Papa Pat Tiny Devotionals

A couple of years ago, I bought a great little printer, HP F4440. After using up the ink supplied with the printer, I bought re-cycled cartridges from eBay. Worked great for a very small amount of money, compared to the new HP cartridges. But THEN!~ I upgraded to Windows 10. And had to get new printer drivers. Which wouldn't be a problem, except that the new printer software INSISTS on genuine HP ink. It wouldn't print for me. At all. No REAL problem; I rarely print anything anyway, other than my tax forms. And since I usually don't file my taxes until they put a lien on my bank account, that really isn't an every year thing. Maybe every five years. (I'm not a tax rebel, I have ADD.) But last night a friend asked me to arrange and print some song lyrics for a performance he is going to lead, so I knew I would need to get some genuine HP ink today. I agreed to print out what he needed, then meet him at his house for lunch and proof reading by 12:30. No problem. I had...

I reviewed an advance copy of Scout's Duty here on my blog on March 3. Henry has just added this third volume of the trilogy (Scout's Oath & Scout's Honor) and I hope he sells a million. Yesterday was the day Doc Brown and Marty McFly picked as a destination in the Back to the Future franchise. That was a good opportunity for the family to binge-watch all three movies, so we did. (By the way, I hate watching movies with the family. I'm a grinch.) The watching family, in case you care, consists of my gift-from-God, happily-ever-after trophy wife Vanessa, the elegant, foxy, praying black grandmother of Woodstock, GA; 10 year old Kenneth; 9 year old Alicia; adult daughter Elizabeth; son-in-law Vincent; and intermittently, the fat black Manx cat SugarBelly. And me. We have a big TV; it's ridiculously huge, something like six feet across or thereabouts. I don't know fer shure, I just paid for it, I don't watch it. Anyway, one SPOILER ALERT scene where George ...

This is a story I made up to amuse myself last week, in a mildly expanded form. The movie "2001: A Space Odyssey" recently appeared on Netflix. I never saw it when it appeared in theaters, and ignored all the media hype about it, with one exception: I did read the MAD magazine spoof, called '201 Minutes of a Space Idiocy.' That might seem to you to be a particularly ignorant decision regarding a ground-breaking sci-fi epic, but I have an excuse: I actually worked on the film. My name doesn't appear anywhere in the credits, which is a demand I made when I stormed into the Shepperton Studio offices after my last day on set. They were disturbingly untroubled by my little tantrum, which I recognize now as being due to the fact that under no circumstances would my name have appeared anyway, since I was just an unpaid production intern. In my defense, I had just turned 23 in 1966, and I suppose I had that old I-am-the-center-of-the-universe thing going. It took years to...

I had completed 10 years as a middle school counselor. That fall of my 11th year, as a matter of good mental health, I knew that if I were to have the proper attitude at work, I was going to have to choose that attitude and have it in place before I parked my truck in front of the school. It wasn't going to come easy. On the home front, my much loved first-born son was gone away for college. I was just coming off a spiritual high, from leading a team of well over  one hundred men in an intense weekend of spiritual self-examination in a Christian renewal retreat. As often happens, when you come off the mountain top, aggravations present themselves; My first piece of mail upon my return home was a notification that my check had bounced at my son's college book store. But the point that I was clear on was this: if I allowed the joys and frustrations of working with 1100 young men and women  in the 7th and 8th grade, their parents and their teachers, to determine my attitude, I wa...

So, Rowan County Clerk Kim Davis is in jail for refusing to issue a marriage license for a gay marriage. She says it is against her religion to do so. In her absence (she's been in jail for a day) the marriage licenses were issued by a deputy clerk. From jail, she proclaimed that those licenses weren't worth the paper they ere printed on, because she is the only one who has a right to issue the licenses, and she's not going to do it. The question it raises for me is not whether a person can choose not to comply with a law they find to be inappropriate, but whether a person in a position which provides a public service can choose to gum up the works. I took a QUICK look at the concept of civil disobedience. I discovered that one of the earliest written expressions of the concept is in Sophocles' play Antigone , written around 441 BC. In the play, the woman Antigone chooses to flagrantly disobey King Creon's order to leave her dead brother unburied, even if it costs h...

I am gradually developing a book review/blog format. I have to separate those two things, because I talk about stuff in my blog that don't really appropriately fit into a book review. Here's what I think is the best format: I review the book on Amazon first, then I copy that review into my blog. However, the blog-specific material, I add in FRONT of the Amazon review. Umm, that's what you are reading  right now, by the way: the non-review stuff. Warning: minor rant ahead. The other day on Mad Genius Club , the Beautiful but Evil Space Princess talks about the split between popular, escapist books and books which feature nasty people doing nasty things without retribution. In that essay, she points out that authors do not have a captive audience. That's not fair. I WANT a captive audience. I want a HUGE captive audience. Why don't I HAVE a huge captive audience? Well the answer to that last is simple: the 'captive' part doesn't exist, and the huge part is...

This post is about blogging under the influences, but let me first recap for you. Prior to sometime in May, I was blogging almost every day. Most of the blog posts were based around book reviews, but there were some exceptions. For example, I reviewed a book called "Dirty Money: Confessions of A Stripper," but that was not so much a book review as an attempt to find meaning in the death of a friend of the family, a beautiful young girl who worked as a stripper, and who died from a form of pneumonia that attacks people with impaired immune systems. I also wrote a three part series about tolerance, some Hugo posts, and a couple of Amazon-related posts. And then my laptop croaked. And then my back-up laptop became unusable. If there is ANYONE who regularly writes a blog with the virtual keyboard on a tablet, you have my respect, because I can't do it. I ordered two NEW laptops, only to find that they were such a hot item that they were backordered. So, I canceled the order, ...