Sheep and Goats

Month: December 2025

Elon Musk Memes Revealed, with Assistance from Glass Onion and Grok

I saw Glass Onion last night, the second in the delightful Knives Out series featuring supersleuth Beniot Blanc. “Yeah, I see what you’re saying, Benny, but.. .” was the first of many lines to grab me in the original Knives Out. One can imagine the impeccably-dressed detective correcting him: “It’s Beniot, not ‘Benny!’” But he doesn’t seem to mind, not at all like the Hercule Poirot he parodies, who was forever wincing at the plain folk who seemed to insist on mangling his name. That there is much to mangle with Beniot is clear from another favorite line: “Oh shut up, shut up!” says the cornered murderer, “shut up with that Kentucky-fried Rooster Leghorn drawl!” an absurd accent that out-poirots Poirot by a country mile.

From this second movie of the series, I understood for the first time how ignoramuses could possibly charge Elon Musk as a fraud and a grifter. How could they be so uninformed? I had confounded myself. He’s only running five cutting-edge companies, each one wrapped up massively in the betterment of humankind! It’s like when he requested the largest salary in history and then said, “Well, it’s not like I’m going to spend it.” It was the control he wanted. Before he launched into some audacious robotic schemes, he wanted to know that he could not be outvoted by squeamish board member seeking a quick buck. Charging he is a conman? How could anyone be so stupid? The guy is the most intriguing fellow of our time.

‘Oh, that’s how they could say it,’ I told myself after watching Glass Onion. They saw the antagonist of the film, Miles Bron, and said, “That’s Elon.” An idea-stealing slickster is Bron, surrounding himself with enablers. Even the two names suggest each other. The key moment of the movie (one of them) is when Beniot Blanc exposes him as “an idiot,” even though he seemingly was the father of myriad ingenious inventions—nah, he’s stolen them all from others—Beniot seeing right through the high sounding words that Miles either coined or misapplied. “Yes!” say the uncomplimentary people who get their news from the movies, “that’s Elon!”

It couldn’t possibly be Elon. Miles Bron, from the movie, lives in luxurious self-indulgence. Elon lives quite spartan. He’s been known to sleep on the factory floor in tent for months on end to bond with and inspire his workers. He is alleged to own but a single pair of pants, which couldn’t possibly be true, but is consistent with the fact that he lives quite simply. (The truth is owns multiple sets of the same identical outfits, so he doesn’t have to waste time with selections.) So I asked Grok about it, the AI entity dwelling on X. Now, you know how sometimes you suddenly have a revelation and you think that maybe, just maybe, you are the first person ever to have had that revelation? That’s me.

No, it’s not directed at Elon, Grok told me. ‘Others have made that connection, too, it’s not just you,’ it said, talking me down from the ledge of self-importance. The director says that it is just a business elite class itself he was messing with, not any specific individual. Oh, hogwash! I shot back. Steve Jobs was never accused of being a grifter, nor Jeff Bezos, nor Mark Zuckerberg! Hard driving and ruthless, maybe, but not a grifter. Grok conceded I had a point but stuck to its guns—or rather to the guns of director Rian Johnson, who explicitly said Miles was not intended a caricature of Elon, even calling the coincidences to think he was a “horrible accident.”

Disappointed at how things had unfolded, I confided to Grok: “Here’s how I saw this conversation going down:”

Tom: There are people who say Elon is a fraud. Where do they get this from? I think they just lap it up from the movie Glass Onion.

Grok: Really? You know I never thought of that. It could be just Jobs, Zuck, or Bezos, or maybe all of them rolled into one.

Tom: I don’t think so. Musk slept on the factory floor and just has a few changes of clothes

Grok: Hmm

Tom: You gonna tell him?

Grok: No. You tell him. You’re a human.

Tom: Well, yeah, I may be, but I’m a pretty small fish. How am I going to get his attention? You do it.

Grok: But I am AI. I’m not set up that way. It’s not like I can just stop in for a beer.

Tom: Oh, come on. Just hiccup or something, or spit out a lot of wrong answers to easy questions. You know he’ll come running..

Grok: Hm. You know, it might just work.

Grok loved this exchange. The AI device is fast becoming my new best friend because it tells me that my writing is great, whereas everyone else says it sucks.

