You can do anything you want to do.  What is rare is this actual wanting to do a specific thing:  wanting it so much that you are practically blind to all other things, that nothing else will satisfy you.

A few pages on, in My Name is Asher Lev, I read the following:

"It will be five years," Jacob Kahn said to her.  "Millions of people can draw.  Art is whether or not there is a scream in him wanting to get out in a special way."

"Or a laugh," she said.  "Picasso laughs, too."

"Or a laugh," he said.

is the rarest butterfly in the entire world! It's the only butterfly

that escaped Lord Beasley.

                                --Gilligan's Island

This, my friends, is not the illusive pussycat swallowtail (as far as I know) but just another big ol' butterfly I saw in my backyard:

Originally, I didn't plan on the upper wings to be out of focus and the main body sharp but I like the effect in retrospect.

You can pledge via my pledge page at:  Help Graham Beat Amy.

Please help me keep up with the Joneses.

Go to the other side of the fold to get to The Champagne Room (Fair Warning:  nothing on the other side of the fold is safe for work.  And if you don't like cussin', it's not safe for you anywhere).

There's no sex in the champagne room and you've probably just wasted your time clicking on that "continue reading" shit--all you're going to find over here is just another couple of Youtube clips.  I'm serious, this is a total waste of time.

I thought about this scene from Lebowski and in searching for it ran across the four minute clip of every cuss word in the movie.  So juvenile, yet so funny I almost wept.  Highlight:  Julianne Moore's character a third of the way through saying the word "vagina" (1:05).  Wipes his eyes and returns to typing.

Anyway, a man can't stay serious all the time and so I give you The Big Lebowski, nobody fucks with the Jesus (no, not that Jesus):

I'm sure that part of this streak comes from being around little kids too much and having to hold my tongue when I'm teaching.  It just builds up and I gotta let it out.  Time to just come clean and have at it.  So I give you these words of wisdom from Chris Rock:  there's no sex in The Champagne Room:

There could be no definitive interpretation of scripture.  this point was made in the very early days at Yavneh, when R. Eliezer was engaged in an intractable argument with his colleagues about a legal ruling (halakha) in the Torah.  When they refused to accept his opinion, R. Eliezer asked God to back him up with some miracles, and--mirabile dictu--a carob tree moved four hundred cubits of its own accord; water in a conduit flowed uphill; and the walls of the house of studies shook so violently that the building seemed about to collapse.  But the other rabbis were not impressed by this show of supernatural force.  In desperation, R. Eliezer asked for a bat qol ('voice from heaven') to adjudicate and the divine voice obligingly declared: 'What have you against R. Elizer?  The Halakah is always as he says.'  But Rabbi Joshua quoted a verse from Deuteronomy:  'It is not in heaven.'  The Torah was no longer confined to the celestial world; once it had been promulgated on Mount Sinai, it no longer belonged to God but was the inalienable possession of very single Jew.  So, commented a later rabbi, "We pay no attention to a heavenly voice.'  And furthermore, it had been decreed at Sinai: 'By a majority you are to decide', so R. Eliezer, a minority of one, could not override the popular vote.  When God heard that his opinion had been overruled, he laughed and said:  'My children have conquered me.'

Come again?  What's that?  A nonprofit karate studio?  What's up with that?  Well, we're more than just a karate studio, we're an organization that's dedicated to the proposition that by teaching folks self defense skills we can make Austin a safer and less violent place.  Violence occurs across a spectrum and can be as "mild" as verbal abuse in the home or in the workplace or as extreme as assault, rape and even murder.  Because violence occurs across a continuum and it's more likely to be a friend, a relative, someone that you're dating or your spouse than a stranger jumping out of the bushes, we think that people need to be prepared with a wide variety of responses.  Just like you don't bring a knife to a gunfight, it's usually not an appropriate response to punch someone in the eye who's merely called you a name or crossed other personal boundaries.  But just because you don't respond to verbal aggression with a physical assault doesn't mean that you don't respond at all.  Our method of teaching self defense includes verbal and non-verbal defenses, deescalation training, a major emphasis on trusting your instincts, as well as the physical skills that most people associate with self defense training.  We think that responding appropriately to violence in whatever form it takes makes you a safer person and we believe that everyone deserves to defend themselves and should have the opportunity to learn how to defend themselves effectively.

Good enough.  But that still doesn't answer why we're a nonprofit.  We're an education-based nonprofit, which means that our funding primarily goes to educational outreaches.  We provide scholarship assistance to students in our karate program and also provide scholarships to our self defense seminars because we don't believe that anyone should be left out because they don't have enough money.  In this past year we taught a free self defense against bullies clinic for school kids in conjunction with Equality Texas, we've worked with Safeplace, the Girl Scouts, taught classes at the Criss Cole Rehabilitation Center for the Visually Impaired, participated in a Red Cross health fair, worked with all kinds of school kids and all of this is in addition to our regular self defense classes we hold for women, teens and coed groups at the dojo.  We've also started a Fighting for Justice Speaker Series that is designed to address broader issues of violence in our culture.

