Category → Fruit of Contemplation
Shen Yun thumbs up review
Somewhere in the time frame of 1971 to 1974, a troupe of Chinese acrobats and dancers put on an incredible performance at Penn State University’s Recreation Hall. Despite having been a wee lad up in the bleachers that evening, I can still now recall moments of their performance with shocking clarity, such were the amazing skill and feats of strength they brought to the American public.
Lots of male and especially female displays of traditional weapons mastery – spears, swords, knives – whose choreography defies even an aged and highly skeptical intellect decades later, as well as incredible and frankly unbelievable balancing + acrobatic + martial arts acts with tea cups and people, bending iron bars that the audience members were invited to try etc etc.
And now looking back, I realize that those early 1970s Chinese performers must have been the last of their kind, or maybe they were exiles, such was the crushing tyranny of Mao’s “Cultural Revolution” aimed at stamping out through murder, torture, and literal destruction of every single thing that had made China China for the past five thousand years. In any event, in Rec Hall that night I had witnessed history.
Well, fast forward about fifty years, and into the intervening gap steps Shen Yun, a modern show about “China Before Communism.” That is, before all that Mao Cultural Revolution communist crap that has destroyed one of the world’s great nations and culture. Begun in 2006, Shen Yun performances have been evolving and growing for the past sixteen years, and now boasts eight geographically dispersed troupes regularly impressing audiences around America. The Princess of Patience and I saw one such troupe in Pittsburgh, PA, this past Sunday, at the historic and beautiful Benedum Theater.
Looky here, I am no theater or musical show kind of guy. So don’t go on reading further here and expecting to encounter the usual aphorisms and adjectives “professional” art and theater critics regularly provide through their Pez dispensers.
What you are about to read is my own unvarnished layman perspective, as told from the guy who almost always falls asleep as soon as the lights go out and the curtain rises, and who is then awakened either by the sharp elbows of the theater goer to my left or by the Princess of Patience to my right. Apparently I think I am not snoring when I sleep in a theater, but in fact I do snore.
Apparently one play was stopped mid-scene while an actor asked someone to stop me from snoring, such was the distraction. What can I say, few theater performances are memorable to me. Men singing…bad. Men dancing in tights and playing dress-up…really bad. Theater and especially musicals and most especially opera are all a refined form of torture. If a play is any good, it will become a movie, which I might see and during which I probably will not fall asleep. My highly educated and experienced opinion here.
But, such is my love for the Princess of Patience, that I bought tickets and took her to see this updated version of whatever it was I had been mesmerized by fifty years ago.
To its credit, Shen Yun kept me awake. We can joke, but that is actually an achievement.
Shen Yun’s scenes or performances are relatively brief, each probably five to seven minutes long, and also varied. That constant change helps keep the audience’s attention focused. The subjects are about traditional Chinese culture, love, war, good vs. evil, history, spirituality, chivalry, family, and the performers wear culturally appropriate dress in each scene. They also have an act about forced organ harvesting, the current real-time inhumane insane crazy can’t believe this is happening actual action of murdering political prisoners and transferring their healthy organs to the unhealthy bodies of Chinese citizens who are “more equal”* than the 99.99% of the Chinese socioeconomically beneath them.
*(George Orwell, author of dystopian novel and a foreshadowing message about the present political situation in both China and America 1984, coined this phrase more equal than others in his other dystopian novel Animal Farm, where the political leader pigs betray the farm animals’ revolution against the humans and go on to corrupt the original commandment that all animals are equal in order to keep their pig selves in unintended, constant, never-ending more equal than others tyrannical mastery over all the other animals)
Something I had not seen before is Shen Yun’s use of a digital screen as the stage backdrop, instead of the traditional painted screen that would form the background for the stage in each scene. Shen Yun uses different digital backdrops, often several different ones, in each scene. They are crisp, clear, and bright. They also allow for cartoon versions of the actors to soar through the air or run away over the horizon. Maybe this is old technology, but it is a first encounter for me, and I liked it.
Things I liked about Shen Yun: The amazing dance, ballet, tumbling, and acrobatic abilities of the professional actors, the incredibly tight and perfectly executed choreography, the superior talent of the live orchestra members, and the bright and flowing costumes that must be a real b#tch to move around in. I liked all the subject matters. The simpler weapons handling wasn’t intended to be anything like the old days, but it adds a nice change to each story and act. The pleasant combining of traditional Chinese music with a modern European/ Western orchestra is very cool.
Things I did not like about Shen Yun: About a third of the acts are repetitious, despite using different costumes and some different choreography, with the same sweeping “windmill” arm motions of the actors in each one. Consider that the one act that brought the loudest applause was about a traditional Tibetan dance, complete with very different moves and costumes. Another thing that irked me was how MC/Announcer Perry’s suit crotch was obviously rumpled. Probably because I am not a regular suit wearer, my eye was immediately drawn to this unprofessional and uncomfortable anomaly. Come on, Perry, your suit must be cleaned and pressed before each performance. Even a knuckle dragging lug like me knows this.
