Book Review: Saint Francis of Assisi by G. K. Chesterton

Saint Francis of Assisi by G. K. Chesterton

In an unconventional biography, G. K. Chesterton looks at the personality of Francis of Assisi, the founder of the Franciscan order who lived in the late 1100s and early 1200s. Chesterton's professed aim is to make Francis more accessible to people who do not know anything about him. He does not give the standard biography's history of the man within his own world. Chesterton makes reference to Francis's time and also Chesterton's time, almost in equal measures. He presents the universal truths and the particular character of Francis, how both have persisted through the eight hundred years after his life ended (Francis died in 1226). 

Francis was a romantic in a medieval sense--he admired the troubadours of his time and was drawn to military service as a way to be a hero, a righter of wrongs or defender of those in need. He was a bit disillusioned with soldiering and worked for his father, a cloth merchant. His desire to help others led him into conflict with his father, getting to the point where Francis renounced his father's goods, threw off his clothes, and went out into the world a pauper. He was in the ruins of a church when he heard a voice asking him to rebuild the church. Francis took the request literally and started gathering stones and begging for resources to restore the building where he heard the voice. His life surely seemed odd to a lot of people but he did have a few acquaintances join him in his life of begging and working to restore the Faith among the Christians. Love and joy were central to Francis's work, leading him into an extraordinary life.

Chesterton relates these and other incidents in Francis's life with a lot of commentary about how various people in Chesterton's own time would understand them. Chesterton brings out the unique worldview of Francis as a contrast to how others (then and now) see him. He gives a good idea what Francis was like and what motivated him in doing the amazing things he did.

Chesterton's style is very witty in both senses of the term, intelligent and funny. He has a playful writing style, with paradoxes and puns helping to bring out the points he makes. The book is a delight to read and I look forward to rereading it, though I should try out more of his many other works first.

Recommended.

Geocaching February 2023

My first cache for the month of February was HAPPY THANKSGIVING GEOCACHERS. I found it inbetween dropping off my daughter for Algebra II and picking up my son from Debate. It was a quick cache for which I was happy. It's in a parking lot for a restaurant that's closed, which explains the darkened sign.

A shopping center full of muggles in the distance

I found an unsignable log at Mad Skillz #5 Academy Junction. The trail leading to it was almost already overgrown with thorns and other winter shrubs, I can't imagine what it would be like in the summer!

The lid from the cache proves I made the find!

A fun find on a very cold and windy day was Lamby. The cache was on the side of the road though I could not park right next to it.

My car barely visible over the rise

On a frigid Saturday morning I found Our Anniversary Cache... in a nearby park. Thankfully, the find was quick because the temperature was below 20 degrees. Also, it was the cacher's anniversary, not mine!

More woods

I found another of the Random Acts of Kindness hides, RAKMD26:compliment someone to their boss. It's another hide along a stream, this time the Little Patuxent River.

Actually, it looks bigger than the Middle Patuxent in this picture!

A fun puzzle cache not far from home is The Golden Cache, a mathematical mystery that I solved quickly thanks to a lucky guess. The hide is on one of the many walking paths of Columbia, Maryland.

Some people go both ways!

I went to the Robinson Nature Center to find Mica in the Middle Patuxent: A Kids' Earthcache. I was not with the kids since they were in school. The weather was so nice, I couldn't wait. The walk was easy and I picked up some information for another cache that I will find on another day. I was worried when I got to the beach and saw a fence in the way! Luckily, it was only protecting an area just above the beach.

The nature center

The fence!

Behind the fence

Me with the river (and a hanging tree! How does it stay there?)

On the next empty day empty on my caching calendar, I went back to the nature center to find the final stage of CAM 2022 Bonus: Robinson's Trees and Trails. The hide is just outside of the nature center in a unique container. I made the find quickly and had the combination to the lock thanks to finding a series of trees at the center.

Not much to see

I found The White Christmas Cache... in the middle of February on a cold and windy day. The church where it is located was totally quiet on a Friday early afternoon.

More like "Bleak Midwinter" than "White Christmas"

On another miserable day I found Grunge is so Grungy!, a mystery cache that involves knowing lyrics from the band Nirvana. I don't really know their lyrics. The internet saved the day on that front. 

