the turtle speaks

My dad speaks of roses as some men speak of wines:

This one has a particularly strong aroma

Publications are scoured for pedigrees, new offerings, and desirable traits; clippers and gloves sit in the car floorboard ready to prune the unruly bush at a park or business; pilgrimages are made to the growers to buy when the age is right; and roses grown in a hothouse for profit are identified by their lack of scent — an unforgivable defect.

The name comes from a family in France who have bred this one for decades

My dad tends roses at several houses in Oklahoma, the church where he preaches, the YMCA in Midwest City, and a few locations in Sydney Australia. There are roses blooming literally year-round due to his care. We have given bucketfuls to widows, the sick, teachers, neighbors, and — most importantly — my mother.

pH levels affect the growth of the plant and the blooms

Roses take him back to the garden: the fertile Australian soil of my youth, the arid red soil of his western Oklahoma youth, and the primal garden from the Good Book. God made man to have his hands in the dirt, to tend the land he created, to help bring beauty from decay. And this he does when time and energy permit. When the unforgiving Oklahoma climate and unrelenting pastoral duties conspire against the bushes they get replaced with heartier stock from the latest publications.

Do you think a red or a white or a pink would pair best with this meal?

Some men buy a dozen roses; more thoughtful men try to teach their sons to do the same. My dad bought a dozen rose bushes for our backyard. I came home to my boys helping my father put mulch around the new bushes. They’re learning — as I did with the 80 or 90 rose bushes from my childhood backyard — about earth, growth, patience, pruning deadness, and how to bring beautiful things to mothers.

This one’s beautiful and intoxicating

I’m not interested in roses to the same degree. But I have an interest in my father and a primal need — on occasion — to mar my hands with soil and thorns. I’m grateful my father’s hobby lives on in our backyard and will die in slow petal showers from vases inside our home.

Calculating the exchange rate on civilian life

Recently my son needed to learn how to convert currency for a Cub Scout project. Got me thinking about how we can calculate other exchange rates. So here’s a textbook example for calculating the ALV.

Calculating the ALV (American Life Value) for foreign values

The war in Iraq was prompted, to some degree at least, by the search for Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMDs). In the aftermath of 9/11, it was determined that such things needed to be sought out to prevent the future death of Americans. The subsequent war in Iraq was costly, both in monetary terms and in terms of human life. Here we can begin our valuation of human life by comparing the lives taken to determine how much each life is valued:

• American civilians lost on 9/11: 2,977
• Iraqi civilians lost in US war: 111,390 – 121,736

While the American casualites did nothing to deserve death, the Iraqi civilians neither chose their country of origin nor to hide the stockpiles of WMDs that precipitated the attack on their country.

By divding the two values, we have an inital ALV-ILV (Iraqi Life Value) exchange between 37.42 and 40.89. This number shows how many Iraqi civilians the average American civilian is worth.

Armed with this knowledge, you should be able to calculate the ALV for other nations and situations.

Try this

Civilian deaths are not the only casualties. Calcalculate the ALV-ILV exchange rate for fighting casualties, including combat-only and combat + non-combat US deaths.

• Americans lost in war: 4,488. In combat: 3,532
• Iraqi insurgents lost in war: 21,221–26,405

Exercises for the reader

1. Calculate a composite exchange rate by combining civilian and military casualties to get a war exchange rate.

2. Work out the rate not as direct numbers, but as a percentage of population. The American civilian casualty rate is one for every 104,131 people while the Iraqi civilian rate is one for every 269 people. Calculate these values as a percentage and then as a ratio against each other.

3. Some conversions only involve a different scale, but remain constant (Fahrenheit-Celcius, feet-meters, etc) while oher conversions have adjusting values, like currency. Is the ALV a constant or does it change over time?

4. Plot the American and Iraqi casualties as well as the yearly ALV-ILV over the last decade. HINT: you will need the number of American casualties for each year since the Iraqi war started in 2003. Be sure to label your axes!

5. Find another comparison of civilian deaths and calculate the ALV rate for civilians.

Integrate what you’ve learned

Talk with your history or civics teacher to determine how many of the 2,977 American civilian casualties were caused by Iraqis. Recalculate your ALV/ILV based on these new numbers. Also determine how many American civilians were saved based on the massive piles of WMDs that were discovered. Determine a formula to take these saved lives into account.