In conclusion, I spoke with half a dozen members of the audience both inside and outside the theater, and everyone liked it. Some appreciated the simple artistic expression, despite not synching with the political, religious, or cultural messages. Others really liked the occasional blips of overt religious messaging, which if I had to guess is some sort of Bhuddist messianism that most Christians can relate to in one way or another. One audience member I spoke with said that she is politically liberal, but that she was not bothered at all by the political or religious aspects of Shen Yun: “I don’t have to agree with it to enjoy it. This is just their own artistic expression and I am here to see it and enjoy it as it is,” she said to me.
Amen.
Benedum Theater is worth visiting just to see the beautiful interior
Benedum Theater ceiling
Benedum Theater interior
If I had a big social function, I would have it at the Benedum Theater. Tons of cozy little nooks like this
If I can’t get front and center seats, I won’t go see an event that has a stage.
Shen Yun audience had everyone old, young, in between, Asian, black, white, purple…
Some parts of Pittsburgh have not been successful. Around the block from this ancient bar and hotel we encountered what had been a recently built very attractive state of the art Martin Luther King, Jr cultural resource center abandoned in an overgrown lot
Pittsburgh smartly employs vehicles powered by clean burning propane
The entire city of Pittsburgh is stunningly beautiful. This one column is representative of the beautiful hand carved stone buildings from the Victorian Age to the 1940s. Thanks to industrialists like the Mellons, Carnegies, Olivers, and Benedums, Pittsburgh is a world hub for architecture and science
Merry X-Mas to all Americans
Today is Christmas, the national holiday of America and most Western nations. Its origin is easy enough to decipher from the English name we use today, which is a conjunction of two words, Christ and Mass, or Christ’s-Mass, Christ being the Anglicized version of the Greek Chrystos, which means anointed.
Why does any of this matter? Because people best do things they agree with and understand, and in order to understand a thing, a person must understand the entire thing, especially its genesis.
Holding a Christian Mass -or Christmas- in honor of the Jewish man Joshua the Nazirite (or Joshua of Nazareth) whom orthodox Christians believe fulfills anointed messianic prophecy as interpreted from the Hebrew Scriptures (TANACH, or Torah (The Old Testament), Nevi’im (the Prophets), and Ketuvim (the Writings), is a way of celebrating the person at the center of the Christian faith. At least as the faith has been understood after the First Nycean Council (held in Nyceae Greece, now Iznik Turkey, in the year CE 325), when the first 275 years of Christianity was then greatly reformed and shaped, and out of which a religious orthodoxy emerged that both Protestants and Catholics today follow.
Apparently observed mostly as an austere holiday devoid of outward joy or expressions of happiness for most of its 1,500 year history, and conveniently set for the 25th day of December to match up with Hanuka’s 25th day of the Hebrew month of Kislev, Christmas as we now know it in America was created by a Briton, a 19th century writer named Charles Dickens.
Charles Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol, something almost all Americans are familiar with. Starring one Ebenezer Scrooge and Tiny Tim and a cast of other characters designed to tug at our heart strings and elicit our deepest sympathies and emotions, A Christmas Carol aggressively addresses what Dickens saw as a dearth of happiness and Christian charity. Especially at that time, when the modern industrial revolution had pulled people off the rural farms and pooled them into teeming urban slums, creating a huge strata of direly poor people in need of everything and unable to provide for themselves as they had back on the farms.
(note that Karl Marx wrote his Communist Manifesto at the same time in response to the same industrial revolution socioeconomic dynamics playing out in Germany and Europe, but instead of trying to encourage Christian faith to rise to the occasion, like Dickens, Marx sought to supplant Judaism and Christianity with his own new religion…)
Dickens believed that those who had benefited most from the industrial revolution and its cheap labor had a Christian duty to share their success in the form of charity with those living in the urban slums. And so Dickens’ A Christmas Carol story is both a huge guilt trip and emotional plea that was immediately and wildly successful when it debuted and continues to shape our own Christmas experiences to this day.
Combined with Scandinavian traditions of Santa Claus and reindeer, evergreen trees decorated with festive lights, and German gift giving, Dickens’ vision of a friendly, happy, merry, relaxed Christmas is how Americans celebrate, observe, or simply enjoy the holiday today.
So today is Christmas in America. Whether or not one is an orthodox Christian, an orthodox Jew, a Hindu, a Buddhist, or any other religious or nonreligious faith or identity, this day is yours to make of it what you will. Religious or secular. Even the secular version has the best of human traits.
