Interesting Movies on the Radar

I see Drudgebart has linked to a review of the new Clint Eastwood film, Gran Torino. I can’t wait to see this one.

Think about it. It’s about a crabby old guy who drinks beer and has too many guns, who sits on his porch glaring at punks who set foot on his lawn. I can relate! This is my dream lifestyle! I’m nearly there NOW! I just hope there are a couple of parrots in the film.

Looks like Jean Claude Van Damme has a film out, too. Weird. It’s called JCVD, and it appears to be a strange mixture of truth and fiction. Playing himself, Van Damme confronts things like his drug and domestic problems, as well as the difficulties of being an aging action star with a dead career.

Van Damme has made a lot of bad movies (and bad decisions), but he seems like a more sympathetic character than, say, Schwartzenegger, who has never publicly admitted wrong or questioned himself. Have you ever seen Arnold admit he did something dumb? I haven’t. I would be surprised if he was capable of admitting fault. People seem to love him now, but they’ve forgotten Pumping Iron, the old documentary in which he displayed his true personality. He was quite obnoxious.

People who never have a moment of humility are a little scary. Except for me, of course.

According to Wikipedia, Van Damme is not lying when he says he was a karate champion. True? I don’t know. It says he got a reputation for lying because people who checked out his claims didn’t realize he competed under his real name, which is not Van Damme.

Beat Your Power Tools With a Hammer

Okay, the sensation of manliness has worn off, and I feel like an idiot again.

I’ve been watching Taunton’s Router Joinery DVD, with Gary Rogowski. He says he has been making furniture for 20 years, so I guess he knows a few things.

Remember all the BS I’ve been through with my router aspirations? I got a big-ass plunge router with a huge motor. I wanted to be able to use it in a table, and I wanted to be able to change bits and so on without reaching under the table, so I bought a lift and a router plate. For days, I’ve been agonizing, trying to get my old MDF/melamine desk perfectly flat so I could mount the plate in it.

Guess what this guy uses for a router table? A crappy sheet of melamine with a hole in it. I am not kidding. It’s like two by three feet, and it has NO attachments except for a router base. It has no dust collection hole. No cutesy fence. Is it flat? I very much doubt it. He sets it up by putting about four inches of it on a workbench and holding it in place with TWO CLAMPS. There is no way it doesn’t flex when it has weight on it. I can’t believe it hasn’t snapped.

His router? It’s a Stanley. I know; I didn’t know they made routers, either. It’s probably thirty years old. It’s such a piece of crap, he has to bang on it with a hammer to make the bits come out. He has other routers, too, but he seems to use this one just to torment people like me, who actually spend money on tools.

His fence is a piece of scrap held in place with clamps. This guy is a professional woodworker, and it appears he has invested about two hundred dollars in tools.

I want to kill him.

I haven’t gone all that crazy. Some guys buy $300 lifts and $900 tables. I have a router and a lift and a cheesy old desk; that’s not so bad. But compared to Gary Rogowski, I’m wildly extravagant.

I was considering giving my old Sears router and table away, but now that I’ve seen what this man does with horrible tools, I may have to keep them. Although I really hate that router. You adjust the depth by turning the router inside a plastic collar which gets stuck once a certain amount of sawdust hits it. I hate it. I HATE it. Maybe the table is worth keeping.

I need a band saw.

Look, leave me alone.

Norm Abrams is a Loser

I just finished screwing a two-by-six to the underside of my routing-table-to-be. I only made one mistake, and it was one of those things people never find out about until they take things apart.

I got a funny result. The left half of the table is now absolutely true. The right half is damn near true, but not quite. And oddly, most of the problem is in the 3″ of the table that are beyond the two-by-six. I would say we are looking at maybe 0.2-0.3 millimeters. I don’t know if that’s bad enough to cause problems. I very much doubt it, considering the kind of crap I am likely to use the table for.

I learned one fun thing today. Melamine and MDF don’t like being drilled with Forstner bits. This stuff is pretty hard.

Question: how much MDF/melamine dust do I have to breathe to be sure of getting a gigantic tumor? I was a few holes into the project before it occurred to me to put on a mask. If that’s not a big enough dose, I can always go out there, put some dust in a spoon, and eat it.

The router lift will be here on Monday, more or less. Between now and then, I have time to play with shims. And the table might straighten up on its own, I suppose.

If I decide to try shimming, I think I’ll cut something out of thick paper instead of trying to make a wooden shim. I don’t think I would enjoy trying to cut a 0.3mm slice off a two-by six.

I feel all manly now. This is a rare sensation, so I am trying to enjoy it.