This nearby pond is kinda grungy

My fabulous wife cleverly solved the puzzle for Omnicache, which involves Perl programming. I have no programming skills, so I had no hope of coming up with a solution. We went to find it on a cold Saturday morning. The area was surprisingly busy--there's a dance studio and a small gym right nearby.

Emptiness

The next day I found two caches. On unofficial trails in Columbia, Maryland, is littleblkdog's letterbox, a hybrid between a regular geocache and a letterbox cache. Letterboxing is another form of outdoor activity using clues instead of coordinates to make the find. Also, a letterbox will have a stamp and ink pad so finders can leave their own stamp and get a new stamp in their book. I don't have a stamp or a book for stamps, so I just signed the log and moved on. On the hike in, I saw some deer across the way.

We stared at each other

More Patuxent water

At a nearby park and ride is Not Pricky and pokey? Aside from the weird capitalization, the cache is a fun multicache and has a super-powerful magnet holding it in place. I thought about finding a tool to pry it off its spot but eventually slid it around until I could get a finger underneath part of it.

The cache location looks a bit run down

The parking area looks normal

The Silly Rock... was a quick find on a cold day that threatened rain. When I got to ground zero, I looked around and the cache container leapt out at me. Not literally, of course, but I recognized it as soon as I saw it. 

The weather doesn't look so bad

I end the month with only two holes in the calendar--the fifth and...the twenty-ninth! Couldn't fill that one this year, but I will make double sure (maybe quadruple sure) next year! The total cache finds is 761, so I feel confident that 800 will be achieved this year.

TV Review: Junji Ito Maniac (2023)

Junji Ito Maniac: Japanese Tales of the Macabre (2023) based on the manga by Junji Ito

Junji Ito is a manga storyteller who specializes in horror stories. This anime series brings a collection of his stories to Netflix in half-hour segments. Each episode has one or two stories along with a post-credits sequence that is an ongoing story. The stories are imaginative and dark with a lot of death and menace thrown in. The show has too many stories (twenty-one) to go through each individually. My favorites are "Hanging Balloon" about a celebrity who dies and a giant version of her disembodied head starts haunting her fans and "Tomb Town"about a city full of grave markers all over the place, like in the middle of the roads. Two siblings ran into a woman as they were driving into town and they have a body to hide. My less-than-favorite stories involved gross-out or body-horror that were a bit too gruesome without anything else to recommend them. Some of the stories were just odd and unsettling. 

Recommended for horror fans only.

Book Review: One-Punch Man Vols. 9 & 10 by One et al.

One-Punch Man Volume 9 story by One and art by Yusuke Murata

A new, ambitious villain shows up. His name is Garo and he has admired villains since he was a little kid. He thought it was unfair that heroes always win so he decides to become the first triumphant villain. The best way to triumph is to beat good guys, right? Meanwhile, Rank 1 of Class B, Hellish Blizzard, has shown up at Saitama's apartment to recruit him as part of her group of heroes. He's not interested in a partnership. She finds that annoying and fights him. Speed-O'-Sound Sonic has also shown up and is fighting with Genos because he wants revenge against Saitama. 

This book has a lot of action, some of it serious like when the Tank-Top corps goes up against Garo with bad results. The conflict with Blizzard is much more comedic. The story is still interesting enough to keep me reading.

Mildly recommended.

One-Punch Man Volume 10 story by One and art by Yusuke Murata

Garo continues his campaign against the heroes, taking out lower level guys and gals as he preps to take on the Class-S set. Meanwhile, the clueless Saitama prepares to enter a martial-arts contest incognito, resulting in an incidental run-in with Garo. Nothing comes of that. While he's at the contest, some gigantic intelligent centipede-monsters show up and make trouble for Metal Bat, another mid-level hero who shows his character as he fights tougher and tougher multipedes. The book ends with a couple of bonus manga that are more humorous than plot-driven.

The story developments are a bit random (a martial arts contest?) and the storytelling is starting to slip into standard manga stuff (the battles are getting crazier, the depiction of women is moving toward objectionable) but it still is interesting overall.

Mildly recommended.

