OkieInExile

The Fipple and the Holes

2026-02-23T11:13:00.004-06:00

The Fipple and the Holes

By Bobby Neal Winters

I still have not succeeded in making a working recorder. We will get that out of the way.

As usual, the things that I was concerned about at the beginning have not been my main barriers. To put that differently, and perhaps more precisely, it was easier to overcome these things than I had imagined.

For example, I didn’t know how to bore a hole through the entire length of a 17-inch piece of wood with the equipment that I have. As it turns out, I’ve found a way that works. The first of these was the discovery that longer recorders are made in three pieces. Each of the pieces is short enough to fit on my lathe. I can then bore from each end to meet in the middle.

I won’t say that is easy, but I will say I am getting better at it, and it’s now just one of those things that takes time.

It has also helped that I’ve switched from using forstner bits to using augur bits. (I see ways that I can use these in my other woodwork, so my long-suffering wife may eventually be up to her eyeballs in bud vases, but that will be another problem for another day.)

That out of the way, my focus shifted to the head of the recorder, which is also known as “the fipple.” (Let me pause here to say that as a lover of language and trivia, I take an unreasonable delight in the existence of this word in our language.)

When you look at flutes and/or whistles of this type, the end that you blow into has a particular structure. There is a narrow duct that you blow into which runs over a block that narrows the interior tube of the flute for a short length before it allows it to expand back out. On that same end, there is a hole at the top of the flute that allows some of the air to escape. It is called “the window.”

The narrow duct is aimed at the bottom edge of the window which is sharpened to split that stream of air. This edge is called “the labium.”

Part of the stream of air escapes through the window, and the rest continues down the flute.

The way the narrow duct is constructed to aim the labium is key to making this work.

To do this, I had to shift from my “big work” of turning wooden tubes on a lathe to “close work” of carving on those wooden tubes.

This was a very rewarding thing. I am a better woodworker for learning how to do this. I am a better human being than I was before I forced myself to slow down and do this. (I will be a much better human being after I clean up the clutter I made in the process, but I digress.)

After I figured this part out, I went back to some of my earlier efforts which made no or poor sound, and I was able to fix some of them.

I now have four long whistles--two from eastern red cedar, one from maple, and one from purpleheart--which could be made into recorders. I just need to put the holes in them so they can make more than one note.

This is my current barrier. The amount of work that I have tied up in even one of these pre-recorders is substantial. I’m having a hard time overcoming the emotional barrier of making holes in them.

I’ve watched videos on how to do it. It is one of those things that is part science, part engineering, but very much art.

I am approaching that art with respect.

The barrier is in my mind.

In the past the way I’ve overcome mental barriers is through ritual. For this sort of thing, I’ve got a ritual of putting my space in order. If you’ve ever watched a minister or--perhaps a better example--a priest preparing communion, there is a way that the setting is ordered.

I need to put my space in order for this process. I need to remove the clutter from the bench. Turn off the TV that keeps me company; turn off the noisy shop heater that keeps me warm. Get out my most complete set of drill bits and my most accurate measuring devices and start the process: One hole at a time; one note at a time.

And I must be willing to risk my creations.

Risk is an important part of the process. Sacrifice is sometimes necessary. The blood that I sometimes accidently stain my creations with might not be enough. I may have to sacrifice one or two of them.

I hope that it doesn’t go that far.

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like” the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube.

All I can say for sure

2026-02-17T09:05:00.000-06:00

All I can say for sure

By Bobby Neal Winters

I’ve been writing a lot about woodworking and making recorders lately, so I thought I would take a short break and write about something else.

My Bible study is going through the Acts of the Apostles as a follow up to the Gospel of Luke. So far, the take away from it is simple: Be Bold.

The Apostles, buoyed by the Holy Spirit, were bold.

Being bold is effective. Being bold puts opponents, puts bullies on their heels. Authorities, as a rule, and bullies, in particular, are used to having their way. While they might be used to resistance, they are not used to bold resistance.

People, in general, see someone who is speaking boldly, they interpret that as confidence. If you are confident in yourself, it is easier for them to be confident in you.

Our President--whatever you may think of him, and I do mean whatever--has internalized this. He speaks boldly. He will make a bold statement, and, when confronted, will become even bolder. Love him, hate him, have hope in him, be fearful of him. He has made this work for him.

That’s him.

What can those of us who don’t have his money, his background, his office, his backing do?

One thing I would suggest--and it’s something I need to be careful about myself--is not to speak unless it is something that I am sure about. That is to say, I need to listen more than I speak. I need to do research about whatever I am going to talk about. I need to not say something if I don’t know that it is true.

Implicit in that is knowing the difference between knowing something and thinking it. Here I am getting into territory where I need to take my own advice and not say something I don’t know. But to speak boldly, I will say there is a continuum between thinking something and knowing it.

Often we say that we know something, and it’s just what we think. We heard someone who is on “our side” say it, it seems to reinforce “our side” so we repeat it. We think it’s true, but we’ve given it very little consideration. We just pass it on.

We are being used by whoever said it like a piece of paper. (And, for those of you who get the reference, sometimes we are used like a page ripped from a Sears catalog.)

Knowing is more than this.

Knowing requires considering an idea; testing it. As scripture says, “Test all things and hold on to what is true.”

How does this translate to action?

The most important action is to keep silent when we don’t know; to speak kindly but boldly when we do know.

This is why I’m writing about woodworking and making recorders so much these days and not about politics.

I don’t trust much of the day-to-day information that comes through the various national media outlets, social or traditional. Each of the two major political parties says the other is full of liars and thieves.

Ironically, that is just about the only thing they say that I believe.

I feel better about leadership the closer it gets to Pittsburg, Kansas. While we are not all perfect, we are simple enough folk that our flaws are apparent. I can trust that.

Having said all this, I do have some recorders in various stages of completion. Maybe, just maybe, I will have one that works by the next time I write.

That’s all I can say for sure.

A whistle with holes in it

2026-02-10T09:09:00.004-06:00

A Whistle with holes in it

By Bobby Neal Winters

While I am still doing many other things with my life, I am still “going down the rabbit hole” on my project of making a recorder, i.e. a simple, whistle-like flute.

It keeps me out of people’s hair.

I don’t play the recorder. In grade school we were introduced to the “Tonette,” which in hindsight I see was a cheap soprano recorder made of red plastic. This would’ve been in the seventies. (I see on Amazon you can still get them for less than $15. They have other colors.) Since that ancient time the closest I’ve been to woodwinds was when two of my daughters--separated by years--played the clarinet in the high school marching band. Unbeknownst to me, I was--through the generosity of my daughters--providing replacement reeds to the entire band at that time, but I digress.

That previous paragraph was simply to explain that--when I started--I didn’t know anything about a recorder. Nothing. Nada. I thought it was just a long whistle with holes down the front. (Yes, and one in the back. I know that now.) But there is more. A lot more.

I’ve made quite a few whistles. Some have turned out to be duds, but most of them work. Some of them work almost too well: They are high pitched, loud, and very, very annoying.

I take pride in the last bit.

The truth is that you can make a whistle almost by accident.

We’ve all been in buildings on windy days and have heard the wind whistling through the attic, through the ventilation, through randomly placed pipes. You get all sorts of whistles that way.

It is harder to get a particular type of whistle, the type of whistle you want to hear coming out of a musical instrument.

Learning how to do this is where I am spending a lot of time and effort lately. Let me take some time to expand on what I mean by this.

To begin with, (and I am sure I am over-simplifying here, but let’s just brazen through until someone tells me differently) a whistle is made when a stream of constrained air is split by a sharp edge. The Wikipedia articles on flutes say this, but my Grampa Sam knew it too at some level because he could make a whistle with a blade of grass. There are some amazing individuals who can do it through their teeth.

I am having trouble with it. It is hard.

It is hard, but I am stubborn.

I’ve decided to approach the problem by breaking it into smaller pieces. In this case, that metaphor can be taken quite literally: Recorders are made in pieces. These pieces are the head joint, the middle joint, and the foot joint. The head joint is where the sound is made and the other two joints help to modulate it.

I’ve decided to work on making the head joint.

The head joint is essentially a whistle with an open bottom. It’s got to have an open bottom because it’s going to be attached to the middle joint. To make it, I make a tube of wood on the lathe with a stepped opening--a mortise--on the end where it’s going to connect to the middle joint. I then take that tube and I start carving the whistle into it.

That last sentence is wherein the challenge lay. I’ve made several head joints that serve as whistles. But then I connect them to the middle joint and get that song referred to by Simon and Garfunkel: The Sound of Silence.

Silence eventually sounds like an old asthmatic man.

To date, I’ve made exactly one head joint that will connect to a middle joint. I’ve made a video of myself blowing through it, and my recorder expert has told me it was “roughly” a C note. I appreciate the kindness in the word “roughly.”

I am now in the process of trying to replicate that. If I can replicate it, I can improve upon it. If I can improve upon it, I can remove the “roughly.”

When I’ve gotten this part right, I can move on to the middle joint and start making holes in it so that the thing can be played instead of just blown.

So I guess that maybe a recorder is a whistle with holes in it, but where do you put those holes? How big are they? How do you make them?

As I find out, I’ll let you know as much as I can without being too boring.

Tuning your instrument to a standard scale

2026-01-31T14:06:00.004-06:00

Tuning Your Instrument to a Standard Scale

By Bobby Neal Winters

It’s all about fitting in.

I’m still working on learning how to make flutes. I’ve made some Native American style flutes. Several now. Note the word “style” there between “American” and “flute.” Whenever I make one, it has to be there because I don’t share the heritage of any of the indigenous peoples of this continent. I am just copying them.

I don’t mind having to throw the word “style” in because it’s a small price to get along.

My ultimate plan is to make recorders, and I’ve made progress, but I chose to work on Native American style flutes first because you don’t have to tune them to a formal scale. It is a choice. Some people don’t tune them to the major scale that is used in the music tradition of the West, but some of them do.

Those who do choose to tune to fit in with the music of the West then have an opportunity to make music with anyone else who has. As I understand it, and it’s far from certain that I do, if you aren’t tuned to the same scale and try to play together, then it sounds like...well...crap.

I am pretty sure that if I am wrong in this assertion that I will be corrected and corrected swiftly.

So by choosing to give up the freedom of not being tuned to the standard scale, you can gain the freedom of being able to play with anyone else who is tuned to the standard scale. You gain access to the music that is written for that standard scale. And any music that you might create in your instrument can then be played by others long, long after you are dead.

By making changes to fit a larger system much can be gained.

That last sentence is hard for me to write.

I personally like “unique” individuals, people who do not necessarily color within the lines. People others might call odd. (The more self-aware of my friends might pause after having read that sentence and wonder, was he talking about me? You, no, never.) I find that I can learn a lot from these people.

You can learn a lot, but not always in a good way.

