them opportunities to practice the skill, may be more important than we think.

George Friedman's The Next 100 Years:  A Forecast for the 21st Century is not yet available, but there's a long and fascinating excerpt at InvestorsInsight.  If some of Friedman's predictions seem nonsensical, the same cannot be said about his conclusion that the least reliable predictor of the future is our expectations.  In the immortal words of investment prospectuses, "past performance is no guarantee of future return."

Friedman dramatically illustrates his point by imagining what observers standing at each even decade from 1900 to 2000 might reasonably have expected the future to be like.  In most cases they would have been proven wrong within a decade.

Here are some of his unreasonable predictions—but consider his reasoning before rejecting them altogether:

American power and influence is not on the wane, but rather ascending.

The war between the United States and the radical Islamists is virtually over and will be little remembered in 100 years.

America's next challenge will be Russia, which will rise, bring on another Cold War, then collapse once again.

Despite appearances, China will be a threat only to itself.

Japan, Turkey, and Poland will become major world powers along with the United States

Increasing tensions will result in a mid-century global war.  This war will be science fiction-like in its execution, and will lead to dramatic technical advances, including space-based solar power, which will jump-start a massive economic boom.

The most important dynamic of the 21st century will be falling birthrates leading to world population decline.  Countries hungry for laborers will openly compete for immigrants rather than turning them away.

Thanks in large measure to the immigration-induced population and power shift, the final crisis of the 21st century will be a major conflict between the United States and an increasingly influential and aggressive Mexico.

Friedman may be 'way off base in his conclusions, or he may be prescient.  Where I am certain he is correct is in his assertion that we must expect the unexpected.  To that end I'm beginning what I hope will be several posts on ways we might prepare to meet whatever is coming our way.

To conclude the beginning, here are a couple of Friedman's thoughts that I found both frightening and comforting:

It is the delight of all societies to belittle their political leaders, and leaders surely do make mistakes. But the mistakes they make, when carefully examined, are rarely stupid. More likely, mistakes are forced on them by circumstance. We would all like to believe that we—or our favorite candidate—would never have acted so stupidly. It is rarely true. Geopolitics therefore does not take the individual leader very seriously, any more than economics takes the individual businessman too seriously.

The twenty-first century will be like all other centuries. There will be wars, there will be poverty, there will be triumphs and defeats. There will be tragedy and good luck. People will go to work, make money, have children, fall in love, and come to hate. That is the one thing that is not cyclical. It is the permanent human condition.

From this you might begin to guess the tenor of my upcoming posts.  Some things never change, and therefore there are ways to face the uncertain future, ways that involve work but not worry, preparation but not panic.  I take as the theme of my approach this admonition given by God to the Israelites, who had been conquered and dragged away into exile in Babylon (Jeremiah 29:5-7):

Build houses and settle down; plant gardens and eat what they produce.  Marry and have sons and daughters; find wives for your sons and give your daughters in marriage, so that they too may have sons and daughters.  Increase in number there; do not decrease.  Also, seek the peace and prosperity of the city to which I have carried you into exile.  Pray to the LORD for it, because if it prospers, you too will prosper.

There's a reason the Oxford University Press had to include "common sense" in its new Junior Dictionary.  In 2003, a construction worker, egged on by his boss and co-workers, dived into a shallow river.  The not unsurprising result?  He broke his neck.  Now he is paralyzed, his mother cares for him full time, and the company he worked for is bankrupt.  A tragedy all around.

Another, less heart-rending but no less serious tragedy is the further erosion of the notion of personal responsibility for our actions.  In 2007 a judge ruled that the company was negligent, and this week a jury decided that the man

should receive $1.5 million for past medical expenses, $89,000 for lost earnings, $21.7 million for future medical expenses, $583,000 for loss of future earnings, and a whopping $52.8 million for pain and suffering.

He's not likely to collect, since apparently there is no one with deep pockets to bleed for the man's stupidity and that of his foolish coworkers.  For the jury's stupidity we will all suffer.

Rather than hijacking Heather's post, I'll ask my question here.

The pay toilet has long since disappeared from American public life, but is still common on Europe, a fact which often strikes visiting Americans as barbarous.  I feel similarly about paying high prices to drink water in European restaurants.  Other surprises I have found in my travels—for these are first-world, modern, and wealthy countries—is home refrigerators the size of those in U. S. college dorms (and no separate freezers), severely restricted laundry hours in apartments (sometimes as infrequently as once every two weeks), and the scarcity of clothes dryers.