I had to get a 7/8″ Forstner bit at Home Depot today, and when I got there, they had a regular old bit for like five bucks, plus the super-amazing Porter Cable bit assortment, with slip-proof hex-shaped shafts as well as some remarkable improvement or other that makes them cut UP TO TWICE AS FAST AS REGULAR FORSTNER BITS and they were only $45, and they came with a box which, I’ll bet, would cost me like $25 to make, so it’s as if the bits were only $20, and, well, obviously I made the smart choice.

It’s a shame a person with my gift for rationalizing isn’t married. Look what I’m wasting.

More

Forgot to say, I ordered a router DVD, and it arrived today. I plan to break that out to enjoy with lunch. And here’s something crazy: Woodworking With the Router, by Bill Hylton, has gotten hard to find. A new version is coming out next year, and the 2006 one has disappeared. I found it online at McFeely’s, so I ordered that, too.

Heh heh. Life is sweet.

It’s amazing how much pleasure I get from things that are utterly trivial.

“I’ll Sneak up on Jeff Bob and Try to Insert a Tag”

Because I am a failure and I do not possess a 7/8″ Forstner bit, I had to quit working on my woodworking table pretty early yesterday. I get to bed between 8:30 and 9:00, so I’m glad things didn’t work out, because I think there is a good chance I would have stayed up late and ruined my morning.

I ended up watching a woodworking video with Marv and Maynard. It’s a Taunton.com video about table saws, featuring a guy named Kelly Mehler. It was so relaxing. When you have tools but still can’t get anything done, they cause anxiety. When you see someone tackle similar problems effortlessly, it’s incredibly soothing. I do not know why.

Maybe this is how women want to feel when they pick husbands. “Look at all the crap this guy can do; he can take CARE of me.”

Oh, hey, it looks like he has his own site: Kelly Mehler’s School of Woodworking.

He works in Berea, Kentucky, where my late mom went to boarding school. According to her, Berea was “arty.” I think that means a lot of yankees had descended on the place and tried to turn it into a bizarre and geographically inappropriate colony of longhairs. I don’t know too much about Berea, but I believe it’s one of those towns where they have a whole lot of people making butter churns with hand tools. It’s probably the kind of place where it’s very easy to buy a really good chisel.

I don’t know if the theme of the place has anything to do with Appalachian culture. To hear my mom tell it, the situation was pretty much the opposite.

Wikipedia says a past president of Berea College started the artsy-craftsy metamorphosis, hoping to capitalize on the national market for Kentucky crafts. I don’t want to break anybody’s rice bowl, but Eastern Kentucky is not known for finely crafted items. It’s just not. It’s not even known for good construction. The old houses tend to have crooked walls and sloping floors. I’ve been all over Appalachia, and one of the things I noticed was that old houses and buildings in North Carolina looked a hell of a lot better than they did in Kentucky. The difference is very obvious.

I’ll bet the vast majority of the people making this junk are from out of state, and that they have taught the locals ten times what the locals have taught them. I’m just being honest. People up there have always made great music and fantastic quilts, but I can’t think of anything else they do really well. The sad truth is, people who are good at things generally leave, to get away from the bad local economy. They call it “brain drain.” This is why I grew up in Florida.

Kentucky attracts people who are much more excited about its culture than they have any right to be. One example: Appalshop. This is an outfit in my dad’s hometown, Whitesburg. This town is located among some of the most nearly vertical terrain in the US. The hills aren’t all that high, but they’re about four feet apart. It’s very close to West Virginia. For some reason, a bunch of hippies showed up and started documenting the culture and recording the music. That’s Appalshop.

It’s kind of odd, because culturally, the hippies are about as much like the locals as Cambodians. Their values are utterly foreign. Nobody in Eastern Kentucky wants to hear about composting and tofu and recycling. People who preach that stuff are lucky if their houses don’t get burned down. The only liberal value people in Eastern Kentucky support is the desire to addict people to welfare checks. When it comes to government money, they are hardcore socialists, on the same page as Saul Alinsky.

Here’s a handout horror story. My aunt was a school principal up there. She said people in her town instructed their kids to fail ADD tests so they would get stuff from the government. Imagine that. “Honey, be sure you don’t bust 600 on the SAT, so mamaw can get free Ding Dongs.”

It’s kind of insulting, having hippies educated in New England show up and “help” the locals preserve their culture. But I guess they’re not going away. If I lived up there, and they came to record me playing the autoharp or the banjo, I’d feel like a monkey at the zoo. It’s funny; no one seems to notice the implicit condescension. There is nothing flattering about having yankees show up, take photos of you, your house, and your family, and treat you like a newly discovered aborigine.

I wonder why the hippie organizations don’t send people into black ghettos to preserve the wonderful culture. Okay, I don’t really wonder. It’s because it’s harder to get away with condescending to black people.