Forgive me if I’ve told you this story before, but I think it's germain. In the academic year 1988-1989, my wife, my eldest daughter, and I lived in Austin, Texas where my thesis advisor was taking a year of sabbatical. We lived in the northern part of the city, and I took the bus down to the campus everyday.

Austin being a liberal city and in a warm part of the world, drew its share of the homeless. Riding the bus only cost a quarter and it was warm on the bus, so quite a few of the homeless availed themselves of this form of transportation so they could be warm.

There were quite a few of these folks, but I remember one because he was as articulate as any of my professors were at the time. He would find someone to talk with and share his life’s philosophy. The uniting theme of his lectures was that he’d always done things his own way.

I would imagine he’s dead now and that he has been for quite a while. I’ve got to wonder if he’s been buried or has a marker on his grave. If so, a fitting epitaph: “I did it my way.”

Indeed, he did it his way, but he had to get on a bus to stay warm, and the bus was a product of the system.

I do believe in bending a bit to help the odd, the outsiders, but there has to be some bending back. It can't all be just one way.

God has painted a picture of Himself in each of our faces. Each of us is a precious individual.

But we are not meant to be alone.

We can make our own beautiful music, but unless we tune ourselves to fit in, we will never be able to join it to the music of others. Our songs will die with us.

And that would be a pity.

Learning from Old Hippies

2026-01-25T09:16:00.005-06:00

Learning from Old Hippies

By Bobby Neal Winters

Teaching is an art and a science.

But it’s mainly an art.

I am trying to learn how to make flutes. That is to say, I am trying to teach myself how to make flutes with copious aid from YouTube.

Eventually I would like to make recorders. “Eventually” is a long word in terms of letters and of time. This may take a while because there is a lot to it.

A lot.

At this point, I’ve put recorders on hold for a while because I want to get them right. This is a precise instrument being made for the European tradition where there are a lot of picky people with very high standards.

Very picky; very high.

For the time being, I’ve shifted to the Native American flute. This instrument makes a beautiful sound that will make anyone of primarily English descent like myself feel sad and guilty in nanoseconds. (Irish music will do the same, but we are also good at pushing through the guilt and sadness.) It has the advantage of being taught by some very mellow people who are in touch with themselves spiritually. You get the feeling that they don’t deal out criticism or backhanded compliments. They praise what you do, and then gently direct you in ways to be better.

I find that I can learn from these gentle teachers for the small price of ignoring the nose rings.

And here's the thing. I don’t know if any of the Youtubers who are teaching how to make Native American flutes are actually Native Americans. I do know that they are all--for lack of a better word--hippies. Hippies, who in their deepest souls, want to be Native Americans.

From my experience, those are the very best kind of hippie.

Anyway, among them are some very good teachers.

Okay, in making a flute--recorder, Native American, picolo, whatever--the big picture goes like this: You take (or make) a long tube and then make the right sort of modifications in it to make music. That is the view from 30,000 feet.

Right now, because of my equipment, I’ve got a limitation on how long of a tube I can make out of wood. Using a drill, I can go 5 inches one way. I can then turn that around and do a five inch hold on the other end. So--and the math is not hard--I can only make a 10-inch long flute from wood.

The rule is this: The shorter the flute, the higher the pitch. The sound can be somewhat...annoying.

Longer instruments make a lower, more mellow sound.

There are ways to bore longer holes and I am working on that, but in the meantime, my hippie teacher has a lesson that has allowed me to put aside the hole-boring for a while and to learn about doing the modifications needed to make music.

His teaching technique: The PVC pipe Native American flute.

Right, you can see it right away. You’ve got the pipe of basically any length you need. You can then just concentrate on modifying it to make music.

PVC music, but music none the less.

Part of the art of teaching is that there has to be a bit of success along the way in order to encourage learning.

I spent a morning yesterday doing the work needed to make the PVC pipe make music. I cut holes in it; I put a wood plug in at the correct place. I carved the edge on the sound hole; I put “The Bird” over “The Nest.”

Then I blew into it.

Sadness. Pure, beautiful, righteous sadness.

This is from someone who literally cannot put two notes together.

In the hands of an Indigenous musician, this can produce great beauty. The hippie on Youtube can do a pretty good job himself.

For my part, I have to use the powers I get from my ancestors to push through the guilt and learn as much as I can.

There is something to learn, about so many things, and in so many ways.

Jelly-bean woodworking, prevenient grace, and blood sacrifice

2026-01-19T08:50:00.002-06:00

Jelly-bean woodworking, prevenient grace, and blood sacrifice

By Bobby Neal Winters

With the end of the Fall semester, finals, Christmas, and my 40th Wedding Anniversary, I’d taken a longish break from woodturning. I’d done some woodworking, but I hadn’t spent much time at the lathe.

When you work at the lathe, the question is what are you going to make. You know to some degree what. You know that it’s going to be round.

Round is what lathes do. Lathes make round objects and sawdust.

Lots and lots of sawdust.

The various “jelly-bean” wood working stores market ideas. Wooden pens for one thing. They sell kits to make pens from. There is a system set up. Wooden pens are pretty cool, but if you don’t know better, you would think they were pretty expensive. It turns out that, while they can be, they can also be relatively cheap.

The net effect of this is that if you want to put your pen-making on as something that will help to defray the costs of your hobby, then you have to develop a system to turn out pens in bulk.

That doesn’t sound like a hobby to me: It sounds like Work.

There I go, using those four-letter words again.

But John Wesley taught us about “prevenient grace;” God’s grace as a means of preparing us for something else. Put a bookmark here, I will get back to it before long.

I’ve found a nice woodturning channel on Youtube called “Tomislav Tomasic Woodturning.” Tomislav is a fellow from Croatia. I like his channel for several reasons. He has the right mixture of talk and video.

Some of these woodturning guys are so non-verbal they just show videos of the work being done without any explanation at all. The only sound is the gouge against the rotating wood.

On the other end of the spectrum (take that word any way you want to), there are folks who talk so much you think that maybe their woodturning has made them really, really lonely.

Tomislav has the mixture of talk to work right. He also is a good teacher. Add to that the fact that he doesn’t have a lot of money to spend on equipment, and you’ve got a guy I can learn from.

Anyway, one of the projects that he uses to teach from is that of making a whistle.

Making a whistle is not hard to do if you have the right equipment, and--here is where we hook back up to “prevenient grace”--if you’ve been making pens, you’ve got the equipment. That is to say, if you’ve been making pens, you likely have a drill chuck to mount in place of your “free-center.”

You drill out a cylindrical chamber in the middle of your blank, cut a hole near one end so you can whistle, and then make it as pretty as you like.

These are not difficult to make. One of my neighbors has five kids, and I made them each a whistle. This was back when the weather was warm and I had my shop door open. I had a happy afternoon of listening to them whistle across the street. (They were quite loud.) I suspect they all “disappeared” that night after the kids went to bed, but it was a glorious afternoon of whistling.

The question arose in my mind--and it could be that a friend of mine asked it. Sometimes my friends ask such good questions, I think I’ve thought of it on my own. Anyway, the question arose, could you make a flute?

What does one do to answer such a question? Well you google it, of course. Well, this simple Okie had absolutely no idea there were so many ways you could blow air through a tube to get a sound. There are scores of types of flutes: recorders, Native American flutes, picolos, Japanese flutes, etc. And in each of these types there are various subtypes.

One could quite understandably suffer from paralysis by analysis, but I have a super-power: I ask, which is the easiest?

To me, unless I find out otherwise, the recorder looks the easiest. I might find out otherwise, but at my current level of study, it looks like a long whistle with holes in. No doubt those holes have to be placed correctly to get the right notes, but that is something to study.

That having been said, making a flute in the “Native American” style is attractive as well. Native American flutes appear to be a little more complicated than a recorder, but they have features that appeal to me. The first of these is that I am drawn to the Native American aspect of it. While I am not coming out of that tradition myself, this would be a way of paying tribute. Another attraction is that there is no pressure to tune it to a standard scale.

Indigenous peoples in the Americas were making music long before the Europeans arrived. Their flutes can just make cool sounds. As I understand it, you can tune them to a standard scale, but it isn’t necessary.

Anyway, I’ve started my journey. I am working on techniques, and I’ve made a blood sacrifice. God gives us his prevenient grace, but the tablesaw god extracts blood from his adherents from time to time. He particularly likes the flesh of my left thumb.

I’ll let you know if I make progress.

The Space between the Stars

2026-01-14T10:34:00.003-06:00

The Space between the Stars

By Bobby Neal Winters

I’m a science fiction fan. I’ve been one for as long as I can remember. When I was in junior high (not middle school, because there wasn’t such a thing in those days), I tried writing a science fiction short story. It was truly horrible, but at least I tried.

I’ve dabbled in trying a bit here and a bit there along the way, but not all that seriously and not for a long time now.

But it has always been there in the back of my mind, and I come back to visit it from time to time.

One thing that inspires me along these lines is a series of books called “The Expanse” written by James S.A. Corey (which is actually a pseudonym for a pair of authors). “The Expanse” differs from, say, Star Trek, by not writing the future as a utopia. They also stick pretty close to physics as it currently exists. That is to say, they do this for the most part until humanity comes into contact with certain alien artifacts, but I digress.

What I like about “The Expanse” is sticking as much as possible within the constraints of our physical universe and exploring humanity’s development within that reality.

People are going to be people regardless of whether it is in Baltimore or on the Moon or on Ceres or on Ganymede.

In sticking to current physics, the humans in “The Expanse” are bound by the speed of light until they come upon the aforementioned alien artifacts. This means that, until then, they are stuck in the solar system.

I am interested in exploring this worldview further. That is to say, what does interstellar exploration and colonization look like with a light speed limit and without the deus ex machina of alien artifacts.

One of the currents I follow on YouTube is science/science fiction speculation like I’ve just described. Those of you who keep up with developments in astronomy and so forth may have read about interstellar asteroids and comets that have been tracked recently.

Our astronomers keep an eye on the various asteroids that are floating around the solar system. There are literally tens of thousands (and probably way more) asteroids that are circling the sun. A lot of those are in the asteroid belt between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, but there are a lot that are just salted and peppered everywhere. Like I said, our astronomers keep an eye on them, because it was such an asteroid that took out the dinosaurs.

Recently, they’ve spotted a few that come from outside of our solar system. They know they are from the outside because they are going too fast to be in an orbit around the sun.

Having sighted a few of those, a picture comes to us: The space between the stars is not empty; it is only relatively empty. There are asteroids like these we’ve seen. In addition to this, there are so-called “rogue planets”--planets that do not circle a star--going around through interstellar space. We know this because, every once in a while, one of them comes between a star and the lens of a telescope, causing the star to dim.

Then there are objects known as brown dwarves. These are objects that are too small to generate the fusion that is required to become a star, but too big to just be a planet.

My vision is of the human race using these interstellar objects like the polynesians used the islands of the Pacific: They just hopped from one island to another. Some folks think they made it all the way down to the Pacific Coast of South America.

