19 degrees

Thanksgiving was lovely, thank you; 18 of us gathered around 3 tables (although this is rather a small group for this area, where everyone I talk to seems to have had more company). A game of 42 was constantly going on, and sometimes more than one--I even joined in one for amateurs. We made short work of all 11 pies, even though there were other leftovers to consider, too. The Dallas Cowboys won, and Texas lost, and the Sooners beat the Cowboys (I know most of y'all don't really care; just interpret: we were happy.) I went for walks in the beautiful fresh 74-degree country air, and sang very loudly in an attempt to prevent any chances of being shot as a deer. I think there were some hunters who were about ready to shoot me to make me be quiet, but they restrained themselves.

Today, however, if it is lovely, is only for the sake of cancelling work and staying inside with Jane Austen and hot chocolate. Every once in a while, I glance out the window to make myself more thankful for not being there. There is white; but most of it is whirling like a snow globe in the hands of an excited two-year old. More than an inch (if that) of our projected 5-8 may be outside, but it won't settle long enough for us to find out. It is enough, though, to cancel school across the state, for companies to tell their employees not to come to work, for us to be thankful we don't have any Canadians around to see the local news coverage that is almost enough to convince one we're in the middle of a blizzard from "The Long Winter." Enough for the Boys to say that they should get out of school (and beg to go outside to play football in the snow--and actually to ask me, drinking hot coffee in my pajamas and slippers under a pile of afghans to go, too--"It's great! You don't have any traction, and you're slipping all over the place..."). Cold enough for me to suggest sending hot chocolate and cookies to the mailman, and too cold for my nice thoughts to be turned into actions. Cold enough that the dog must romp in the snow, and shake himself off when he comes in, curling up on the heater vent or a stack of afghans or the nearest convenient human. Enough, in short, to make me quite certain that summer is my absolutely favorite season. But enough, too, to be quietly happy in the hominess of home in winter.

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(for the many who I am sure miss my bad jokes--or at least miss me (?). I had another one the other day, but alas! It is lost to the world forever, by reason of my having forgotten it. I'm sure it was hilarious...)

Q: What do you call a snowman whose middle section has been over-rolled?

A: An Abdominable Snowman

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Winter: My Secret

I tell my secret? No indeed, not I:
Perhaps some day, who knows?
But not today; it froze, and blows and snows,
And you're too curious: fie! You want to hear it? well:
Only, my secret's mine, and I won't tell.

Or, after all, perhaps there's none:
Suppose there is no secret after all,
But only just my fun.
Today's a nipping day, a biting day;
In which one wants a shawl,
A veil, a cloak, and other wraps:
I cannot ope to everyone who taps,
And let the draughts come whistling thro' my hall;
Come bounding and surrounding me,
Come buffeting, astounding me,
Nipping and clipping thro' my wraps and all.
I wear my mask for warmth: who ever shows
His nose to Russian snows
To be pecked at by every wind that blows?
You would not peck? I thank you for good will,
Believe, but leave the truth untested still.

Spring's an expansive time: yet I don't trust
March with its peck of dust,
Nor April with its rainbow-crowned brief showers,
Nor even May, whose flowers
One frost may wither thro' the sunless hours.

Perhaps some languid summer day,
When drowsy birds sing less and less,
And golden fruit is ripening to excess,
If there's not too much sun nor too much cloud,
And the warm wind is neither still nor loud,
Perhaps my secret I may say,
Or you may guess.

~Christina Rossetti

Oklahoma at Oklahoma State, 1:30 p.m. CT

Two aggies were walking down the street, whooping and celebrating. A Sooner fan noticed them, and asked what the big deal was.

"We just put together a puzzle in 3 months!" they answered.

"What's the big deal about that?" the man asked.

"It said 2-4 years on the side!"

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Q: How do you get an O-State grad off your porch?

A: Pay him for the pizza.

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A man walked into a bar and noticed the OSU game was on. The owner's dog was sitting on the counter, watching the game. After a little while, OSU kicked a field goal, and the dog did a backflip. The next quarter, they kicked another field goal, and the dog did another backflip. The man was intrigued.

"What does he do if they score a touchdown?" he asked the owner.

"I don't know," the man replied. "I've only had 'im five years."

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Q: What's an OSU diploma good for?

A: Parking in the handicapped spot.

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3 aggies left the football game, and headed back to their car, only to discover that they had locked the keys in it. They tried breaking into the trunk, and picking the lock, but they couldn't get in. So they were standing around, trying to figure out what to do next, and one of them asked the owner of the car, "what are we gonna do now?"

"I don't know," he replied, "but we need to think of something fast, 'cause it's startin' to rain, and I left the top down."

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A man named Bob went to OSU, but when it came time to graduate, he hadn't completed the required math class. He stuck around to finish, but year after year he failed his math class and couldn't graduate.

Bob became something of a legend on the OSU campus. One year, the president of the school approached him and said, "Bob, we have decided to give you your own special one-question oral math test, and if you pass this, you can graduate." Word got around campus about the test, and it turned into something of an event. Lots of people wanted to come see this, so they made plans to hold the special test in the football stadium.

The day of the test arrived, and the stadium was packed out. The president arrived, and he and Bob walked out to the special platform in the middle of the field and sat down, and everyone got quiet.

"Okay, Bob," the president said, "Here's your question: what is two plus two?"

Bob sat and thought about this, and he thought some more, and finally, slowly, hesitating, he said, "two plus two is...four."