Why not make the most and best of it? Wishing some stranger in the shopping center a Merry Christmas can have as much theological meaning as you want it to have, or it can simply be your best of heartfelt personal well wishes to a fellow American citizen. It is yours to choose what you mean by saying Merry Christmas, but the point is that saying it neither detracts from your own faith, nor does it add to anyone else’s faith if you simply wish them a Merry Christmas.
Some places like Dearborn, Michigan, and Borough Park, Brooklyn, have such an absence of Christians that it would not make sense to wish anyone one encounters there a Merry Christmas.
But to everyone else in America, I wish you a very Merry Christmas, with only the best of hopes for you today and in the year 2023 ahead.
The real Hanuka needs to stand up
Hanuka is represented today as the “Jewish Christmas,” and why not, right? Why not have more fun, more celebration, more love, more gifts. And everyone enjoys a lighter moment instead of things being so heavy and deep.
Problem is, Hanuka suffers from the same dumbing-down that has also made a mockery of Christmas and turned it too into an orgy of materialism. Religious observers in both faith groups need to reclaim what is theirs, because at the core both Hanuka and Christmas are about core values. And if there is one thing that America has lost is its core values, resulting in our culture terrifyingly spiraling down the drain. Religious holidays used to serve the purpose of instilling religious values, may we all return to that soon.
Historically Hanuka was not about silver and blue tinsel or a disarmingly childish sounding “festival of lights” that evokes fairies twirling in tutus with flashy lights sparkling all around. Rather, in reality Hanuka is precisely the opposite image, because it marked a turning point in a bloody civil war between Jews in Israel. For three generations, two Jewish groups representing divergent philosophies were locked in a brutal civil war for control of the Temple and the religious customs and practices that Jews would follow.
On the one hand were liberal secularists, Hellenists, who represented a light Jewish identity dominated by Greek culture and behavior, including unbridled sexuality. They were enabled by Greeks descended from Alexander the Great’s conquering of the region. Opposing them were the “Maccabees,” named after an orthodox Jewish family patriarch who defiantly confronted, and killed, a whole bunch of Hellenist soldiers for control of Israel and the Temple Mount. His sons carried on the tradition of fighting and killing Hellenists for several generations before the matter was settled.
The “festival of the lights” miracle stuff results from the story of the Maccabees finding one sealed pitcher of kosher olive oil for lighting the giant gold menorah in the Temple, and having it last more than the one or two days that it should have lasted, given its limited volume. Read into that fact what one will, this has become a conveniently plain vanilla and non-threatening focus of the holiday, which at one time celebrated the “decisive winning of the righteous and pure over the evil and impure.”
The bottom line is that Hanuka commemorates a Jewish civil war for control of the Jewish future, either as a feel-good universalist ethnic identity destined for dead-end assimilation, or as a daily living Biblical (Torah) truth identity. Both Jews and Christians exist today because the orthodox Jews (Hasmoneans) who inaugurated Hanuka gave rise to the religiously observant Jews who later begot Joshua Of Nazareth (or the Nazirite) and today’s Orthodox Jews. Had the Maccabees lost their civil war with the Hellenists, there would have been no Hanuka, no surviving Judaism, no Joshua Of Nazareth, and no Christianity.
Without Christianity there is no Western Civilization, and without Western Civilization there is no light in this world and all of the Enlightenment science that makes our lives so comfy today. God only knows where the world would be now, had the Maccabees not won their war against the liberal Jews of their time. Which raises two questions. First, why don’t today’s Christians celebrate Hanuka? They should. Christmas is set for the 25th of December, which closely matches the Hebrew calendar’s 25 of Kislev for the start of Hanuka, and I don’t see any contradiction in it. Second question is when do we all begin to push back against today’s destructive Hellenists, who like their predecessors in Israel 2,200 years ago are playing an outsize role in the destruction of the American and Western Civilizations?
Happy Hanuka, everyone!
Harrisburg Candlelight House Tour 2022
The Princess of Patience and I have an annual event we enjoy, and that is the Candlelight House Tour organized by Historic Harrisburg Association.
The homes are historic, often brick and stone, but increasingly being rehabbed and rebuilt to suit modern lifestyles. Mid Town Harrisburg is the center of a great deal of this gentrification and re-use, the reclamation of its former glory days by investors, young couples, and entrepreneurs taking empty dilapidated homes and fixing them up into tax-paying structures once again.
Often the true downtown homes are as-is-as-found-as-was, somewhat cluttered and dark, filled with holiday tsatchkes, very homey and comfortable. These downtown spaces are all smaller attached homes from the 1860s-1900s, whose original materials and design often require a significant boost to make them truly livable today. And yet so many owners keep the original pine flooring, which is as attractive now as it was 130 years ago. Many owners aggressively incorporate new steel I-beams and wall materials, and install new windows in the former closed brick, while maintaining as much of the original construction as possible. The result is always a fun and harmonious combination of antique and modern, and I would say that most of them make me wish I had it as a pied-a-terre.