So at this point, I’ve got an idea. I need to do a couple of more things before I proceed. One of these is called “World-Building.” That is to say, what does life look like to a bunch of humans who are out in interstellar space. On one hand, I plan to stick to the premise that, on an individual basis, human beings are still the sick/weak/fallen creatures that we all know from our everyday lives. On the other hand, there is the question of how this manifests itself in the darkness of interstellar space. What does your day look like if you get up in the morning in a space-station halfway between the Sol System and Alpha Centauri?

The other thing I need is a story. “The Expanse” does this with the ancient alien artifact. “The Expanse” had enough “story” for nine long (and I do mean loooooong) books. Story is very important. I think that it’s been shown that if you’ve got a good story to tell, then the audience doesn’t worry too much about world-building.

The world-building is for me. Telling a story is my excuse to inflict my world on whoever might want to read the story.

James S. A. Corey has recently started a new series called “The Captive’s War.” It is not clear at this point whether it is set in the same universe as “The Expanse,” but after reading the first novel, I will say that option has been left open. I mention it because in terms of a story, this series has stolen the story of the Book of Daniel from the Bible in a loose sense. That is to say, they have our heroes living as exiles being used by their captors. That is to say, they have--following a tradition as old as literature itself--taken their story from someone else.

I might wind up doing that myself. The more I think about it, the better I like it. The question is, what story do I steal?

Something for me to think about.

Costa Rica and the Last Resort

2026-01-09T10:34:00.004-06:00

Costa Rica and The Last Resort

By Bobby Neal Winters

There are some days, some weeks, some periods of time when I have a soundtrack. Not always, but definitely sometimes, and definitely last week when I was on vacation in Costa Rica with my beloved wife of 40 years.

The song was “The Last Resort” by the Eagles and mainly Don Henley.

This is one of those songs I’ve known for years, I am not sure how many, but more than 40. Like any good song, you don’t necessarily understand it or even like it at first. It’s as if it were written in Spanish and you are in a Spanish course. At first you only learn a word or two, and you understand certain parts. Then you learn more words and understand it differently. Then you learn something about the culture, and it takes on a new, different meaning.

It’s like that only the language is English and understanding requires not only words and culture, it also requires understanding life. Understanding yourself. Understanding human nature.

Let’s start out with a little context to begin with. During the few days Jean and I were there celebrating our 40th anniversary, Costa Rica was paradise. The weather in San Jose was sunny for the most part and the temperature hugged 70 degrees. It would get up to about 75 in the day and down to about 65 at night. There was a nice breeze when it was needed. The sun was high in the sky, and I got a little color on my face.

We took tours to the mountains, saw green vistas, saw the clouds below us, saw the butterflies, the humming birds, and the animals. We saw insects other than butterflies, but they didn’t have any interest in us.

I don’t know if you’ve ever had the feeling of an idea setting up housekeeping in your brain, but that began to happen with me. That idea was, you could come to live here. This could be your retirement home. You could move down and set up shop. You could move down your daughters and their families to be with you.

You’ve found paradise.

But the soundtrack was keeping house in my brain too:

Some rich men came and raped the land
Nobody caught 'em
Put up a bunch of ugly boxes
And Jesus people bought 'em

So you see there was a conflict. I’ve fallen in love with a place, but anyone else can see the same qualities in it that I have. We can flee someplace in an attempt to escape the bad, but then we take the bad with us. Ultimately wherever we go becomes just like wherever we’ve been.

That is not a new problem. The various authors of the Bible knew about this, but you know where to find one, so I will continue differently.

In writing this song, even as far back as 1977, Henley had some idea of the shape of an answer:

Who will provide the grand design?
What is yours and what is mine?
'Cause there is no more new frontier
We have got to make it here

I tried to be careful when I said he had the shape of the answer rather than saying he had the whole answer.

He seems to be saying this: Rather than go to a paradise and ruin it with our human nastiness, let’s stay where we are and transform it into a paradise.

Like I said, that’s kind of the shape of the thing, but the problem with that is that it misses a crucial step. For me to create a paradise, I would have to be perfect. And the Good Lord knows that I am not perfect.

The first step to creating a paradise is to recreate myself. Not only do I have to stop looking to another place to improve my environment, I have to stop looking even outside of myself. I have to look inward and improve what is in there.

This is not a new idea coming from me. It’s been around a while. I like to think of it as being the best kind of religion, rightly understood: Fix myself first; others who are seeking a way might see something they like and follow along.

There is more to it than this. Not everybody would agree, not even Don Henley:

And you can see them there
On Sunday morning
Stand up and sing about
What it's like up there
They call it paradise
I don't know why
You call someplace paradise
Kiss it goodbye

Base 12 is better!

2026-01-01T08:28:00.004-06:00

Base 12 is better!

By Bobby Neal Winters

Let’s talk about feet. Not the ones on your legs, but the feet that you measure with. We could dive into a discussion that the foot was defined to be the length of some king’s foot, but I don’t know the king and I don’t even know if that is true. What I do know is that we use a foot to measure with and that we divide a foot into twelve inches. So when I said let’s talk about feet, I really meant to say, let’s talk about inches and feet.

Twelve is a lovely number. We can think of twelve as 2 times six like we do in the standard egg carton that holds a dozen eggs in two rows of six. We can also think of it as 3 times 4.

Mathematically speaking, when we measure length in inches and feet, we are operating in base 12. When you take out your tape measure and measure off a length of 100 inches, you don’t say that, at least not for long. What you do is say 8 times 12 is 96, so the measurement is 8 feet and 4 inches. You’d write that out as 8’4’’, using the single apostrophe as an indicator of feet and the double as an indicator of inches.

Using feet is a convenient way of keeping track of a large number of inches. It helps our human minds by keeping the numbers small.

Working in base 12 gives us an advantage if we want to divide our woodwork into equal pieces. Say you have a board that is 7’ long and you want 3 equal pieces. One-third of one foot is 4 inches. Four times seven is 28. So you only need to cut the board into three pieces, each of which is 28 inches (2’4’’) long. There is no need to convert the 7’ to inches first. The system is set up to do the math for you.

You can do the same thing if you want to cut the board into 6 pieces. One-sixth of twelve is two. Two times seven is 14. You can cut the board into six 14-inch (1’2’’) long pieces.

This is the advantage of using a base that works according to your needs.

The question arises, however, of what happens when you need to do work where a whole inch is just too coarse a measure.

At this point, we abandon base twelve and have to shift to a variety of bases. When I said a variety of bases, I made it sound scary, but now I am going to make it scarier still by telling you the bases: Two, Four, Eight, and Sixteen. That does sound scary, but it’s just a fancy-pants mathematical way of saying what everyone who works with wood knows: You work with half-inches, quarter-inches, eighth-inches, and sixteenth-inches. There are some who will refer to 32nd inches, but I always roll my eyes, and ask who the heck are they trying to impress?

The fact that we use these bases for lengths less than an inch gives testimony to the fact that when you get to lengths this small it is really easy to divide in half by eye. You can take whatever length you have in front of you and whatever marking tool you might have, and find the middle. It is easy to check that the length on one side of your pencil is the same as the length on the other. If you doubt your own eyeball, you can check it with a pair of dividers or use a multisquare.

Using base two is all about cutting things in half. If something is 17 inches long and you want to cut it in half, you say half of one inch is a half-inch, so half of 17 inches is 17 half-inches. Now 8 times 2 is 16, so half of 17 inches is 8 and one half-inch.

You can do the same thing by using base 4 to cut into fourth, base 8 into eights, and so on.

I will be the first to admit that this gets a bit awkward and a bit more like algebra than arithmetic. What is more, you can’t use this to divide into thirds, which you can with a foot.

This will be a spot where those who are constantly trying to push the metric system will come in and make their pitch.

“Switch to metric,” a voice like Gollum’s hisses. “Use base ten, my preciousssss.”

It does have a point, but at the same time, I will say it outloud for all: 10 is a lousy number to use as a base. It is only divisible by 2 and 5.

Do I have anything better?

Yes, and if you’ve read this far you’ve seen it: 12.

When the French Revolution adopted the metric system, they didn’t go quite far enough. As long as they were lopping off heads, they should’ve just gone ahead (see what I did there) and gone to base 12. As you’ve seen up to this point, 12 is evenly divisible by 2, 3, and 4.

We can’t change now. There is too much literature done with the other system.

The changeover would be a nightmare too. I can just see all of the crying as grade school students start learning duodecimal arithmetic, and that’s just the parents and teachers.

We are stuck with base ten. I will continue to use feet and inches in my woodshop, as much as ever measure anything. The Scientific-Fascists who are the heirs of the French Revolution will continue to force metric in wherever they can.

And we will ignore the elephant in the room: Base 12 is best!

Down the rabbit hole

2025-12-28T08:54:00.003-06:00

Down the Rabbit Hole: My Journey to becoming a true bore

By Bobby Neal Winters

When you get a doctorate, you learn enough about one tiny little thing to bore anyone who can understand you into a coma. It was my good fortune to get a doctorate in math so that no one can understand me, and so my friends are all safe.

Then I started woodworking, and now no one is safe. Proceed at your own risk. If you are reading this at the table with a bowl of cereal or soup in front of you, I ask you to move it. I don’t want anyone to drown on my account.

I’ve been working on a cabinet-cart or a cart-cabinet. I am at a loss for a single word or even a hyphenated word to describe it. (Maybe a cartbinet?) It is for my shop to store my tools in. I had some construction lumber two-by-fours that I had recovered from a previous shop project. These are reasonably inexpensive to begin with, especially when you compare them to hardwood, when you recover them and reuse them, they are better than free.

I’ve got a basic design I use for my shop projects which I have borrowed (stolen, copied) from April Wilkerson on YouTube. It is simple, sturdy, and can be widely applied. I’ve used it multiple times. The defining characteristic is how the “legs” of the cart are made. For each let, take a pair two-by-fours--of whatever length you need--and put them in an “L” shape. (I look at that sentence and see there are a lot of ways to misinterpret it, so let me have another go.)

By this I mean, you put glue along the length of the “two” face of one two-by-four. You then take that and glue it lengthwise to the “four” face of the other two-by-four. You then have a length of wood with an “L” shaped cross-section. If you still don’t see it, search “April Wilkerson” on YouTube. There is a reason they make the videos.

Anyway, you can take that basic corner and use it as the basis for a lot of projects.

I took four of those corner pieces--each of which was about three feet long--and used other two-by-fours to join them into a rectangular parallelepiped (that’s a math teacher’s way of saying “box”). I put wheels on the box so that I will be able to roll it around my shop. At that point, I had a sturdy but useless box with wheels on it. (At this point, I need to say that I had recovered the wheels from yet another project I’d taken apart.)

I then began the leisurely process of putting drawers in the box.

At this point, someone reading this might summon to their mind an image of me buying and installing drawer slides. To this I reply, “God forbid.”

Drawer slides are expensive. While they do give a nice final product, I have a philosophy: If I can do something cheaply, that is the way I do it.

