FREEBIE TOY FAN WITH STUFF ON IT

I love toys. I was working by the time I was 10, pulling irrigation pipes, pulling bolls, chopping weeds, shooting vermin. By 14 I was working every afternoon and weekends as an electrician helper. At 16 I added early morning delivery of freight to that list. So now that I'm RETIRED, I have decided playing and toys are good for me. Actually I've been buying toys since before my first kid.

So I like to play with toys. My wife brought this one home from a school carnival that her school had. It is marvelous. I know everybody else has seen thousands of these things. I'm kind down the supply line from the sources some times.

So here is this little promotional toy fan from one of the big old super duper Oil companies here in Oklahoma City.

Now here is what the toy does:

NOTICE: (to my older friends and relatives) This is a movie punch the little triangle to play it.

NO, NO, not with your finger, put the curser arrow on top of it and left click. OK, call one of your kids in to help.

Thank you DEVON Oil Company for such a neat toy!

Lewis and Clark in Space

The Bicentennial of the the Corps of Discovery a.k.a. the Lewis and Clark Expedition has been over a few years. I paid a lot of attention to the celebration in that I have been a Lewis and Clark student for quite some time. I collected a lot of images, most I took, but many came from the plethora of the WWW.

So I've decided to share with you dear readers, lookers, and lurkers some of the best pictures I have. I will do this over time as the mood strikes me of course like everything else in bloggerland.

Let us begin with the most Estoric of the Lewis and Clark items: Their Space Ships:

Movie uniform patch.

Probably one of the most grotesque movies I have ever seen was " The Event Horizon", not to be confused with the L&C movie "The Far Horizon". But it did have a space ship named the Lewis & Clark.

And so this is it, the Space ship Lewis and Clark from the movie " The event Horizon". Want to know more about it:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Event_Horizon_(film)

This little ship was one of the first Star Ships of the Star Trek imagination.

It is the UNSS Lewis and Clark of the Aventeur Class, as depicted in an early history of Star Trek ships.

This is later version Star Trek ship, the U.S.S. Lewis and Clark of the Andromeda Class.

And here some "action" shots of the U.S.S. L&C




And this little ship is a Type 6 Shuttle Craft named "Sacajawea" that was part of the Star Trek Voyager series. She's a little slicker that the WWII Liberty Class troop ship named Sacajawea(a.k.a. 612) , or even the WW II USN Tugboat Sacagawea (YT-326). Those will be taken up in a future post.

Yes there are even more, but they are the imagination of specific artist who hold copy rights on the pictures so I won't show them here.


So do you know of any other Lewis and Clark Space/Star Ships? Clue me in.

Future L&C post will be "down to earth".

Post Script:

How could I have missed the famous "Torch Ship" from Robert Heinlein. Named the 'Lewis and Clark' , it was a sub-light vehicle that traveled at 99% of light speed. It was sent out to the stars with several sets of telepathic twins used for communication. One being left on earth and the other on the ship.

HOLY MOSES

EXODUS 19:

16 And it came to pass on the third day, when it was morning, that there were thunders and lightnings, and a thick cloud upon the mount, and the voice of a trumpet exceeding loud; and all the people that were in the camp trembled.
17 And Moses brought forth the people out of the camp to meet God; and they stood at the nether part of the mount.
18 And mount Sinai, the whole of it, smoked, because Jehovah descended upon it in fire; and the smoke thereof ascended as the smoke of a furnace, and the whole mount quaked greatly.
19 And when the voice of the trumpet waxed louder and louder, Moses spake, and God answered him by a voice.
20 And Jehovah came down upon mount Sinai, to the top of the mount: and Jehovah called Moses to the top of the mount; and Moses went up.

Holy Moses, look at this. (click to enlarge)
This is a photograph of the recent eruption of ash from the Chilean volcano

Mt. Llaima.

So you are out in the desert and some guy leads you to this and then disapears and the comes back and tells you he's been talking to God. OK, I'm in. Right on Moses, what ever you say.

Gila Wilderness

Long Long ago I took a backpacking trip into the Gila Wilderness on the Mogollon Rim in SW New Mexico. Those of you who only know me as an old fart, can stop laughing now.
These pictures are from then.



I think of this one as the welcoming committee. They are looking us over, checking out their prospects for a meal sometime in the near future.



"Oh no, more tourist! That makes 6 this year."




I truely appreciate that God put rattlers on this sucker. I could hear him but it took me too many seconds to find him in the grass.



The gold at the end of the rainbow. Yes he was orange, but looked gold in the light.

