confidence of
ignorant youth seeps away
nothing takes its place

I felt thoroughly grown-up at twenty-one — more grown-up, indeed, than I have ever succeeded in feeling since. The confidence of ignorant youth seeps slowly, slowly away and to our astonishment no confidence of sapient age comes surging in to take its place.

From Here at the New Yorker by Brendan Gill, New York : Random House, 1975.

As Mark Twain is credited with saying “…when I was seventeen, I could hardly stand it to be with my father because he was was so ignorant, and at twenty I noticed that now and then, my father said a sensible thing, but at twenty-five I was simply amazed to discover how my father had improved in the last eight years.”

Sad to mention that according to the Quote Investigator, “… the earliest known attribution to Twain occurs in 1915 and this is rather late because Twain died in 1910. To date, the saying has not been found in Twain’s writings, notebooks, or letters. Quotation experts and Twain scholars are skeptical of the attribution to Twain.”

Me at 21?

Back in 1981?

Just accepted to continue my studies at an institution of higher learning, I doubted there was anything left for me to learn.

My first lecture, I was seated at a long table in a room that looked out a window through the iconic columns of the landmark building on the campus of this institution.

The bell in the bell tower central to central campus was striking the hour.

I had arrived.

15 minutes into my first lecture with 4 pages of notes, my confidence started to leak out all over the floor of the room.

I was comforted by the looks on the faces on the other students, that they too, were feeling it.

Then a goofy thing happened.

Without raising their hand or waiting to be recognized, the student next to me called out to the Professor, “You really think that?”

The Professor paused and then started a 5 minute dialogue with the student and while the student did give in, the student was not at all convinced and the Professor picked up where he left off.

This was something new to me.

What had I got myself into?

Argue with a Professor?

Maybe even BE EXPECTED to argue with a Professor?

I am not sure how I resolved all my thoughts – most likely I just doubled my note taking speed.

I knew I had to get through this first lecture because being Mr. KNOW-IT-ALL, I had set up my class schedule like I was in high school.

I had three more lectures back to back to back that first morning.

And I was 21.

All grown up.

More grown-up!

More grown-up, indeed, than I have ever succeeded in feeling since.

And you know what?

The confidence of ignorant youth seeps slowly, slowly away and to our astonishment no confidence of sapient age comes surging in to take its place.

something simple that
is also beautiful and
extraordinary

Further north, the environmental claims stack up better. Sited across the roaring A1 from the Stade de France, and connected by a new pedestrian bridge (sadly closed off for the Games due to overcrowding fears), the €175m aquatics centre is a beacon of what this Olympics stands for: lean, green and a little understated. It will be a boon for an area with the lowest swimming proficiency in the country, where half of all 11-year-olds don’t know how to swim.

“It’s about doing better with less,” says Laure Mériaud of Ateliers 2/3/4, architects of the project with Dutch firm VenhoevenCS. “You can do something simple and efficient that is also beautiful and extraordinary.”

From the article, Plastic-bottle seats and wooden pools: can Paris deliver the leanest, greenest Olympics yet? by Oliver Wainwright, the Guardian’s architecture and design critic.

The Métropole du Grand Paris, has been awarded the “Technical Achievement” prize in the Construction Bois 2024 Regional competition.

On the VenhoevenCS website, the firm listed all the members or the design team, made up of folks from both VenhoevenCS and Ateliers 2/3/4/ and they include Cécilia Gross and Laure Meriaud, Ton Venhoeven, Arjen Zaal, Yves de Pommereau, Jos-Willem van Oorschot, Eraldo Brandimarte, Margot Lamazou, Tjeerd Hellinga, Arjan Pot, Louis van Wamel, Maria Boletou, Julie Fuchs, Yann Tregoat, Jeremy Cassin, Ivo Brandes, Rubing Xu, Nicolas Handtschoewercker, Timothée Pignoux, Wai Ming Lam.

I think a lot these people went to high school with me in West Michigan or at least their cousins did.

It’s about doing better with less!

Something simple and efficient that is also beautiful and extraordinary!

His final word is
not of anger, but of love
rests His case in love

Adapted from the Oxford NIV Schofield Bible Notes for the verse, Zephaniah 3:17.