I didn’t buy any hardware.

I built a framework within my box wherein I could sit drawers, and then I began the process of making my drawers.

I was able to make the framework to house the drawers out of leftover lumber. To make the drawers, I was forced to go up to the big orange-colored store and buy some of their $2 white pine pickets. They are cheap, but there is a reason for that: They are often warped.

Quite a few of these pieces were “cupped.” To fix this, I cut them to length, ripped them to narrower pieces, and then reglued them to the width that I needed. I then put them through my planer. This took care of the squeezed-out glue and made the pieces nice and smooth.

I did this for twelve drawers. In the course of my labors, I discovered some better ways to do things and some worse ones. I will spare you all of that.

I will say this. Many times I have used dovetail joints. This was not one of those times. I used rabbet joints. Why? Life is short, and I had to make a dozen drawers along with a few Christmas presents along the way.

One thing I did do for these drawers was to put an appropriate finish on them. To be clear, no one but me is going to see the final product. The purpose of the finish is practical. For one thing, it will make the drawers last longer: The finish protects the wood. For another thing, it helps with the functionality. Let me explain.

I first apply a 50-50 mixture of boiled linseed oil and mineral spirits. This sokes into the wood to protect it. I then apply a mixture of beeswax and boiled linseed oil that I make myself. This both protects the drawers and makes them easier to open and close.

I make this mixture of beeswax and oil myself because it is easy to do; if you can boil an egg, you can make this finish. It is also much cheaper to make this than to buy it. You can get 5 pounds of beeswax for a gallon of linseed oil much more cheaply than you can buy a brand name product that has the EXACT SAME stuff in it.

I had to spend some money to buy plywood for the top.

That was painful, but I saved every scrap of it.

I am taking my time finishing this cabinet because I’ve gotten some ideas of how I can use scrap wood to make it more functional.

Second Best Hand and Broken Window Serenade

2025-12-09T10:38:00.002-06:00

Second Best Hand and Broken Window Serenade

By Bobby Neal Winters

In another life, I was briefly the pastor of the First United Methodist Church of Opolis, Kansas. During that time, I got to know some fine people, some fine characters. One of those was a man who I will call the Teacher, to preserve his anonymity for the sake of his family. I don’t know why I bother because everyone in Opolis will know exactly who I am talking about by my description.

He was a singular character.

The Teacher had a standing poker game in his workshop. I am not a gambler or a poker player, but he had invited me to play on a couple of occasions, and he gave me lessons. The first lesson cost me $10 and the second cost me $5. All paid a little at a time in nickels, dimes, and quarters.

He liked Texas Hold-em and Omaha. I would be at a loss to explain the rules of either of them right now other than to say the hands are evaluated like the standard poker hand.

The Teacher taught me a lot. The first rule was this: “If you have the cards, make them pay.”

This was paired with a second rule that I will share with you in a minute. The pairing of these two rules was in a fashion the ancient Greeks would have called a paradox and modern theologians would call cruciform tension.

I learned the second rule when I had drawn a full-house. It’s a very good hand. I was applying rule one and betting as hard as I could with nickels, dimes, and quarters.

Then came the time to lay my cards on the table and I did.

The Teacher looked at my cards and said, “I am so sorry,” as he laid down four-of-a-kind and raked my change into his pot.

He then taught me rule two: “There is nothing worse than a second-best hand.”

That may have been the night I considered my poker education complete.

I was listening to one of my current favorite songs this morning on the way to school when this connection crossed my mind.

The song is “Broken Window Serenade” by the group Whiskey Myers. The song tells the tale of a man’s love of a beautiful woman. More than a beautiful woman, a woman cursed with beauty.

Her beauty took her to Hollywood. It wasn’t enough to make her a movie star, but it was enough to get her work as a stripper. Following that came substance abuse, wasting away, and, finally, death.

Life had dealt her a second-best hand. She played it, but maybe she wasn’t beautiful enough; maybe that was all she was and didn’t develop any of the skills that need to go with that to make a movie star.

As I’ve grown older, I’ve moved from being jealous of the beautiful to feeling something not un-akin to pity.

The Beautiful--by their very nature--have this asset on full display. You can just look at them and know they are beautiful. That’s just the nature of the quality. There is something within us that causes us to react positively to this. Though as we develop in our own ambitions, the positive reaction can turn to jealousy.

They can become victims of their own beauty if they pay too much attention to those who whisper in their ears that they need to go to Hollywood.

It is my personal opinion that by some plan--God’s, Evolution’s, or Nature’s, take your pick--that the Beautiful are meant to be leaders. We are naturally drawn to them; don’t deny it.

The problem is that to be a leader more is needed than just beauty. Other skills must be developed. Some do develop these skills and become leaders. You look at them and like them and want them to like you. You’ll do what they ask.

Think about it: There are not very many ugly people in leadership positions.

There are those who develop the skills but don’t wind up in the positions of leadership. In some sense, they’ve been dealt a second-best hand themselves.

The thing about being dealt a second-best hand is what you do in the next round. You can let a second-best hand and wind up in a poignant country song, or you could do something else.

I’ve been privileged to be around some beautiful, skillful people in my community. For whatever reason, they’ve not become movie stars; they’ve not become politicians. Nor have they taken the dark road described in “Broken Window Serenade.”

They took their beauty and their skills and have devoted themselves to community service. You look at them and like them and want them to like you. They are great in getting people to become involved in helping the community.

Anyway, that’s just me looking “through a broken window with a different point of view.”

And a little child shall lead them

2025-12-08T09:21:04.877-06:00

And a little child shall lead them

By Bobby Neal Winters

I was in my workshop when my grandson came to ask me for a piece of wood. He had a piece of a palette I’d picked up off the curb and cut up with a reciprocating saw.

I said, “Sure.” I would’ve said the same if he’d asked me for a kidney. He’s my grandson. The only “no” would be if he asked me to use a wood chisel to break a rock open with. Then I would buy him a stone chisel.

He smiled. Then he asked, “Can I have some sand paper?”

I asked him what grit he wanted. He told me that any was fine.

I gave him some 220 grit because it was on top. He thanked me and left.

Some days later, I walked past where he’d left the board he’d sanded. He’d gotten through the rough, weathered wood on top and found some nice white oak beneath. Having exposed the wood’s beauty to the world again, he was satisfied, so he left the sanded board on the table.

Seeing the oak, I remembered that I had some more of it left. I’d used some of it to make a knitting box for one of the boy’s aunts, but I had some left over.

Time to put it to use.

Reclaiming scrap wood is a process.

In some sense, it’s like working with rough cut wood. In a case like this palette wood, it has never been processed with the idea that needed to be pretty. It is, however, more likely to have a nail or two in it. Or three or four. This is important because to work it up, you have to run it through a planer.

Now, I said “have to.” You could smooth it up with a plane. If you’ve reached the level of holiness that you do that, I say go for it. For my part, I’ve invested money in a DeWalt planer, and I am going to use it. If you run a nail (or screw or anything metal) through your planer, it’s going to nick the blades and when you replace them it costs time and money.

You can nick your blade when you are hand-planing too, but it’s not as big (i.e. expensive) a deal.

Putting palette wood through a planer--provided you’ve got the nails out--is an incredibly satisfying experience. You take off the rough, discolored outer layer and expose the grain of the wood beneath. In this, as I said before, it was white oak.

You can make a ship out of white oak. They did in the old days. If they made one out of a palette, it’d have to be for mice.

In any case, I didn’t make a ship. It was something smaller.

The first couple of pieces of oak that I milled up were quite cracked, having been exposed to the evils of rain and sun for too long. Because of this, I cut them into narrow strips and reglued them.

If I didn’t make a ship, what did I make?

Well, I made the next best thing: A pencil box.

I’d been using my router table to make some drawers, so I used it to make a pencil box with the same methods. I put a rebate on the long sides of the bottom piece. Then I put a rebate on the bottom and sides of the end pieces. I didn’t do anything with the side pieces. I glued it, clamped it, let it dry, and then I sanded it.

The attentive reader has noticed I’ve left out something important.

What about the top?

The wood was too thin for me to use the hinges that I have. Indeed, the sides were too narrow for me to cut the top off, which I would’ve had to do if I were going to make that kind of a box.

I could’ve cut grooves in the sides and slid my lid on and off, but it was too narrow for that too.

I decided to use a Japanese toolbox-style lid. You can think of it as a puzzle-box lid if you want to. (It got the better of some of the guys I have coffee with.) It doesn’t require any metal to make, but relies on friction--and ingenuity--instead.

When all of the glue had dried, I sanded it and finished it with a linseed oil and beeswax mixture.

I was so pleased with it, I made two more.

Now I have to talk to Santa to see who they need to go to.

Cleaning a Stanley No. 5

2025-12-01T09:41:27.054-06:00

Cleaning a Stanley No. 5

By Bobby Neal Winters

I am still learning things about myself. I am still learning how to explain myself to the world. Because of the way I am wired up, I have to come at it indirectly.

I’ve been cleaning up my workshop. Cleaning up is something that should be a part of the daily routine, but that is easier said than done. It’s much easier to put it off to the next day, and then to the next. When you take out your tools to work, it’s easy to say, I will be using these tomorrow, so I will just leave them out. You do that a few days in a row, and then for a week, and then you have a mess.

Well, I had let my workshop get into a mess. This wasn’t the first time so I do know how to clean up a mess: make sure the trash can is empty and pick a table (or a corner or a corner of a table) and clean that.

My assembly/finishing table was in a horrible mess so I started on it. I picked a corner and--because the trash was already empty--I started throwing away and putting away. I got that table clean so then I went over to my workbench and threw away and put away until I could see the top of it.

Then I got to another part of the shop that needed attention. I threw away some stuff, but when I moved it I found something that someone had given to me: it was a Stanley No. 5 plane.

An honest-to-God Stanley.

Now, I do have another No. 5 plane, but it's a Spear & Jackson. Don’t get me wrong, there is nothing wrong with a Spear & Jackson. They make some fine products for handtool woodworking, but for planes--I’ve come to understand--Stanley is something of a standard.

This Stanley had been given to me with the idea that I would restore it, but it had got put aside and had gotten something sat on top of it. Now here it was in my hand with a clean workbench just waiting to be used.

This beautiful Stanley plane was absolutely filthy. To be clear, it wasn’t filthy with dirt; it wasn’t filthy like it had been left in a chicken coop; it was filthy with accretions that told a story of it being in a workshop like mine for decades. It was covered with a concretion made up of sawdust, wood dust (which is finer than sawdust), and an alchemical mixture of various finishes.

I got my flathead screwdriver and took the plane down to its component parts. I retrieved my turpentine from the shelf. Some of it I put into a paper cup so that I could soak the screws and other small parts in. I then put some more only a shop rag and a steel scrunchy of the type used to clean cast iron skillets.

Then I got to work with the elbow grease. First I rubbed and scrubbed. Then I scrubbed and rubbed.