I think people from Appalachia should get in vans and go to places like Michigan and Massachusetts and document the culture. Problem is, people in places like that don’t have any discernible culture. “Here’s Lance and his wife Margaret. Let’s see if we can film them playing some indigenous music. Oh, wait. That’s right. They HAVE no indigenous music, because they’re exactly like people in California and Indiana. Well, maybe we can film them hitting a bucket of balls at the driving range.”

I want some more woodworking videos. I can’t get enough of this stuff. For some reason, they’re the best tool videos. The metalworking stuff just isn’t as satisfying. Maybe it’s because metalworking is so much easier. Metal does whatever you want. At least it seems that way.

Router Table may Conceivably Work

I am feeling unusually smug, and that is saying a lot.

I decided to make a final effort to stiffen up and flatten my old MDF desk, so I could put a router on one side and a miter saw on the other. I went to Home Depot today and got the stuff. Two two-by-sixes and a bunch of lag screws and washers. The idea is this: use the table saw to put straight sides on the two-by-sixes and then screw them to the underside of the desk. I was going to try to screw in from the bottom, but I decided to take Og’s advice and go down from the top. It’s just too hard, making straight holes all the way through a two-by-six with a hand drill. Going in from the top, I only need to go a couple of inches past the MDF, and if everything isn’t completely straight, I’ll never see it.

The table saw scares the daylights out of me. Ever since I saw a Sawstop promotional video featuring a guy with about six and two-thirds fingers, I have been afraid of the table saw, and if I ever get rich, I will buy a Sawstop in a heartbeat, just to put that video out of my mind.

I set it up today, and I even remembered to attach the shop-vac AND turn it on for some of the cuts. And guess what? It will true up the side of a piece of lumber. I didn’t think it would work, but it did. I now have a piece of 4 7/8″ wide lumber with a very straight side on it, and I’m going to screw it to the desk.

Unfortunately I underestimated the size of the Forstner bit I would need. I thought my 3/4″ bit would do it, but it looks like it will have to be 7/8″ to accommodate the washers under the heads of the screws. I am on hold until I get the bit.

I’m sure I used the table saw improperly. I got out my Fine Woodworking DVD and looked at parts of it, but it seems like every time I get ready to use a tool, the books and videos cease to apply to whatever it is I’m doing. I have no outfeed table, so I had to go around the saw and hold up the lumber myself, once it got to the point where it could tip. I’m not sure how this could be dangerous, but since I did it, I’m sure it is.

Any clues for handling outfeed would be appreciated. I don’t have anything approximating the height of the saw table. I guess some sort of roller deal is the easy way out. Let’s check the Home Depot site. “Roller stand.” I suppose that’s it. I need me some of those.

The two-by-six is still crooked in the other direction. That is, if you stand it on an edge and look down on it, you can see a bend. I have that figured out. I’ll pre-drill the screw holes in it, and I’ll attach a few at one end first. That will be easy, because the deflection over half the piece is small. Then I can shove the other end into line as I put the other screws in. I think.

The big question is, will the tabletop be flat once the lumber is screwed to it? If not, I’ll have to kill myself. It certainly should be. It would take a lot of force to flex that two-by-six, and the tabletop is not that rigid. I don’t even think it’s warped. I think it’s just sagging because it isn’t supported.

This is recreation, so if it doesn’t work, it’s still fun.

I impressed my father today. He has a newish copier, and the toner ran out. He also has a bunch of old toner from old machines. I told him to refill the cartridge from them. He brought it to me and told me to go to town on it.

Generally, toner cartridges have plugs you can rip out, in order to add toner. Canon has figured this out, and they don’t like people filling their cartridges, so they make their cartridges so you can’t get to the plug without destroying them. I took the Wecheer tool and a Dremel disk and cut out a rectangular piece of the cartridge, and I dumped everything out and filled it with toner. Then I covered the hole with duct tape. I saw that trick on the web. Now he has a $90 refill for absolutely nothing, and he can keep refilling the cartridge until it stops working. He probably has a pound of toner, which is a huge amount.

He can’t believe it. He thinks I’m a genius.

I absolutely love tool videos. It’s so beautiful, seeing people succeed easily at the impossible. I think I’m going to buy a few more and just watch them when I feel like I can’t cope. I’ll know that no matter how inept and pathetic I am, somewhere there is some guy who can make a dovetail joint.

I am GOING to have a woodworking table. You just watch.

What Exactly IS “Congress”?

I just took a look at Howobamagotelected.com. Man, is it funny. And sad. I’m sure you’ve seen it already. A conservative group sponsored a scientific poll, comparing the knowledge of McCain and Obama voters. And of course, the Obama voters came out behind.

That makes sense. Liberalism appeals to coddled ivory-tower eggheads with high IQs and the common sense of lemmings, but it also appeals very strongly to people who are either unintelligent or ill-informed. Like many conservatives, I have had the experience of explaining undisputed, verifiable facts to self-proclaimed liberals, and then having them tell me they agree with conservative positions. Awareness tends to lead to conservative opinions. But we live in a nation which no longer educates its people, and a huge percentage of Americans know almost nothing and make decisions purely on the basis of emotion or a desire for approval from others.