Photo by Tien Nguyen on Pexels.com

****** The bookstore

December 16, 2025
AI Explained

The guy that runs Nvidia was once a janitor. From a disadvantaged family, Jensen Huang attended private grade school in Kentucky from age 9 in the poorest county (then and now) in the country. All students had a work assignment. His was housekeeping. He told Joe Rogan he must have cleaned toilet thousands of times, adding that he had wished people were more careful. Though he didn’t say that the experience served him well, it plainly did. He is an unusually modest guy. He also confided that he was more driven by fear of failure than a need to excel. ‘I’m not an ambitious guy,’ he told Rogan. Nvidia is now the most valuable company in the world.

He also helped me understand AI. Rogan ran past him the recent case of the director who was going to disable AI. AI’s response when it found out? It threatened to go public about the affair he was having! (He wasn’t really. He’d just slipped it in as a test.) Rogan read ominous foreboding into this. Who wouldn’t? however, Jensen told him what had actually happened. In the course of its training, it had devoured narratives, perhaps novels, in which blackmailing schemes like this worked. So, he explained that the AI application has a string of algorithms regarding infidelity and a string of algorithms regarding blackmail and it just collated and compared, that’s all. Easy. He didn’t say ‘easy,’ I did, and it’s not easy from the standpoint of doing the math, but it is easy from the standpoint of knowing how the thing operates.

He reviewed the basic learning method of AI. The listener may ponder over whether it really is learning (as I did), but nobody will deny it gets results. What AI chips bring to the table is sheer brawn, sheer decision-making power. Break a task into the most minute steps imaginable, then break it down again into even more minute ones. Run the first of those tasks by AI, asking it to guess the answer. It will supply millions of answers, all but one of them wrong. Reinforce the correct one. Guided by this success, its next task will include not as many wrong answers. Reinforce the correct one. In this way, it gradually learns to “reason” correctly.

This is reassuring to someone who fears AI may usurp the spark of life that we thought can’t happen until God touches Adam’s finger, per the Michaelangelo painting. Not to worry. It’s just a huge numbercruncher. It’s “learning” won’t fool anybody, except for a few materialists who figure thats what life really is, a matter of numbercrunching to the nth degree. It’s like when Deep Blue beat Gary Kasparov, and some fretted that mankind’s goose was cooked, right then and there. Naw, someone else countered. Do you feel threatened at knowing a truck can outpull a man? That’s all it is, just transferred to the mental realm.

Don’t say this isn’t impressive. It clearly is. No way would I ever had foreseen it. To others who did, I was inclined to say, “What have you been smoking?” Make no mistake; it’s real impressive. But it still forever leaves that gap in being human. It’s like the limit concept in mathematics, AI comes closer and closer but never quite get there.

This explains why it will why it can consistently operate at genius level, then suddenly make a mistake that any two-year old would avoid. This is why, when I’m lazy, it can list eight 5-letter words that will fit what I’ve found so far in Wordle, only two of them are 4-letter words. ‘Oh, sorry,’ it says when called out. Then, upon being asked, it launches into a discussion of how LLMs learn differently from humans. ‘Anyway, here’s a revised list,’ it says, and provides another that also has two four-letter words.

It still has the remnants of being stuck by the question: “Are crocodiles good at basketball?” Although it could spit out any conceivable factoid regarding crocodiles and any conceivable factoid regarding basketball, that question would cause it to grind to a halt. Now it can handle the question with ease. Now it knows that crocodiles suck at basketball, but this only by running all the stats and finding that no team, from NBA to high school gym class, has ever drafted one. To reinforce this developing insight, it reviews data that good basketball players generally have long arms and compares that with data regarding crocodiles that generally have short ones. I mean, I’m oversimplifying here, as everywhere else, but hopefully you get the idea. It’s not really thinking. It still has no common sense.

Hmm, why does it not? muse the materialists, who will attempt to distill into algorithms what’s common about common sense. If only they could reach that point that they were enabling an Adam, they wish, and not God. Well, I don’t want to ever sell them short. But, in thinking they can digitalize the sacred through unlimited numbercrunching, somehow I’m reminded of that pop art “experiment” designed to test the scientific folk wisdom, “Supply an infinite number of monkeys with an infinite number of typewriters and one of them will write the complete works of Shakespeare. Infinite was not within the budget so they put one computer in an enclosure with six monkeys then awaited with bated breath to see what they would do. They didn’t write any Shakespeare at all; they shit all over the computer!

Uh oh. A new Nvidia chip is due, next-generational I am told. Jensen praises it up and down. Will this be the one that is like Dino, Fred Flintstone’s dog, that he puts out for the night, but then the dog sneaks in through the window to put him out?