One of the big efforts is taking old mansions and commercial buildings and turning them into apartments. This is not an easy or cheap thing to do. When I was in graduate school, I lived in an old Victorian mansion on Lyle Avenue that had been turned into apartments by an enterprising cocaine addict named Steve. Steve lived in one of the larger apartments that spanned from the basement to the roof. One day, while watching Steve hold his own, raging drunk, buck naked and armed with a single shot .22 rifle, in an armed stand-off with the Nashville police, who had taken cover with their service revolvers over the hoods and roofs of their squad cars and a humorously deployed bullhorn, I came to appreciate the thick, strong brick construction of the building I was in. If the bullets ever flew, I was without a doubt immune to dying from acute lead poisoning behind those bunker-like walls. Ever since then I have admired the must-be-crazy people who seek to bring these clunky dinosaurs into the current day and age as livable spaces.
One of the people I spent time talking with was Nathaniel Foote, who took the old Carpets & Draperies building and provided Harrisburgers with luxury loft apartments. His emphasis is on short-term nurse housing. Another entrepreneur I spent time talking with was Justin Heinly, who has restored both the historic Cottage Ridge Mansion and the historic Donaldson Mansion next block down. Justin told me true rehab war stories, like finding old brick chimneys upstairs that had been pulled apart downstairs, thereby leaving thousands of pounds of hidden unsupported weight bearing down hard on the floors below.
This historic home rehabilitation work takes real dedication, risk, and sacrifice by people who have slight streaks of both crazy and artistic creativity. This work directly benefits everyone who lives in Harrisburg, or who owns real estate in Harrisburg. Thank you Nathaniel, Justin, and all the others who are making Harrisburg’s old abandoned areas now livable and desirable once again, one building and one apartment at a time.
And thank you to all of the home owners who let the public enter their private spaces, and to Historic Harrisburg, for bringing us all together as the community we are.
A home place that was special in 1900 and is once again in 2022.
Real estate entrepreneur Justin Heinly keeps a smile on his face, despite encountering unbelievable engineering challenges resurrecting majestic old mansions for today’s renter
The Princess of Patience listening in surprise to home rehab war stories from entrepreneur Justin Heinly
Perfectly produced home tour booklet by Historic Harrisburg
Can’t pin Kanye on Trump
Only Kanye West is responsible for his own statements, and no one else. Each time Kanye West says something more outlandish, too many suspect people do the tired old “It’s TRUMP’s fault! TRUMP did it!” routine. Like the fake Russia collusion hoax thing, fake “Very Fine People” hoax thing, fake Ukraine call hoax thing, etc etc etc, President Trump bears zero responsibility for the crazy stuff West says, he has never supported it, he has Jews in in his own family and in his business and in his home etc.
This Trump Had Dinner With A Jew Hater thing is not a real issue, it is just yet another fake issue and fake story to try and artificially hurt President Trump.
And think of it – Kanye has only been doing his crazy racist guy shtick for a month or two. His now very public mental illness and Tourette’s Syndrome Jews blabbety-blah Jews thing is all new. If President Trump had known about it five months ago, he would have never met with West five months ago.
When President Trump had the Ambush Dinner with West, Nick Fuentes (I still have not really dug into Fuentes because it is deer season and I have a deer herd to reduce, but Trump had no reason to know him because the guy is an internet thing), and reportedly Milo Yiannopoulos as well, he had no idea that West was actually as nuts as he now evidently is. And he had no idea who Fuentes is. And everyone in politics knows who Milo Yiannopoulos is, and all of us had until recently thought of him as intellectually gifted, emotionally hamstrung, and incapable of purposefully springing a trap on President Trump.
So for all of us in Trump Land, this Kanye West dinner thing is about Kanye West’s own personal struggle with mental illness, and it has zero impact on President Trump’s standing. Why would it? It is just more BS thrown at the only guy who can save America from internal destruction by people who want to destroy America. Swing and a miss again, commies.
Now about Kanye West’s rantings and ravings: If he and his fellow Adolf-loving kook travelers would limit their criticism to liberal Jews, as well as liberal Catholics and Protestants and Atheists, horrendous destructive liberals all, then he would be fair-minded. It is a fact that liberals in general and liberal Jews in particular are really messing up America. There is no denying this, and if you care to try denying it, just starting ticking off the names of the corrosive people who have done and who continue to do so damned much damage to our beautiful country. It is a long list. Of liberals. And a ton of liberal Jews.
But the people on the long list are not representative of everyone or even a majority in their group.
The problem is when Kanye, Adolf Jr. et al blame all members of any group, which as a group is made up of a lot of different people. For example, there is a huge pile of Jewish dentists and accountants who are not political, who are probably mostly registered Republicans, who live in the suburbs, mow their lawns, follow all the laws, and who bother no one. Then add in the most identifiable Jews, the Orthodox, who are 98% registered conservative Republican, and you have a large contingent of Jews who don’t deserve any criticism at all.