People tend to become more conservative as they age. That’s because we learn as we get older, and as a result, older people know more than young people. When you’re old, you know better than to run with scissors, make the minimum payment on your charge cards, or let random men in pickup trucks blacktop your driveway for “bargain” prices. And you may also know better than to vote for socialists who spout empty slogans and promise a return to the utterly discredited notions that destroyed the prosperity of Europe and caused more suffering than Nazism.

The more you know, the harder it is to fall for a leftist pseudo-messiah. Prison inmates are, on average, exceedingly dim, and they overwhelmingly support liberal policies. That ought to tell you something.

If the public had been better informed, Obama might well have lost. He’s a real zero, there is no reason whatsoever to expect him to be an able President, and McCain’s qualifications were clearly much better.

It’s an interesting situation. I used to think that the power of the new media would guarantee a fair shot for conservativism, and that as a result, the country would continue sliding to the right. But I underestimated the right’s power to fall on its sword–actually, to jump up and down on it like a pogo stick–and I also underestimated the old media’s willingness to openly whore for its chosen candidate, and to stifle the new media and blunt its effectiveness.

The conservative Blogosphere used to be a factor in politics, but that’s no longer true. We are dead. We are nearly powerless. No one pays any attention to us any more. Pajamas Media is part of the reason. There used to be a healthy exchange of links on the right, but when PJM contaminated the data stream, and especially when it became obvious that PJM was an utter failure, and the principals became desperate and started circling the wagons, the linkage became incestuous. I predicted this when PJM was created. People who used to communicate and exchange links quit. Glenn Reynolds started putting up ridiculous blind links to PJM’s mother site, in vain hopes of turning it into a significant web destination. Links that used to go to pieces of quality writing went to unremarkable blog entries of little merit.

Let me ask you something. Say it’s October of 2008, and I come up with something as damaging to Obama as the Rather memo was to CBS. Do you think the major PJs would link to me? Please. No one beyond my small circle of readers would ever hear about it.

There are bloggers I just don’t communicate with any more, and PJM is the reason, and I’m not alone. I wish they would just let it die instead of pretending it’s viable. PJM is never going to be anything but a flop. It has had years to succeed, and so far, we have seen nothing but failure. Certain pockets have been lined, and that was probably the only real purpose of the enterprise, and the funding has dried up (according to insiders), so why not close the lid on the coffin and say you gave it a darn good try? I suggest the Pee Wee Herman approach. Say “We meant to do that.”

The conservative old media didn’t help. They have a zero-sum mentality, and they deliberately ignore people who pose a threat to their franchises. They let a few new people get near the cameras–especially attractive but boring girls with no talent or knowledge or insight–but on the whole, we’ve been kept out. The tokens got all the gravy.

Meanwhile, the left was turning the Internet into the biggest cash and propaganda conduit in the history of American politics. Obama even managed to use it to suck up gigantic illegal donations from our enemies in China and the Muslim world. With no repercussions. Doodad Pro will never be called to testify before Congress. Obama got away with countless crimes, and nothing will ever be done about it. Meanwhile, John McCain got hoisted on his own remarkably ill-conceived campaign finance reform petard. Great law, John. That worked out real well.

It amazes me to see how the right threw away the Internet. We used to own it. And it’s a huge loss; it is still the future. If the Internet were TV, 2008 would be like 1950. The explosion, in its fullness, is not here yet.

Our online inferiority is going to be permanent; it will take years to begin digging our way out. The lingering PJ magic is still at work, like a daily dose of Roundup and Nonoxynol-9. The conservative old media has learned absolutely nothing, except this: the right is in trouble, so they need to work even harder to protect themselves from competition. The left wiped us completely off the map, and we helped. We are not a factor. We have been utterly crushed, and we aren’t smart or altruistic enough to do anything to fix it. I congratulate Markos Zuniga and George Soros. When your enemies are as inept as we are, a victory is nothing to brag about, but they beat us really, really badly. Their knees are on our throats, and they deserve credit. They sold our nation an Edsel, and Americans think it’s a Ferrari. We couldn’t sell raw meat to sharks.

I know it makes the cheerleaders mad when I say this stuff, but here’s something to think about: they have always been wrong. There is a difference between thinking positive and refusing to face reality.

I’ve been wrong, too. I was wrong when I said the future for the right was rosy.

I Will not Submit

Here is my latest trick. I tried to true my old desk, to make it into a router table, by screwing an L-shaped piece of aluminum to the underside. This effort was a failure. So I went back out and stuck shims between the aluminum and the desktop. That helped a lot. But not nearly enough.

