Photo credit: New York Public Library. Via Unsplash.
Here’s what came up in my personal devotions this morning. I was reading in Romans 13:
For because of this you also pay taxes, for the authorities are ministers of God, attending to this very thing. Pay to all what is owed to them: taxes to whom taxes are owed, revenue to whom revenue is owed, respect to whom respect is owed, honor to whom honor is owed. (v. 6-7, ESV)
This may offend some of my friends, but there’s zero biblical grounds for saying taxation is theft. The passage above clearly states that we have an obligation before God to pay our taxes (note, Paul’s talking about the Romans here. Nero is the emperor). Government, Paul says, is ordained by God and He expects us to bear our share of the costs.
A particular tax may be unjust. It may be disproportionately levied. It may be too high. We have every right to dispute wrong taxes, and to minimize our own payments the best we can within the law. Tax reform is great. Particular taxes should in many cases be abolished.
But a Christian has no business saying “Taxation is theft” as a general principle. I overlook it when my agnostic or atheist Ayn Rand-following friends say that. But Christians should not.
After all the fights we’ve had about abortion and homosexual marriage, it bothers me to see conservative Christians spouting plainly unbiblical slogans.
Wyatt Earp and friends in Dodge City in 1883. Wyatt is 2nd from left in the front row. Bat Masterson is 2nd from the right in the back row. The rest of these guys you’ve probably never heard of. But there are several pristine Boss of the Plains Stetsons here.
Today I got more translation work, so that’s what I’ve been doing, pretty much. This puts us all at the mercy of my wandering brain, which alights on random topics in idle moments.
I don’t think I’ve ever talked about cowboy hats on this blog. I mean, what could be more appropriate for a book blog? (Hey, there are lots of books about cowboys. Some of them are even good. A few are excellent. As with every other subject.)
Most of us are well acquainted with cowboy hats – we think. But in fact, the cowboy hat as we think of it today is not one the old-time cowboys would have recognized.
The original cowboy hat, of course, was designed by John B. Stetson (1830-1906), a hat maker from New Jersey. He went west for his health (consumption), and used the skills he’d learned in his father’s hattery to make a wide-brimmed hat to wear under the western sun. Originally it was a joke, but he found it useful and comfortable, and later a cowboy bought it off him for five bucks. Eventually Stetson went to Philadelphia (the western climate had cleared up his tuberculosis) and started making hats for the cowboy trade. The rest is history.
Here’s an interesting detail – John B. Stetson was a devout Baptist. The profits that came from selling hats to all those wild and wooly western characters – cowboys and rustlers and gamblers and saloonkeepers – went largely toward his charitable interests, to build the Kingdom of God.
That original cowboy hat style was called “The Boss of the Plains.” It had a relatively tall, rounded crown and a relatively wide brim (though not as tall or wide as the one Kurt Russell wears so well in “Tombstone”). There was no idea, originally, of curling the brim or denting the crown. Those things happened, of course, when a fellow was working a ranch, but were considered slightly disreputable. A respectable man, like the Earps aspired to be, took pride in keeping theirs nice and flat and uniform.
I realized recently that I’ve carried quite a stupid idée fixe in my head all my life, about Wyatt Earp’s hat. I watched the old Wyatt Earp show starring Hugh O’Brien back when I was a kid. One of his trademarks was a flat-brimmed hat, sort of a Spanish hat really, which stood in for a Boss of the Plains on the show. When I first saw the photo above, where Wyatt (second from the left, front) wears a genuine BOTP, I associated that hat (often reproduced in images cropped to make the crown look higher than it is) with him. And whenever I’ve seen a Wyatt Earp movie since, I’ve compared the actor’s hat to that one. (There’s another picture of Wyatt in the same, or a similar, hat – a group photo in front of the fire department in Tombstone. Wyatt is pretty small in that one, but it’s recognizably the same style.)
What I realized recently, though, is that almost everybody wore a BOTP in those days. If I’m going to obsess about Wyatt’s hat, I should obsess about all the others. Wyatt’s hat was in no way unique. Relax, I tell myself. It’s just a movie.
By the way, you know where those turned-up sides on cowboy hats came from (“four in a pickup hats,” I’ve heard them called)? Not from the cowboys themselves, but from movies. In the early days of movie making, lighting was primitive. Scenes were shot out of doors or in open-roofed studios, in natural light. Nobody had figured out you could illuminate a person’s face from below, with reflectors. So when they shot Westerns, the hats were a problem. They shaded the actors’ faces – a real obstacle in a silent film where facial expressions are everything.