And yet, Kanye is excoriating them all. And isn’t this curious?
Because at the root of Kanye’s viciousness is an alien version of supposed Christianity that is missing ye olde Christian charity, forgiveness, kindness, gentleness, honesty, non-judgmentalism, humility, and treating people the way you want them to treat you. Like, I am sure Kanye West is opposed to racism against Blacks, because group discrimination is wrong. It is a given today that this is wrong. And I think Kanye would also object to the 16-85 mantra that his fellow Adolf Hitler lovers say all the time: How American Blacks are 16 percent of the population and yet they account for 85% of the crime…? Even if this claim is somehow based on crime statistics, is it helpful? Is it actually true? Would Kanye like it if people hung banners on overpasses proclaiming it? Nope. And neither do real Christians.
Well, it turns out Kanye West is in fact chummily hanging out with really destructive Adolf Hitler lovers who think all Blacks are subhuman, along with the Jews and the Asians, etc. And only a crazy person would try to operate freely in both of these mutually exclusive worlds. These people hate you, Kanye, just like they hate the Jews, and they are using you, brother. Dear Kanye, you are not going to be president of America, and you do need professional medical help. Probably a mild mannered apolitical Jewish psychiatrist can help you best.
This is the real issue with the Ambush Dinner at Mar-A-Lago: Three certifiably crazy people actually got up close and personal with President Trump and broke bread with him and had a yelling match with him about batshit crazy shit.
What the hell even happened there and how did it happen…
We interrupt our regular political bickering to bring you Deer Season
People who don’t hunt may think they have some serious political differences. Well, they have not yet gotten involved in the Pennsylvania deer hunting wars, where fifteen years ago PA Game Commission board members and senior staff believed they had to wear bullet proof vests to public policy gatherings, such was the intensity of hate and vitriol…over deer.
With deer archery season ending Sunday night (our first Sunday hunt of the year) and deer rifle season just two weeks away, what better time to interrupt all the political acrimony from Tuesday’s mid-term election and introduce people to some real genuine debate. Yep. About deer.
Last week PA Governor Tom Wolf signed into law a change to the annual antlerless deer (doe) tag purchase system that only took twenty five years of bipartisan effort to achieve. All too well are Pennsylvania hunters familiar with the gigantic pink envelopes that screamed out to anti hunting Postal Service employees “Throw me away, throw me away!”
The gigantic pink envelope doe tag application system had been in place since the 1970s, and the system that was implemented in the 1970s was only a slight modification of the doe tag allocation process from the 1940s. That is how freaking backwards one major aspect of PA’s deer management program has been…hunters living in 2022, but operating in 1945.
And yeah, aspects of 1945 were great improvements over the sinking cultural ship nonsense we have going on today, but the gigantic pink envelope doe tag application lottery was not one of them. In the era of the Internet and email and texting, the now discarded doe tag system relied upon an unreliable Postal Service, two licked stamps, a check, multiple folds in the gigantic pink envelope, exactly the correctly checked boxes, and hoping your application made it in on time, or No Doe Tag For You!
And for most deer hunters, having a doe tag is a really big deal, because the harvest rate on does is about forty or fifty percent, while the success rates on wily bucks is about fifteen percent. Having a doe tag meant a much higher likelihood of getting fresh and healthy venison for your family and personal enjoyment. And not having the doe tag, because of some ridiculous minor bureaucratic rule or unchecked box in the application, was a big deflation for many a hunter.
Now we are going to have an online doe tag lottery and application process. No more photos of gigantic pink envelopes stacked up in Postal Service back rooms, waiting to be sent in weeks after their best-by date.
What is the doe hunt all about? It is about managing Pennsylvania’s over-abundant deer herd so that the non-hunting public doesn’t start to think that we hunters can’t get the job done right. It is a big and important job. In Europe, if wild game populations get too big and begin causing agricultural damage and car crashes, the local hunters actually get fined for it. Here in PA we have an enormous impact from too many deer, and a gigantic whiny peanut gallery that wants even more deer. Much more than the landscape can feed or than the public can afford to pay for.
Deer population management is done by the PA Game Commission. PGC uses hunting harvest numbers, statistical models, and input from individual hunters, hunting groups, landowners, farmers, “birds ‘n bunnies” environmental groups, and timber companies. One of the loudest voices is from hunters who want to see more deer, but who don’t care about the cost that those deer impose on other people. It is a tough job, requiring PGC to balance a lot of competing interests.