Oklahoma City Overflow

The theme is water.
These are pictures of the Overholser Reservoir in Oklahoma City in late fall 2007. This is the Canadian River.


This reservoir is seldom ever close to full. Normally it diverts its water to another holding tank off river called Lake Hefner. Once Hefner is full, then they will fill this one. When everything is full then the river flows unobstructed.


Here as you can see, the river is flowing through the diversion gate quite well.


This is the Canadian river below the damn. It is now 30 feet deep and flowing at, well, very fast.
Two young men died here. One in a car that plunged into the waters and another while jogging.
Normally, at this place you can walk across the river and not be Jesus. Try it now and you will meet him.


This a clip of the outflow. The next day, when I didn't take my camera, dumb, it was flowing over the whole length of the dam at a depth of two feet. The fence along the walk way next to the water was long gone, as were the light poles. The Canadian River drains western Oklahoma which doesn't normally get so much rain. But what is normal anymore anyway? Yes, this flows into the Mississippi..

Mississippi River Deep and Wide

My daughter is in post graduate work at LSU. Yesterday she sent these pictures taken two blocks from her home.

The water on the right is the Mississippi River. The asphalt road on top, is a bike path ON TOP of the river levy. On the left, 25 feet lower than the top of the levy is the edge of the LSU campus. Can you say, get wet.

We got 5 inches of rain here in the last three days. It is raining almost constantly somewhere in the Mississippi drainage basin right now. It is all headed down to the Mississippi River.

My daughter has sent me some updates and more pictures.

This is what the levee looked like in December from the River's side. The Mississippi is off to the

left and down 20 feet further.

More perspective. This is looking from the top of the levee out towards the River.

Enlarge the picture by clicking on it and note hubby type person by the edge of the river waving.

This is what the River looks like from the LSU side of the River just down from my daughter's home. A road is in the foreground, the bike path is at the top of the levee and the water in the river is about even with the bottom of the trees in the photo. I'm not sure how much sleep I could get in a house with 20 feet of water above it two blocks away.

This is at Levee top again normally you drive on dry land to get to this place. Now it is an island in a River 43 feet above flood stage. In the last few days the level has dropped to 35 feet above flood stage.

Nuclear War Address Change

Gripe and moan and groan and curse and grinch, Thing are just too terrible to talk about these days!


Bullshit!


You could be filling out one of these.




I remember watching the Hungarian Revolution on TV.


I remember just outside of a small Oklahoma town, watching an Atlas ICBM outside of its Silo, fueled up, emitting vapors under the flood lights, and ready to go somewhere.


I remember the Bay of Pigs.


I remember the U-2 (not the band) photos of the missile bases in Cuba being shown on TV.


I remember seeing the Hawk Missile batteries deployed along the beaches of the Gulf of Mexico.


I remember when movies like "On The Beach" and "Seven Days in May" didn't seem like fiction.


I remember telling my girlfriend things were so bad that we might not have long to live.


I remember my girl friend telling me if didn't move my hand I wouldn't live very long anyway.


Maybe it ain't so very bad these days after all.


Dangerous yes, but it isn't likely we will need to fill out something like this soon.



Any other Cold War Survivors remember any of that stuff or more?

By the way you can purchase these and many other post cards of all shapes, types, and kinds at this very nice dealer online(Just browsing his stuff is a treat by itself):
http://stores.ebay.com/Outerbridge-Modern-Postcards

Hearding Cats

I love my cats. Sometimes they love me.
When I feed them they love me.
When I brush them the really love me.
So as a cat lover, I love this old commercial.

Obama and the Black Messiah

My friend ER has a post on his site about the diverse ways the Bible is read in a Southern Global Context. An example of that diversity of "reading" is being played out in the United States even on this day of Democratic Primary Elections in Indiana and North Carolina. Most American, who are used to hearing the rantings of many white evangelist on television and have long since grown inured to them, where startled to hear "Black" rantings coming from the pastor of the first Black man with a clear shot at the Presidency. What this , What's this they said....

Below is a thoughtful analysis of the situation from the Asian Times. It has been excerpted but the full article can be found at the citation at the end. Meanwhile check out the posting at the Erudite Rednecks as well (after you read mine of course): http://eruditeredneck.blogspot.com/2008/05/for-my-english-nonbeliever-friend-lee.html



Asian Times (On Line)
Excerpts:

The Peculiar Theology of Black Liberation

By Spengler

Senator Barack Obama ….belongs to a Christian church whose doctrine casts Jesus Christ as a "black messiah" and blacks as "the chosen people". At best, this is a radically different kind of Christianity than most Americans acknowledge; at worst it is an ethnocentric heresy. What played out last week on America's television screens was a clash of two irreconcilable cultures, the posture of "black liberation theology" and the mainstream American understanding of Christianity…..