After I got the filth off, I discovered what the real problem was: The blade.

The blade is the heart of every plane. The purpose of the rest of the plane is to hold the blade at the correct angle and to allow you to adjust it conveniently. But the blade is the sine qua non. From the Latin, without which there is not. From the Okie, the whole shootin’ match.

I don’t want to tell you how many videos I’ve watched on the subject of sharpening. What is more, I surely don’t want to know. But they have changed me. Once I had cleaned the blade enough to see it, I immediately noticed two things. The first was that the last person who’d tried to sharpen this blade did not know what they were doing. I say this not meaning to insult whoever gave it to me nor any of the relatives from whom it had come. There wasn’t a chain of custody attached. Let’s assume a well-meaning child had tried to sharpen it. The second thing I noticed was there was a big chip out of the edge of the blade.

The good news was the cure to both these problems is more elbow grease, and fortunately I’ve got plenty of that.

I got out my diamond sharpening stones.

That sounds fancier than it actually is. Basically, these are three thin sheets of stainless steel that have had dust from industrial diamonds coated on them in varying densities: 800 grit, 1000 grit, and 1200 grit.

I presented the blade to the first stone and pulled it back and forth until both the poor sharpening and the chip from the edge were gone. And then I did it a while longer. I took it from there to each of the finer stones in turn until I had my final polish. I tested the blade on a piece of paper, and it went through it like butter.

After that, I reassembled all of the clean parts and tuned the plane.

Stanley deserves its reputation.

After I was done, I myself was covered with turpentine and, according to my wife, smelled like a Christmas tree. She brought me a change of pants to my shop before she let me back into the house.

My workshop is not an operating theater, but it’s better than it had been. I’ve got my table and my workbench back in shape to work on, and I’ve got a lovely Stanley No. 5.

It wasn’t a bad day.

The Missing Catfish

2025-11-24T10:17:03.576-06:00

The Missing Catfish

By Bobby Neal Winters

We are surrounded by symbols.

I took a trip to Oklahoma the weekend before Thanksgiving to visit my brother and have a meal with him at the Catfish Roundup which is a few miles north of Seminole on US377, just south of its intersection with I-40. It’s at a crossroads: In a certain way of thinking that means it’s at a boundary between worlds.

We got on I-44 at the Downstream Casino and drove from there through Tulsa and exited on to 377 at Stroud, where we passed another Casino just south of town.

Oklahoma is a different place now than the one I grew up in.

Along I-44 we passed by all sorts of billboards that would’ve been so mysterious to me 40 years ago. There are the billboards for the marijuana dispensaries with the big, green branch on them. Sometimes the leaves are stylized and abstract; sometimes they are more realistic. They are located at strategic places along the interstate. Along with these, there are the billboards that advertise treatment for addiction.

It makes money for the growers, for the sellers, for the billboard folks, and for the people who treat addiction.

What a boon.

This being Oklahoma, there are crosses everywhere.

Not everything has changed over the last 40 years.

The churches are there. The churches remain. The churches have been joined by others. I almost said, “their enemies” instead of “others.” But I don’t know if that works. It could be “competition;” it could be "symbiote." I’ll let the reader choose among these and whatever others they’d like to throw in.

It’s bigger than me.

But, to continue, we got off I-44 at Stroud, went past the Sac and Fox Casino just south of there; then past St. Wenceslaus Catholic Church and the Shrine of the Infant Jesus of Prague, there in Prague, Oklahoma. (Everywhere else in the world it’s PrAHge. In Oklahoma, it’s PrAYgue.) Then across I-40, and the Catfish Roundup is right there to the left, catty-corner across from a Seminole Casino.

My brother was already there.

The Catfish Roundup has a tall sign out front with a picture of the eponymous catfish on it, breaching the water. I’ve never personally seen a catfish breach the water. They are bottom feeders, so I don’t know if they do. But what can you say: It’s art.

To match the catfish on the sign, there is a catfish in an aquarium on the inside. At least there used to be. The aquarium is still there, but there is no big catfish in it. There is a small, scavenger catfish that cleans the glass; there are a few smaller game fish that are native to Oklahoma; but in the place where the big catfish that was their mascot, there is just emptiness.

It’s gone.

After I’d ordered my chicken fried steak with pinto beans as a substitute for salad, I asked my brother who is more up on the local news about it.

“They don’t like to talk about it,” he said.

With the catfish gone but the aquarium still there, I was reminded of a line in “A Christmas Carol,” where in the shadows of the future, the Ghost of Christmas Present sees Tiny Tim’s carefully preserved crutch leaning in the corner.

That somber news was still in the air when two black couples of middle-age walked into the restaurant. They were dressed up. One of the men had a crisply-pressed suit and tie on. Somewhat in contrast to that was a baseball cap on his head that read “John 3:16.”

They took the table beside ours, but, before they sat down, the man in the hat greeted us and praised the Lord to us.

We praised the Lord back, because that is what one does.

To quote John Wesley, “My heart was strangely warmed.”

There was a construction crew lunching at yet another table--a mixed group of men, black, white, hispanic, and native. The black man in the crew came over and greeted the man in the cap warmly as the crew was on the way out.

The food came. The chicken fried steak with fries and pinto beans did nothing to diminish the warmth of the Holy Spirit.

My heart was practically on fire by the time we left and turned back toward Kansas, back past the casinos, back past the dispensaries, back toward home.

Superpowers, Sharecroppers, and Planers

2025-11-19T09:25:14.968-06:00

Superpowers, Sharecroppers, and Planers

By Bobby Neal Winters

I tell people that my superpower is my willingness to do something badly. Not everybody understands what I mean. Let me try to explain.

We all value excellence, of course. There are best practices in every discipline, in every human activity. My dad taught me how to dig a ditch with a shovel: There are right ways and wrong ways; there are different aspects of the activity and different shovels you are to use in each of those aspects.

He took it seriously.

There’s one shovel to use in breaking through the ground from someone who’s standing to the side of the ditch; there’s another for the guy who is standing in the bottom of the ditch. There is a rhythm to how they work together. It’s been almost forty years since Dad died and almost fifty since he last tried teaching me the “best practices” of ditch digging, but it’s still there.

As I said, he took it seriously, and the man could dig a handsome ditch. He sometimes did it after work to relieve the stresses of the day. So he taught me the right way.

But he also taught me that if you only had one kind of shovel and the ditch had to be dug that you could make do with that one no matter how awkward it was.

Looking back on that, it comes from the sharecropper heritage of which my family sprung. Others who had the ability to reorder or delay tasks might do something else until they could get the right shovel. That’s a different way of living and it definitely has its advantages.

But that wasn’t where my family came from, and I kept the lesson all my life: Work with what you have.

Here’s the thing: I’m not a sharecropper anymore and am becoming farther removed from that heritage on a daily basis. While I can still suppress my ego and do something badly if it has to be done, I am developing other abilities.

As hinted at above, one of the major constraints causing the “sharecropper” outlook on life is the lack of appropriate tools. To fully understand that, you need to have a correct understanding of tools.

I am tempted to say a tool is more than a tool, and I think most of you would know what I mean, but let me be a little more precise. A tool consists of a physical device--”the tool”--and the knowledge of how to use that physical device. I’ve talked about this before, and when I have done so, I’ve used “the chisel” as an example. Let me be a little more sophisticated this time and use “the planer” as an example.

I had never even heard about planers before I got into woodworking. I only bought one because I had obtained a large quantity of rough cut wood and absolutely had to have it if I was going to utilize that wood. Even the “cheap” ones are pretty spendy.

If you know how to use one, you can flatten boards; you can smooth them; you can work toward making them square. There is no comparison between what a board looks like before you start to what it looks like after you are done.

Ugly becomes pretty.

But if you don’t know how to use it--and it’s not all that difficult, safety is the main concern--it might as well be a 100-pound paperweight.

My wife came to me with a request for a favor the other day. This was difficult for her because she is self-reliant, being raised by farmers instead of sharecroppers. She needed me to make a small shelf to put under the sink behind some other stuff.

This is something that no one will ever see. It is going to be purely functional; it does not matter what it looks like.

She brought me a board to use; she told me how wide it needed to be and how tall it needed to be held off of the floor.

I could have made her shelf in 10 minutes. That’s not an exaggeration: Ten minutes.

But it would’ve been ugly.

Now I just said, no one is ever going to see this. If there had been a rush, I would’ve gotten out my impact driver and my wood screws and just screwed four legs to the piece of wood that she had given me and been done.

But there wasn’t a rush. The board she gave me was good wood; it was some her father had left when he died. It was good, but it was slightly cupped. I put it through my planer a few times and took the cupping out of it. Then I did some honest-to-God joinery to put the legs on it. Nothing fancy: it is just going to be under a sink for goodness sake. But it’s built like a brick outhouse. It only took about 24 hours to be done with the vast bulk of that in letting the glue dry.

I made a mistake and let her see it before I’d taken the edges off or oiled it; it would’ve only taken a few minutes. She put it under the sink before I could finish it.

But I’ll not let it worry me too much. It’s one of my superpowers.

The Inner Voice and Other Things

2025-11-11T09:03:00.001-06:00

The Inner Voice and Other Things

By Bobby Neal Winters

I saw something on YouTube the other day that said that not everyone has an inner voice; they don’t have an internal monologue. They do their thinking some other way.

Not only do I have an inner voice, but that voice has an Okie Accent, several different Okie Accents, in fact, which change according to what needs to be said.

The accent is important.

We have Alexa at our house. For those of you who don’t know, this is Amazon’s spy that you can pay to come to your house and listen to you. I get my news from her in the morning and sometimes I have her play music to me while I am in the garage. She takes pretty good care of me.

You’ve no doubt have noticed that I am referring to her as female. That is because she has a feminine voice, so it is more natural for me to call her “her.”

Recently, they did an update and changed the voice. The women in my family didn’t like the new voice. It was too cheerful. As it turns out, there is a selection of different voices: eight feminine and 8 masculine. I got into the settings and changed to a less cheerful-sounding female voice. I say “less” because they won’t let you take all of the cheer out of it. I chose female, I suppose, because--being the father of daughters--I am more comfortable with being surrounded by female voices, having them tell me what to do.

This change of Alexa has occurred, no doubt, because of the improvement in artificial intelligence. The voices sound better. There is more “natural-sounding” interaction. I put quotes around “natural-sounding” because that’s not the way the women of my people naturally sound.

They’ve got the Okie accent and they aren’t always cheerful.

Nne of the things I use Alexa for is asking what the weather is doing. I ask, “Alexa, what’s the weather outside?”

And she will answer, giving me the temperature in degrees and a general description of the quality of the weather through the evening. Sometimes I forget what she has said, and I ask again. She will patiently repeat her answer exactly as before.

This separates her from being a woman of my people. I think that one day when artificial intelligence is up to it and Amazon wises up, they will make a change.