I think I know the answer. I should scrap the desk’s legs and make a new desk out of wood. I could use my table saw to rip a few very straight pieces of lumber to put under the top. Then I could put the newly reinforced top on some new two-by-four legs. I would still get to use my nifty melamine/MDF top.

On the other hand, maybe I could get a couple of warped two-by-fours and fasten them under the top lengthwise. Then I could put long screws through them, into the table, and tighten the screws selectively to flex the table into line.

Hmm. I may have a better idea.

*#^%*#%%*#!!

I took a piece of scrap aluminum and screwed it to the bottom of my heavy MDF desk, in hopes that it might take a dip out of the center of the desk’s top. No dice. The aluminum is fairly sturdy, and I checked to see if it was straight before I attached it, but I guess the desk is too strong for it. Maybe I should have forced the desk into a true plane before I put in the screws. The aluminum exerted a lot of force on the table as I put in the screws to attach it, however, so I am sure it’s pushing against the bow.

I don’t know what to do now. I’m wondering if I could put a turnbuckle under the front of the table and connect it to the ends with cable. Then maybe if I tightened it, it would pull the table out of the bowed shape.

The steps I have taken so far cost about two dollars, so I don’t feel too bad.

I wonder if I could get a long threaded bolt and run it between the front feet of the table and use it to pull them together.

Clue me In

Say you’re building a router table, and the desk you’re basing it on is pretty big. Like 30″ deep.

How far back from the front edge should the router spindle be?

I’ve read that it shouldn’t be more than 16″ from the right edge, because a longer distance makes work uncomfortable.

Bitter Clinging Goes High-Tech

My new green laser arrived. It’s a hoot. I’m wandering around looking for new things to shine it on.

These things pose some risk of eye damage. I am going to be careful not to hit anything shiny with it.

I’m thinking it may have been a mistake to go green. Indoors, which is where this thing would be used, there are a considerable number of reflective surfaces. I don’t want to injure my eyes while defending the house, and the additional brightness of a green laser isn’t needed indoors.

Fun to play with, regardless.

You Can’t do it; They Can’t Help

Home Depot may not be the most efficient retailer on earth, but it is one of the most entertaining.

They put a saw on sale. The saw was on their website. The site said the sale price was not available in local stores. I ordered a saw. I paid for shipping.

I ran an errand to Home Depot. I saw that they were selling the saw for the sale price. I bought it. I tried to cancel the online order. I was told I could not.

Home Depot called me and said they couldn’t stop the shipment, but they were waiving the charge. I took the other saw back to the store.

Today I checked my email, and Home Depot said the online order was CANCELED.

I called them up, and sure enough, it’s true. There is no saw on its way to me. And the one I bought is back at the store.

Now I have to go to the store again and buy back the saw I returned.

My bet: the other one will arrive this afternoon.

More

A reader comments: “My bet is that the one you brought back (the last one in stock) has been sold.”

I just got back, and it appears he was correct. I would have recognized that beat-up box anywhere, and it wasn’t there. But two new saws had materialized, so I bought one of those.

While I was wrestling it onto a cart, some guy appeared from nowhere and helped me. Then a second guy appeared in line behind me and started telling me what a great saw it was, and how he had one, and how I was going to enjoy it.

I know this will sound truly stupid. I understand that fully. But every so often people pop up in your life, out of the blue, treat you unexpectedly well, and disappear. And you know how religious people interpret things like that. But you don’t expect it to happen when you run random and insignificant Home Depot errands.

The only non-self checkout line was bogged down, and I didn’t know I could take giant boxes through the self-check lines, so I stood there and waited it out. I thought they would never get me out of there, but it finally happened.

Now I fully expect the saw I ordered online to arrive later today. This story would not make sense if it didn’t.

Have you ever tried to accomplish a simple task and had so many things go wrong, you were amazed? That’s what this saw purchase has been like. I almost wonder if there is some secret significance to it. It’s crazy! I’ve been trying to get one of these saws for about a year, and things have gone wrong over and over.

I am afraid to open the box.

I Can’t Believe We’re Even Discussing This

Kim du Toit claims he is all done blogging.

Who believes it?

Color me skeptical.

If he sticks it out, it will be a gigantic loss to the Internet.

I’ve been awaiting his final post all month, and then yesterday, I forgot to check! Unbelievable.

Excuse the cryptic title and subtitle. Obscure reference.

I Have no Faith in Lizards

I am kind of stuck, with regard to new writing projects. That is a rare situation for me. I have been blessed with an ability to generate ideas prolifically, and I manage to get up almost every day and write something I’m pleased with, but for a while now, I have been idling.