One of the strangest dialogues in American political history ensued on March 15 when Fox News interviewed Obama's pastor, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, of Chicago's Trinity Church. Wright asserted the authority of the "black liberation" theologians James Cone and Dwight Hopkins:
Wright: How many of Cone's books have you read? How many of Cone's book have you read? Sean Hannity: Reverend, Reverend?
Wright: How many books of Cone's have you head?
Hannity: I'm going to ask you this question ...
Wright: How many books of Dwight Hopkins have you read?
Hannity: You're very angry and defensive. I'm just trying to ask a question here.
Wright: You haven't answered - you haven't answered my question.


Hopkins is a full professor at the University of Chicago's Divinity School; Cone is now distinguished professor at New York's Union Theological Seminary. They promote a "black power" reading of Christianity, to which liberal academic establishment condescends….

Obama referred to this when he asserted in a March 14 statement, "I knew Reverend Wright as someone who served this nation with honor as a United States Marine, as a respected biblical scholar, and as someone who taught or lectured at seminaries across the country, from Union Theological Seminary to the University of Chicago." But the fact the liberal academy condescends to sponsor black liberation theology does not make it less peculiar to mainstream American Christians. Obama wants to talk about what Wright is, rather than what he says. But that way lies apolitical quicksand.

Since Christianity taught the concept of divine election to the Gentiles, every recalcitrant tribe in Christendom has rebelled against Christian universalism, insisting that it is the "Chosen People" of God - French, English, Russian, Germans and even (through the peculiar doctrine of Mormonism) certain Americans. America remains the only really Christian country in the industrial world, precisely because it transcends ethnicity. One finds ethnocentricity only in odd corners of its religious life; one of these is African-American. During the black-power heyday of the late 1960s, after the murder of the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr, the mentors of Wright decided that blacks were the Chosen People. James Cone, the most prominent theologian in the "black liberation" school, teaches that Jesus Christ himself is black. As he explains:

Christ is black therefore not because of some cultural or psychological need of black people, but because and only because Christ really enters into our world where the poor were despised and the black are, disclosing that he is with them enduring humiliation and pain and transforming oppressed slaves into liberating servants.

Theologically, Cone's argument is as silly as the "Aryan Christianity" popular in Nazi Germany, which claimed that Jesus was not a Jew at all but an Aryan Galilean, and that the Aryan race was the "chosen people"……

Black theology refuses to accept a God who is not identified totally with the goals of the black community. If God is not for us and against white people, then he is a murderer, and we had better kill him. …….

Unless God is participating in this holy activity, we must reject his love.
In the black liberation theology taught by Wright, Cone and Hopkins, Jesus Christ is not for all men, but only for the oppressed…….

In this respect black liberation theology is identical in content to all the ethnocentric heresies that preceded it. Christianity has no use for the nations, a "drop of the bucket" and "dust on the scales", in the words of Isaiah. It requires that individuals turn their back on their ethnicity to be reborn into Israel in the spirit. That is much easier for Americans than for the citizens of other nations, for Americans have no ethnicity…….

In his response to Hannity, Wright genuinely seemed to believe that the authority of Cone and Hopkins, who now hold important posts at liberal theological seminaries, was sufficient to make the issue go away….…

Americans, who for the most part belong to Christian churches that preach mainstream Christian doctrine. Christianity teaches unconditional love for a God whose love for humankind is absolute; it does not teach the repudiation of a God who does not destroy our enemies on the spot. …

Obama views Wright rather at arm's length: as the New York Times reported on April 30, 2007: Reverend Wright is a child of the 60s, and he often expresses himself in that language of concern with institutional racism and the struggles the African-American community has gone through," Mr Obama said. "He analyzes public events in the context of race. I tend to look at them through the context of social justice and inequality.

Obama holds his own views close. But it seems unlikely that he would identify with the ideological fits of the black-power movement of the 1960s…..

It is possible that because of the Wright affair Obama will suffer for what he pretended to be, rather than for what he really is.


The complete article and related articles may be found at:http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/JC18Aa01.html

James Cone's Black Liberation Theology

So much has been inferred and said about Black Liberation Theology, perhaps we should listen to the man who help start it all, Dr. James Cone. The first video is 20 minutes long, but well worth the time on many levels.

1. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-1X5sZ6Q4Fw&feature=related

The second video on the Black Church is 7 minutes long.

2. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fPF2RuD4124&feature=related

I'll resist comment and let these tweak your brain cells by themselves.