I am always surprised to hear hunters complain about PGC’s deer management, because invariably these critics really don’t know the actual mechanics of how it is done. Nor do they bother to take the time to learn the mechanics. Nor do they take the time to go on a local State Game Lands tour, to understand about deer impacts on the landscape. Instead, these hunters behave like communists and demand that everyone else provide year-’round room and board to the overabundant deer that they want to experience for just a few days a year. As much as I love our hunters, I am getting more and more cranky with them in my old age. Guys, please get educated about this subject, or just leave the adults alone.
This summer my wife and I drove out to Colorado and back. We passed endless deer roadkills on I-76 on the way out, but from the Ohio border westward, we saw just two dead deer on the side of the road. One in Iowa and one in Nebraska. On our way back to Pennsylvania, we saw no roadkills anywhere until we crossed into PA on I-80. Literally within the first mile of entering PA we began counting the freshly dead deer, and we continued that counting all the way home to central PA.
This Fall I hunted elk in northern Centre County and western Clinton County, and we saw TONS of deer every single day. This northcentral PA area is supposed to have no deer since 2001, if the official lazy stumpsitter hunter assessment is to be believed. The fact is, both PGC and DCNR have done fabulous jobs of clearcutting large blocks of forest, which has resulted in perfect habitat for deer and a bunch of other important animals. A hunter simply must get up off his butt and go do the Elmer Fudd hunting thing, nose into the wind. If this is too difficult for you, then deer hunting is not your thing.
I have hit several deer on the road in the past two years, each one doing expensive damage to my vehicles. My friend Mark just totaled his expensive sports car on the PA Turnpike 110 miles west of Harrisburg, because a deer walked out in front of his 70 MPH missile. He texted that the tow truck driver said that his was the sixth deer collision the tow truck operator had to address in 30 hours. That is just one tow truck in one small area, and so we know (and see with our eyes) that the deer collision problem is enormous, and expensive, and unnecessary,
Hopefully with the elimination of the gigantic pink envelope the PGC will also change the way it issues doe tags and the number it issues. I hunt all over PA and my opinion is, you can’t really issue too many doe tags. Especially in the southeast part of the state. WMUs 5B, 5C, and 5D should have unlimited doe tags. Apply for one and get one up until the end of the season.
There are so many deer everywhere, and all of them are causing enormous damage and highway carnage. This is presently a hunting problem to be solved by hunters, and unless PA hunters want to go the way of Washington State, where hunting as a wildlife management tool is being taken off the table, they had better step up and do the job and fix the problem.
Sayonara, Gigantic Pink Envelope! We won’t miss ya! And now that that problem is fixed, let the deer wars bickering begin about doe tags all over again. One camp living in 1945, the rest living in 2025. Can’t wait…..
Elk, glorious elk
I have been on extended time and distance travel, the report of which will be posted here soon. Fascinating experiences.
In the mean time, an elk tag was procured, and the hunt is in the planning stages. The camp site is an old log landing, with a big tent to house the gang. If the weather is nice, a single shot muzzleloader will be used. If the weather is damp and unfriendly to black powder muzzleloader arms, then a centerfire black powder rifle will be used. And if it’s raining, well then, an open-sight modern cartridge rifle will be used. More on this as it approaches.
Bidenflation just killed a national publication gem
“Soaring prices of paper, shipping, ink, and printing have put us into the red, and we can no longer function,” reads the personal note I received on a fabulous custom Double Gun Journal card from DGJ proprietors Daniel and Joanna.
What a message: Disastrous loss, beautifully wrapped and delivered on a silver platter.
My first encounter with the DGJ was spring 1991, in Rockville, Maryland, on a Tower Records bookstore shelf, along with Grey’s Sporting Journal and other fancier field sports publications. But the DGJ was different than any other publication I had ever seen, and, therefore, every quarter thereafter I purchased the latest edition and learned about reloading for black powder firearms long believed to be “obsolete” or “dangerous!” or un-sexy enough to compete with modern mass produced plastic and stainless steel firearms lacking a soul, a heart, or even personal appeal.
Distinguished gun and outdoor writers like Ross Seyfried and Sherman Bell introduced modern shooters, antique gun enthusiasts, and financially or historically oriented gun collectors to actually making those beautiful historic firearms shoot once again. Seyfried and Bell, in particular, removed the mystique and veil from antique rifles, double rifles, and double barreled shotguns with Damascus or twist barrels.
It turns out that the beautifully hand crafted double barreled black powder rifles and shotguns of the 1800s, and the early nitro express rifles of the 1900-1930 period, did not just look good. They also shot with incredible precision.
Since the late 1990s I have been an annual subscriber to the DGJ, eagerly awaiting each quarterly installment. In 2017, 2018, and 2022 I published a number of technical articles about Charles Lancaster double rifles. Of particular focus has been the development of Lancaster’s most valuable trademark technology, their singular oval bore rifling. For those with any curiosity, the Lancaster oval bore rifling looks like a smooth shotgun barrel. But if you squint your eyes and look hard enough, you will eventually discern an egg-shaped bore that rotates on a central axis. Lancaster’s proprietary oval bore rifling was long ago, and remains today, one of the great mysteries of sporting arms ballistics, because it absolutely defies physics. And yet, it works incredibly well.
