Don’t get in her face today.

Don’t tell her a task is almost there. Don’t tell her the deerhound is being somewhat obedient. Don’t tell her you sort of understand what it must be like to be a military contractor in the midst of the sequester.

Everyone she works with knows these simple truths. I’m just warning the rest of you. Whatever you do, whatever you say in the Comments, don’t piss her off.

Two rules. Don’t EVER turn your back to her. Something about a hurricane.

And don’t EVER let her get on horseback when you’ve crossed her. She WILL ride you down.

And, no. it’s not all about armor and rhetoric. It’s also about celtic magic.

Swap out the hair for a red mane and you’ve got the picture. Are we understanding one another?

Other than that, she’s sweet and docile and nice. Are we clear? Good. That’s settled then.

The Progressive Mind

Robert knows. Robert has seen. When a man is both young and aware his pen is invincible.

But one cannot transmit (as a virus or a meme) if one kills with such immediacy that there is no opportunity-time to transmit the messages to another node.

Take up the pen; make them anonymized but show the Queen for what she is.

They have not (yet) sufficiently extended the definition of insect. They are ready to receive your medicine; they are strong enough to see themselves against the fabric of your original thesis.

He linked this: Five New Species Discovered

But I’ll do him one or two better. This is what we’re really up against with the progressive hive mind.

Part I:

Part II:

Sigourney kicks ass, doesn’t she? Nothing more dangerous than a pissed off mommy wannabe. Take it how you will.

A point of clarification. The “Insect Brain” was not the original thesis of the work most of you are familiar with. It was the tongue in cheek premise of a book called The Naked Woman, written in 1993 and responsible for getting me blackballed for life from the book publishing industry. Just so we’re clear.

Now for a moment of necessary atonement…

Are we good now? No garden shears in that huge manly purse?

Don’t forget I have Raebert to protect me. He doesn’t like manly purses.

Don’t like’em. Don’t ask me why.

Raebert +

Me

Equals:

One ancient, cranky laird of the manor. Hi. You were saying?…

Scottish arithmetic. It may not add up to much, but it has some bite to it.

Thanks for putting up with us. We appreciate it. Your thought for the day:

One you can see, I think. “Three Men in a Boat.” Charming, silly, episodic, and a relief from everything we’re dealing with now. Rowing on the Themes. For fun.

You can’t see it here, but you should also try Innocents Abroad. Mark Twain in a lovely miniseries starring Craig Wasson on PBS. Sorry I can’t show you the video, even though they also took some wooden boats here and there.

Sorrier still I can’t show you the best parts of the Snow Goose. Not my best night.

But I do love wooden boats nonetheless.

They breathe, you know. Like we do. Regardless of who’s at the tiller.

P.S. Forgot. The best river story ever, beginning right here.

Stop boring me with nothing. There’s no more soup. Otherwise, I’d kill The Nothing myself.

No talking. Please. I have to have my sleep.

He showed up on Fox News Sunday. His name at the moment is Ezekiel Emmanuel.

Even kids know The Nothing when they see him.

So why can’t ordinary Americans? Are we really so neutered that we can’t see the enemy when he announces himself?

Gee whiz. I had another me vs Raebert post lined up on the subject of Kirsten Powers, the Fox News Channel’s most beguiling defender of Democrat nanny state policies.

Sleeping Beauty

Yorkies rule

It seems we were both wrong this time.

I was wrong to think her coddled and Raebert was wrong to think her diminutive.

I honestly can’t think of anything braver for a professional liberal to do than publish the column she just wrote for Christianity Today. The first few paragraphs:

Just seven years ago, if someone had told me that I’d be writing for Christianity Today magazine about how I came to believe in God, I would have laughed out loud. If there was one thing in which I was completely secure, it was that I would never adhere to any religion—especially to evangelical Christianity, which I held in particular contempt.

I grew up in the Episcopal Church in Alaska, but my belief was superficial and flimsy. It was borrowed from my archaeologist father, who was so brilliant he taught himself to speak and read Russian. When I encountered doubt, I would fall back on the fact that he believed.

Leaning on my father’s faith got me through high school. But by college it wasn’t enough, especially because as I grew older he began to confide in me his own doubts. What little faith I had couldn’t withstand this revelation. From my early 20s on, I would waver between atheism and agnosticism, never coming close to considering that God could be real.

Later on:

To the extent that I encountered Christians, it was in the news cycle. And inevitably they were saying something about gay people or feminists. I didn’t feel I was missing much. So when I began dating a man who was into Jesus, I was not looking for God. In fact, the week before I met him, a friend had asked me if I had any deal breakers in dating. My response: “Just nobody who is religious.”

But she wound with a boyfriend who was religious:

A few months into our relationship, my boyfriend called to say he had something important to talk to me about. I remember exactly where I was sitting in my West Village apartment when he said, “Do you believe Jesus is your Savior?” My stomach sank. I started to panic. Oh no, was my first thought. He’s crazy.

When I answered no, he asked, “Do you think you could ever believe it?” He explained that he was at a point in life when he wanted to get married and felt that I could be that person, but he couldn’t marry a non-Christian. I said I didn’t want to mislead him—that I would never believe in Jesus.

Then he said the magic words for a liberal: “Do you think you could keep an open mind about it?” Well, of course. “I’m very open-minded!” Even though I wasn’t at all. I derided Christians as anti-intellectual bigots who were too weak to face the reality that there is no rhyme or reason to the world. I had found this man’s church attendance an oddity to overlook, not a point in his favor.

As he talked, I grew conflicted. On the one hand, I was creeped out. On the other hand, I had enormous respect for him. He is smart, educated, and intellectually curious. I remember thinking, What if this is true, and I’m not even willing to consider it?