There are, of course, many more things I've found delightful in all the countries we've visited, but the question of this post is:  What do visitors to the United States find barbarous or bizarre here, that we accept without a second thought?  To some friends visiting from Brazil it was being required to stop at red traffic lights even when there was no visible cross traffic.  To others I'm sure it's the lack of clean and convenient public transportation.  The Swiss must be shocked at the unreliability of schedules here.

What can you add to the list, dear foreign readers and those who have friends from other countries?

For the amusement of our friends and family, particularly those who were in New Hampshire last week, we are under a hard freeze warning.

All persons in east central Florida venturing outdoors this morning... should dress in layers and wear a hat.

Okay, okay—stop throwing things!

What do you expect to find in a public library?  I would like—though no longer expect—to find a large selection of old, unusual, and out-of-print books, music, and videos, the kind I am unable to buy from Amazon or borrow from Netflix.  Shouldn't that be a basic purpose of libraries:  to be a treasure store of valuable materials outside of whatever happens to be popular at the moment, especially those not otherwise easily obtainable?  Unfortunately, most libraries seem to be divesting themselves of these materials in order to make more room for the the latest favorites.  To be sure, this is also a function of libraries, and I appreciate being able to borrow a book when all I want to do is read it; I prefer stocking our own bookshelves with materials I already know are worthwhile.  (One casualty of the libraries' jettisoning old books is that our shelves are overflowing; I can no longer prune our collection of lesser books on the grounds that I can always borrow them from the library if needed.)  Most libraries, I believe, are out of balance in the way they address both functions, and our culture is suffering for it.

Thanks to my sister-in-law, who should have her own blog because she and my brother send me interesting ideas much faster than I can write about them, and to the Percival Blakeney Academy blog, I now know that this phenomenon is not limited to libraries, but has had a major impact on the Oxford University Press Junior Dictionary.

The battle over which words to include and which to exclude is not new for dictionary makers.  With language constantly changing and growing, keeping a dictionary to a reasonable size requires excising some words when others are added. This is especially difficult with a children's dictionary, which must be extremely limited.  That said, I believe the Oxford University Press has fallen into the libraries' error, depriving children of important information in favor of what's new and popular.

Words taken out:

Carol, cracker, holly, ivy, mistletoe

Dwarf, elf, goblin

Abbey, aisle, altar, bishop, chapel, christen, disciple, minister, monastery, monk, nun, nunnery, parish, pew, psalm, pulpit, saint, sin, devil, vicar

Coronation, duchess, duke, emperor, empire, monarch, decade

adder, ass, beaver, boar, budgerigar, bullock, cheetah, colt, corgi, cygnet, doe, drake, ferret, gerbil, goldfish, guinea pig, hamster, heron, herring, kingfisher, lark, leopard, lobster, magpie, minnow, mussel, newt, otter, ox, oyster, panther, pelican, piglet, plaice, poodle, porcupine, porpoise, raven, spaniel, starling, stoat, stork, terrapin, thrush, weasel, wren.

Acorn, allotment, almond, apricot, ash, bacon, beech, beetroot, blackberry, blacksmith, bloom, bluebell, bramble, bran, bray, bridle, brook, buttercup, canary, canter, carnation, catkin, cauliflower, chestnut, clover, conker, county, cowslip, crocus, dandelion, diesel, fern, fungus, gooseberry, gorse, hazel, hazelnut, heather, holly, horse chestnut, ivy, lavender, leek, liquorice, manger, marzipan, melon, minnow, mint, nectar, nectarine, oats, pansy, parsnip, pasture, poppy, porridge, poultry, primrose, prune, radish, rhubarb, sheaf, spinach, sycamore, tulip, turnip, vine, violet, walnut, willow

Words put in:

Blog, broadband, MP3 player, voicemail, attachment, database, export, chatroom, bullet point, cut and paste, analogue

Celebrity, tolerant, vandalism, negotiate, interdependent, creep, citizenship, childhood, conflict, common sense, debate, EU, drought, brainy, boisterous, cautionary tale, bilingual, bungee jumping, committee, compulsory, cope, democratic, allergic, biodegradable, emotion, dyslexic, donate, endangered, Euro

Apparatus, food chain, incisor, square number, trapezium, alliteration, colloquial, idiom, curriculum, classify, chronological, block graph

Removing spinach to make room for chatroom?  Replacing devil with MP3 player?  Poultry with trapezium?  And what about block graph?  I'd love to know the new dictionary's definition, as all my dictionaries and Wikipedia failed me.  I suspect they mean a simple, graphical way of presenting data, and not the higher-level math of graph theory, or this definition I found via Google:  "a block graph...consists of a plurality of logic blocks interconnected by nets which carry logic signals between the logic blocks."  In any case, its inclusion at the expense of emperor seems bizarre.