An 1888 Charles Lancaster black powder double rifle that I shoot regularly is capable of placing paper patched bullets from BOTH its barrels into a 1.5″ hole at 100 yards. Now THAT is the very definition of firearm accuracy.
Charles Lancaster oval bore double rifles were The Thing for wealthy sportsmen around the world from the 1850s into the 1920s. That I eventually became the probable “expert” on Charles Lancaster oval bore rifles is due to a simple mistake, or a weird act of Godly intervention, or Fate. Because when now deceased Maine forester extraordinaire Tim Scott asked me to buy his Charles Lancaster .450 BPE double rifle, I bit. And then Ross Seyfried walked me through the steps of making it shoot safely. After that I was hooked, and the rest is history (see also lancasterovalbore.com).
And so here we are, saying goodbye to one of the last, if not THE last artisanal publication in America. A family owned business for decades, a byword and watchword and often the final word on antique firearms technology and reloading, the DGJ is irreplaceable. And yet it too is now fallen victim to Joe Biden’s hyperinflation. Everything is so expensive now, so much more expensive than it was just a year ago.
I recognize that Biden’s purposefully destructive economic policies are aimed at re-setting America into a more communist China-type place. While most Americans oppose this needless, illegal, forced, and destructive change, I think the loss of the DGJ is like the proverbial canary in a coal mine: Its early demise warns of us of coming dangers that can be fatal to us, too.
If you are interested in contacting the DGJ to acquire back issues, binders, beautiful note cards and artwork, etc., they can be reached at 231-536-7439 in central Michigan.
Maybe some day younger Americans will encounter these treasures, and discover an appreciation for fine firearms
My final article in the Double Gun Journal, thanks to Joe Biden’s purposefully destructive economic policies
Why Ken Matthews’ show was terminated at WHP580 AM
In 2013 or 2014, radio personality Ken Matthews followed the late and great gravelly voiced, cowboy hat wearing, hard charging, chiseled face long time prime time radio host Bob Durgin here on Harrisburg, PA’s WHP580. While Bob frequently talked about the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection’s most recent ridiculous and pointless regulation that had squashed Mabel’s farm stand, or that had SWAT raided some little girl’s lemonade stand, which, believe me, all resonated here in Central PA, Ken Matthews brought a broader and more general American government policy discussion.
Like most conservative talk show hosts today, Matthews hit the daily or weekly zeitgeist of subjects and issues, from the global warming/ global cooling/ global whatever hoax to regional politics to the 2020 stolen election. But when he first arrived, it was clear that Matthews was working hard to impress the radio station engineers. And it was clear that they were making him work at it, because his first few months on air were a little tense. Listeners could feel that tension, and it seemed that Matthews might just be a fly-by.
Eventually, Matthews and WHP580 engineer Art Selby hit their rhythm, and the show took off. When he first arrived in town, I did some amateur on-the-ground citizen reporting “live from the Perry County court house!” for Ken. I frequently called in to the show or sent an email, either of which Ken would almost always take on air. After all, I have been involved in politics and culture battles for a long time, and I try to offer substance. And for a long time it felt like I, too, had a quiet, good rhythm with Ken Matthews.
But then somewhere around 2019 Ken changed. He became more popular, more self-aware, more self-important. He did some radio shows for Rush Limbaugh, and suddenly Ken’s on- air voice changed. His personality changed. His patience with callers changed. His voice was clipped. He sounded snooty. It was obvious that Ken Matthews was awfully proud of Ken Matthews, and that he looked down on just about everyone. Because he was important, ya know.
My last interaction with Ken was mid-January, 2021, I think when his radio show became nationally syndicated and Ken was feeling especially very important. While I was on a long drive returning a car trailer to a garage in rural Centre County from Harrisburg, a very low, unimportant-person kind of thing to do…I suppose. Below are the screen shots from our emails that immediately followed my being on hold for half of Ken’s entire three hour show. What was so important at my end? Well, I wanted to share with Ken and his listeners my own law-abiding experience in Washington, DC, on January 6th. It was exactly the kind of call-in Ken used to take, about a subject he was covering.
I actually ended up staying on hold just because I was fascinated at the technology at play. My truck’s own AM radio had long since lost contact with WHP580, but here I was clearly connected via a tenuous but unbroken cell phone call. Driving across the lightless, deep darkness that is rural Central PA in winter time, hearing WHP580’s on-hold show through my bluetooth connection made me feel a bit like an astronaut floating way out in space, far from Earth, yet with a very slight connection to the Houston control room back home. It was both fascinating and a little assuring.
