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Post by windtimber on Aug 17, 2006 13:48:20 GMT
I've got quite a database of masonic halls - currently 59 entries - does anyone want to share theirs? www.waymarking.com has 124 Masonic Temples in its database. Go to "directory" then to "buildings" and then to the sub-category "Masonic Temples." Join up and put your Masonic Temple in the database. Both waymarking.com and its related site, geocaching.com, have free registration and a host of stuff for gps users to review/use. I registered with them some time back and haven't gotten a single advertisement, spam, or whatever. Other places a gps user might find interesting are www.confluence.org - photographing and memorializing the integer degree intersection of longitude and latitude across the globe - and [this is in the USA but I imagine the same thing could be, or is being done, in other countries] www.cohp.org - locating and memorializing a visit to the highpoint in every county/political subdivision. Right...some of us have mighty odd hobbies, don't we?
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Post by windtimber on Aug 14, 2006 15:03:52 GMT
Vacationing up in the Rockies a couple years ago my wife and kids and I ran into a fellow up on Mosquito Pass near Leadville, Colorado, who wowed us with his knowledge of local terrain - creeks, old mines, roads, passes, etc. all available in a little handheld GPS. So they got me a Garmin eTrex for my birthday last year. I primarily use it for geocaching, benchmarking, memorializing good hunting spots, and general outdoor recreational information. Then I decided to try in it lieu of my roadmaps. Where I go I don't really have a need for a street level basemap but it sure can get you from town to town without any trouble and provides a wealth of other, probably unecessary, information as well!
A useful and fun gadget.
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Post by windtimber on Aug 3, 2006 15:41:20 GMT
There is a difference between law & sentencing..... True, but that difference is tending to blur. In the US there has been a strong effort over a number of years to remove, or at least significantly limit, judicial discretion in sentencing. In Federal criminal proceedings the formal sentencing guidelines rather drastically limit a U.S. District Judge's sentencing options. State legislatures commonly enact minimum and/or mandatory sentences for various offenses. In our system this becomes an interesting interplay with the separation of powers doctrine - is the legislative branch meddling with the discretion of the judicial branch? In the case of the Federal sentencing guidelines the U.S. Sentencing Commission promulgates the same and the Commission is nominally a creature of the judicial branch. In most, if not all, states mandatory sentences are legislative, not judicial, creatures. There is no question that the legislative branch defines criminal conduct and establishes the penalty therefore. Is there any reason the legislative branch must defer to the discretion of the judicial branch in sentencing? No. Historically legislatures have provided ranges of potential penalties for defined criminal behavior - 10 years to life, for example - and the courts have exercised judicial discretion by determining where in that range a particular defendant may fall. Mandatory minimum sentences simply define the penalty with greater particularity. That said, is a specifically defined penalty necessarily appropriate? That's the nubbin of the great debate. If Hammurabi's mandatory sentencing code said "An eye for an eye," there seems to be a fair and equitable equivalency. However, in the case of a one-eyed prepetrator of mayhem the end result is he will be blinded while his formerly two-eyed victim still has a single eye left. The equivalency falls down. Hence the development of sentencing ranges and use of judcial discretion to allow the punishment, within specified parameters, to meet the crime. Mandatory sentences provide certainty, clarity, and allow politicians to appear "tough on crime." Mandatory sentences can also provide strangely inequitable results - like the 9 year old girl discussed in an earlier post. Making discretionary sentencing work requires public understanding of the underlying philosophical basis of the process, public faith in the system, and a reflective and independent judiciary. Is there an easy answer? No. That's what makes it all so interesting.
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Post by windtimber on Jul 22, 2006 19:35:22 GMT
My folks always insisted that bad things come in "threes." Looks like you got them all in one day and now stuff should go on swimmingly!
