Cory Doctorow reviews Blood in the Machine, a forthcoming history of the Luddites. I’ve had it on pre-order since the day I heard about it. đ
Rachel made persimmon drop cookies!
Indiana persimmonâstraight off the ground and warmâan absolute delight.
Powerful song by Derek Spencer on a real life tragedy in small town Kentucky. This guy deserves more attention than he’s gotten. đ”
Happy Hobbit Day! Unfortunately I won’t have as much time for celebrating today but I will certainly have this music playing in the background.
It’s a Soundgarden Superunknown kind of morning.
Made it through a thing today that had been giving me anticipatory stress. Also, two days from substantially complete financial statements and nine days from official issuance. Fresh start coming soon!
Following on from the âhusbands in carsâ memory: Rachel made a good point that our services were very demanding. If the âunsavedâ husband actually went inside the building he could very easily have been targeted by the preacher. Maybe even named and called out. (It happened many times.) Ours was also a very emotional religion: men of that generation were commonly uncomfortable with such outward emotion, even if they inwardly believed.
We had a point midway in the service (I donât know how commonly this was done in other churches) where the pastor, or someone called up by the pastor, would open the floor for prayer requests. They could be spoken out by anyone in the congregation and then we would kneel (by which I mean knees on the floor, elbows on the pewsânot any of those fancy kneelers the âformalâ churches had) and pray for a few minutes. Many of those women wouldâevery service, and for years on endârequest prayer for their âlost husbandsâ or, even more commonly, âlost children.â
A phenomenon I associate with country churches in my childhood: an irreligious husband waiting in the car while the devout wife is in churchâeither because she didnât drive (this was fairly common in rural areas) or because the husband didnât want her driving in the dark. Anyone else remember this?
âThe Weirdâ versus âweirdâ {TWT02}
Part two in a series. Two definitions of âweirdâ from Merriam-Webster: Of strange or extraordinary character: odd, fantastic Of, relating to, or caused by witchcraft or the supernatural: magical By capitalizing The Weird, Iâm obviously intending it to mean something more than the everyday, first sense of âweirdâ: unusual. When people say something is weird, they mean that it is something they donât have a ready explanation for. The paradigm they inhabit is not sufficient to explain it.