The verse reads:

The Lord your God is with you,
the Mighty Warrior who saves.
He will take great delight in you;
in his love he will no longer rebuke you,
but will rejoice over you with singing.”

The New Schofield Note reads: (3:17) For the Lord’s own, His final word is not of anger, as with the unbelieving nations, but of love, as expressed in this beautiful verse.

When it comes to His people, chastised and forgiven, the LORD rests His case in love and rejoicing.

I was early in embracing the online Bible.

I was part of the team that put the NIV Bible online.

I was the web guy for Zondervan Publishing and we were working with an early Web Group that was set to help churches get online.

They named their company Gospelcom.

But they came up with their name a little early in the game so their website ended up being gospelcom.com.

Once we got the NIV text online, the President of Zondervan came to my office in the Corporate Library where I worked and asked just how much of the NIV was available online.

He had been assured that users could see only one chapter of text at a time.

I introduced him to the “*” wildcard search that returned the complete text of the entire Bible.

Then I clicked SELECT ALL and COPY and pasted the text into a Word Document and said, “It’s mine now.”

He ran out yelling something about having to stop this and I didn’t have the heart to tell him, it was too late, internet wise.

Of late I have gone back to bringing a printed Bible to church.

I have a hardcover Oxford NIV Schofield Bible that I picked up when I worked in a bookstore back in the 1980’s.

There was something about using an NIV Bible that wasn’t printed by Zondervan.

My Dad always liked the Schofield notes and he asked me to get him copy as well.

I brought one home and he took it and sat at the dining room table and opened the front cover and on the inside cover, with a strong hand, he signed it Robert P. Hoffman and he used that Bible the rest of his life.

Using a printed Bible, I noticed that I noticed a lot more of the Bible when I read it.

The apps and the NIV Bible Gateway that replaced Gosepelcom shows you the requested text but with a printed Bible open on your lap you get to see two pages worth of verses.

I found I miss that a lot.

This morning, the sermon was out of Haggai.

I was listening to the sermon on Verse 1:5 Now this is what the Lord Almighty says: “Give careful thought to your ways. You have planted much, but harvested little. You eat, but never have enough. You drink, but never have your fill. You put on clothes, but are not warm. You earn wages, only to put them in a purse with holes in it.”

And my eyes wandered over to the notes at the bottom on the page that read: “His final word is not of anger, as with the unbelieving nations, but of love, as expressed in this beautiful verse.”

Then I read the last words of the book of Zephaniah:

… I will bring you home.
I will give you honor and praise
    among all the peoples of the earth
when I restore your fortunes
    before your very eyes,”
says the Lord.

… when I restore your fortunes before your very eyes.

As the note says, beautiful verses.

making people doubt
accurate perception
of reality

From the passage:

Behavior like this has a name: gaslighting, a form of psychological manipulation that involves making people doubt their own, accurate perception of reality. If the term has gotten a workout in recent years, that’s because a lot of people are engaging in it. The right-wing justices have become masters of the form, telling the American people again and again not to believe what they see with their own eyes.

In the Opinion Piece, “The Supreme Court Is Gaslighting Us All” By Jesse Wegman in the New York Times, July 12, 2024.

When I was a kid growing up in Grand Rapids, Michigan, my siblings and I would often badger our Dad into taking us downtown to the Grand Rapids Public Museum.

The Museum had a whale skeleton, a hall of mammals filled with stuffed moose and elk and The Gaslight Village.

The Gaslight Village was a recreated main street of Grand Rapids as it might have appeared in the 1880’s and it was lit by gaslight.

It wasn’t much looking back, maybe 200 yards of street but it was cool.

The roadbed was of sawed off round pieces of logs and there was a horse drawn tram car with tracks and both sides of the street were lined with store fronts from the 1880s.

And it was dark!

Gaslight when you got right down to it, didn’t give much light.

Gaslight Village was contained in one big building so the street started and ended at wall.

As I remember it, one entrance was designed to make it feel that even though you walked through double doors, you entered the street from a covered bridge over the river.

The other end was a painted perspective of the town with the sides of a few buildings and the road way disappearing into the middle distance.

The painting was pretty good and it didn’t take much imagination to pretend you were going to continue walking down the main street.

That is until, despite what you perceived as the road continuing on, you walked smack into a wall.

Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.