On the other hand, they do include common sense for the first time.  I'd like to think that, like MP3 players, Euros, and celebrities, common sense has been included because it has become popular and commonplace.  But I doubt it.

Heather and Jon gave us a gift certificate for the El Bodegon restaurant, because they know we've been mouring the demise of our favorite tapas restaurant.  We thought we'd celebrate our anniversary again tonight (the first celebration having been in Switzerland) and try it out.

Our intentions to use the gift certificate went by the board, however.  We arrived during tapas happy hour, and learned that we couldn't use both discounts.  We couldn't resist two-for-one tapas, so we'll need to return to use the gift certificate.  This is a good thing.  :)  The meal was thoroughly delightful:

Pimientos del Piquillo Rellenos (Roasted Piquillo peppers stuffed with crab meat in romesco sauce)

Gambas al Ajillo (Spanish Style Shrimp in a garlic and sherry wine sauce)

Patatas Bravas (Wedge potatoes with a Spanish spicy tomato sauce)

Champiñones al Ajillo (Mushrooms sautéed in garlic and Sherry wine)

The meal was accompanied by slices of toasted bread, which served the noble end of soaking up the delicious leftover sauces, making it some of the best garlic bread ever.

We finished the meal by splitting a dessert:

Tarta San Marcos (Homemade Vanilla Cake made with Orange Liqueur) 

Thanks, Heather and Jon!  We'll try again to use the gift certificate another time.... 

It doesn't really matter that Barack Obama was not my candidate of choice (see my election series, Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3 for some of the reasons why); as a friend said, "I didn't vote for him, but I hope he's the best president ever."  What boggles my mind is the adulation, ethusiasm, and outright joy that Inauguration Day 2009 brings—it's not all media hype.  I can't imagine any presidential inauguration inspiring that kind of joy in me.  At best I usually manage feelings of relief that the worst candidate did not win.  But perhaps that's just a character flaw:  I find it hard to get that enthusiastic about anything.  We recently returned from our daughter's fabulous wedding to a wonderful man, and though I am pleased and enthusiastic and joyful, even for that event I can't imagine participating in the kind of jubliant demonstration associated with Obama's inauguration.  Be that as it may, I truly wish our new president the best, and pray for him, because he will need it.

And yet my primary commentary on this Inauguration Day is a thank you to outgoing President Bush.  History alone will tell,  but as far as I can see the evidence so far pronounces George W. Bush a good man but an unfortunate and often unwise president, the same judgment I gave to Jimmy Carter.  Nonetheless, he had his successes, and a very important one was highlighted by yesterday's Mallard Fillmore.

Insofar as I care about the Super Bowl, which isn't any distance at all, actually, I did think it would be cool to have an all-Pennsylvania matchup.  Failing that, I'll give condolences to my Philadelphia friends, say congratulations to my Pittsburgh friends, and hope the latter were safely away from downtown last night.  :)

I've noticed a disturbing trend in recent writings condemning individualism and independence, from the oft-quoted "It takes a village to raise a child" (best response to date: "I've seen the village, and I don't want it raising my children") to several of the essays on Patrick Deneen's excellent blog, What I Saw in America, to the many Christian writers who are taking pains to distance their religion from currently unpopular, Western—and particularly American—ideas.  Collectivism is in.

Some of this is a much-needed correction.  Basic human sinfulness (there is no better word for the phenomenon) has bent a respect for the rights and responsibilities of every human being into an excuse for me-first, me-only, me-now self-indulgence that has torn apart community on every level, and especially in our families.  Individual rights without individual responsibility is not a workable equation, and the fault must be addressed.

Nonetheless, it's worth noting the risk of tumbling into the opposite fault.  Some recent conversations with people about their experiences with some African countries alerted me to a cultural problem that I did not, until now, connect with collectivism.  I've removed the country-specific references in the excerpt below, because it is representative of a more wide-spread mindset.

One of the most striking things about [this country] compared to many other developing countries is that there seems to be no spirit of entrepreneurship.   When we were standing along the main street, one of the missionaries pointed to the stores across the street:  "that one is owned by a Lebanese, the next one by an Indian, then a Nigerian", etc.  None by [the locals].  It's obviously not impossible to start a business, given the number of small businesses, but [they] wait for someone else to do it and then hire them to do the grunt work.

It was a remarkable essay by Matthew Parris (hat tip to John Stackhouse) that connected these points for me. In As an Atheist, I Truly Believe Africa Needs God, he muses on a return to his boyhood home of Malawi (then Nyasaland) and his reluctant conclusion that the heart of Africa's problems is spiritual.

