Sunday/The Baptist and Reeds

The more uncivilized the man, the surer he is that he knows precisely what is right and what is wrong...the truly civilized man is always skeptical and tolerant, in this field as in all others. His culture is based on "I'm not too sure."--Mencken 


I continue to linger. I am reassured I haven't developed St. Vitus' Dance. 

On September 24th, 1980, a man wearing cowboy boots and carrying two brown suitcases entered Binion’s Horseshoe Casino in Las Vegas. One suitcase held $777,000 in cash; the other was empty. After converting the money into chips, the man approached a craps table on the casino floor and put everything on the backline. This meant he was betting against the woman rolling the dice. If she lost, he’d double his money. If she won, he’d lose everything. Scarcely aware of the amount riding on her dice, the woman rolled three times: 6, 9, 7.

“Pay the backline,” said the dealer. And just like that, the man won over $1.5 million. He calmly filled the empty suitcase with his winnings, exited Binion’s into the desert afternoon, and drove off. It was the largest amount ever bet on a dice roll in America.

The self-storage industry is growing fast and has grown into a $38 billion industry. Some statistics stand out from this recent article:

1. "One in 11 Americans pays an average of $91.14 per month to use self-storage."
2. "According to SpareFoot, a company that tracks the self-storage industry, the United States boasts more than 50,000 facilities and roughly 2.311 billion square feet of rentable space."
3. The industry has grown by 7.7 percent per year since 2012.
4. "Paying for storage space is like a gym membership; consumers join and forget about it. Even better for owners, they’re often willing to accept slight increases in cost, rather than deal with the hassle of moving their possessions across town to a competitor’s warehouse."
5. New York has roughly 50 million square feet of self-storage space. And yet, with 3.5 square feet of self-storage per resident, it's the most "underserved market" in America according to CBRE (the national average is 7.2 square feet per person).

Four new dollar stores will open in the U.S. every single day of 2019. That's a new dollar store every six hours. There are more dollar stores than there are Walmarts, McDonald’s and CVS stores combined.

In 2017 Google and Facebook lost $100 million between them to one scammer who sent them fake invoices.

Black women in the United States die in childbirth at roughly the same rate as women in Mongolia.

If it is morally wrong for the disadvantaged person to demand transfers at gunpoint, is it also be morally wrong for political actors to demand transfers at gunpoint on behalf of the disadvantaged person.

On this day in 1945, General Douglas MacArthur, in his capacity as Supreme Commander of Allied Powers in the Pacific, brings an end to Shintoism as Japan’s established religion. The Shinto system included the belief that the emperor, in this case, Hirohito, was divine.
So a military guy declares a religion untrue. And he stops it. Bad things happen when you lose a war.





                          The Baptist and Reeds


In today's gospel, The Baptist in prison sends messengers to ask Christ if he is The One, or should they wait for another? This has been one of those debated events in the New Testament. Is John unsure? Are his men unsure? Does John want to show his followers that Christ is indeed The One? The implication has always been that this is one of the defining moments of the division of the Old Testament from the New. John is the last of the Old Testament prophets, describing a more physical deity, a God of smiting and war. The New Testament is completely different. As Christ ascends, John declines.


                    A Musical Instrument

 I.

WHAT was he doing, the great god Pan,

    Down in the reeds by the river?

Spreading ruin and scattering ban,

Splashing and paddling with hoofs of a goat,

And breaking the golden lilies afloat

    With the dragon-fly on the river.

II.

He tore out a reed, the great god Pan,

    From the deep cool bed of the river :

The limpid water turbidly ran,

And the broken lilies a-dying lay,

And the dragon-fly had fled away,

    Ere he brought it out of the river.

III.

High on the shore sate the great god Pan,

    While turbidly flowed the river ;

And hacked and hewed as a great god can,

With his hard bleak steel at the patient reed,

Till there was not a sign of a leaf indeed

    To prove it fresh from the river.

IV.

He cut it short, did the great god Pan,

    (How tall it stood in the river !)

Then drew the pith, like the heart of a man,

Steadily from the outside ring,

And notched the poor dry empty thing

    In holes, as he sate by the river.

V.

This is the way,' laughed the great god Pan,

    Laughed while he sate by the river,)

The only way, since gods began

To make sweet music, they could succeed.'

Then, dropping his mouth to a hole in the reed,

    He blew in power by the river.

VI.

Sweet, sweet, sweet, O Pan !

    Piercing sweet by the river !

Blinding sweet, O great god Pan !

The sun on the hill forgot to die,

And the lilies revived, and the dragon-fly

    Came back to dream on the river.

VII.

Yet half a beast is the great god Pan,

    To laugh as he sits by the river,

Making a poet out of a man :

The true gods sigh for the cost and pain, —

For the reed which grows nevermore again

    As a reed with the reeds in the river.

BY ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING