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Have you ever thought about this? Bill Volkart, from Cincinnati, has made some comments a lot of average people like me have often thought -- My thanks to Bill for letting me publish another one of his essays.
THE WORDWRIGHT
Who Judges the Judges?
Copyright 2007
The US has a long history of an excellent legal system. In past years, the word judge invoked thoughts of a fair and well educated person, steeped heavily in our laws and above reproach in society. A person of reason who has earned his position only after years of work in the courts. Today's judges have become more like lawmakers than one who weighs the scales of justice to see what is right and fair. Lawmakers who are very hard to fire, if indeed they can be fired at all. Thus they sit in places of authority handing down one ridiculous ruling after another with impunity. Unlike elected officials and appointees tied to a certain administration, a judge basically has tenure for life and the potential for abuse is very high and we hear more about it every day. So who will judge the judges?
From old women being awarded millions for spilling their hot coffee to the month long spectacle involving Anna Nicole Smith and her baby and the parade of TV cameras, with the judge as star of the show, they prove again and again they are unworthy of the title they hold. If they even agree to hear such cases or prove to be too liberal in sentencing or releasing convicts to the street, there really should be something that can be done to move more responsibility to their shoulders and make consequences for their actions. But how do we do that?
For one, there needs to be someone a judge is accountable to, even if some say it might color their opinion on this or that case, it beats letting the inmates run the asylum. There are people suing each other for the silliest reasons and it won't be long before someone sues a chewing gum maker for his lost filling or crown. Now my take on that would be “did that not occur to you before you started chewing the gum, sir?” but the point is judges have the option to refuse to hear such a case but it sure gets their name on the evening news.
And when you voted for a judge last time did you notice most run unopposed? You can choose not to vote for them but that is about it. We should always have a choice of another candidate just in case old judge what's-his-name goes nuts and starts releasing child molesters. The last thing we need is a bunch of judges in a good old boys club overturning election results and passing on real worthwhile projects that might benefit the people or the country. No, we get Judge Judy.
So if you want to really make a change that might actually do some good, start putting pressure on your lawmakers to enact laws that oversee the judges throughout the legal system. Let them know you want judges to be accountable and insist on a choice on the ballot or come up with a darn good reason why. If this is a democracy, it applies to everyone, even someone in a black robe.
Sorry this post was so serious but I am in a bad mood. Maybe I should sue somebody?
+++++ THANKS, BILL VOLKART – you have certainly brought up some things to think about.
THE WORDWRIGHT
Want to read more of Bill Volkart's essays?
WHEN DID WE FIRST START USING FORKS?
By Robert J. Tinsky - Copyright 2008
If you came looking for another essay by Bob Tinsky, and it's not in the immediate list, or you don't find it in the listing to the right of this column, just type in ROBERT J. TINSKY in the Search Window above and a window will drop down with a list of his essays.
This is, of course, true of any of our visiting essayists should you have missed them when they appeared here. In the slightly over two years THE WORDWRIGHT has been publishing essays, several guest essayists have been used other than Bill Venrick, and their names are: Hugh Singleton, Ken Davis, Harry Spence, Jean Steel Venrick and Bill Volkart. Just type in any of these names in the Search Window and their specific essays will be listed by a link to that page. Over 110 essays have been published on THE WORDWRIGHT to date (06-18-08).
When I was a student in college my English professor gave us an assignment to write an essay on any subject we chose. For some strange reason I decided to write about the history of eating and drinking utensils. That essay has been long gone and I don’t remember what grade I got on that paper. But I do remember that I learned some fascinating information about forks.
Forks are mentioned in the Bible a few times but they bore no resemblance to our modern dinner forks. Instead they were three pronged forks more like our modern pitchforks. A three pronged fork was used to arrange the meat on the altar of sacrifice and to lift the priest’s portion from the vessel in which it was cooked. We also read about “winnowing forks” used to separate the wheat from the chaff.
Before our modern forks were invented people used their fingers to eat many things that were part of their meals. There were some interesting rules of etiquette for aristocrats. Table manners required the diners to use only three fingers to touch their food. The ring finger was not to be used.