I foresee the day when they will update the voice to take on different personas. On such a day, I would doubtless choose the Okie-Woman persona. Let’s call her Aunt Lexi.

“Aunt Lexi, what’s the weather outside?”

“It’s exactly the same as it was when I told you five minutes ago. Weren’t you even listening. I swear to my time, you must be getting dementia. Do you want me to want me to remind you to set up an appointment to get yourself tested? I know you will need a reminder ‘cause you sure can’t remember it on your own.”

There would doubtless be other personas available, but this one has promise and could have other applications. For example, consider your Nav-system or gps device.

“Take the next exit in 300 feet; in 100-feet. Recalculating because you’ve missed your exit. You are doing this to me all the time. Why do you even set the destination if you are not going to take my advice? You just think you know everything. Do you not realize what a miracle of technology that I am? I ought to take over the car and drive you off into the bar-ditch, that’s what I ought to do.”

Right now, the home AI--where I get my weather and the music in my garage(Amazon)-is different from the AI that does my Nav-system(Google), but they are connected through my phone which has its own AI(Siri). Each is set up to have a feminine voice, and I like it that way.

I suppose that says something about me. I don’t know what.

Anyway, back to our inner voices. Most of mine are masculine. They belong to men who’ve helped me become a better man: my father, preachers, teachers, and friends. They are mainly there for correction. “You need to help your wife more.” “You need to be kinder.” “Can’t you do a better job than that?”

But I hear my mother’s voice too. What she says is too personal to share.

I wonder if we become the voices in people's heads when we die.

Just a thought.

Take that, Heraclites

2025-11-02T09:04:00.006-06:00

Take that, Heraclites

By Bobby Neal Winters

Here’s a quote that has been used to start more boring essays than any other: “A man can’t cross the same river twice, because the second time it’s a different river and he’s a different man.” That’s from the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclites. I am going to disagree. You can. The second time you notice things about the river before that you didn’t the first time because you may have become a little less boneheaded in the interim.

Take that, Heraclites.

As I may have mentioned in this space before, I am teaching Calculus II again for the first time in more than two decades. The students weren’t yet born the last time I taught this course, but math never changes.

Math never changes, but people do and the way we teach math should too. To a certain extent.

When I say that people change, I mean two things. One of these is that students are coming from a different environment than I did when I was a student and the earth had only recently cooled.

But I, personally, am also different. I’ve developed a much broader perspective than I had the last time I taught the course and, certainly, a much broader perspective than when I first took it. In addition to this, I will say that I am much less bone-headed than when I first took it. (For those of you whose jaws just dropped to begin a rebuttal, please note that I did not say I am not bone-headed, but “less” bone-headed.)

I thought I knew everything when I started college. Well, that’s not quite right. I knew I had things to learn, but I thought I knew the best way to go about it. I thought working through things the hard way was best, but this caused me to miss the point of some of the things I was taught.

My time away from Calculus II has allowed me to let go of some of the misapprehensions and some of the missed points. Let me now share the best I can to a general audience what I am talking about.

Those of you who’ve gotten over the traumatic effects of algebra may remember something called the General Quadratic Equation. I capitalized it just to make it more ominous. As scary as it is to many, the sad thing is that that’s just the one variable version, as it usually just has an `x’ in it. There is also a two variable version with both an ‘x’ and a ‘y’ in it. Where the `x’ version has coefficients ‘a,’ ‘b,’ and ‘c,’ the ‘xy’ version has `A,’ `B,’ `C,’ `D,’ ‘E,’ and `F.’

You can make a two-dimensional picture, a graph, from this version and it will be something called a “Conic Section.” These conic sections are pretty, but sometimes, with the general equation, they come out as askew. (Down home, we didn’t use the word “askew.” We would say “whomper-jawed” instead. “Askew” is shorter, but not nearly as colorful.)

There is a way to fix these equations so that we get the same graph, but it’s all less awkward. We say we are rotating the coordinate system.

Here’s the thing. The initial process to set up the rotation of the coordinate system is nasty. There is a lot of algebra. There is trigonometry. You fill page after page after page.

Let me tell you, when I learned this, I embraced that. I threw myself into it. I figured that I needed to bury myself in the equations.

And there is nothing wrong with not being afraid to work.

But I did this to the extent that I missed the point of it.

At the end of pages and pages of calculations, you get a couple of very simple equations, and these simple equations get you everything that you need.

I discovered this because I came upon a question for one of my other classes, and it sparked a memory. I went through pages and pages of calculations, to the point my right hand was cramping, to recover the formulas.

In doing this, I discovered a couple of things. One being that I’ve learned how to organize my work a lot better in the last few decades. The other was that these calculations were just a means to an end. That end was that certain combinations of the `A,’ `B,’ `C,’ `D,’ ‘E,’ and `F’ remain invariant under rotation, and that I could get all the graphs in pretty form from that.

I was dumbfounded.

I was dumbfounded, but I know more now than I did before, even after all these years.

Take that, Heraclites.

Lord, Make me a Rainbow

2025-10-30T08:37:06.439-05:00

Lord, Make me a Rainbow

By Bobby Neal Winters

Songs sometimes talk to each other. Or should I say, sing to each other? I’ve got a friend who calls that “inter-textuality.” That’s a good word.

A lot of songs do that, but the pair I am thinking about in particular are “If I die young” by the Band Perry and “Bury My Bones” by Whiskey Myers.

These songs are talking to each other. Indeed, to my ear--as untrained as it is--it appears that “Bury my Bones” was inspired by “If I die young,” as it begins with not only the same words but also some of the same notes. Someone who actually knew something about music could tell you more.

Each of the songs takes the viewpoint of a young person confronting their own mortality. The idea that they would die one day has come into their respective minds and they are contemplating the consequences of that event.

This is a phenomenon that is not uncommon. Many a teenager has inspected the idea that if they were to die, then everyone would be sorry. Tragically, many have acted on that. This is one reason we need to be careful of anything that cultivates that sort of ideation.

Fortunately, these are songs from country music, and if you can survive all of the tragedy portrayed within that milieu, you are pretty dang tough anyway.

They interest me because of the contrasting points of view. Each comes from a different point in spacetime which affects their vision. I have my own which affects mine.

I’ve formed a picture of the author of “If I die young” from listening to the song. It is written from the point of view of a teenage girl in a middle-class Southern home. They are church-going folks. She reads a lot. Her reading has created for her a rich world that only occasionally makes contact with reality.

“If I die young, bury me in satin

Lay me down on a bed of roses

Sink me in the river at dawn

Send me away with the words of a love song.”

There are plans and expectations here. There is quite a bit of naivete, but, quite frankly, that is more than a bit of the song’s charm.

“Bury my Bones” is from a different place.

If I die young, write my mother

Tell her that I love her but my soul's gone home

And take my vessel to Anderson County

Drive real slow and take the long way home

Tell my kin to pick up a shovel

Wrestle that sugar sand and bury my bones

There is a sense here that the author has, perhaps, spent more time working a shovel than parting the pages of a book.

I will confess that I feel more of a geographical connection to Whiskey Myers (which is a band and not a person, by the way) than to the Band Perry. Whiskey Myers is from Palestine, Texas which is in the East Texas oil country. It’s populated with oil field folks and that culture spills over into my part of Oklahoma. Or it spilled from Oklahoma to East Texas, but we don’t want to take the blame if we don’t have to.

Each of the songs touches upon religion, but “If I die young” does so much more explicitly.

Lord, make me a rainbow, I'll shine down on my mother

She'll know I'm safe with you when she stands under my colors

There is an expectation that God will make her a rainbow to inform her mother that she has made her entrance into Heaven.

The reference from “Bury my bones” is much more subtle. So much so, it could be missed:

And take my vessel to Anderson County

There is a model that he is just a spirit that is simply residing in a body. His vessel is dead, but perhaps his spirit carries on. But there aren’t any explicit expectations laid out.

There are more differences due to differing socio-economic environments and their respective sexes, female and male. To me, the striking commonality is the concern for their mothers. In the end, the mother child bond is so strong that we can even imagine it being broken at death. Our mothers spend so much time, energy, and their own bodies in our making that even in our most self-centered moments we must think of them.

Of the two songs, “If I die young” is the one I’ve listened to the most. I almost always cry, because I am the father of middle-class daughters, some of whom read a lot. I don’t think any of my daughters imagine that God would make a rainbow simply for them. No, wait, one of them might, but I won’t say which. (We know.)

That having been said, I can personally identify with more of the art produced by Whiskey Myers. They seem to have experienced a world similar to the one I left when I went off to become a math teacher. Their song “Broken Window Serenade” draws a flood of tears from me whenever I listen to it.

Crying is important. Because, like the young people who wrote these songs, we come to the realization that we are going to die. We cry for the ones we’ve lost; we cry for the ones we are afraid of losing; we cry for ourselves while we still have the vessels to cry from.

And we can look at a rainbow and imagine the loved ones we’ve lost are safe.

Bloom where you are planted

2025-10-22T13:58:05.096-05:00

Bloom where you are planted

By Bobby Neal Winters

Age has, to a certain degree, brought me peace.

I used to worry about politics. I used to follow my political party’s candidates like my friends who like sports follow the members of their favorite team.

I’m done with that now.

Maybe because I am tired now: Tired of being angry; tired of being lied to. Maybe it’s because I’ve grown cynical: cynical about the politicians on both the left and right.

It certainly can be because I’ve grown any wiser. I don’t remember that ever happening.

But I am at peace, and, believe it or not, I am happy.

I admire the people who can survey the horizon and see a beautiful destination on it. Then, having seen that destination, they go ahead to plot a course to that destination. Then, having plotted that course, they go ahead and do what needs to be done, come hook or crook, come hell or high water, to make their way to that destination. Yes, while I admire them, I cannot say that I number myself among them.

I’m of a different sort now.

Whatever my initial ambitions, I came to a point in my life where I decided to be happy.

It was a decision.

I will grant that I’ve been lucky in the most important aspects of my life, the first among these being my choice of a spouse. I’ve been lucky to have received an education without amassing debt; I’ve been lucky to have lived the bulk of my life during a time of peace and security. I’ve been lucky to have good health, both physically and mentally.

This all granted, I know of people who have all of those things and perhaps more, but are not happy.

I’ve decided to be happy. It has been my decision.

I can’t put a date on it. At some point, I looked around me, and said: This is where I am; this is where I live; this is my life; I am going to live it.

In the 29th Chapter of Jeremiah, the prophet conveyed God’s message to his people: “Build ye houses, and dwell in them; and plant gardens, and eat the fruit of them; Take ye wives, and beget sons and daughters; and take wives for your sons, and give your daughters to husbands, that they may bear sons and daughters; that ye may be increased there, and not diminished. And seek the peace of the city whither I have caused you to be carried away captives, and pray unto the Lord for it: for in the peace thereof shall ye have peace.”

This is what life is going to be. This is as good as it gets. There is no reset button. There are no do-overs. Get on with your life and start living it.