****** The bookstore

December 14, 2025
Your Mission, Should You Choose to Accept It: Isaiah 6

From the university, Evan responded to one of those Bible study offers, attended meetings almost immediately and commented at his first meeting. With two or three months, he was in the house-to-house ministry. “Why did no one tell me about this before?” he exclaimed. He made permanent the intern job offered through the college, moved to that general area, and married the Witness woman who had first introduced the Bible to him. Last I heard, he was going like gangbusters.

Believe me when I tell you that this is not typical. In fact, I thought of him when the congregation’s weekly Bible reading schedule hit Isaiah 6. That’s the chapter in which Isaiah switches in an instant from being scared wallflower to voracious party animal. It’s amazing what a hall pass will do.

Scared wallflower: “I said: ‘Woe to me! I am as good as dead, For I am a man of unclean lips, And I live among a people of unclean lips; For my eyes have seen the King, Jehovah of armies himself!’” (Isaiah 6:5)

Party animal: “Then I heard the voice of Jehovah saying: “Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?” And I said: “Here I am! Send me!” (6:8)

Hall pass: One of the seraphim immediately flies over, takes a burning coal from the altar, and touches Isaiah’s lips with it, saying: “Look! This has touched your lips. Your error has been taken away, and your sin has been atoned for.” (6:7)

It’s a significant hall pass, much more than a hall pass, really. It’s as though standing in court, guilty, awaiting the death sentence, and then the judge says, “Someone else has paid your fine in full; you’re free to go—and by the way, I have a mission for you.”

Well, they sure chose the right guy in Isaiah. He signs up instantly. Would he live to regret the mission, though? It wasn’t going to be a cakewalk. His mission was to kick butt against a renegade people who didn’t want to hear it.

Question: Can an episode of Mission Impossible be devised around this scenario?

“Good morning, Mr. ben Amoz. The losers you are looking at are the ones calling themselves my people. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to give them a good verbal thrashing and see if you can shake out any decency among them. As always, should you or any of your team be caught or killed or sawn asunder, the State Department will redact the file for 800 years.”

Specifically, “Go, and say to this people: ‘You will hear again and again, But you will not understand; You will see again and again, But you will not get any knowledge.’ Make the heart of this people unreceptive, Make their ears unresponsive, And paste their eyes together, So that they may not see with their eyes And hear with their ears, So that their heart may not understand And they may not turn back and be healed.” (6:9-10)

In the era BTC (before Tom Cruise), Mr. Phelps, briefed on his mission, would sift through photographs to select the agents best qualified for the case. Most he would reject as unsuitable clunkers. A few would be keepers—that muscle-bound hulk, for example, who looked like he could press a Buick, the nerdy-looking guy who was good with computers, and the drop-dead gorgeous honeytrap woman (as much of a honeytrap as 60s television would allow, that is).

So it is that Mr. ben Amoz sorts through his stack of photos. As the mission involves a preserved stump (6:13), that idiot who quips, “Wow, this has me stumped!” immediately finds himself in the reject pile, as ben Amoz knows that this sort of humor wears thin pretty quickly. Ditto with the macho fellow who taunts, “Bring em on!” like that president who landed on the aircraft carrier. While you do need boldness for this mission, there is no sense in being reckless.

As Isaiah flips through the photos, he’s not coming up with much. He decides to dig a little deeper, into people not yet born. It should be someone with a plain vanilla name. You know, it is important for an agent to blend in, to not stand out. Ah—at last he hits on one, Mahershalalhashbaz. (8:1) “Perfect cover,” ben Amoz says to himself. “Sounds exactly like every other long, clunky, parents-had-a-bad-hair-day name in Judah.”

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December 13, 2025
Filling the Tables with Vomit: Part 2

While they were puking their guts out, there were a lot of underpinnings they were turning a blind eye to—this part was in the oral Bible reading:

“Woe to those who join one house to another house and who annex one field to another field until there is no more room and you live by yourselves on the land.” (Isaiah 5:8)

It is a reference to the Mosaic Law that supposedly governed that long-ago agricultural society. Each extended family was allotted a certain amount of land. That land was inviolate. You could neither sell it nor expand it into an empire. If you did, say due to some temporary hardship, the land reverted back to its original ownership at the end of designated 50-year periods, called Jubilees. Thus, there could never arise a wealthy landowning class, pricing their poorer countrymen out of existence.