I would like to do something worthwhile with my time. Humor is fun, but I wouldn’t say I’m improving the universe with it. If I could come up with something useful to a Christian audience, I’d like to do it, but ideas like that don’t fall in your lap three times a day. And there are so many people doing Christian writing well; I don’t think I’m needed. Humor is different. Virtually nobody does it well. Maybe five people in the US. Oddly, humor is still very hard to sell to publishers. Maybe it would be easier to sell serious writing, in spite of the law of supply and demand.

I considered trying Christian humor. I foresee two problems. First of all, who would publish it? It’s very easy to get yourself in trouble when you’re a humorist, by writing things that turn out to offend people. Inadvertently crossing the line must be much easier when you write Christian humor, and I have to wonder if editors have the stomach for dealing with the problem. Second, it would be a harder thing to write, because I would have to go over and over it, looking for things like doctrinal and factual errors. I would have to write it with references sitting in front of me, and it would be best if everything were run by a minister before going to print. Sounds like a nightmare to me. I’d have to find someone willing to read this junk, and then I’d have to deal with him before publication.

Maybe it would work for books. A column would require weekly or monthly interaction, but books would work out to two or three times a year, which would be easier to manage. Imagine trying to write a weekly column another person has to review before publication. You’d kill four days every week, trying to get it ready, emailing back and forth.

Yesterday at church, the pastor mentioned Charles Templeton, a person I had never heard of. Templeton used to be one of America’s greatest evangelists. As an adult, he had “a religious experience,” and he became a Christian. I don’t know what kind of experience he had; I can’t find a description of it. He toured the country with Billy Graham, filling football stadiums with believers. Later on, he started to have doubts. At one point, he watched a newsreel of Holocaust victims and decided he could not believe a loving God existed. He ended up studying theology at Princeton, which is a bit like studying stripping at a yeshiva, and he eventually proclaimed himself an agnostic. He turned hostile toward Christianity and devoted a lot of energy to attacking it. Funny thing for an agnostic to do; maybe he was unclear on the definition of the term.

What a wretched story. How does a thing like that happen to a person? How does a person know God and then decide God doesn’t exist? My best guess: he never knew God to begin with, and instead of learning to use God’s power and guidance, he had a forced ministry based on his own desires and efforts.

The Holy Spirit is the biggest difference between effective believers and believers who fail. The Apostle Peter is the evidence many people cite. Before being baptized in the Spirit, Peter was a worldly disciple who sought glory for himself, he was not reliable enough to stay awake for an hour while Jesus prayed in Gethsemane, and he didn’t have the courage to stay with Jesus after he was taken captive. He was not impressive by any standard. After the Spirit entered him, he wrote wonderful inspired scripture about the way in which a Christian is supposed to grow and develop, and he accepted crucifixion instead of renouncing his faith. He became an amazing person. A marvel.

My guess is that Templeton never experienced the baptism, and that he did his best with his limited human abilities. When his little human brain told him God existed, he believed. When it could not generate the faith to overcome doubt, he ceased believing. A Christian who hasn’t been baptized with the Holy Spirit is like an electric toothbrush that never gets recharged. He has no external power source to sustain him.

Many people think every Christian is baptized with the Holy Spirit immediately upon believing or being baptized with water, but that didn’t happen to the disciples or to other believers in their time, and two millennia of history show no evidence that it happens, generally. On the contrary; the general rule is that Christians are not fundamentally changed by belief alone. They retain their old nature, although many fight to subdue it. They don’t understand scripture any better than nonbelievers; they get little insight from God. They don’t have a greater capacity for faith. They don’t become prophets. They don’t exhibit the character improvements known as the fruit of the spirit. They develop truly silly ideas about God.

Sincere Christians raped and pillaged during the Crusades. They turned Jews over to the Nazis. They exterminated the Indians. They participated in the slave trade. I find it hard to believe that these people had experienced anything resembling the infilling of the Holy Spirit. You can have the baptism and still sin, but you aren’t likely to live like a vicious, ignorant animal, as millions of Christians have. It seems pretty clear that while you can receive the baptism simultaneously with salvation, it is a separate thing, and you don’t get it automatically. And being baptized “in the name” of the spirit is not the same thing. It’s not even equivalent grammatically. If it were the same thing, then being baptized in the name of all three parts of the trinity would mean you have been “baptized with the Father” and “baptized with the Son” as well as with the Holy Spirit. And of course, that is not what happens. Those baptisms don’t exist; I just made them up.

I think people who deny that the baptism is a separate item are sometimes trying to excuse the poor spiritual condition of their denominations. “Not Invented Here” is the phrase. If it didn’t come to their church first, it must be wrong, because surely God would give all the good stuff to the best and only correct denomination. And admitting you’re not full of the spirit, and that lots of other people in the one perfect denomination are not…that’s just unthinkable!

Human effort is great, but if it were sufficient to make you an effective Christian, the baptism of the spirit would never have been provided. The Bible is full of references to God helping us to grow from within. Helping us to obey. Giving us faith. Illuminating the scriptures so we understand them correctly. We still have free will, but he helps us to want better things, and he gives us the strength to do what our better inclinations tell us to do. You can find it in both testaments.