Now a confirmed atheist, I've become convinced of the enormous contribution that Christian evangelism makes in Africa: sharply distinct from the work of secular NGOs, government projects and international aid efforts. These alone will not do. Education and training alone will not do. In Africa Christianity changes people's hearts. It brings a spiritual transformation. The rebirth is real. The change is good.

The Christians were always different. Far from having cowed or confined its converts, their faith appeared to have liberated and relaxed them. There was a liveliness, a curiosity, an engagement with the world—a directness in their dealings with others—that seemed to be missing in traditional African life. They stood tall.

There's long been a fashion among Western academic sociologists for placing tribal value systems within a ring fence, beyond critiques founded in our own culture: “theirs” and therefore best for “them”; authentic and of intrinsically equal worth to ours.

I don't follow this. I observe that tribal belief is no more peaceable than ours; and that it suppresses individuality. People think collectively; first in terms of the community, extended family and tribe. This rural-traditional mindset feeds into the “big man” and gangster politics of the African city: the exaggerated respect for a swaggering leader, and the (literal) inability to understand the whole idea of loyal opposition.

Anxiety—fear of evil spirits, of ancestors, of nature and the wild, of a tribal hierarchy, of quite everyday things—strikes deep into the whole structure of rural African thought. Every man has his place and, call it fear or respect, a great weight grinds down the individual spirit, stunting curiosity. People won't take the initiative, won't take things into their own hands or on their own shoulders.

Christianity, post-Reformation and post-Luther, with its teaching of a direct, personal, two-way link between the individual and God, unmediated by the collective, and unsubordinate to any other human being, smashes straight through the philosphical/spiritual framework I've just described. It offers something to hold on to to those anxious to cast off a crushing tribal groupthink. That is why and how it liberates.

Those who want Africa to walk tall amid 21st-century global competition must not kid themselves that providing the material means or even the knowhow that accompanies what we call development will make the change. A whole belief system must first be supplanted.

And I'm afraid it has to be supplanted by another. Removing Christian evangelism from the African equation may leave the continent at the mercy of a malign fusion of Nike, the witch doctor, the mobile phone and the machete.

Perhaps if Christians in America looked more like those whom Parris observed in Africa, we wouldn't be so eager to reject a way of life "influenced by a conception of man's place in the Universe that Christianity had taught."

At this moment, the temperature is the same in Orlando and Basel, which means that Orlando is having a "cold snap" and Basel has warmed up a bit since we were there.  Hillsboro, on the other hand....  Stay warm, all you Daleys!

From Conversion Diary:

Want to get to get things done like never before? Try writing a book.

I guarantee you, every time you sit down and see the blank screen with the blinking cursor, you will suddenly feel an urgent need to clean the baseboards, get those crumbs off the kitchen floor, de-lint the couch, Windex the skylight, clean the gutters, do your taxes and mop the garage. If you can swing a contract that puts even more pressure on you to write something good and thus brings out writer's block in its worst form, you can count on having your to-do list cleared off in about a week.

So that's why I accomplish the most whenever something else urgently needs to be done.  I find it especially true when leaving on a trip.  Suddenly all the items that languished contentedly on my to do list for weeks demand to be addressed before I leave, even though they're much less important than, say, packing my suitcase.

A couple more quick takes, as I dig through the backlog.

Think Your Kid's Gifted?  You're Probably Wrong, from Geek Dad.  An unfortunate title, as is the similar title of the article on which he is commenting; I would have said instead, "You're Probably Right."  At long last parents are beginning to realize that children are not mindless lumps of clay, but are nearly all born brilliant.  (You doubt that?  Plunk yourself down in the middle of a foreign country and see how long it takes you to become fluent in the language.)  Finally people are realizing that what they do, or don't do, with their young chldren makes a difference, and that they need better opportunities than most of them get.  Why do some people feel it necessary to debunk the idea?  Probably because, being fallen humans, we tend to focus not on "my child is brilliant" but "my child is brighter than someone else's child."  Geek Dad catches the real issue, however.

It doesn't matter if my son (or my daughter, in a few years) is officially deemed "gifted."  All that matters is that my kids get the best education we can provide for them.  Based on his experience in kindergarten and first grade, I'm certain my son will do better in the G/T classes, and that is really the only reason that matters for my wife and me to push hard to get him into the program.

Whether or not your kids get fitted with the label "gifted" doesn't matter.  All that matters is that you do what you need to do to get your kids the very best education possible for your kids and for their specific needs.  That may or may not be the same education all the other kids are getting, or your next-door neighbor's kids are getting, and that's all right.  If you do what needs to be done to get your kids the best education possible, you've done your job well.