Eating utensils similar to our modern forks were first used by people in Turkey around 400 A. D. It was not until the 7th century, however, that forks were very widely used. Even then they were only used in Middle Eastern countries and by very wealthy people.
Forks were not used in Europe until the 10th century but were not widely accepted until the 17th century. The first European countries to use them were Italy and France. When forks were first introduced it was the custom for people to have their own fork and knife which they carried with them in a special box called a cadena whenever they were invited to a dinner party.
When forks were introduced into England women used them but the men thought they it was too sissy to substitute the use of fingers with metallic instruments.
When forks were first introduced there were clergymen that railed against them. They said that God gave us fingers and that the use of forks was an insult to God. We should not be surprised at this since there have been clergymen down through the ages that have objected to various modern inventions. I have in my file a copy of a sermon preached years ago by a well known radio preacher in which he said it was wrong for man to try to go to the moon since God only intended for mankind to have dominion over the earth.
Early forks only had two tines. It was not until the 16th century that a third tine was added. This may have been to replicate the custom of using only three fingers. A fourth tine was later added by an Italian named Gennaro Spadaccine. He also gave it the rounded shape our modern forks have today.
As late as the 18th century many people did not know how to use a fork. It was not until the 19th century when it became possible to mass produce forks that they became widely used.
So next time you tell your kids to use their forks instead of their fingers just remember that fingers were not only invented a long time before forks but were also used for a long time before forks were even thought of. On second thought, you might not want your children to read this.
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I'm sure you just been sitting out there wondering when we first started using forks, so I thought I would let my friend, Bob Tinsky, tell us all about that subject. THANKS BOB! THE WORDWRIGHT
June 15th is FATHER'S DAY -- My friend, Robert J. Tinsky has written a Father's Day tribute to his Grandfather Tinsky. THE WORDWRIGHT is proud to share this space with Bob Tinsky as he tells us what a Jewish man and his family experienced at the turn of the century as the 19th century became the 20th century. Quite a story!
I know that Father’s Day is a day to especially honor our immediate father. I want, however, this year to pay special honor to a man I only met one time, my grandfather.
Both of my grandparents on my father’s side were born in Russia in 1874. They left Russia in 1900, moving first to England and after a few years they came to the United States. I never had an opportunity to talk to them about why they left but know that since they were both Jewish their leaving had to do with the various pogroms instituted against the Jews during the late 1800’s.
If you have seen the musical “Fiddler on the Roof” you have some idea of what happened to the Jews during that period of time. This delightful musical, however, does not even begin to portray the horrors that many Jewish persons experienced.
Historians tell us that the pogroms started early in the 19th century but intensified during the latter part of the century. According to the Jewish Encyclopedia the first pogrom was during the riots in Odessa in 1859. The term pogrom became common after a large-scale wave of anti-Jewish riots swept southern imperial Russia from 1881 to 1884, after Jews were wrongly blamed for the assassination of Tsar Alexander II.
In the 1880’s thousands of Jewish homes were destroyed, many Jewish families were reduced to extremes of poverty. Women were sexually assaulted. Large numbers of men, women and children were injured in some parts of Russia.
In 1881, 19 years before my grandparents left Russia, there was a conspiracy against the Jews in the Russian government. Efforts were made to get rid of all Jews in St. Petersburg and Moscow. In 1891, four years before my father was born, Jews were expelled from those cities and their goods were confiscated. This expulsion began on the first day of the Jewish Passover, March 29, 1891.
S. M. Dubnow has written a three volume history of the Jews in Russia and Poland. In volume two of his history he gives us this description of what transpired at this time:
“The police invaded the Jewish homes, aroused the scared inhabitants from their beds, and drove semi-naked men, women, and children to the police station, where they were kept in filthy cells for a day and sometimes longer. Some of the prisoners were released by the police who first wrested from them a written pledge to leave the city immediately. Others were evicted under police convoy and sent out of the city like criminals, through the transportation prison. Many of the families having been forewarned of the impending raid, decided to spend the night outside of their homes to avoid arrest and maltreatment at the hands of the police. They hid themselves in the outlying sections of the city and in the cemeteries; they walked or rode all over the city the whole night. Many an estimable Jew was forced to shelter his wife and children, stiffened from the cold, in houses of ill repute which were open all night. But even these fugitives ultimately fell into the hands of the police inquisition.”