Why we named our third son Carper

Because this awesome guy is on our family line:

Account of Arthur Green Carper’s Civil War and “Pony Express” Service

Taken from a letter written to Michael Cummings by Lloyd George Melgard, 17 December 1979

“Your great great grandmother, Francis Elmira Iona Carper, had a brother, Arthur Green Carper, b. 8 December 1851, d. 3 Nov. 1934 in Sayre, Oklahoma, who escaped the stockaded school of Notre Dame where his Mother, Mariah Cline Firestone Carper, had placed him to keep him from joining the Civil War volunteers. He bribed a negro washerwoman to carry him out on her head with the dirty laundry and he worked his way south to join the union forces as a drummer boy and saw much action. When the Civil War was over he was too scared of his Mother to return home so he joined the Pony Express and on one of his runs he decided to cross the Oklahoma Indian Territory to save time and was captured, stripped, tied to a stake, had slivers of wood stuck in his flesh by the Indian women and set afire. He showed no fear and such bravery that the Indian chief had the fire doused and had him brought to his tent where he was treated for burns all over his body and he was out of his head for weeks. He became the chief’s slave or personal servant and had to sleep at his feet each night. After many years,he began to think of his Mother and his family in South Whitley, Indiana, and he planned his escape. One night when all were asleep, he dragged the end of his lariet through the camp fire’s coals and loosening the tether rope for the horses, he got on the chief’s white horse which was the fastest and whirled his flaming lariet over the horses causing them to stampede and then he set out for the territory’s boundary. It took time for the Indians to take chase and they pursued him shooting him so full of bullets and arrows that he was able later in life to pass knitting needles through his arms and legs without feeling any pain. The next morning a doctor married to an Indian woman and living on the border came out of his home to find a white horse covered with blood and a man hanging under his belly. He brought him in and worked to save him and he was delerious for months. Finally he learned that he was from South Whitley, Indiana, so we wrote a newspaper there asking if anyone knew of a man of such a height, weight and facial features and his Mother read and realized that this must be he son so she hired two of the best doctors and set out in a stage coach for the Indian territory but the closer they got, the more frightened the doctors became and they both left her. She brought him home and it took a long time before he realized he was no longer an Indian with Indian ways. He married and returned to Oklahoma when it was opened and had a farm there”

Marriage as a joke

My sons love jokes. Bad jokes, Laffy Taffy™ jokes¹, knock-knock jokes, puns; usual young boy stuff. They also love comics, especially Far Side and Calvin and Hobbes. The comics, however, are often read to us from the backseat or recited from memory without the [vital] accompanying pictures.

Dad, funny Far Side. Oh no Wilson! [premature laugh] Look what you sat in! [laugh]

I’m starting to understand their fascination with jokes beyond their understanding and humor level. One of my favorite bloggers, ACU psychologist Richard Beck, explains the phenomenon in Joking Matters. He notes jokes function to reinforce stereotypes and boundary markers. They are funny to those who are on the inside and share the worldview of the joke teller.

…most jokes are highly compressed which demands that the listener fill in the background assumptions, values, and beliefs that make the joke work. If the listener cannot fill in this background he doesn’t “get it” and the joke fails to produce spontaneous laughter. Curiously, if you don’t “get” a joke no amount of post-joke explaining, filling in the background you were supposed to produce on your own, makes the joke suddenly funny to you. You can’t explain a joke into being funny. You either get it, or you don’t.

Why do my boys love older jokes? Why do they laugh out loud at what they don’t understand? They want to feel included and bigger, participating in a world of knowledge and experiences they can only guess at as they gaze in wonder at the adults in their lives.

One of the best things of marriage is sharing the little inside things that I find so meaningful. I will find myself looking for examples or parallels that only Kate understands and that I know will make her laugh. I’m attracted to her quotation of an event or moment from our shared experiences. These references bind us together and reinforce our boundary markers.

Jokes mark off a shared space. A space of shared attitudes and experiences. A joke is compressed because it functions as a kind of test. Do you share my view of the world? Are you with me? Are you an insider or an outsider?

Joking is a risky venture when meeting someone for the first time. Will they accept my attempt at humor? I find myself laughing or enjoying a joke or humorous story because I’m drawn to the person telling it. I want to share in their world. Conversely when I find myself scoffing or merely enduring a joke or story, it’s because I want to distance myself from that person.