Easier said than done, especially when "best education" must cover social, spiritual, emotional, and physical issues as well as intellectual ones.  Although I have an obvious prejudice in favor of home education on all fronts, what really matters is awareness, flexibility, and freedom.  What is best now might not be best in three years.  Above all, make sure that the person making (and evaluating) educational decisions for your children is you (that is, you, your spouse, and your children together).  Not the state, not your friends, not habit and custom, and not even your well-meaning mother-in-law.  :)

And speaking of the genius of babies, here are three worthwhile discussions of young children and mathematics.  The initial question was "My two-year-old can verbalize the answer to almost any other factual question, and and clearly knows the answers to arithmetic problems I must check with a calculator.  But he can't verbalize the math answers.  Why not?"  From Doman Inspired Parenting: Math (Dots) and the follow-up, Math Dots; and from Life with a Preschooler: The Math Mystery.

"If you ask a fluent reader to explain how they read they would simple state that they can. It is possible that the mental manipulation of quantity develops to the stage where the entire process takes place at a subconscious level."

If math was simply about memorizing a set of facts—What is the capital of France? Who was the fifth President? What sound does the letter A make?—it would simply be a matter of recalling the correct answer, the corresponding fact. But math, in the way that babies can do it, is not about memorizing facts: it is a way of thinking and reasoning.

This brought to mind the stage Janet went through several years later, in which she balked at being asked to show her work on math assignments.  She knew the answer, period—and was right 99% of the time—but could no more put the workings of her brain on paper than she could fly.

Diplomacy.  It was Henry Kissinger's favorite game.  It was also a significant part of our lives in the early 1980s, back when Porter thought he had time to spend on interminable strategy board games.  He played in person; he played by mail.  He designed and implemented a multi-tiered rope-and-pulley game board system for our basement, so he could keep track of several games at once.  By far his favorite—no doubt because it is all skill, no luck—was Diplomacy.

I doubt the number of games Porter persuaded me to play exceeded two, but that didn't stop the whole family from being sucked into the vortex.  Somewhere in the process of all the conventions, fanzine activity, and of course, game playing, we made some lifelong friends, including two for whom Porter would subsequently be best man at their weddings.  Heather gave Porter his less sinister nickname, Dippy Daddy.  (The other, bestowed by one of his favorite opponents, was Porter the Knife.)  Two of our close friends published their own "Dipzines"—small publications with a few articles that primarly served the purpose of managing play-by-mail games—to which I occasionally submitted an article.  In one of them I even had a short-lived cartoon, which I called Dip City.

  Bill Highfield and Janet

Time, life, and a move brought an end to that era of our lives, but the Internet recently brought it back to mind.  Someone is collecting and posting old Dipzines, which I found through a Google search while looking for something else that I no longer recall.  Lo and behold, there were a few samples of Bill Highfield's The Modern Patriot (scroll down the page to find it) and a good collection of Don Sigwalt's Hoof and Mouth.  Of most interest to me, however, was the inclusion of Hoof and Mouth Issue #27x.

A minor side of the hobby that appealed to me was the creation of fake issues.  That is, someone would publish a Dipzine issue that had the appearance of one of the regular zines, but was not; usually it was a spoof containing clues to its deceptive nature.  As a puzzle-lover, I enjoyed reading the fakes.

I enjoyed even more creating my own.  When Don's typewriter broke down and he came to our house to use ours, I had the final piece for my own puzzle:  access to his mailing list.  I was already familiar with his zine, his style, and his life, not to mention his regular contributors.  Putting together #27x was great fun, and I eagerly awaited the response I was sure it would generate.

That's when I discovered there's such a thing as being too good.  Despite all the clues, to my knowledge no one ever guessed that the issue was a fake.  Even the principals had no idea I was behind it.  We gradually faded away from the hobby and 27x into the mists of time.  Until now.  Because I'm still proud of it.  It won't mean much to anyone not familiar with the real Hoof and Mouth, but if you want you can see it here.  I also can't resist reproducing my favorite part of the issue:

 

Feeling the relief of the immediate pressure of travel/Christmas/wedding, I decided to make some long-overdue blog modifications.  Some were easy, and some...well, let's just say that—as with much system maintenance—it started by breaking more than it fixed.  Specifically, links.  And because this particular change was system-wide, it messed up Janet's links as well as mine.  Not all of them, but some, and finding out which ones is part of the fun.  :)  So please be patient as I continue to work on this, all the while trying not to let it consume too much of the time that should be spent on laundry, etc.

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