During this time one high government official made this statement about the Jews: “The Jew is a parasite. Remove him from the living organism in which and on which he exists and put this parasite on a rock—and he will die.”
Is it any wonder that my grandfather decided to take his small family and leave the land of his birth? On this father’s day I want to salute a man that I never really knew and thank him for making it possible for me to be born in this land of freedom.
THANKS, BOB, for writing this tribute to your Grandfather Tinsky,
THE WORDWRIGHT
Snippet – small scrap or fragment
As an amateur essayist I am always looking at the world around me with my tri-focal glasses in search of something to write about. Often while reading, my attention span gets side-tracked and I raise my eyes to note something that may have moved or maybe I simply wanted to change my focus for a moment or cogitate on what I have been reading. If I am not careful I might lose my original train of thought completely and start off in an entirely different direction One early complaint I received was, “Venrick, you major in minors.” “Well, thank you, but I don't remember asking for your opinion,” should have been my reply but I probably lost the nerve to shoot back in such a snippy manner. But snippets of information somehow still rule in my life.
As I have written before in this blog I am a member of the American Amateur Press Association, and during the twenty odd years I have belonged to this group I have been satisfied with all the snippets available in the monthly bundle of the AAPA. The few dozen of members who really work at being an active member abound in their unique abilities to pry out interesting stories from every-day life or mine informative journals from the depths of life around them have been a blessing to me. What is sad, however, is the inevitable fact that life is cut short for some of these writers and it is hoped another will step up and take their place in the pristine writers group of the AAPA. This fact of life has been the norm for the few decades I have known of the AAPA and pleasant thoughts abound to recall names of former members once found in the bundle.
One of the members whose writings often find a spot in my mind is a (now-retired) dentist in Redding, California. Dr. Leonard Carrick is his name and Len, as many call him, has an uncanny ability to weave snippets together making very interesting stories. One such story, “Ink & Wings”, was found in INK CAHOOTS '89 (the 17th Annual Edition) which is an annual cooperative effort of the members of the AAPA.
In this edition of Len's articles, he wrote about Orville and Wilbur Wright, who hale from my state, OHIO, and it was in their bicycle shop that the metamorphism of two men whose name would ring in the ears of America, and perhaps the world, for years to come. Later, the name Patterson was added to their name, and Wright-Patterson became the name for an air base in Dayton, Ohio. To those living near Columbus, Ohio, another name was prefixed to their name, Curtis, and thus Curtis-Wright became the name of an airplane factory as well as an aircraft. Even though these brief snippets of how Orville and Wilbur's name were examples of how they became known to the world of flight, I never knew their bicycle shop in Dayton, Ohio, was the place where these two brothers invented an improvement to a hay-baler, a practical paper folder, and used a variety of their machines to remodel their home.
While reading Len's piece “Ink & Wings” I didn't really give the title much thought until the very end of his little essay (which, by the way, was printed using hand-set type and took up twenty lines of space on the back side of this piece), until I read about Orville, when he was 17, designed and built a printing press large and fast enough to publish a daily newspaper. Ultimately their inquisitive and inquiring minds nurtured a consuming interest in manned flight. “Putting beans on the table,” as Len wrote was why they worked on bicycles but those two brothers demonstrated what masterful men they were in dealing with unique snippets. May their tribe increase!
WANT TO READ ABOUT THE AAPA?
THE WORDWRIGHT
Obama's Hidden Enemy
by Bill Volkart - Cincinnati, Ohio
Copyright 2008
Guest essayist for THE WORDWRIGHT today is BILL VOLKART, of Cincinnati, Ohio. This is an opinion piece and we cannot verify that what he predicts will actually transpire. Our country has been filled with intrigues of all flavors and degrees from as far back as historians have reported. For a country that has so much to offer and provide for its citizens, the words rampant and rampage are key words for much of the political and social activity that we have experienced in the brief history of our nation. Guest Essayist Bill Volkart has dared to put into words what some may have thought but never spoken. THE WORDWRIGHT.
