Okay, I'm going to dedicate this entire post to pro basketball.

Oops! WTF?

My brain just took a crap from my ears down my neck.

I was some befuddled yesterday by a website dedicated to Atheists. I was buying the horse on an examination of the wrong end. I am tired of being an "-ist", and there was never any influence from any individual or group in the my decision. Least a group of "atheists".

Danny Burns steered me around to the other end, the etymology of the term, and it's all so clear I'm too embarrassed to add.

I resent leftist and anarchist. Never spent any time with either, and can't say my politics deserved to be lumped together with theirs.

And I'm a bit of a "-path", socio- and maybe, measurably, psycho-.

What I am, totally, is a dumbath, and I'll share responsibility, along with nature and nurture.

A red tail sat on top of a pole in the humid furnace of yesterday, with plenty of birds for company on the wires to and from. (Okay, I know it's the same wire. What I can never be made to understand is that electricity doesn't travel in the wire, but sets up a field from one terminus to another, with the positive charge tending toward the negative terminus. By all means work that out for yourself. I have nothing to offer.) My guess is they felt safe in the near, as the beautiful giant would have no room to mount an attack, were he so inclined.

He had a variety of pickins. He could easily see a hint of movement for over a mile in any direction.

What's it like? Observe a drop of water through a good microscope. If you haven't in a while, prepare to be entertained. Step back and look at your drop, and what a small portion you are seeing, and know this is what the red tail sees. In every direction. From his perch. For over a mile.

I boarded my chestnut gelding, Mister Buckles, for some time at a facility called "Green Apple Stables', behind the Veterans campground on SR 22 east of Kokomo.

It emerged the owner was a fucking loonie, total literalist Christian, Home Bible schooling

three children.

The youngest child, a girl about 6, showed me a Silurian fossil she had picked up, perhaps from local, crushed stone. I told her that about 400 million years ago, this area was covered by an ocean, and this shell lived in it then.

I moved Mister Buckles because he had become agitated, even stepping on my foot and breaking some toes. Also, they were keeping bitches and litters in unused horse stalls, sensory deprivation I felt was unwarranted.

What little I knew.

E-mail and newspaper stories a couple years later noted that the little girl and her 8-year old brother were step-children, and being treated in every negative connotation of the word.

The worst was they were punished with confinement in a horse stall, for extended periods, to include overnight. They were taken in whatever they were wearing, even pajamas in the winter, and locked up, in an unheated barn.

The high sides of the stall had been wired up, to prevent them from climbing out.

Doing the Lord's work.

Prayer: "Dear Lord, protect me from your believers"*.

A problem I have (see "Shopping in the House of the Holy", Archive, Nov. 2, 2009) is the literalists with the no-holds-barred adherence to the word of god, and the realists, scholars and all other believers who accept the book as open to interpretation.

A simple dichotomy, for starters:Did god invent the world in six days?

Yes, out of nothing.

No, the genesis of the earth has been ongoing for billions of years.

Never mind, this is much too depressing.

I suppose evil, such as that loosed on those two little kids, would exist without god.

Prove it.

For Britt, whom I truly love. I could not be one iota happier for you and my nephew.

* The "prayer" is by Tim Dorsey, via Serge Storms, the absolute best anti-hero in all of creation.