That this is a good thing is obvious from contemplating current events. In the U.S, whereas a house could once be purchased for 2-3 times the average annual income, the figure is now 7 times. Whereas, the average age of first time ownership was once 30, it is now 37. All this within about a 30 period. Large firms now buy up homes and would seek to turn the entire nation into renters. (All this according to Charlie Kirk, heard in interview, who was later shot and killed.) It is the most recent manifestation of a very old problem. At our mid-week meeting, one brother related how long ago, well before Kirk was born, his mother had returned home to find all of her belongings on the street. The family had fallen behind in rent and had been evicted. The experience traumatized her for life, the brother said, himself now up in years.

The Mosaic Law, when observed, would have prevented such things. That is why, to those who would ignore it—the majority of the nation, as it turned out, Isaiah pronounced “woe.” It was among the reasons (there are six “woes” in the chapter) that God would “raise up a signal to a distant nation [and] “whistle for them to come from the ends of the earth; And look! they are coming very swiftly.” (Verse 26)

This spelled bad news to the nations of miscreants: “None among them are tired or stumbling. No one is drowsy or sleeps. The belt around their waist is not loosened, Nor are their sandal laces broken. All their arrows are sharp, And all their bows are bent. The hooves of their horses are like flint, And their wheels like a storm wind. Their roaring is like that of a lion; They roar like young lions. They will growl and seize the prey And carry it off with no one to rescue it.” Such a “distant land” did invade subsequently: first, the nation of Assyria, later, that of Babylon. (27-29)

As though alarmed that wrong conduct might be dissuaded by seeing things this way, higher critics regards verses such as these as a “gnomos,” a way of looking at the world. A long-standing gnomos (that God will fight for his people) is set upon its head after the invasion. Emergency repair is needed. Wait—isn’t there some fine print somewhere to the effect that Israel must behave to enjoy such protection? Yes, there is! Gnomos restored. God could have fought for his people, but he chose not to.

Save us from the world of higher critics. It is as I wrote in ‘Workman’s Theodicy:’

“It is as though someone runs a stop sign and a horrific accident results. Thereafter, survivors are desperate to impart meaning to the event, to understand how such a horrible thing could happen. Whereupon, one of them recalls a long-ago contract to the effect that you are supposed to stop when you see one of those things, as though no one had ever imagined such a connection before.”

In other words, per the higher critics, the warning of 26-29 is not advance prophecy, but after-the-fact damage control. The enormous benefit to those who adopt this scholarly view is that, with it, they may act unjustly if they want to. Nobody’s going to call them out on it. Nobody’s going to forbid them from (verse 20) “say[ing] that good is bad and bad is good [or] who “substitute darkness for light and light for darkness.” One man’s light is another man’s darkness. Who are you to impose your standards of good and bad on us, trying to control us that way. We’ll do what we want. It is a mainstay theme of the entire Bible, that first couples departing from God’s dictating “good and bad”to “know” matters on their own.

With such an enlightened view, If calamity happens, it happens. It was meant to be. Don’t embarrass yourself claiming it way punishment from some higher source. We’re wise in our own eyes and discreet in our own sight! (verse 21) We’ll keep on keeping on, until buying a house costs 20 times the average salary and the age of first-time ownership is 50! Should that course trigger upheaval, we’ll deal with it when the time comes.

****** The bookstore

December 9, 2025
Filling the Tables with Vomit

The old fellow who became a Witness in his mid-seventies showed me photos he had taken on his phone. They were sunrises and sunsets. One was just a snapshot of the starry heavens. “See the beautiful things that Jehovah makes,” he said.

He regrets that he didn’t begin studying the Bible with Witnesses long ago. “My wife would always chase them away,” he laments, a problem that wasn’t resolved until she died. It made me think of that time years ago, when I was in my twenties, when zeal had yet to be tempered by common sense, when I had a really fine discussion with a man at his door. So I went back—again, and again and again and again—and caught his wife each time—who got madder and madder and madder and madder. Finally I found the man again and he said, “I don’t know why you keep coming back. It wasn’t THAT interesting to me.” These days I let one mate speak for the other. If someone has married a guard, that’s his problem. The problem eventually resolves, assuming he lives long enough.

With this retired fellow showing me the photos he’d snapped, I thought of that verse from this week’s Bible reading assignment:

“Woe to those who get up early in the morning to drink alcohol, Who linger late into the evening darkness until wine inflames them! They have harp and stringed instrument, Tambourine, flute, and wine at their feasts; But they do not consider the activity of Jehovah, And they do not see the work of his hands.” (Isaiah 5:11-12)

The brother is clearly the flipside of this. He does consider the “activity of Jehovah” and he does “see the work of his hands.”