As you can see from the emails below, Ken’s snarky, disrespectful responses showed he relished keeping me on hold. He was enjoying being mean. I don’t know why he didn’t just get on the phone with me during a radio break and say that he didn’t want to talk about January 6th, or why he didn’t simply ask call screener Art Selby to come back on and tell me they were not going to take it (Art had told me they would take the call) (And why not just send a normal email response that says “I am sorry you think that”). Instead, Ken enjoyed being a jerk, even and especially when someone he knew was a loyal follower told him he was. Ken’s sense of personal power and self importance took over his brain. Making people feel badly made Ken feel good.
And that is exactly what got Ken’s nationwide radio show canned two weeks ago. Ken Matthews’ ever increasing on-air arrogance eventually overrode his professionalism so egregiously that he was terminated on the spot. His behavior has been called a “slip-up,” a hot mic moment etc. But the actual truth is Ken Matthews had long since cared little about what other people thought or think, because he had become way too important.
While I felt stung that January night on my way up north, my desire for revenge against Ken for treating me like a jerk was gone a few hours later, by the time I got back to Harrisburg late that night. Afterwards, I never called or wrote in to the radio show, and only quite infrequently listened to it. Because let’s face it, Mark Steyn, Mark Levin, and a bunch of other radio hosts all do pretty much the same format and content. And listeners can hear pretty much the same thing, without having to listen to Ken Matthews’ self-important, arrogant voice grating on your ears.
It had been my long time loyalty to local station WHP580, and the occasional local story flavor, that had kept me listening to Ken Matthews for several years, during his transition to “stardom” and then after he had become an all-out on-air jerk. All that shred of loyalty ended with the email exchange below in January 2021.
So I am not happy that Ken Matthews got his come-uppance. But boy, did he need it. And he earned it. Hopefully he learns from this experience, but it is doubtful he will.
Movie review: Top Gun: Maverick
Sounding like a nattering nabob of negativism is not my thing, so suffice it to simply say Hollywood is an overflowing sewer of anti-Americanism, anti freedomism, anti rule-of-lawism, anti-religionism (except radical Islam, which the areligious ethnic Jews of Hollywood looooove), anti Constitutionalism etc. Meaning that Hollywood rarely produces anything of value or anything worth seeing any longer, unless you are so desperate to see anything at all on the big screen that you also like clawing out your own eyes afterward so you can un-see the garbage Hollywood poured into them.
Suddenly, enter Top Gun: Maverick, a new re-make update from the fun, cool, and patriotic 1986 military movie Top Gun. People (Hollywood movie “critics”) complain that actor Tom Cruise (center stage in both Top Gun movies) plays pretty much the same masculine stud role in almost all of his movies (Mission Impossible, Jack Reacher, Top Gun, The Last Samurai etc), but who else in Hollywood is going to or even can actually act like a real man these days? Radical feminism axe murdered masculinity, and so Hollywood is now filled with lisping, mincing, Valley Girl talking actors born with boy parts down there, but who can not possibly be mistaken for a man’s human shell with a hint of testosterone. And Brad Pitt traded in his masculine stud acting persona for something a lot more drunk, high, and pathetic in real life.
So, fact is, Tom Cruise has the masculine stud role market cornered. He is the only Hollywood male who could play the role of fighter jock Maverick. I think he does it well, and he plays a compelling guy with feewings, too. Actor Tom Cruise has depth and breadth, in addition to acting skill. Thank you, Mister Cruise.
At a time when America is being purposefully failed and destroyed from within in every way, it is refreshing to watch a movie about American freedom’s greatness and motivational patriotic grit. Unique aspects of our nation that we took for granted. Top Gun: Maverick does this very well, as well as delivering on all of the military technological finery one had come to expect from America just 18 months ago. Before the Biden Administration began shoveling our most valuable technology out the door to our enemy China on purpose.
America needs heroes now, and especially military heroes, and no, a guy pretending to be a woman in a military uniform is not a hero. From the time of Ulysses, Samson, and Achilles until just 18 months ago, a military hero has always been a strong man (and occasionally a really impressive and brave woman chopper pilot) who is brave enough to risk his life in combat for the safety of America (or any other nation under risk of failure). Treading on dull military procedural failure at every step, Tom Cruise’s ultimately successful character Maverick gives us that heroic figure here, exceptionally well.
It feels good to believe in a free and robust America again, even if just for two hours and ten minutes. Go see this fantastic movie, which also has a classic early Kawasaki Z-1000 superbike (Mad Max), an original Mustang P51 fighter plane, and some other classic gas guzzlers whose presence once highlighted and then underpinned American greatness. It is worth the price of admission, and your buck sends a message to Hollywood that they will ignore, but which the normal people in America will understand.
10/10 rating here (I liked it even more the second time).