My Father's Son

A few months back, as our anniversary was coming up, I went shopping for a card for my wife. Not just any card, an Avanti card. Avanti makes greeting cards that are both funny and heartfelt. I simply cannot abide the standard Hallmark drivel, so I go out of my way to get an Avanti.

One of the places that carried them was Barnes and Noble. As I walked through the store, searching for their greeting card section, I went past row after row of shelves carrying novels. I'd not been to a bookstore in a long time and certainly not since I decided to try my hand at fiction, so it hit me differently that it had before.

My idea for writing one or more novels was a stupid waste of time. 

If what I'm doing isn't going to make a difference, preferably a big difference, then what's the point? Even if a miracle happened and I got my novel published, it would occupy a tiny section on a shelf of a rack of similar books with nothing to differentiate it. Within 2-3 months, it would be in the remainder bin and then it would be thrown away, never to be seen again.

What was the point?

Then I started thinking about my dad and his painting. My father took up painting after a career marked with substantial successes. He spent his last 20 or so productive years at the craft of painting and sold exactly 1 canvas. He never even tried to sell his paintings. He would loan them out to friends and family, but "loan" meant "loan." At any time, he could show up at your house with a different painting and demand to swap it out because he wanted the one in your house back.

I kept many of his paintings. This one, "The Weir" was always my favorite. It hangs in my study.

As an ENFJ, where EVERYTHING YOU DO MUST SERVE SOMETHING IMPORTANT, the thought of straining to knock out even one novel only to have it rejected by all publishers or sit on a dusty shelf in a bookstore before it was thrown out was just too much. Writing was going to mean nothing at all.

So, Dad, why did you do it? Why did you take all those classes and then move on to being taught by a local master craftsman? Why did you spend all that time in museums, learning what moved you and why the painter had chosen this technique instead of that? What was the point? You never sold anything and no one knows your name. 

He wasn't around to answer. Not for the first time did I deeply miss my father and wish I could have just one more deep conversation with him, the him that existed about 10 years before his death.

I kept turning the problem over in my mind. At the same time, scenes from my fiction ideas kept popping into my head and I couldn't help working out the dialog and prose for this section or that as I drove. Still, who cared? No one was ever going to read what I wrote just like nearly no one saw his paintings.

That didn't matter to him. Why?

He was painting for himself, not for everyone else. That finally came to me. Once I had that key, everything fell into place. The vacations in Europe with my mom were all about going to places he wanted to paint and that had museums he wanted to visit. He mastered the craft because he wanted to express himself through art, through images of scenes he loved and he didn't care how many people saw them.

I could just hear him telling me. He'd done his bit for king, country and family. It was time he did something for himself. Looking back, I can remember my mom telling me this in full-throated support of it. She adored him. He'd been a hero in many ways and she loved the fact that he was painting. That it didn't do anything to put money in her pocket or bring her social standing meant nothing. He loved painting and that's why he did it.

In a way, he was the canvas that was being painted. With each year, the picture of him as an artist came more into focus. The important product wasn't ultimately the collection of canvases. It was the man he became by seriously pursuing something beautiful. The classes, museums, travel, study, failures, improved technique, and years of looking carefully at the world were brushstrokes on him.

Because he painted for an audience of one, he could paint what he wanted the way he wanted. Being the man he was, he worked hard at it. He wasn't avant-garde, he was a storyteller who used oil paints and a canvas to tell stories.

As I get older, I have involuntarily become more like him. I can't help it. And here I am, contemplating creating art that will bring me nothing just like his paintings brought him nothing, if you are only counting fame and fortune.

I felt a weight being lifted off of my shoulders. If I wrote my stories for an audience of 1, I could do as I pleased with my content. Not in terms of writing rubbish, but in terms of writing the stories I want to write. I'm not a creature of 2026 and I have no interest in writing what sells today. Now I don't have to.

Writing for an audience of 1, just like painting for an audience of 1, doesn't let you off the hook when it comes to honing your skills. I won't have the time he had, but I can still work hard to explore the craft and write as well as I can.

My father painted scenes from Europe and the American Southwest with a few Wisconsin and New England bits thrown in for good measure. Would they have sold if he'd been trying? Maybe. But painting for sales drives decisions that would result in subject matter he might not have liked. Painting for himself, his choices of content, lighting and mood were entirely his.

I want to write comedic adventure-romances whose underlying moral logic is profoundly Catholic and whose romantic elements are chivalric. In a world where romantasy porn is the #1 fiction genre, that's about as against the grain as you can get.

By writing for 1, I can write my Bobby Lee and Basil adventures and my Hardy Boys knock-off comedies and not worry about anything other than improving my prose with each writing session.