She went to church, heard a pastor who argued philosophy, history, everything but fire and brimstone. She came to believe in Christianity as a moral system, but no more than that.

Then one night in 2006, on a trip to Taiwan, I woke up in what felt like a strange cross between a dream and reality. Jesus came to me and said, “Here I am.” It felt so real. I didn’t know what to make of it. I called my boyfriend, but before I had time to tell him about it, he told me he had been praying the night before and felt we were supposed to break up. So we did. Honestly, while I was upset, I was more traumatized by Jesus visiting me.

I tried to write off the experience as misfiring synapses, but I couldn’t shake it. When I returned to New York a few days later, I was lost. I suddenly felt God everywhere and it was terrifying. More important, it was unwelcome. It felt like an invasion. I started to fear I was going crazy.

More resistance, of course, because she’s a fighter.

I spent the next few months doing my best to wrestle away from God. It was pointless. Everywhere I turned, there he was. Slowly there was less fear and more joy. The Hound of Heaven had pursued me and caught me—whether I liked it or not.

Read the whole column. I believe she’s risking the career she spent her whole life pursuing. I, for one, admire her. She’s ceased to be a cartoon to me, not that that was ever my judgment to make for anyone else. She’s a human being who knows that’s not such a small thing in the grand scheme of the universe.

Kirsten Powers

Words Fail. Senses overload. Angels.

At 3:30 this afternoon, Notre Dame will play Navy again. Snore.

What’s not a snore is that the Blue Angels will make their first return to duty since the sequester.

Hallelujah. We’ve seen the Blue Angels. They’re magnificent.

We heard the takeoff. It sounded like the naval guns beginning the bombardment of Normandy on D-Day. But still no sign of those blue and yellow machines we had seen lined up on the tarmac. “They can’t do all their maneuvers ten feet off the runway,” I offered lamely. “Of course not,” said Mrs InstaPunk.

By now the sound was firing at us from, seemingly, all points of the compass. We, and a few others camped pathetically in the parking lot, craned our heads in every direction. Where were they? Where was the sound coming from?

Then I saw them. Four planes climbing straight up to the north. At our distance from them, there was no separation among the triangular shapes. Each wingpoint was welded to another, and the ascending formation was but a single unit through which you could see small triangles of sky. Behind us a shattering engine scream announced the arrival of a fifth plane, and a sixth, returning to the airfield from the south at very low altitude. They disappeared, and apparently parted company, behind the hangars that blocked our view west, but after their exhaust blasts diverged, I suddenly saw them through a wide gap between the two biggest hangars — passing each other in opposing directions nearly six inches apart just a couple hundred feet over the runway. “There!” I shouted. “Jesus.”

There were seven planes in all, but it seemed like more. We got the feeling of being at the epicenter of a vast virtual armillary sphere, around which various combinations of planes were orbiting in all possible directions, in impossibly tight formations, to the limit of the invisible tether that bound them, until the gravity of the center pulled them back together at the reckless velocity of a brand new universe. When they converged and flew past one another, the colliding onslaught of sound resembled Stephen Hawking’s version of the Big Bang, an incipient mega-explosion that doesn’t ever quite happen because you can never get closer than a trillionth of a second to the birth of physics.

“We can go now,” announced Mrs. InstaPunk. “I’ve seen the Blue Angels.”

So we started the car and began the drive back home.

That should be the end of it. But it isn’t. When you leave the ballgame or the concert, you’re almost immediately outside the action and whatever you hear of it is muted, diminished, and subsiding. When you leave the epicenter of a Blue Angels performance, you are merely plotting the direction of subsequent, incredibly immediate encounters.

We hadn’t thought of that. But the residents of Millville and the surrounding rural areas had. We reached the heavily wooded main road that would lead us back home, and the first clearing we came to was lined on both sides by cars, pickup trucks, motorcycles, lawn chairs, blankets and dozens of people. We followed the direction of their upturned faces, and here came the Blue Angels again, four planes locked together as one, slowly rotating as they shivered the pine trees en route.

“Should I pull over?” I asked. “They’ve obviously got the perfect spot here to watch from. I don’t want you to miss anything.”

“No. Keep going. It’s okay.”

We still hadn’t gotten it. Nobody had to go to the air show to experience the power and majesty of the Blue Angels. As we proceeded down what I’d always known as a back country road, every gap in the trees, every crossroad was jammed with cars, bikes, and people. Where there were houses, there were crowds, and the American flags flew, and the Blue Angels obliged by flying past and back again, showering us with waves of sound that rattled windows and rippled the wading pools.

Through one stretch of pure woods, we experienced a flyover so low that both of us ducked inside the car. The sound of the plane overhead was like a a yard of duct tape being ripped off your naked eardrums. Farther on, more people, more cars, more flags, the occasional, helplessly grinning state trooper guarding an intersection, and oddly unhurried traffic away from the show. I drove just under 50 and was astonished that an old biker who could have been Paul Teutle, Sr, made no effort to pass. When he finally turned off, I tossed him a wave, and he gave me a nod.

So I’m giving you a nod now. Watch the game and hope NBC has the wit to give us a glimpse at least of the angels in navy blue.

On earth…

…as it is in heaven…

…but then it’s back to earth, and step by step for every generation.

Step…

…by step…

…by step…

Because we’re all still alive until we surrender. Unless despair is our new passion.

FOOTNOTE: The Bach piece was borrowed from an NRO post in which a reminiscence was cited. Carl Sagan insisted that his Voyager mission had to include music. One professor said the answer was simple: Send the entire works of Bach. Then he thought better of it. “It might look like showing off.”