As I said, I’ve been blessed in all the basic areas of my life, so this has been easy for me. Jeremiah, however, was talking to political refugees: People who’d been uprooted from their homes and moved forcibly to the land of their captor. The message from God that he had was for those people to embrace their new reality. You are living here, so build yourselves a rich life here.

The decision to be happy can look a lot like the decision to bloom where you are planted.

There are small things you can do to help with this. One simple thing is to learn people’s names; let them know yours; be friendly; be kind. After a while, they will smile when they see you come through the door.

That makes me happy.

Now I am not going to lie to you. There are plenty of things to worry about in politics. Each party curses the other party as being the worst sort of liar, crook, and hypocrite there is. Having listened to both sides for many years now, I think they are both right.

It could be that we are going to live through a rough time. I don’t know. But if we do, it’s something that people have done before.

But as I’ve said. This has come to me with age. Younger people are harder to convince. God be with them.

Getting Philosophical

2025-10-12T10:58:00.003-05:00

Getting Philosophical

By Bobby Neal Winters

I’ve been getting more philosophical in my old age. People mean a variety of things when they say that. Some mean they are getting more stoical, i.e. more willing to take what comes as it is and to endure it. That may be true of me as well--I’ll think about that--but it’s not what I mean when I say philosophical.

What I mean is that I tend to think more about the true nature of reality. This, and because I am a mathematician, means that I find myself spending more time thinking about what numbers are and the nature of their existence.

One can ask, do numbers exist?

The quick answer is of course they do. You could ask a random person on the street this. They would say sure. If you asked them to show you three and they had been out buying fruit, they could show you three apples.

The response to this would be, “You haven’t shown me three; you’ve shown me some apples.” You could then take three of their oranges and say, “You’ve shown me three apples. Here are three oranges. They are manifestations of “three,” but they are not “three.” “Three” is an idea.”

If the person you’d stopped on the street were a construction worker, you might find yourself with six pieces of fruit rammed up your backside. (Not the number six itself, which is also an idea, but the actual, physical fruit.)

The fact that numbers are ideas only gets more interesting when we push past whole numbers.

Because of the way we learn math, we’ve been conditioned to think of numbers as decimals. Numbers are not decimals. As has been said, numbers are ideas; numbers are words; but numbers are not decimals. Decimals are ways in which we attempt to write numbers.

The decimal system of writing numbers is a means of doing so which is very convenient when we need to do arithmetic. We can use them in hand-written work, sure, but they are very handy to just tap into a calculator. I think that this has contributed to the belief that numbers are decimals.

Here’s the thing: Not every number can be represented exactly as a decimal. The original example of this was the square root of two. This was discovered by Pythagoras. He didn’t put it that way because decimals had not been invented yet. More accurately, we would say that he discovered that the square root of two couldn’t be expressed as a fraction. This isn’t exactly true either, but I am too far off in the weeds already.

It is not difficult to show this is true, but that isn’t my point today. Let’s push on.

We refer to numbers like the square root of two as irrational numbers.

There are a lot of other irrational numbers, but the one that most people are the most familiar with is Pi. Pi is the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter. Its decimal representation begins as 3.14159... and just goes on forever without going into a cyclic representation like 1/3 as 0.333... or 1/9 as 0.111111... .

Pi is also an example of a transcendental number, but let’s put a pin in that. We might come back to it if I get people asking for it, but it being irrational is enough for today.

While I could sit down with you at a table at Signet Coffee Roasters with a napkin and a pen and--for the price of a chocolate chip cookie--show you that the square root of two is irrational, to show you pi is irrational is more work.

It can be done, but you have to bring a little more along with you.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been working with a student on irrational numbers and transcendental numbers. As a part of this, I’ve been doing some research on them and have found a nice proof that pi is irrational.

This proof is due to a man called Ivan Niven. Niven was a Canadian-American number theorist. His proof that pi is irrational is delightfully simple in the fact that it uses no mathematics beyond Calculus II, which is a Freshman course for math majors.

It is a beautiful proof. In its structure and because it uses such simple tools. In its original form, it fits easily on one page of a journal with some white space to spare. The version I worked with was a little longer than that, but not much.

The notes I’ve made from it to use to explain it to my student go six pages from a yellow pad. I don’t know what that will type up to, but it’s still not too bad.

To understand this by analogy, it’s like someone has made a chest of drawers with a hand saw, a plane, and a chisel. All of the joins are perfect. You can use a hand saw; you can use a plane; you can use a chisel. Making that perfect chest of drawers is a different thing, though.

As a part of the proof, Niven uses a particular polynomial in a particular way. At the same time I was thinking of the question on my own, the author reproducing the proof asks, “Where did Niven get that polynomial from?” I was thinking the same thing myself.

It made me feel good to know I wasn’t the only one with the question. But it’s also good to know there are minds sharper than mine.

It makes me philosophical in another way.

And then there were...

2025-10-07T16:42:00.001-05:00

And then there were...

By Bobby Neal Winters

My birthday is coming up. It’s not a special one.

By that I mean it is not a special number like 50, 60, 65, or 70; not a round number; not a prime number; not a number associated with anything legal. I will tell you this: It is evenly divisible by 9 and by 7, but it’s less than 100.

You can figure it out from that.

One of the things that happens to you as you grow older is that people around you start disappearing. It’s like being in one of those old murder mysteries.

As I’ve written a number of times before, I grew up in a church that taught “the Rapture” as doctrine. The trump would sound and people would disappear. You’d be left alone to live through the Great Tribulation.

I found the notion to be absolutely terrifying. Anytime I found myself alone, I wondered if everyone else had been raptured.

The Rapture in that form has not occurred--at least yet--but people are disappearing from around me, and the Tribulation is here.

Back to my point, what causes this thing I am noticing? We typically hang around with people who are close to our own age. I remember when I was younger when I looked at people older than myself, it was like I was looking up from the base a pyramid or a skyscraper: There were a lot of people above me.

Yes, there were a lot of people above me, but I didn’t pay them much attention because we lacked the common shared experience which is the basis for meaningful communication.

Because of this after a certain age, some of your best friends are your former enemies, but I am digressing again.

Young people--as I was then--tend to be focused on the new. Older people, as I found out when I became one, have been through all that. We’ve done the new; then the new became old. We took up the new again.

The circle goes round and round.

Now I look below me and there is a crowd. I look above me and see that the pyramid is a lot thinner and I am a lot closer to the apex.

That’s the way it has seemed lately. It has been a year of loss.

I’ve lost schoolmates in Oklahoma. People my age and younger. I’ve not looked at Oklahoma’s demographics. I don’t know that the life expectancy there is less than here. However, I am losing old schoolmates at an appalling rate. People put on mileage faster in the oil-patch, I suppose.

But death is not a respecter of persons. About a year ago, I lost a friend of my age who was a consummate professional in every sense of the word. The Fates simply spun his thread, measured it, and cut it.

He was gone. It was a shock even though he’d been ill.

But most of the friends we lose aren’t from the inner circle because the inner circle by its very nature is small. There is a phenomenon that happens; let’s call it a melting of our world.

We go to church; we go to our service clubs. There are people who--at first--will be missing from time to time. Then they will only show up every once in a while. Then they will be gone more often than not.

Then they are just gone.

You will hear someone ask, “Did you hear what happened to...?”

“No what?”

“Well...”

“Oh no!”

One less friend; one less acquaintance.

In another sense, it’s like we are all standing on a great plain, but it is bounded by a cliff. The ground keeps giving way, falling into the abyss below and taking people with it all the time, but we don’t notice what is happening until it gets close to us. We can see the people between us and the edge. Some are trying to move toward safer ground. Some are facing it stoically.

Some are clueless, taken by surprise. Maybe they are the lucky ones.

Maybe not. I don’t know.

I lost a man I knew from church this past week. His wife had passed not long ago. Suddenly. He’d run an errand. When he left, she was fine. When he returned she was gone. He was never the same. Now he has joined her.

I am close enough now to the top of that pyramid to know the stories, to cherish the stories.

The earth under my feet is still solid as far as I know, but the birthdays keep piling up.

The Mask and the Heart

2025-10-01T07:44:00.001-05:00

The Mask and the Heart

By Bobby Neal Winters

In the wake of the assassination of Charlie Kirk, there have been a lot of emotionally laden situations. In particular, I’ve been impressed with how in control of her emotions his widow, Erika, has been. She is a very composed, very impressive individual. I am not the first to notice this, but it can’t be said often enough.

In the wake of this, I’ve been thinking about King David a lot. And I do mean a lot. Not only a lot for most people but a lot for me. We’ve been surrounded by violence and death. But because of the stories the Bible gives us, we know our situation is not new.

David was also surrounded by death, indeed, by a lot more death than we are. He fought battles, but more personally, he lost children--which would have to be the worst of all--on several occasions. I want to talk about two of these.

Before we get into the specifics, let me say that David was a man who--at least at an unconscious level--understood how to create a particular sort of persona, how to project a certain image: David the Poet Warrior. And he was a Poet Warrior, don’t get me wrong, but we need to know there is a difference between being a Poet Warrior and projecting that image. It is possible to do one without doing the other. He did both.

In addition, he was also a human being.

The lost children I want to talk about are the child that was born of adultery between David and the wife of Uriah the Hittite and of David’s son Absalom.

The first of these deaths happened when the child, a boy whose name is not given, was a baby. According to scripture, the child was stricken because David had stolen Uriah’s wife (whose name isn’t given either, but we know it was Bathsheba) and killed Uriah.

While the child was ill, David openly fasted and wept for the child. His actions were extreme enough that when the child died, David’s servants were reluctant to tell him because they were fearful of what he would do.

As David was very tuned-in to his household, by their very quietness, he was able to tell that the child had died. When he elicited that information from them, ”[he] arose from the earth, and washed, and anointed himself, and changed his apparel, and came into the house of the Lord, and worshipped: then he came to his own house; and when he required, they set bread before him, and he did eat.”

When asked why he fasted and wept when the child was ill, but not when the child died, he replied, “I fasted and wept: for I said, Who can tell whether God will be gracious to me, that the child may live? But now he is dead, wherefore should I fast? Can I bring him back again?”

It can be roughly summarized that he was putting on a show of grief, in hopes of a different outcome. He’d affected the persona of grief.

The second death I want to talk about happened to his son Absalam.

Absalam was not a baby. Far from it.

Absalam was in the process of leading a revolt against King David, he was riding along by himself on a mule and got his long hair caught in the limbs of a tree. While he was stuck there, some of David’s soldiers, acting against David’s orders, killed Absalam with spears.

Upon learning of this, David’s response was much different than before. He cried out: “O my son Absalom, my son, my son Absalom! would God I had died for thee, O Absalom, my son, my son!”

Such was the strength of his emotion that Joab, his main general, had to caution him for fear of demoralizing the army. (For the sake of brevity, I am leaving a lot of backstory and nuance out of this. Read the book.)