That's what Dad did with his paintings. I could do a lot worse than follow in that man's footsteps.

A Huge Leap For Women

 ... right into the blackout bags.

Sarah Mullally, the Archbishopess of Canterbury and the first woman to hold that post, recently gave an award for interfaith and reconciliation. It was September 11 when she gave it, so naturally she gave it to Hafiz Tahir Ashrafi, chairman of the Pakistan Ulema Council, a group of Islamic scholars.

Hey, why not?

Here's a photo from the event.

The dark blob in the background is Mrs. Ashrafi. I have no idea if the chick on the right is a family member or part of the James-Younger Gang.

What's the point of being a crusader for women's rights and a massive middle finger to the patriarchy who has run the CofE forever if you're just going to hand out awards to dudes who put their wives in darkened burlap sacks?

The award was rescinded shortly afterwards, but the reversal had nothing to do with misogyny. Apparently, Hafiz sided with Osama on September 11. While it's perfectly OK to stuff girls into trashbags, it's still a faux pas to root for the terrorists, at least when it comes to that particular atrocity.

Rockin' In The Diocese

I learned this morning that on X when I use the A-word, "auti$m," I get muted. So here, we'll just refer to rockin'. That is, where you grab your knees and rock back and forth, repeating something to comfort yourself.

In the case of the Diocese of San Diego, we repeat "God is love."

In a week or two, we're asked to participate in the World Day of Migrants and Refugees. Here's why.

Bishop Pham has called on clergy, religious, and non-denominational leaders to stand together in solidarity with those who have fled war, persecution, and hardship.

“As shepherd of this Diocese here at the border, I have been feeling an increased urgency to call people of faith around values that unite us: all human beings are sacred, no matter where we are born, or where we now live. Too often we let politics divide us and take away our faith-inspired values and our voice. I invite you to walk with me behind a banner that will read something we all know to be true: ‘All are Sacred’.

What an obnoxious jerk. I'm really hard over on immigration. Close the border and mass deportations of illegals is my preferred policy. Legal immigration is fine with me. At no point in time would I or anyone I know who thinks like me disagree with the statement that all lives are sacred.

I would never want to send B-52s over to Haiti and blast it into oblivion. I just want the Haitians to stay in Haiti. Dittos for all the other garden spots who sent us their best during the Biden open border fiesta. Lives are indeed sacred. Just keep your life where it is unless you go through the full American immigration process.

So just who does our bishop think he's talking to? That banner is meant to differentiate him and his fellow travelers from the rest of us, but it only does so in his head. It actually says nothing of consequence at all. All are sacred? No kidding, genius.

I've come to the conclusion that Church leadership these days is auti$tic. They are expressing this equation:

f(t) = 7.

That is, no matter what inputs they get, they respond with the same thing. The topic of immigration is fraught. When the USCCB posts something on X about immigration, they get absolutely bodied in the comments and quotes. A lot of it is simple rage posting, of course, but a good portion of it is well-considered and poses questions for the bishops to answer.

They never do. Now we see why. "I invite you to walk with me behind a banner that will read something we all know to be true: ‘All are Sacred’." That's pretty freaking auti$tic there, dude. You and your friends are just grabbing your knees and rocking back and forth repeating, "God is love." You have absolutely no response to the serious objections of those in the Catholic laity who disagree with you.

The obnoxiousness of it all is turbocharged by the fact that our bishop is all in on synodality. We're asked to listen to each other with open hearts and open minds. Meanwhile, this doorknob can't comprehend the most basic arguments of people like me. Instead, he simply says that I'm full of hate and intolerance.

Talk about corrosive!

Meanwhile, the migrants are bringing joy and love everywhere.

A group of female villagers say "life as we know it will be destroyed" if plans to house asylum seekers at a nearby former Ministry of Defence (MoD) site succeed.

Earlier this year, the Home Office announced plans to house 1,256 men at MoD Bicester, saying the proposal would bring the system "back under control".

But the plans have proved contentious locally, including in nearby Piddington where a symbolic independence referendum in opposition to the proposals is being held next week.

On Thursday, a group of 133 women from the village issued an open letter to every female Member of Parliament to share their concerns.

The group wrote: "As fellow women, you will understand the serious risks this will expose us to.

"Our safety, our security and our freedoms will be under threat. Life as we know it will be destroyed.

"We will not feel safe walking our streets. We are already living in fear."

God is love. All lives are sacred.

It's not like the bishop and his fellow dingledorks don't know this is happening. Well, OK, maybe they're in such a bubble that they're totally unaware of it, but that just underlines in bold the fact that synodality is a one-way street for our leadership.