It seems to me a key to marriage is to want to reinforce those boundaries with your spouse. Purposefully create a shared space only the two of you inhabit. Find things you can joke about and cherish. Enjoy that space; relish it. Consistently pass the test of the joke.

In short, when someone likes our jokes we’ve found a kindred spirit, someone who sees the world like we do. This is the joy of laughter and humor.

But there is a dark side here as well. This very feature of jokes makes them potentially harmful and forms of exclusion.

Marriage and jokes, in the best form, are both community building experiences. When this works, it’s beautiful: couples who visibly delight in the share space and comfort of their spouse are inspiring. When it doesn’t, couples use (ironically insider) jokes to ridicule or demean. You’ve seen it.

Listen and participate in the marriage like you would a [good] joke. Decides to form and inhabit that space. Make the most of it. Do not allow it to be toxic.

And laugh.

1. Does anyone aspire to be a Laffy Taffy joke writer?

Pro-life verses pro-existence

My inner-Republican and inner-Democrat (again, rocking the stereotypes. They have previously discussed the issues of credit and poverty ) discuss what it means to be pro-life

> Of course he shouldn’t [neglect his kids], but he’ll never change his ways. Are you going to take out your disapproval on his children?

> -To Kill A Mockingbird

DL: Remember high school AP Government?

RL: When we sat at the back with the other conservatives, huddled together for safety?

DL: Yeah. Good Times™. We had that one debate on abortion, remember? Someone, realizing your position, asking what you would do if your wife were going to die unless her pregnancy were terminated?

RL: Yes. We said something like “Well, I’d kiss her and tell her I love her, but we wouldn’t kill the baby.”

DL: Didn’t put a lot of thought into that, did you? Had you been married at the time? Had you even a serious girlfriend?

RL: So I may have been a little hyperbolic to make a point. I mean, pro-life has to be defended…

DL: Fair enough. I’ll forgive us for being 18. I think many who say they are pro-life are actually just pro-existence

RL: What’s the difference?

DL: Well, you’ve heard it said Life begins at conception, but I say unto you that Life may begin at conecption, but it doesn’t end at birth. Life means more than just being alive.

RL: I’m not sure I follow…

DL: You may want to force someone to have a child she does not want, but what kind of life are you condemning it to? Whether you agree with the legailty of abortion or not, a woman currently has the right to prevent a child from coming to term. If a woman were forced to give birth, an unwanted human enters the world.

RL: Those are the consequences of decisions. You know I’m really big on consequences and personal responsibility, right?

DL: Yes. I remember that as a sticking point from our prior talks. What do you think of this though:

> It is a moral necessity that we not be forced to bring children into the world for whom we cannot be responsible and adoring and present. We must not inflict life on children who will be resented; we must not inflict unwanted children on society.

> Anne Lamott, Grace (Eventually)

RL: I’m not in favor of unwanted children.

DL: That’s true. Few are. But do you see that unwanted pregnancies bring unwanted children?

RL: Yes, but the mother — and father — should want the child.

DL: Agreed. But if that were the case, abortion wouldn’t be an option. And the adults’ lack of desire to love and raise a child is not that child’s fault.

RL: I see. So what do you propose?

DL: Pro-lifers need to adopt a posture that involves promoting life in all its forms. This means providing educational and financial opportunities for women, providing daycare opportunities for working women, especially single mothers, providing parenting resources, and especially promoting foster care and adoption.

RL: Is that what provoked our interest in fostering and adoption?

DL: Partly, yes. It seemed to me that being pro-life was more than just being pro-existence. Pro-life thus conceived would also include microfinancing, serving the underserved, promoting under-funded schools, mentoring the fatherless, helping the homeless, etc.

RL: That all makes a lot of sense. So you’re saying if we want to force children into the world, we need to make the world a good place to live?

DL: Yes. Regardless of the abortion debate and outcome, all people need to be pro-life. This should especially be true of people of faith. In fact, I would go so far to say that you shouldn’t be allowed to be against abortion unless you’re actively involved in making the world a better place for the unwanted.

RL: Sounds good to me.

What was the greatest thing _before_ sliced bread?

Anyone?