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Post by windtimber on Jul 22, 2006 19:31:16 GMT
This would confirm the theory that the climate undergoes cycles from hot to cold. I still wish that Lodges etc would move with the times and install air-con in Temples where possible or let Brethren take off their jackets in hot weather. On the first point. Accurate weather records have only been kept for about 100 or 120 years out here on the South Dakota prairie - of course we only stole the place from the Native Americans about that long ago. Anecdotal evidence and "boom and bust" bonanza wheat farming show things are fairly regionally cyclical. I'm no expert but it seems like a 10 or 15 year cycle of rains and good grass, good grains, expansion of tillage and farming farther west, etc. is then followed by a decline into drought. Our temperatures are always a wide swing - 100 to 120 degree F swings between the highest summertime peaks and the lowest wintertime valleys. Maybe things are changing on a global scale - but our regional cycles "seem" about the same - at least to a casual observer like me. I don't doubt for a minute that we're pumping more "greenhouse gasses" into the atmosphere and I'm concerned about what that will eventually do...but are the doomsday prophets acting like Chicken Little, or are they right? Only time will tell, I guess. On the second point. As I've noted in other posts we're a lot more casual in this neck of the woods. It was in the 90's for our last lodge meeting and nobody wore a jacket, there were only 1 or 2 neckties, and a few fellows showed up in shorts. It seems that some sartorial allowance should be made for the weather. If it was the tradition to come to lodge in shirtsleeves and short pants, would we all do that in the dead of winter? I don't think so - we're smart enough to come in from the rain and cold and put on warm clothes. Shouldn't be be smart enough to dress appropriately when it's hotter than hades? Just a thought.... In the meantime, it's hot and dry, the corn is withering, yields don't look promising, and there's no grass or forage - and very limited water - so ranchers are selling off cattle in huge numbers. Things don't bode well for agribusiness at the moment...not to mention the 1000's of acres of grass that have caught fire from dry thunderstorms and burned off in the last week to 10 days. We're praying for rain - and those aren't just words - we ARE asking for divine intervention. If you have a moment to join in, please do. We really need it.
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Post by windtimber on Jul 22, 2006 19:03:40 GMT
Has anyone else noticed how totally inaccurate the local weather forecasts are? For years my colleagues and I have always referred to them not as "weather men" but "weather guessers." In the last decade or so the expansion of doppler radar and satellite imaging has made our forecasts remarkably accurate...so maybe I now need to more charitable in my naming!
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Post by windtimber on Jul 21, 2006 14:38:57 GMT
If I did my math right [Does anyplace other than the USA still use Fahrenheit?] it was 43.89 C [111 F] on Saturday at about 3 in the afternoon. Thereafter it's been running to highs of around 32 C to 34 C [90 F to 92 F] with lows about 15 to 20 degrees F lower at night. Today, however, bodes cooler due to some early morning overcast.
Uncommonly hot on Saturday, not so unusual the rest of this week, but it sure is DRY! We've also had unusually warm winters the last couple years as well. My mother is over 90 years old and she's predicting a return to the extensive drought of the "Dirty Thirties" based on her recollection of similar weather patterns in the late 1920's and early 1930's.
In response to Ingo's question "How do you feel?" About normal - it's hot in the summer and cold in the winter and THANK YOU Willis Carrier for coming up with air conditioning!
Keep cool, brothers!
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Post by windtimber on Jul 26, 2007 22:26:34 GMT
The same article appeared in our local paper this morning. It had a few more paragraphs, though. Including one medico's opinion that the cat ended up in dying patients rooms because it was standard practice to use warmed blankets at that point. Maybe Oscar isn't the Grim Reaper's cat so much as he likes sleeping on nice warm bedding...
Who knows. My dog talks to me all the time...usually complaining about his food.
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Golf.
May 23, 2006 3:31:06 GMT
Post by windtimber on May 23, 2006 3:31:06 GMT
What is a 'Corn Palace' Bro WT? The Corn Palace? An a-maize-ing [sorry] architectural oddity out on the prairie. Take a look at www.roadsideamerica.com/attract/SDMITcorn.html or www.cornpalace.org/ to see the thing. My office is across the street and I've been looking at it for a couple of decades. The murals are renewed every year with local corn, prairie grasses, and other natural products. Thousands of folks pass through every year to view the murals, take in the annual "Corn Palace Festival," or otherwise enjoy many of the basketball games, shows, civic events, and other activities held inside. Stop by sometime if you're in the neighborhood. We're a darn friendly bunch out here! The Masonic Temple is just a half block away, by the way.
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Golf.
May 22, 2006 20:21:39 GMT
Post by windtimber on May 22, 2006 20:21:39 GMT
Somebody once wrote a book on golf carrying the title which, in my experience, defines the game nicely - "A Good Walk Spoiled."
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Post by windtimber on Mar 30, 2006 18:07:33 GMT
Bravo! When my son was about 4 years old he had the great revelation, and required all of us to conform to his usage, that "if the sun comes up in the morning, the dark has to come down at night."
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Post by windtimber on Jan 19, 2006 0:00:56 GMT
How do we know a pig's orgasm lasts 30 minutes? I'm not sure I want the answer to that question, by the way.
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Post by windtimber on Dec 29, 2005 2:16:20 GMT
My 9 year old daughter gave me a set of Square & Compass decals to put on the tail lights of my truck. Well...she thought they were "neat" and I'm not going to disappoint her!