Like I said, corrosive.

Meanwhile, in Ceuta, the results are similar to what would happen if you moved out of your house for a month and allowed a randomly-selected group of teenage boys to take up residence.

Editor's note: I was going to post one of the many videos of the invaders in Ceuta going at each other with machetes, pipes or truncheons and making an absolute ruin of the place, but instead, I'll just end with this one that is practically made for our very own Bishop Pulido, a native of Mexico. Whenever I see these, where a woman is trying to explain the terror she feels because of the migrants, speaking in Spanish, I can't help but imagine Bishop Pulido having a stroke as he watches it, his mind fractured by the sight of a Spanish-speaking woman opposing "migrantes."

🇪🇸🔴 JUST IN: A local Spanish mother in Ceuta demolishes a left-wing TV host sitting comfortably in Madrid during a debate about immigration.

The host tries to claim it is "dangerous" to say all the migrants should leave Spain.

The mother explodes: "If they came by violating a… pic.twitter.com/Sp0CnaVff9

— Remix News & Views (@RMXnews) August 28, 2026

Fish River Sunrise

 ... because Fish River Sunset has gone away.

At our new place in Alabama, I mounted a ReoLink camera at the end of our boathouse. I have it pointed as near to true West as I can, given the blockage created by the big tree in our back yard. I've tried to use it to grab video, but my network design failed me and the path from the ReoLink to my Raspberry Pi is intermittently infested with delays as the Pi keeps stopping data transfers to look for new WiFi sources.

Stupid Pi. The Pi is less than 6" away from its access point, but the WiFi driver is such a blockhead that it can't stop checking for better signals every 2-3 seconds. That causes a 150ms delay which isn't enough to be noticeable by a user, but is enough to make the streaming video have ugly gaps in it.

I fell back and went for still shots every 10 seconds and then used ffmpeg to stitch them together into a video. Yay?

Well, sort of yay. By the time I had the thing running, the sun had walked itself out of the view of my camera.

Stupid sun.

As a result, I've fallen back again and now capture sunrises, just for grins. I'm pointed in the opposite direction, but I thought they might be interesting. Here's today's. I think it's worth clicking over to YouTube to watch a full-screen version, but that's just me.

I love seeing the ducks cruise past. There are two whites and one mallard. They like to come into my backyard and grumble at me in their ducky language. It's wonderful. I reward them with bread sometimes, which they eat, but reluctantly. I don't have any fish to give them and I'm not going to go to the bait shop just for a trio of grumbly ducks.

(Let's see how long that vow lasts.)

Diagnosing The Problem

Using the lat lon of the camera and picking out landmarks in the video, I was able to figure out the angles in my field of view. Directly in front of my camera is 310 degrees. The far left is 268 degrees. Sunset right now is at 276. Why can't I get a good sunset? The trees are too dense on the far left.

Stupid trees.

Moving off the left hand side of the view to the first filtered shot of sort-of horizon, you get an angle of 290. Since sunset is 276 degrees, I'm out of luck until... when? Try May. My sunset camera as currently mounted will give me sunsets from May to August.

I could mount it on a pole, of course. If I give it enough height, I can aim it over the top of the tree and point it due West or perhaps a bit Southwest.

I could also come back to the house and look up at an empty pole where the camera used to be until it got sheered off by a storm coming in off the Gulf.

Oh well. It's still been a ton of fun and it's just the start of the cool things we can do at the River House.

Where Do Children Rank?

Intersectionality is the term given to the process by which people are classified, grouped and ranked according to some notion of victim and oppressor. Blacks are oppressed by whites, gays oppressed by straights, women oppressed by men. A black lesbian, therefore is ranked well ahead of a straight, white woman.

When Iryna Zarutska was murdered by a big, black man on a train in North Carolina, it got almost no news coverage at all because she's white and he's black. Since, by definition, blacks do not oppress whites, almost no information can be allowed to leak out into the public that might disrupt the machinery of intersectionality.

If the races had been reversed, this would have played on loop for weeks on our MSM channels and a dozen American cities would have burned.

This week, we learned where children rank in the intersectional hierarchy. Below women. It shouldn't have been a surprise.

Here's the governor of Massachusetts recently signing a bill permitting abortion up to the moment of birth under any circumstances. Dig all the women cheering her on as she signs it.

The Lindsay Clancy trial came within a whisker of ending with a verdict of not guilty by reason of insanity. The woman strangled her three children. Post-verdict interviews with the jurors indicate that they wanted to see Lindsay get the help she needed. The one dude who simply wouldn't go along with it could not get past the fact that she had throttled her kids. The women on the jury could and they were all annoyed with that one guy.