Movie Review: Black Panther: Wakanda Forever (2022)

Black Panther: Wakanda Forever (2022) co-written and directed by Ryan Coogler

Wakanda is in mourning after the death of T'Challa, their king and Black Panther. He died a year ago and the country still does not have a new leader. Without the Heart-Shaped Herb, there is also no new Black Panther. T'Challa died of a lingering illness and his sister Shuri (Letitia Wright) tried to recreate the Herb in her lab but with no success. Queen Ramonda (Angela Bassett) has been governing but her isolationist policies have not been popular with the rest of the world. The Wakandans don't trust anyone else with vibranium. The United States has fielded a vibranium detector that makes a discover on the Atlantic sea bed. The detector and its crew are attacked by some blue people but the blame for the assault is on Wakanda. The true assailants, Namor (Tenoch Heurta Mejia) and his fellow submarine followers, also have vibranium and do not want the surface dwellers to disturb their homes or get power from vibranium to challenge them. Namor travels to Wakanda where he seeks an alliance to prevent another vibranium detector which was made by a nineteen-year old student at MIT. The Wakandans are not interested in kidnapping and handing over the student, so they refuse. The conflict between Wakanda and Namor's people grows throughout the film.

The tragic death of Chadwick Boseman (who played T'Challa) looms over the movie and provides its most dramatic and heartfelt moments. The grief of the Wakandans, especially former lover Nakia (Lupita Nyong'o) who has moved to Haiti to deal with her sadness, is palpable and provides a good start. Then the film bogs down in its plot. The concept of one nation's responsibility to other nations gets unnecessarily drowned out by the conflict between Wakanda and the sea dwellers. A lot of minor and major plot holes (like how the teenager built the vibranium detector without any vibranium to test it on) make the film hard to believe. The post-credits sequence creates an even more nonsensical situation.

Namor's culture is a little underdeveloped and his new origin story (he comes from the Aztec people) does not improve on the Atlantis origin in the comics. Namor is a very conflicted and often evil character in the comics, much like Magneto in the X-Men, but they don't capture that here. He's also a ladies' man in the comics which they try to do unconvincingly. Weirdly, they keep the wings on his ankles which just look silly (plenty of other characters magically fly without flimsy excuses, why not him?). He could have been introduced as the next big villain for the MCU, but he winds up just as a scheming petty tyrant.

Not recommended--this is a huge step down from the first movie, which is one of Marvel's best. So much potential was wasted here.

Cute Kid Pix February 2023

More pictures that did not make their own post...

My youngest had his first school concert. He plays the bass and was in the very back of the orchestra, so hard to photograph.

The orchestra

Close up of him

At the cub scout pack, Pinewood Derby was fun. We built a Minecraft car. Poor Steve had to lose an arm so that the car's weight would not be too much!

Arms and the man

About to race

Goofy victory pose (sorry I didn't get a good shot of the serious one)

Victory ice cream later

I went to one of my older son's debates and volunteered as a judge. The judges waited between duties in the high school's library, which had this awesome chair.

Check it out...not literally, though

The flowers that bloom in the spring have nothing to do with the case...in this photo.

Our G&S front yard

Book Review: Mules and Men by Zora Neale Hurston

Mules and Men by Zora Neale Hurston

Zora Neale Hurston made several trips to the American South to collect folklore from African-American communities. This book chronicles two such trips where she heard the stories people liked to tell and saw how they lived (and did some living herself, too).

The first trip was to her hometown Eatonville, Florida, where the locals remembered her more or less fondly and welcomed her into the community (she had gone off to college). She describes her experience of life, going to parties and going fishing. She tells the folk tales as she hears them, crediting local friends and acquaintances, some of whom try to outdo each other in telling more elaborate or more fantastic tales. Some stories are typical adventures of anthropomorphized animals or explanations of how various animals or people were created. Many stories come from the time of slavery, often with an "Ole Massa" character, the plantation owner, who is tricked by a clever slave (often named "John"). The stories are humorous and wistful, a delight to read.

The last third of the book covers another trip, to New Orleans, where Hurston investigated the Hoodoo practices (superficially known as "Voodoo" in the larger American culture). She found out more about Hoodoo by becoming a student to various conjurors and doctors (referred to as "two-headed doctors" since they had some scientific learning along with their Hoodoo knowledge). She makes no moral or spiritual judgements about the practitioners, merely chronicling their ceremonies. Some clients want to hurt or maim others; some want success in court; some want to retain a spouse while others want to drive a lover away. This part is definitely darker and odder than the first two-thirds of the book.

As an examination of black folklore and life in 1930s America, this book is a fascinating read. Hurston has an easy narrative style that is engaging, as if the reader is along for the ride through Florida and New Orleans. I enjoyed the book a lot.

Recommended.