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Post by windtimber on Dec 7, 2005 23:39:37 GMT
My personal, 5 part, simple solution. 1. Buy your own beef and pork, on the hoof, from your Masonic brothers who feed only grain products. 2. Have it processed by your Masonic brother who owns a custom locker plant [Small butcher shop/abbatoir if "locker plant" is a Midwestern US colloquialism.]and assiduously avoids brain/neural tissue. 3. Shoot and carefully process your own wild game. 4. Avoid the stuff in the big markets like the plague.
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Post by windtimber on Jan 31, 2006 20:48:41 GMT
about 2 axe handles acrossWould that any woman were to describe a man like that ;D Considering the source of that measuring standard was my Father, I heard my Mother apply it to any number of fellows as well! Guess we were just not that sensitive of a family...or maybe it was because of the tendency of the times to give everything and everybody a nickname. Sunday dinner conversation with Mom, Dad, Grandmother and a couple Aunts and Uncles was often an exercise in local colloquialisms and dialect - we all knew who "Stovepipe Simms" and "High Pockets" were. Our old friends "B.O." and "Paddleshanks" were well known to the family but they didn't have any idea what we called them! There were a couple "Bishops" - one a high toned Catholic gentleman and the other a very staunch Episcopalian. Throw in the cast of "Oles" and "Swens" and a bald headed "Curly" or two, the odd "Baldy, "Red, "Cue Ball," etc. and you've covered most of Dad's business associates. OK, I understand that nicknames can also perpetuate slurs, painfully point out perceived physical shortcomings, and saddle someone with an "ungiven" name for life. But if somebody asks me how "Mush" is doing or if I've seen "K'Daffer" or "Beans" lately, I know it's someone who's known us all forever and, like it or not, was part of my life as a kid and is still there keeping an eye on me today!
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Post by windtimber on Jan 30, 2006 18:19:10 GMT
From ruffashlar -
Sorry American Masons, but a pet hate of mine is the unconscious use of Americanisms, such as, but not exhaustively:- "ah dress" for the noun address; "pry vassi" for privacy; "construction worker" for builder; "parking lot" for carpark; and (apologies OED) the termination "-ize" over -ise.
No apologies necessary...we sometimes think you guys talk funny as well!
I have a brother-in-law who is a retired professor of linquistics in a large U.S. university system. He simply delights in various regional dialects and word usages [i.e gutters vs. eavestroughs; plastic sheet vs. visqueen; creek {creak} vs. creek {crick} both as in a small watercourse; and countless others]. Unfortunately, many regional distinctions are beginning to be lost due to the proliferation of network news readers as the "standard" and more cosmopolitan attitudes.
Many new usages give me the willies...but I understand that's how language progresses. That said, I always wondered, and unfortunately never did ask, where my father learned his usual measurement rule for a large lady's backside - as in "She's about 2 axe handles across..." There had to be some story behind that!
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Post by windtimber on Dec 12, 2006 3:46:05 GMT
"Where are Men When they're Not at Home?" by Reid Bush, from What You Know. © Larkspur Press. © George Braziller.
Where are Men When they're Not at Home?
Different places.
Some are out at the barn checking on the mare that's about to foal. I know, not many now. A few.
Some are running down to the corner store to pick up something they forgot. Be right back.
Some are in offices practicing pitches. Spiels.
Some are phoning from offices—saying they'll be late.
Of course, many are dead. You suddenly think about them because you're back where you haven't been in 20 years and go to look them up. But they're not there. Just some widows.
But most are way off somewhere searching for fathers who were never home enough.
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Post by windtimber on May 4, 2007 1:44:56 GMT
I, P, R @ 35. That was 18 years ago.
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Post by windtimber on May 8, 2006 19:24:23 GMT
Aprons only. The officers wear a jewel provided by the Lodge on a ribbon, rope, or other unobstrusive collar.
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Post by windtimber on Nov 9, 2005 3:17:51 GMT
My lodge has revitalized over the last 5 to 8 years as a result of two very simple principles. First, no matter what a member wants to do for a project, activity, public relations program, or outreach technique, no matter how stupid it sounds, as long as it is not immoral, illegal, or prohibited by Masonic law, DO IT! Second, if it succeeds beyond your wildest dreams or fails dismally, the ONLY comments about it are POSITIVE comments. Nothing is failure because any activity at all brings life and members to the lodge. Open your minds and hearts and give this a try. You may be pleasantly surprised at the results!
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