So the lighting people went around and turned the hats up on the sides, to let some light in. Then, in a weird twist, the real cowboys saw hats shaped like that in movies, and turned their own up on the sides to look cool.
Every year creative works slip into the public domain for use in Geico ads and local craft fairs. This year, the first story by A.A. Milne of his delightful bear in the Hundred Acre Wood has become public domain.
“Milne actually wrote four books based on the character and books 2-4 have not lapsed into the public domain. This means that many of the characters from the series, most notably Tigger, have not lapsed and will not for a few more years. In fact, the image of Pooh wearing a red shirt was not published until 1932.”
Most of what’s below can be skipped without any loss to the diverse richness of your life. It’s just the account of my day, offered here for your perusal because I can’t think of anything actually interesting.
No, wait, I do have one interesting fact. Norway has opened its borders again. The requirement that people traveling from countries outside a certain short list must go through a quarantine period before entering has been lifted. You still need to show proof of vaccination, but this is a big relaxation. A step back toward normal life, one fervently hopes.
“Following a recommendation from the National Institute of Public Health, the government is abolishing the requirement for entry quarantine because it is no longer considered necessary for infection control,” the Norwegian Ministry of Health stated.
You may recall that I predicted something like this just a few days ago, based on the amount of translation work I’ve been getting – which would seem to indicate a belief inside the film industry that freer association and travel are coming. I didn’t expect it to happen this fast, though. No doubt the movie moguls I serve in my small way have friends in high places, who tipped them the high sign.
Today was my first day without translation work since… I don’t recall. Probably less time than I think. But it’s been a string of days. I’d marked today out, whatever my work situation, for shopping and errands. (Note: it’s in times like these that I contemplate finding a wife. Only I know she’d retaliate with a Honeydo list.) The coldest day of the week isn’t prime time for such activity, but there are moments when you just need to go to the store, or else you’ll run out of some staple, like chocolate or beef jerky or pigs’ feet.
As I planned my day, I realized a lot of stuff had piled up on my list. It called for careful trip planning and logistics. Aside from the gym in the morning, which was a separate excursion, I must:
Go to the post office. Take my suit to the cleaners. Run my car through the car wash (not optimal on a day with a high around zero, but on the other hand there wasn’t much of a waiting line). Go to Wal Mart for a new computer monitor (because I knocked the old one over and broke the screen. Nothing to do with old age and clumsiness, of course – I was just as clumsy at twenty. And the piece of junk was always unstable. Which should teach me to buy computer components at Wal Mart). Get groceries. Stop at the drug store for immune system supplement. Then get the new monitor working, which is always more complicated than you expect, if you’re over ten years old.
I’m planning to work on the novel tonight. If God gives me strength. And the monitor doesn’t fall over again.
Inspector John Shadow of York, hero of H. L. Marsay’s police procedural series, is annoyed by many things. Crowds for one, which is unfortunate for a man living in a tourist city. Festivals. Geese. Modern music. Social interactions. At the beginning of A Ghostly Shadow, he’s annoyed, as Guy Fawke’s Day approaches, by the costumed tour guides leading “ghost walks” through the city. York is renowned for several ghosts, most prominently Guy Fawkes of the Gunpowder Plot and Dick Turpin the highwayman. Currently, a couple new guides from Oxford have established themselves in the city and are dressing as Fawkes and Turpin, taking business away from local ghost impersonators. Also, somebody has been stealing tour brochures from kiosks.
Then the new Dick Turpin is found hanging from a tree, near the very spot where the original Dick swung for his crimes. Shadow’s team must investigate the murder, under pressure from the city, as usual, to wrap things up before it affects business. Inspector Shadow’s attitude is not improved when he sprains his ankle and has to depend on other people’s help.
I suspect my affection for this series springs from my identification with Shadow himself, as a fellow misanthrope (though I think he’s ruder than I am, yet people seem to like him for some reason I can’t divine). But the writing isn’t top drawer (author Marsay is prone to clichés like “pale and drawn”). Nevertheless, the book was fun to read, and there wasn’t much to offend me. Recommended for light reading.
I’m sure you’re familiar with Augustus Toplady’s hymn “Rock of Ages,” written in 1776. I don’t know how many believers are singing this hymn with James Ward’s arrangement, written in 1985. Ward lives in Chattanooga and served for many years as the music director at a church in my denomination. This arrangement is printed on the page opposite of the traditional Toplady tune in the Trinity hymnal, which is the hymnal PCA congregation use.
If this is a new tune for you, I hope you enjoy it.