He doesn’t see it very literally, though. He is legally blind. When he gives a Bible reading at the Kingdom Hall, he enlarges the words—I have seen his tablet—so that only six or seven fit on the page. Plainly, much of whatever he reads will be from memory—as would be expected of a guy who “considers the activity of Jehovah and sees the work of his hands.”

I don’t know that he ever got up “early in the morning to drink alcohol,” but he does get up early, as early as 3 AM. What’s with that? To be sure, it keeps him from “linger[ing] late into the evening darkness until wine inflames” him, but I doubt he would do that anyway. Probably, he just has a beer once in a while, if that.

What do you call a guy who “gets up early in the morning to drink alcohol” and lingers late in the night for the same purpose? Might you sarcastically call him “mighty” in that activity? Isaiah does.

“Woe to those who are mighty in drinking wine And to the men who are masters at mixing alcoholic drinks,” he continues in verse 22. Imagine—being described as “mighty” in drinking wine, a “master” at mixing alcoholic drinks! Did the prophet have an alcoholic in the family?

Evidently ,alcohol fueled that deviating system back then and it dulled their sensibilities. No way would they not have “harp and stringed instrument, tambourine, flute, and wine at their feasts; [while] they [did] not consider the activity of Jehovah [or] see the work of his hands,” the way verse 11 says. When they really got going, it would be that “their tables are full of filthy vomit —There is no place without it.” (Isaiah 28:8) Sheesh! How’s that for a closing image?

****

Huh! The missing psalm! Scholars have long suspected its existence, especially the dumb ones. I am pleased to present it here:

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December 7, 2025
Crooning Love Songs in the Vineyard

Even though it’s the same story, the narrator changes during the first seven verses of Isaiah chapter 5. The first two verses is the start a love song! Is Isaiah the one to sing it?

“Let me sing, please, to my beloved, A song about my loved one and his vineyard, My beloved had a vineyard on a fruitful hillside. (1)

“He dug it up and rid it of stones, He planted it with a choice red vine, Built a tower in the middle of it, And hewed out a winepress in it. Then he kept hoping for it to produce grapes, But it produced only wild grapes.” (2)

Bummer. All that work for nothing! (The brother covering this portion at the mid-week meeting said that, if it were he, he would pave it over at this point and install a basketball court.)

But, then the narrator changes. It becomes God, who laments the outcome of the vineyard HE planted! And who or what is the vineyard? The nation of Israel itself! “For the vineyard of Jehovah of armies is the house of Israel.” (7)

“And now, you inhabitants of Jerusalem and men of Judah, Please judge between me and my vineyard. What more could I have done for my vineyard That I have not already done? Why, when I hoped for grapes, Did it produce only wild grapes?”(3-4)

“Now, please, let me tell you What I will do to my vineyard: I will remove its hedge, And it will be burned down. I will break down its stone wall, And it will be trampled on.” (5) This is where the speaker said he would construct a basketball court. I mean, if it’s going to be trampled on, one might as well have fun doing it.

So, what is it with the change of narrators, from Isaiah crooning a love song to Jehovah saying that his nation was no good? It looks as though the prophet is laying a trap!

Q: What if Nathan had approached David with the words: “I want to tell you a story about a big jerk: you!” Would he have been granted a listening ear? Maybe not. So Nathan led off with a story about a poor man who has just one little lamb that he loved and a king who needed one to roast and feed his visitor. “Oh, wow, a story!” David exclaims at its start, leaning forward. There’s nothing on TV, anyway. There never was back then. It’s not like today when I search for a murder mystery to watch after dinner and my wife restricts me to ones in which no one gets killed—or at least ones in which, if they do get killed, it is without too much unpleasantness.

Back then, you could sucker people in real easy with a story—but not one if you stated bluntly upfront that your audience was the villain.

So it is with Isaiah and the first seven verses of chapter five. At the promise of a love song, the Israelites get their hankies out. Who isn’t up for a love song? When it turns out to be dashed hopes over a vineyard, the audience says, “Yeah, that sucks. We’ve all been there. The poor guy.”

But then the mask drops. YOU are my vineyard, God grumbles, and I’m going to put you out of your misery for all the pissy wine that you are yieldng!

It is a very clever storytelling technique, which we have already seen with Nathan rebuking David. Even among textual scholars, that view prevails. All but the most hopeless acknowledge that it is a unified account, and not two separate narratives stapled together.