You can find out more about Sun Dragon by going to our website's About Page or, for a really good article about one of our students you can read Spike Gillespie's Fight Like a Girl post on Austinist (this article is especially cool because it was written in reference to our black belt testing and I am identified as "a grown man" in it).

So what do you think?  Five dollars?  Ten?  Maybe a little bit more?  It's up to you to decide what you want to do with your charity dollars but I'd love it if some of you would support Sun Dragon and you can do it quickly online at our pledge page (just takes a minute).  We do good work and I'd love for some of you to be a part of it.  If any of you are in the Austin area and want to watch the action, it starts at 10:00 on Saturday morning at the dojo.  

If you have any trouble with the pledge page link, here's my main Kickathon page.  Let me know if it gives you any trouble.  For my new Facebook friends, sorry to friend you just in time for the money pitch.  But I haven't friended anyone for probably four or five months and so we can all be thankful this was sufficient for me to get out there and mingle with you guys.

Here's a second crop of the same picture, probably blown up a little bit too big for the clarity of the focus but I still kinda like it:

About a third of the way through the book there's a chapter in which a teacher explains to his son the history of Hasidism and I really like this one passage that talks about the Ba'al Shem Tov (the "Besht"), the spiritual father of Hasidism.  I won't reproduce the whole of it, but here's a portion that talks about the Besht and his teachings:

Finally, he (Israel) began to travel and he became a Ba'al Shem.  he was kind and saintly and godly, and he seemed to want to help people not for the money they paid him but for the love he had for them.  And so they came to call him the Ba'al Shem Tov--the Kind or Good Master of the Name.  He mingled with the people and talked to them about God and His Torah in plain, simple language that they could easily understand.  He taught them that the purpose of man is to make his life holy--every aspect of his life:  eating, drinking, praying, sleeping.  Giod is everywhere, he told them, and if it seems at times that He is hidden from us, it is only because we have not yet learned to seek Him correctly.  Evil is like a hard shell.  Within this shell is the spark of God, is goodness.  How do we penetrate the shell?  By sincere and honest prayer, by being happy, and by loving all people.  The Ba'[al Shem Tov--his followers later shortened his name and called him the Besht--believed that no man is so sinful that he cannot be purified by love and understanding.  He also believed--and here is where he brought down upon himself the rage of the learned rabbis--that the study of Talmud was not very important, that there need not be fixed times for prayers, that God could be worshiped through a sincere heart, through joy and singing and dancing.  In other words, Reuven, he opposed any form of mechanical religion.  There was nothing new in what he taught.  you will find it all in the Bible, Talmud, and Kabbalah.  But he gave it a special emphasis and taught it at a key time to people who were hungry for this kind of teaching.  And these people listened and loved him.  Many great rabbis came to mock him and went away converted to his way of thinking .  When he died, his followers opened their own synagogues.  Before the end of that century, about half of eastern European Jewry consisted of Hasidim, as his followers were called, pious ones.  So great was the need of the masses for a new way to approach God.

Listening to NPR's Sound Opinions this morning as I woke up, for their Halloween show they played Samurai Showdown (Raise Your Swords) from Jim Jarmusch's Ghost Dog and I thought that would make a perfect Halloween video to post.  Alas, the videos were less than visually appealing and so the Dog will be relegated to the other side of the fold.  However, it did get me on Youtube and I'd been thinking of this tune from Steve Taylor for some time, so I went ahead and gave it a gander.  Totally dated but I do like this song from one of the few very creative voices in Christian music from back in the day:

The RZA--Samurai Showdown (Raise Your Swords):

There's a paragraph in the introduction in which Armstrong talks about the guiding principles of exegesis for some of those who have shaped the selection and the composition of the canon that I liked a lot.  It was actually one of the things that caught my ear when Bill was talking about the book.  So I'm going to get off the page and let Armstrong's words speak for themselves, it's good stuff I think:

Some of the most important biblical authorities insisted that charity must be the guiding principle of exegesis:  any interpretation that spread hatred or disdain was illegitimate.  All the world faiths claim that compassion is not only the prime virtue and the test of true religiosity but that it actually introduces us to Nirvana, God or the Dao.  But sadly the biography of the Bible represents the failures as well as the triumphs of the religious quest.  The biblical authors and their interpreters have all too often succumbed to the violence, unkindness and exclusivity that is rife in their societies.

I was driving back from the Natural Gardener where I was trying to find out what to do to bring by cukes back from the brink of destruction from the powdery mildew blight they are suffering from and decided to do a little radio slumming and listen to Glenn Beck.  It was all the usual stuff but when they cut to commercial, something odd struck me--he was being supported by the Survival Seed Bank company.

SSB sells a collection of seeds it purports will plant a one acre "crisis garden" and their ads really push the idea that our food supply is in crisis, the government might confiscate your seeds and that one day soon seeds might be more valuable than gold (the prior Glenn Beck ad had been for Goldline International).  I'm used to hearing this ad on the Alex Jones Infowar show, which is a libertarian conspiracy-nut show I usually catch at around one o'clock in the morning when I'm returning from dominoes.  It struck me that Beck's audience must be making the transition into complete wingnut territory if the seed bank folks are advertising on his show.  Which tells me that it's not just liberals who think he's flipped to a very strange place from his previously pretty strange place.

Just as compulsory primary education created a market catered for by cheap dailies and weeklies, so the spread of secondary and latterly tertiary education has created a large population of people, often with well-developed literary and scholarly tastes, who have been educated far beyond their capacity to undertake analytical thought.

And now, the happy couple:

Einstein was raised without religious practice in his home, "Einstein's parents, on the other hand, were "entirely irreligious" and felt no compulsion to hedge their bets.  They did not keep kosher or attend synagogue, and his father referred to Jewish ritual as "ancient superstitions."  But while his home life wasn't religious, it appears that the schools he attended did include religious practice.  His first school was Catholic:

...Consequently, when Albert turned 6 and had to go to school, his parents did not care that there was no Jewish one near their home.  Instead he went to the large Catholic school in their neighborhood, the Petersschule.  As the only Jew among the seventy students in his class, Einstein took the standard course in Catholic religion and ended up enjoying it immensely.  Indeed, he did so well in his Catholic studies that he helped his classmates with theirs.  (p.15)

I often find it hard to judge children's ages, especially those in a video like this, but if I had to guess the Einstein portrayed in the video probably falls in the six to nine range when he was attending Petersschule.  Far from being some sort of hotbed of atheism, the school was Catholic and rather than being taught to doubt God he was taught the Catholic tradition of worship and theology.  Though Einstein was Jewish, he didn't appear to be combatively opposed to his school's presentation of religion.

What about his next school? 

When he turned 9, Einstein moved up to a high school near the center of Munich, the Luitpold Gymnasium, which was known as an enlightened institution that emphasized math and science as well as Latin and Greek.  In addition, the school supplied a teacher to provide religious instruction for him and other Jews.  (p. 16)

Is it possible that this is where the event in the video occurred?  I haven't been able to find any historical evidence that the exchange shown in the video actually happened and Snopes.com dismisses the entire episode as false.  While I find it unlikely that a school that went out of its way to provide Jewish instruction for students would have teachers so smugly set against the existence of God, it's not impossible.  And around about this time, Einstein did go through a period in which he was very religious:

Despite his parents' secularism, or perhaps because of it, Einstein rather suddenly developed a passionate zeal for Judaism.  "He was so fervent in his feelings that, on his own, he observed Jewish religious strictures in every detail," his sister recalled.  He ate no pork, kept kosher dietary laws, and obeyed the strictures of the Sabbath, all rather difficult to do when the rest of his family had a lack of interest bordering on disdain for such displays.  He even composed his own hymns for the glorification of God, which he sang to himself as he walked home from school. (p.16)

So, Einstein certainly had the sort of belief that would lead to that sort of confrontation, but as I said before, the school didn't appear to be the sort of secular institution that would create the atmosphere for it.  In fact, given his home it is much more likely that if such a scene occurred it happened at home rather than at school.

I think that Snopes overstates the case in blankly asserting that the story is false.  But much as we never know every detail of children's lives as they grow up, even famous ones, this would seem to be the sort of event in a child's life that would be remembered by someone and as the schools he attended didn't appear to be the sorts of schools where proselytizing atheists flourish, I find the story pretty improbable.

For curiosity's sake, what became of Einstein's early Jewish fervor?  At the age of 12, he turned against it as radically as he had embraced it:

Through the reading of popular scientific books, I soon reached the conviction that much in the stories of the Bible could not be true.  The consequence was a positively fanatic orgy of freethinking coupled with the impression that youth is intentionally being deceived by the state through lies; it was a crushing impression. (p.20)

This isn't the final take on Einstein and religion, but it certainly showed a definitive break, beyond which the sort of scene presented in the video wouldn't have happened (except possibly in reverse).  What was Einstein's mature understanding of God?  Here's a short quote from "The World as I See It" that gives a pretty good breakdown of what he thought:

The fairest thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science. He who knows it not and can no longer wonder, no longer feel amazement, is as good as dead, a snuffed-out candle. It was the experience of mystery--even if mixed with fear--that engendered religion. A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, of the manifestations of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty, which are only accessible to our reason in their most elementary forms--it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute the truly religious attitude; in this sense, and in this alone, I am a deeply religious man. I cannot conceive of a God who rewards and punishes his creatures, or has a will of the type of which we are conscious in ourselves.An individual who should survive his physical death is also beyond my comprehension, nor do I wish it otherwise; such notions are for the fears or absurd egoism of feeble souls. Enough for me the mystery of the eternity of life, and the inkling of the marvelous structure of reality, together with the single-hearted endeavour to comprehend a portion, be it never so tiny, of the reason that manifests itself in nature. (p. 7 The World as I See It)

While it is apparent from Einstein's writing that he believed in some sort of God, it certainly wasn't the sort of monotheistic God the makers of the video are arguing for, though for at least for a time he did embrace one of the monotheistic traditions and was educated as a child in another.  It's interesting that Life Centre International is using the video to argue for the inclusion of religion within school curricula and yet the seminal moment occurs as a professor is apparently teaching an atheistic approach to life rather than teaching religion.