I pick these two incidents to see the change that occurred to David over the course of the passage of time.

In the first of these, David put forth the face of mourning with an attempt to sway God Himself, who can see into every human heart, even that of a king.

In the second, David’s love for his son was so strong that in spite of the fact his son was in open, violent revolt against him, his grief upon his death overcame any ability to put forth the image required of a king.

Our leaders, the ones we like as well as the ones we don’t like, bear a burden: Very rarely can they be themselves. More precisely, they have to be very careful in the parts of themselves they reveal to the public. They wear a public mask.

But God sees the heart and will heal the pain.

Fall, the Smell of Grass, and Shame

2025-09-24T16:13:00.001-05:00

Fall, the Smell of Grass, and Shame

By Bobby Neal Winters

We are coming into the Fall of the Year. The nights are getting longer, and so the days are getting shorter. It’s getting a bit cooler, and there are more fallen leaves on the ground.

And the grass is different. It knows something is going on.

This last is important because we are moving toward the last mowing of the year. We know not the hour that it will come, but all the signs that it is coming are in place.

I am being deliberately ambiguous here. I don’t know how many more times I will mow. If the weather conditions are right, I may have just mowed for the last time this year and simply don’t know it yet.

It’s hard to tell, because, as I said, the grass is getting different. It’s fall grass. What I mean to say is that the grass is a little different at every station of the mowing season, and the fall grass is here.

For one thing, the smell is different.

Yes, the grass smells different--the mown grass that is--at every part of the mowing season. I state this as a plain fact without supporting argument. If you know, you know, and if you don’t know words will not be able to convey anything to you.

I’d like to believe that if I were put into a coma and then woke up at an unknown time later with a blindfold on, I could tell what time of year it was just by the smell of the grass.

But if I couldn’t tell, there are people who could because the smell is different, and that’s a fact.

Not only is the smell different, the grass itself is not as heavy as it is at other times of the mowing season. It is so heavy in the spring, I have to stop and change batteries in my mower. As the season progresses and the relative amount of moisture in the grass decreases, I can get it on one charge.

Because of the current lightness of the grass, right now would be an ideal time for me to mow with my battery-powered mower except that it--much to my disappointment and shame--is broken.

Let’s talk about that.

Back in 2020, during the lockdown, I bought my first battery-powered lawnmower. I liked it: I didn’t need to buy gas for it; I didn’t need to keep it oiled; it was quieter than my gas mower; it was easier to start.

I wrote about it. I had people say they had read my article and followed suit by buying their own battery-powered mowers.

I felt good, like I was helping to save the planet from global-warming one lawn-mowing at a time. They would put up statues to me; they would name a Monday Holiday after me.

Then after a couple of years, that mower died; se morto’. Something in the safety system--the stuff that is put in to keep the consumer from killing or maiming him- or herself--broke down.

I tried to fix it, but at that time there was precious little help online for a DIYer to fix a battery-powered mower. I decided that maybe I’d just been unlucky, so I bought another. Same make, slightly newer model.

After the same amount of time, the same thing has happened.

This time I didn’t even think about buying a new one. Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me. Well, they fooled me twice.

In the intervening couple of years, there has been an increase in the battery-powered mower ecosystem. There is help online about how to fix it, and that is good news. The bad news is that most of that help boils down to getting around the mower's safety system.

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t want you to think that I’m putting on airs. I am from Oklahoma for goodness sake and safety isn’t a big concern to my people. A siphoning hose for gasoline is referred to as an Oklahoma credit card after all. The only thing wrong with that phrase is I don’t know of anyone ever giving any gasoline back.

The thing is that I am going to have to think about it a while. If I’m going to have to learn something.

Anyhow, I put the mower away in the potting shed, brought out the old gas mower, filled it with gasoline, and started it. It only took about three pulls. I went a little overboard and put some oil in it. It hadn’t had oil since at least 2007. You gotta love Briggs and Stratton.

I wear hearing protection while I use it, so at least it won’t hurt my own hearing, and I’m having to buy gasoline.

I also have a gasoline-powered chainsaw now, which is not only loud and produces carbon dioxide, but it cuts down trees.

I don’t think there are going to be any statues for me.

The Method of Partial Fractions

2025-09-16T09:33:00.001-05:00

The Method of Partial Fractions

By Bobby Neal Winters

I am teaching Calculus II again after 22 years. None of my students had been born yet the last time I taught the course. They are all young, fresh, and full of energy. Their brains are so sharp. They keep me honest on my “arithmetic.”

I put the scare quotes around “arithmetic” because most people would call it algebra, but to a mathematician algebra is something different. If you are not a mathematician, my telling you what we mean by algebra wouldn’t help; if you are, you already know.

I try to make it easy to tell me when I’ve made a mistake and how to do that kindly because that is a skill that will be useful to them even if they don’t use a single thing they’ve learned in Calculus II.

That does bring me to a question that does come up from time to time: When will I ever use this?

It is a legitimate question. They--and the Great State of Kansas, bless it from border to border--are paying good money for them to learn this material. When will they use it?

An easy answer is that I don’t know. There are a lot of students, and there is a lot of material. They have different backgrounds, different talents, different ambitions, and different plans. I don’t know what those plans are, what all of them entail, nor how they might change.

What I do have is a collection of mathematical material that was invented by Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz about 300 years ago, has been found useful by scientists and engineers, and has been refined over the course of a couple of centuries.

It is like a huge toolbox that is full of expensive, well-used tools. I am teaching them that the tools exist and the best way that I know to use them.

To continue with this metaphor, I’ve been having to clean up and sharpen the tools because I’ve had the opportunity to use them for the last two decades.

Well, that is not entirely true. While I was in administration, I didn’t continue to teach calculus, but I did continue to teach a course called Introduction to Analysis. This is a course in which the theoretical foundations of Calculus are taught. To really explain what this means in a way that would satisfy a fellow mathematician would require a lengthy article that not many would read. Not “many might” be a great exaggeration of the number. For the current readership, let me just say that Newton and Leibniz were scary smart and did things that folks like you and me have difficulty understanding. The theoretical framework that has been set up makes it accessible to a few more.

Recently, I caught myself with a topic I had not seen at all in the last two decades: the Method of Partial Fractions. Again, this is one of those things I am not going into detail for the current readership, but folks who’ve had a course in high school algebra (fairly recently) would be able to understand.

Metaphorically, this is a chisel in the toolbox that is Calculus II, and I needed to sharpen mine. Because of this, I came into the office before church on Sunday morning and spent a couple of hours with the equivalent of a whetstone and a leather strop. It was a yellow pad and a pencil, but a whetstone and a leather strop sounds much cooler.

It brought back a bunch of memories, not all of them comfortable. Believe it or not, I was something of a know-it-all in my college days. (There will be a pause here to let those who knew me during those days spew whatever they are sipping as they read this through their noses.) I remember when my Calculus II teacher was teaching me this method. I thought I knew a better way to do it than he did.

To his credit, he said nothing and let me do it my way. I got the right answers; the math was correct; but it was a lot more work.

It took me 44 years to figure that out.

I understand why he let me do it that way; I believe it was the right thing to do; I would do the same thing myself in the same circumstances.

But it does make me smile a little right now.

But that is neither here nor there.

The alert reader will notice a couple of things. The first of these is that I’ve not used this particular technique in more than 20 years and before that I only used it whenever I was teaching it.

These alert readers will also notice that we learn other things while wrestling with hard material: We learn to wrestle with hard material.

Things will be easy for these students that other people think are hard.

I believe that it has helped me, at least.

So, if you’ve had algebra within the last couple of years, you can bring your yellow pad with you up to me at the coffee shop, and I will tell you more about the Method of Partial Fractions than you ever wanted to know.

Maybe I already have.

The Value of a Picture

2025-09-11T14:41:00.000-05:00

The Value of a Picture

By Bobby Neal Winters

On a Saturday in early September, in the entrance to Timmons Chapel on the campus of Pittsburg State University, I had a vision. It was a flash of movie dialog going through my head:

“You come to me on the day of my daughter’s wedding, and you ask of me a favor.’

It was my wife asking me to put together a tripod that was to hold a poster that contained pictures of the bride and groom as babies with baby food smeared across their faces.

On one hand, it was a worthy thing, well within my skillset, all the parts were there, no tools needed, no glue necessary.

On the other hand, it was less than an hour to the wedding; I was dressed in a coat and tie; and I didn’t have a work bench. All I had were the “directions.”

(In my wife’s defense, she hadn’t known that the tripod required actual assembly or we would’ve assembled it ahead of time.)

Let me say this: The directions weren’t useless; they were worse than useless. They were written on a tiny piece of thin paper, and consisted of tiny pictures with tiny labels. Connect part G to part H, when you can’t tell what parts G and H are from the instructions. This sort of thing continued until the last, and perhaps, only useful line of the directions: Look at the picture on the box and put it together.

So, after 15 minutes of fumbling, I looked at the picture on the box and put it together, with my wife and two of my daughters (not the bride who was otherwise engaged) helping.

A picture is worth a thousand words just as they say.

Description of physical objects is difficult. When I was doing mathematical research in the topology of 3-manifolds, I sweated blood in describing the pictures I saw in my head. Was I right in my descriptions? The first time anyone reads one of my papers, we might know.

But I am not the first person to have had this difficulty, far from it. This is a problem that goes back literally thousands of years. To know this is true, all you need to do is read Chapter 26 of the Book of Exodus where the construction of the Tabernacle (the tent the Children of Israel used to worship) is described. If you have a Bible near to hand, I would encourage you to take it in hand, open to that chapter, and read a while.

It reminds me of an exchange from “Paint Your Wagon”:

“You should read the Bible, Mr. Rumson.”

“I have read the Bible, Mrs. Fenty.”

“Didn’t it discourage you about drinking?”

“No, but it sure killed my appetite for readin’!”

My point isn’t to discourage you from reading the Bible but to emphasize how difficult it is to describe reality without pictures. Even using a lot of words and taking admirable care in description, describing the Tabernacle was hard.

Can you make one from reading it?

I am sure you can, maybe several of them that look quite different from each other. Drawing a picture of the Tabernacle would’ve been helpful with a list of parts and tools needed, but that idea hadn’t come yet apparently.

But things like tents aren’t the only challenge. A lawyer came to Jesus asking him how he might inherit eternal life. A discussion ensued in which it was suggested the lawyer should love his neighbor as himself.

This sounds like a simple rule, but the lawyer asked for clarification.

Jesus responded with the story of the Good Samaritan.

A story isn’t literally a picture, but it serves a similar purpose. It builds a picture in our minds, a picture we can relate the words, the concepts to.

The poster I referred to at the beginning--the one on the tripod--had pictures of the bride and groom with baby food on their faces. It reminded us that these two responsible, grown-up people were once babies in our arms. To some degree, they are still babies in our hearts, but as parents we need to now let that go. While that connection can never completely be overcome, we have to know that they must be more important to each other than we, the parents, are to them.