This happened in the same Massachusetts where the duly elected governor just signed infanticide into law. Lindsay's kids disappeared from view just like Iryna did. We know nothing of what they liked to do, what they liked to eat or how they played with daddy. Lindsay was humanized, they were not.

That was the indicator that Lindsay Clancy verdict was coming. Children rank below women in the intersectional hierarchy. Children are a burden, being pregnant is difficult, giving birth is painful and on and on and on.

Of course it went that way. It should have been obvious from the start.

AI Slop

This is genius.

I'm a heavy user of AI for creative projects, particularly fiction writing. It allows me to learn and explore at rates I could never hope to achieve through normal means. I have a much better grasp of character design, plot pacing, writing styles, editing and much more because I write with AI as my junior partner.

Without AI, I probably would have thrown in the towel a year ago. Instead, I'm having a wonderful time creating.

Keeping The Main Thing The Main Thing

In my previous post about the movie The Odyssey, I made the claim that it wasn't a movie at all, it was a recapitulation of the progressive creed. I'm going to see if I can make the case that Harvard and Cambridge as well as the Catholic hierarchy is doing the same thing in their domains.

First off, let's recall that Christopher Nolan chose to cast Ellen Page as a Greek warrior and Lupita Nyongo as Helen of Troy.

The face that launched a thousand ships.

Now I'd like to introduce my new podcast heartthrob, Peter Boghossian. Boghossian is a former professor who was hounded out of his school because he wouldn't say things he thought were wrong. I'm not completely familiar with his history, but I think the controversy had something to do with trans. His new focus is "street epistemology" where he interviews normal people on what they believe and what it would take to change their minds. He has also spent a lot of time analyzing the denial of the Europeans wrt migrants, the trans insanity and the descent of higher education into insanity.

Here's his take on Jason Arday and Claudine Gay and why he thought Jason should not have been removed from Cambridge and why Claudine should still be president of Harvard. I recommend watching the whole thing, but you probably don't need to do that.

What They Have In Common

Imagine being on a professional casting team made up of experienced, talented Hollywood veterans. You are casting a high-budget, high-profile movie which depicts one of the greatest adventure stories of all time, Homer's Odyssey. There is simply no way on Earth that the tiny, effeminate  Ellen Page and the in-your-face ugly, black woman Lupita Nyongo would have made it through the first cuts. It would have been a miracle had they even been given screen tests.

Casting a movie is all about finding just the right talent to further the story. Anything that detracts from the story is an excrescence and gets removed whether that's dialog, action scenes or cast members.

Christopher Nolan and his crew did not do that because they weren't making a movie, they were signaling their allegiance to the rest of Hollywood. The Odyssey was a recitation of the creed first and entertainment second.

Similarly, if you were on a selection committee at either Harvard or Cambridge, your sole purpose would be to find people to fill important positions that cemented your university's reputation as honest, bold and truth-focused. In no alternate reality would you have chosen plagiarists whose work was low-quality even when it wasn't being stolen from other academics. You certainly wouldn't have hired a man who was clearly mentally ill.

Harvard and Cambridge did just that and then stood by their choices until it was impossible to keep up the charade because they are not running universities in any real sense. Their primary job is to pledge their allegiance to the progressive causes of the day by chanting the creed as loud as they can. Of distant import is research and honesty. If there is a collision between the tenets of the creed and academic performance, academic pursuits lose every single time.

Catholicism Today

In a not-so-surprising poll that I can't track down right now, pastors and priests were surveyed about whether or not they thought it was important that a person believed in their faith. Of all Christian denominations, coming in last place were Catholic priests at something like 33%.

There are benign explanations to that, but it dovetails well with my own recent crises of faith. If you take in what the pope, our bishop and our local clergy say and put it all together, I can't figure out why I shouldn't convert to Islam. They all want unity, peace and non-judgmental inclusion. They never talk about sin or damnation even when the Sunday gospel reading is shouting about it. They all imply that God loves everyone and everyone is saved.

Since the Muslims are adamant about the superiority of their faith, I don't see why joining them doesn't accomplish all of the goals my ordained leaders are proposing. In fact, I can't see any other way to do it. So long as we insist that Catholicism should persist, we are setting ourselves in opposition to Islam and, by our own preaching, embracing divisive and implicitly judgmental positions.

Like Hollywood and Harvard, the Catholic Church is obsessing on things that are secondary to its mission at best.

Summary

Others have written about the death of expertise and on the right there have been significant numbers of brain cells recruited in the service of explaining how and why this has happened. What if it's just been a loss of focus? What if the cause is that our institutions forgot to make the main thing the main thing?