Spirit-filled believers allowed the Romans to kill them and turn them into torches to light Nero’s gardens; that is how brave and full of faith they were. Charles Templeton couldn’t even withstand a newsreel. My best guess is, he was limited to his own strength, and he was doing his own will. He built his house on sand.

I have seen too much, not to believe. The obstacles to my faith are vastly outweighed. Templeton got all excited by the fossil record. That’s great, but when I put my reasons for believing on one side of the scale and the fossil record on the other, the fossils don’t amount to diddly. We live in a universe created in a series of miracles. I have seen supernatural phenomena with my own eyes, so I have ample reason to find the creation story plausible. If the supernatural exists, there is no reason not to believe that God can create space and matter and do what he wants with them. There is no reason to think other spirits can’t manipulate matter; they did it to the staffs of the magicians when Moses confronted Pharaoh. Who can say ancient physical evidence is irrefutible or even trustworthy, in a universe where physical laws are clearly trumped by supernatural forces? I can’t see giving up a dramatically improved life and the assurance of a better life to come, in exchange for a cold, unfulfilling life of depravity and the remarkable belief that God’s existence is disproven by the bones of a dead lizard.

The Templeton story made me very sad. It is frustrating to read about someone discarding something beautiful and precious and vital. And to learn that he spent the latter part of his life encouraging other people to do the same thing is even worse.

Junk, Redeemed

I am trying to turn my huge surplus MDF desk into a router/miter saw table. I just put it back together and stood it up in the garage.

This thing is like 1 1/4″ thick, so it ought to be plenty sturdy. But it has a dip in it. The center is a little lower than the ends. I’m thinking of fixing this by screwing a piece of scrap aluminum to the bottom of the desk. It’s shaped like an angle iron, about 2″ on a side. I’m not sure it’s stiff enough to do the job, but I’ll know ten seconds after I attach it.

The table is really long. I am not sure what to do about a T-track, since they are probably shorter than the table. I suppose it doesn’t matter if a T-track dead-ends in the table’s surface, as long as one end is open.

The fun part will be cutting the hole for the router insert. I believe the ideal tool for this is…a ROUTER. But I am not sure. Maybe you’re supposed to jigsaw it out and then clean it up with a router. And of course, I have no jigsaw.

I figure I can plop the miter saw over the router opening, and on the rare occasions when I want to use the router, I can take it off.

If none of this works, I can always put the mangled results by the curb and enjoy the knowledge that comes from screwing up.

Sisyphus Dreams of Chocks From Harbor Freight

I am trying to be better to the birds these days. They see me all day, and I interact with them, but I think I’ve been giving them too little time out of the cage, and I worry that their toy budget has been too low. So I’m taking them out occasionally during the day, for brief bird-pounding sessions. This can be challenging. I got a second huge cage so I would be able to relieve their boredom by moving them from one cage to another. When Marv is in the cage nearest to my chair, and Maynard is out, Marv squawks and tries to run interference, and Maynard launches himself repeatedly at my face and grabs my nose. It’s a jealousy thing. So when I want to take Maynard out, I now have to make sure Marv’s cage is behind me, out of Maynard’s sight.

I still haven’t sold Marv’s old cage. You would think people would jump at the chance to pay half price for a big King’s Cage in nearly new condition, but no one has bitten. I even tried to sell it to Tommy, for his green-winged parakeet, but he won’t go for it. And I was willing to sell extra-cheap!

I got them a $25 hanging bird toy, much like other toys they have destroyed in the past, and they ignore it. I don’t know what their problem is. At the same time, I got a weird bamboo-ladder toy, and they are eating it at a respectable rate.

Maynard is on my arm, watching me type. Soon he will want to stroll on the keys, and then he will want to walk down my legs and eat my shoes.

There he goes.

I wish they had an enclosure outside, so they could get some air. Parrots don’t like the sun–for that matter, they’re not too crazy about being outdoors, generally–but it would be good for them to have a daily change of scenery. I can’t sit them outside on perches. There are hawks here. A while back, I saw one staring at Marv while I sprayed the dust off of him. It probably could not understand why I was doing such a thorough job of washing my food. These guys would be a real treat for a hawk. Other birds eat slugs and lizards. Marv and Maynard eat seed mix, fruit, Jelly Bellies, and pizza. They are hawk Wagyu.

I am getting a bigger miter saw. Home Depot’s sale price is irresistable, and the lifetime Ridgid warranty is hard to beat. This means I will no longer have an excuse for stalling on a few carpentry jobs. I just couldn’t face doing them with a 10″ saw or a circular saw. The small miter saw would have been hard to set up perfectly, because flipping the boards in order to cut all the way across them would reveal tiny errors in cut squareness. The circular saw is a pain in the butt, pure and simple. When I cut a board to length, I want the operation to go “plop, whizzzzzz, plop, next board.” Not “plop, whizzzzzz, turn, aim carefully, whizzzzzz, curse.”