The stadium errupted. People were shouting, and carrying on, and the noise was terrific. A chant broke out, and soon became loud enough that it was clear over the uproar. Pretty soon all the people in the stadium had joined in, chanting "give him another chance! Give him another chance!"

42

Richard Dawkins, Oxford professor, from Time magazine, Nov. 13: “People who believe in God conclude there must have been a divine knob-twiddler who twiddled the knobs of these half-dozen constants to get them exactly right. The problem is that this says, because something is vastly improbable, we need a God to explain it. But that God himself would be even more improbable. Physicists have come up with other explanations…”

[Francis Collins, debating against him, brings up Occam’s Razor, which makes me happy]

later:

Time: “Could the answer be God?”

Dawkins: “There could be something incredibly grand and incomprehensible and beyond our present understanding.”

Collins: “That’s God.”

Dawkins: “Yes. But…”

First, may I say that Dr. Dawkins has more intelligence than I can even imagine. But, given that, does he not seem to be narrowing himself unreasonably? Besides never explaining why God would be more improbable than these "vastly improbable" constants that are necessary for our survival and are in place, Dawkins also accuses his opponent (the man who headed the project that mapped the human genome, if I am not mistaken) of forfeiting his scientific credibility by allowing himself to believe in a supernatural he cannot prove by the scientific method. He assumes, without explanation or argument, science’s right to predominate over all of life.

Please don’t misunderstand me. I think that faith and science, with a small s, work together admirably. I think that what we can see of the world around us, using our wonderful tool, the scientific method, fits marvelously with what we are told of what we cannot see. But even if faith and science were opposed, why ought it to be (arbitrarily?) assumed that science is higher?

I am reminded of this, from G. K. Chesterton's Orthodoxy: “As an explanation of the world, materialism has a sort of insane simplicity…we have at once the sense of it covering everything and of it leaving everything out… [A materialist, like Mr. McCabe] understands everything, and everything does not seem worth understanding. His cosmos may be complete in every rivet and cogwheel, but still his cosmos is smaller than our world. Somehow his scheme, like the lucid scheme of the madman, seems unconscious of the alien energies and the large indifference of the earth; it is not thinking of the real things of the earth, of fighting peoples or proud mothers, or first love or fear upon the sea. The earth is so very large, and the cosmos is so very small. The cosmos is about the smallest hole that a man can hide his head in…”

“The materialist philosophy (whether true or not) is certainly much more limiting than any religion. In one sense, of course, all intelligent ideas are narrow. They cannot be broader than themselves…. But as it happens, there is a very special sense in which materialism has more restrictions than spiritualism….The Christian is quite free to believe that there is a considerable amount of settled order and inevitable development in the universe. But the materialist is not allowed to admit into his spotless machine the slightest speck of spiritualism or miracle. Poor Mr. McCabe is not allowed to retain even the tiniest imp, though it might be hiding in a pimpernel. The Christian admits that the universe is manifold and even miscellaneous, just as a sane man knows that he is complex….But the materialist’s world is quite simple and solid, just as the madman is quite sure he is sane…. Spiritual doctrines do not actually limit the mind, as do materialistic denials. Even if I believe in immortality I need not think about it. But if I disbelieve in immortality I must not think about it. In the first case the road is open and I can go as far as I like; in the second the road is shut.” [emphasis added]

Or this, from J. Budziszewski’s The Revenge of Conscience, explaining why he (formerly) chose to believe in nihilism when he knew his nihilism was self-referentially incoherent: “A sixth reason was that I had come to confuse science with a certain world view, one which many science writers hold but that really has nothing to do with science. I mean the view that nothing is real but matter. If nothing is real but matter, then there couldn’t be such things as minds [Hannah’s note: unless you are an epiphenominalist =], moral law, or God, could there? After all, none of those are matter. Of course, not even the properties of matter are matter, so after awhile it became hard to believe in matter itself. But by that time I was so disordered that I couldn’t tell how disordered I was. I recognized that I had committed yet another incoherence, but I concluded that reality itself was incoherent, and that I was pretty clever to have figured this our—even more so, because in an incoherent world, figuring didn’t make sense either.”

Or maybe just this: “For although they knew God, they neither glorified Him as God nor gave thanks to Him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened. Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools.” ~Romans 1:21, 22

Happy Thanks-giving.

Happy 99th Birthday!

Oklahoma!
Where the wind comes sweepin' down the plain,
And the wavin' wheat can sure smell sweet
When the wind comes right behind the rain;

Oklahoma!
Ev'ry night my honey lamb and I
Sit alone and talk and watch a hawk
Makin' lazy circles in the sky;

We know we belong to the land
And the land we belong to is grand!
And when we say
Yeeow! Ayipioeeay!
We're only sayin'
You're doin' fine,
Oklahoma!
Oklahoma! O.K.!

I have missed you awfully...

The fans =), the heliotrope dresses and hideous yellow; IM conversations about cheese that no one else would understand, and scandalous quote doors; the pre-performance jitters and Tommy Trafford's song; the dreadful statue of Achilles and the Star of the Garter and the diamond snake brooch and the palm tree and the buttonholes. Tape and pins and fire and ice. Late-night rehearsals and set-painting, and celebrations. Being someone else.

Miss you, ET! Have a wonderful time Cyrano-ing; and I wish I were there!

Happy Birthday Levi!

...a special young man who also happens to be my brother, and has been for the last 14 years. I love you! =)

Dio e buono.

(God is good).