Rock of Ages, cleft for me let me hide myself in thee; let the water and the blood, from thy riven side which flowed, be of sin the double cure, cleanse me from its guilt and pow’r.
A college professor told me he gets the most response from his students by exposing them to the first question of the Heidelberg Catechism. It challenges contemporary assumptions and calls out our faith.
“What is your only comfort in life and death?
“That I am not my own, but belong with body and soul, both in life and in death, to my faithful Saviour Jesus Christ. He has fully paid for all my sins with his precious blood, and has set me free from all the power of the devil. He also preserves me in such a way that without the will of my heavenly Father not a hair can fall from my head; indeed, all things must work together for my salvation. Therefore, by his Holy Spirit he also assures me of eternal life and makes me heartily willing and ready from now on to live for him.”
Here’s some other reading from this weekend.
Reaction: Kevin Holtsberry reviews the novella Trust by Italian author Domenico Starnone. “I enjoyed the story as a mediation on the way we create stories and perceptions of ourselves and our lives, about who we are and why we do what we do, etc.”
Jewish Book Council has released its list of winners of the 2021 National Jewish Book Awards. The winner for fiction is Joshua Cohen’s The Netanyahus: An Account of a Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family. (via Literary Saloon)
One Nation Under the Pope: Some politically and theologically conservative leaders today dislike the secular government we have in America and would like to unite the country under one holy, Roman high priest.
Photo: Main Street, Columbus Junction, Iowa. 2003. John Margolies Roadside America photograph archive (1972-2008), Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.
Communists need their people to toe the party line without question, just like INGSOC does in Orwell’s 1984.
In Cuba, the island nation that could be a paradise, 66 protestors arrested for their actions last summer were tried in December and are still awaiting their sentences. A few who were also arrested for unauthorized use of speech have been sentenced to 15-30 years in prison.
“It has never been easy for journalists to work in Cuba,” Juliane Matthey, press officer for Latin America at Reporters Without Borders, said. On the organization’s 2021 list ranking countries on journalistic freedom, Cuba is the 9th worst, not taking last summer into account.
The Communist Chinese continue to bully journalists in Hong Kong. Stand News was the largest free news agency in the country until Dec 29, when police raided their offices. “The online media organization, which had operated for seven years, took down its website and social media accounts and dismissed all staff.”
Being somewhat busy tonight, and having no useful ideas of my own, I turn this space over to G. K. Chesterton as my guest blogger. This film is from his appearance at Holy Cross College, Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1931. His remarks will be brief, and a couple splices in the film have been patched with still photos.
Have a good weekend, my friends, and don’t go outside barefoot.
Winter driving in Tromso, Norway. Driving yesterday looked nothing like this, but it’s Norway. Photo credit: Remi Jacquaint @jack_1. Unsplash license.
Back to translating today. I’ve been pretty busy for… well, for the last couple months. My subjective conclusion is that, although Norway remains locked down fairly severely, its film and TV industry is planning on working pretty hard, pretty soon. I think it’s agreed by all the smartest people that entertainment folks are infallible harbingers of future events, like groundhogs in little sunglasses.
Yesterday’s drive to Montevideo (yes, we have a town called Montevideo in Minnesota. I take no responsibility for this. The culprits are long dead) was a cold one. I said the other day that this winter has been an old-fashioned one. By that I meant old-fashioned in terms of frequent snow and thick snow cover. It’s been atypical, however, in terms of yo-yo temperatures. On Tuesday it got up to over 40⁰ Fahrenheit. Stuff melted all over the place. On Wednesday I got into my car at 7:00 am with the temp around 4 below. It rose to about 2 below as I drove, and soared to 8 above by the time I got back to the Cities.
This wasn’t winter like the picture above (chosen mostly because it was taken in Norway). This was one of those clear, cloudless days where the heat is raptured into what I once saw described as “the tremendous heat-sink of a clear winter sky.” This is the cold of space. Alien. Merciless. Frigid as a Minneapolis Star & Tribune critic when sent one of my books to review.
These cold-weather drives put one in mind of Fridtjof Nansen – if you’re a self-dramatizer like me. The cold permeates the car’s frame overnight, and it lingers, even with the heater on full blast. It was an hour before I could take my gloves off, and longer before I could take off my Homburg (it was a funeral. Had to wear my black Homburg).
I wore my black suit with waistcoat, and a Thinsulate scarf and my lined trench coat. Thinsulate gloves too. I was still bloody cold.
I returned to Minnesota from Florida, years back, because I missed spring.