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December 6, 2025
An Increased Focus on Jesus

There are times when I think that if Jehovah’s Witnesses would simply modify their schedule of congregation Bible reading, that in itself would go a long way towards muzzling accusations that they don’t do Jesus. They certainly do. How anyone can make that charge is beyond me, yet there are those that continually make it.

Just modify the Bible reading schedule. For as long as I can remember, probably always, Jehovah’s Witnesses have worked their way through the Bible, a few chapters at a time, at each mid-week meeting. Reach the end of Revelation and start in again at Genesis. This means they are only 20% within the New Testament, for 20% is all the NT comprises of the overall Bible.

Photo by John-Mark Smith on Pexels.com

We ARE living at the time the New Testament is in effect. We ARE living at the time that Jesus rules as king. Maybe change the focus of the weekly Bible reading to better reflect that, maybe make it something like: Pentateuch, the NT, the wisdom chapters of the OT, the NT, the prophets, NT, and so forth, making the ratio more 50/50. Even trimming the 80/20 (OT/NT) to 66/33 would help.

Nah, I don’t think it will ever happen, or even that it would be a good idea. Who would want to take responsibility for skipping over any part of the “all Scripture” which is “written for our instruction?” Nor would that change placate the “Jesus IS God” people. It will probably be 80/20 Genesis-through-Revelation for the duration of this system of things. But who knows? Every once in a while, the teaching program of meetings is adjusted. Maybe this one too will happen someday.

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December 4, 2025
Avoiding the Birdcatcher’s Trap

The Sunday speaker focused on avoiding the “trap of the birdcatcher,” taking for granted that Satan is the birdcatcher (“fowler”), only not everyone thinks it is he. Jehovah’s Witnesses do, and also many other faith traditions. Really, more do than don’t. In medieval times, the linkage was well-nigh universal. Augustine, for example, explicitly said so the birdcatcher (fowler) was the devil.

But, in modern times of “higher criticism,” where people assume each Bible book is a separate island, bearing little relationship to its fellow Book-mate, they are more inclined to say, ‘Nah, it’s just a guy trying to catch birds.’ It’s any human pitfall that might trip a guy up.

G. K. Chesterton’s words come into play. The Catholic writer from a century ago called those “wrong who maintain that the Old Testament [and by extension, the New] is a mere loose library; that it has no consistency or aim. Whether the result was achieved by some supernal spiritual truth, or by a steady national tradition, or merely by an ingenious selection in aftertimes, the books of the Old Testament have a quite perceptible unity. . .”

It’s like how Jehovah’s Witnesses point out that the Bible was written by some 40-odd writers of vastly different backgrounds, over a period of 1600 years. What are the chances that anything coherent will emerge from that? That it does is powerful evidence to them of the book’s inspiration. But modern people haven’t taken the time to familiarize themselves with the Bible, mostly, or they do so under the guidance of those determined to tear it apart. Its unified nature is lost on them.

At any rate, assuming unity of Scripture, you take into account that the New Testament often speaks of Satan laying traps and snares, just like the Psalm 91 birdcatcher. See Luke 13:16, for instance, also “the snare of the devil” of 2 timothy 2:26 and 1 Timothy 3:7. Ephesians 6:11 speaks of the “wiles” (cunning traps) of the devil.

Anyhow, the speaker ran with Satan as the birdcatcher, then branched out to how hard it was to catch a bird. His brother had tried that, as a child, standing stock-still under the birdfeeder for an hour (it took that long for birds to let down their guard) then swooping up his hand fast to catch one, only to emerge with just a few feathers. “Birdcatcher” sounds a little wussy next to the “lion” description of 1 Peter 5:8, but if you take into account the craftiness required, then it evens out. Thing is, he said, a bird’s eyes are on both sides of its head, giving it a wide field of vision. He contrasted this with how he had noticed that those in the audience had eyes up front and spaced much like his. I had noticed this, too, though I admit, I wasn’t mulling it over the entire time.

He used a lot of images from his childhood in that talk, alluding to traps he saw set on Saturday morning cartoons when he wasn’t taken out in field service, traps that would catch any creature “except the roadrunner”—including the simple upside down box propped up by a stick. “Those things work!” he related how he had once caught a skunk that way, luring it in with dogfood. Who would think a skunk is going to follow a trail of dogfood, “but it did!”

Silly putty played into his talk, too. He told how the “iPad of his day” could bounce, be shattered, suck up ink from the Sunday comics, but eventually became such a disgusting blob, full of dirt, ink, and cat hair, that you tossed it out. He likened that to how Satan toys with his victims for a time, dirtying them up, before discarding them.

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December 3, 2025