How did people ever live, back in the hand saw days? Imagine cutting twenty boards to length with a hand saw. Galley slaves had it better.

Maynard’s new thing: standing on my belly, lunging at my nose. He has had enough time out.

I don’t just want tools. I want tools that make things easy. Over and over, I have said that the real purpose of tools is to end frustration. My idea of hell is spending every day doing jobs with the wrong tools. While listening to rap. And wearing bell bottoms. And drinking Budweiser. In France.

Kind of got off the track there.

The right tool is the difference between pleasure and misery. The other day, I dug a hole for a citrus tree, using a shovel. Planting the tree was pure hell, because the dirt here is full of rocks. I think it took me an hour and a half, lifting a pint of dirt at a time. I dug the next hole with a hoe, and it took maybe ten minutes, and I didn’t break a sweat. This is why I want a big sliding miter saw. This is why I don’t want to build things using small or inappropriate saws. I don’t want a half-hour job to last four hours, and I want results I can be proud of.

This principle is why people who create new slot designs for fasteners should be released naked in the middle of the Libyan desert at midnight. During the scorpion rut. Every time a new slot design is created, people who want to be able to turn screws have to buy at least three new drivers and a bunch of bits. I have tons of these things, I and I still can’t turn all the screws I encounter. That leads to fun activities like trying to turn screws with a small Vise Grip. Put it on, start to turn, watch it pop off. Repeat for four hours. Check Expedia for fares to Libya.

By the way, I saw some fantastic videos yesterday. They’re at Taunton.com. A couple of guys demonstrate carpentry stuff. They build a bookcase. They build a workbench. They install a vise on it. Wonderful. If you click on the first video and watch it, the second one will load when it’s done. I sat through the whole set, mesmerized. They were doing things that WORKED. How come that never happens to me? Their tools didn’t break. They always had what they needed to do the job. The wood cooperated. Nobody threw anything or got out a sledge and beat a frustrating workpiece to splinters. Not that I have ever done that. Three times in one day.

Of course, it’s all rigged. It’s like an old Popeil commercial, where they use a cheap knife to cut a nail in half, but the nail is actually made of lead. The videos are totally unrealistic. They rig them by doing unfair things like preparing, measuring, and owning $500,000 worth of tools.

Bench dogs. Who has bench dogs in his real-life garage? Okay, Og probably does. He probably makes them from brass he made on his stove, from ore he mined in his backyard. He probably assembles the copper molecules from a kit. But nobody else. These guys had a whole collection of these unbelievably useful things. They even had a special pointy hat for a bench dog, which you put on top of it so you can bang a piece of wood down on it and make a starter hole for a drill bit. I think that’s right. My memory is pathetic.

Here’s an idea. Go to the Home Depot in Coconut Grove and tell Employee of the Month Ernesto Rodriguez you want a pointy hat for your bench dog so you can dimple some MDF. You’ll be lucky if he doesn’t bend a pry bar over your head.

Like all DIY videos, these are misleading and ridiculous, but they’re very satisfying to watch, because these guys succeed easily at things you would like to do, but never could. If I were not a Christian, I would compare it to watching adult films.

Speaking of hell, I know the punishment these guys deserve. They should be forced to make complex wooden items without an endless supply of obscure and expensive tools their viewers have never heard of.

SATAN: [holding a leash attached to Cerberus, the three-headed bench dog] Okay, guys, time to make a printing press from a solid block of oak. Otherwise, you have to wear the red-hot cast-iron leiderhosen all day.

FIRST VIDEO GUY: That’s impossible!

SECOND VIDEO GUY: You’re crazy!

SATAN: Observe. I mill the sides flat, draw my guide lines, and THROW THE BLOCK INTO MY BRAND NEW THREE-MILLION-DOLLAR DELTA PRINTING PRESS MAKER!

FIRST VIDEO GUY: Could be worse. We could be in France, drinking Budweiser.

SECOND VIDEO GUY: Word up.

I think I’ll make my own line of realistic DIY videos. “Today I show you how to pinch yourself with pliers and get a blood blister!” “Today I show you a quick and easy way to get a scratched cornea!” “Today I show you how to do everything right and still end up with marred workpieces!”

I already know the name of my next book. “1,000 Exotic Fasteners and How to Strip Them.”

Here’s some comforting news: even the video guys sometimes have to use the wrong tool. In one of their videos, one of them uses a socket wrench to drive a screw that would take .3 seconds with my impact driver. HA. Amateurs. Toss me the ringer.

Tools remind me of War Games. The only way to win is not to play.