Few people will dispute that Barak Obama's candidacy has its enemies. White supremacy groups, working class whites, the Republican right wing, talk radio and others jump to mind immediately. What no one is watching is how this will be received and possibly sabotaged by a group of powerful figures and organizations Obama should obviously be expecting massive support from in the coming months. Who might this hidden threat be? Amazingly, the civil rights movement and its spokesmen themselves!
Now wait a minute Bill, you can't be serious here?? Well hear me out and see if you do not come to the same conclusion I did. The best ideas often come from out in left field and so do the most stunning surprises. Imagine you are a black leader or one of the higher ups in any NAACP group or black church. Since the 60's you have made your living calling out white America claiming racism, lack of inclusion, no voice in Washington and so on down the line. You, as this hypothetical black leader, make your living on these racist arguments but where will your biggest arguments go if a black man is elected President of the United States? You can no longer claim Washington does not understand the plight of the black man, America can't be racist if a black man was freely elected by as many if not more whites than blacks so what will you talk about and rally against? Whites must not be such obstructionists after all based on this fact. Yes, black people will certainly be 'included' in the day to day operation of their own government.
This poses a dilemma for their leaders. What should they do, if anything? Where will the crowds of angry blacks and their dollars go if there is a black man sitting in the greatest seat of power on Earth? They will be out working and happy with the knowledge that Martin Luther King's dream speech has finally been realized, not just on TV or in print but in real life power and authority. African-Americans will have finally arrived at the place they have fought so long and hard for since the Civil War: full equality with white America. This really threatens those who have built their careers and organizations on the premise that days such as these were a hundred years away. Talk about lame ducks!!
The ancient utterance 'Et u Brute?' comes to mind. We have already seen a possible sneak attack in the form of Reverend Jeremiah Wright. Who leaked him to the world? No one seems to know that for a fact.Was it even possible that from somewhere among this group he was spawned when and where he was in the election? What else will soon rear its ugly little head from a group of very hush hush insiders of the very constituency that lifted him up to the Senate? Wait and see.
Will there be the so called 'October surprise' guaranteed to paint Mr. Obama in a light so negative he loses the election in the final weeks so then it can be claimed that the white men pulled the rug out from under the only black man to ever vie for their position of ultimate power? Will there be an attempt to paint him as a white puppet in black media? Will there be an attempt on his life so that he can be shown as a victim as opposed to a successful man? If a black man shoots him or otherwise attacks him, will that man just be a random crazy or an agent of a higher authority. Black or white, successful or not, such an attack could be played into more evidence of racism and assure they and their positions in the black community would be assured. One more axe to grind on the pulpits and platforms of black America is what that could and would doubtless produce. Et u Brute indeed!
So before Barak Obama makes the assumption that those closest to him and his beliefs are securely in his corner, I advise him to look a bit deeper. The word 'traitor' is nothing new on the world stage, and they may carry a gun or a knife or a pen or a video camera or recording equipment and may do more social harm than physical. But it is still a surprise attack from a corner you were not watching. And being a traitor is not an exclusive domain of the white race, all races have them. Watch your back Mr. Obama, enemies may be even now at the gates. The devil always appears fair of face.
READ MORE BY BILL VOLKART
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THANKS BILL VOLKART, for sharing your thoughts today,
THE WORDWRIGHT
A FEW TRUTHS – from THE WORDWRIGHT
For a computer guy, I feel like I entered the fray a bit late in life but I am sure some could boast a bit more than I could, however at 62 I considered my start at bit slow in coming. Now that I have put fourteen years into “working” with a computer I suppose I have seen as many “important” e-mails as anyone else – in fact I imagine I have seen a lot of those “special e-mails” as many as a dozen or more times.
TRUTH is something that is almost rare anymore, that is in the pristine sense of truth. The hoaxes, and flagrant abuses of the truth abound but isn't that an expected issue due to the fact that the press (whether it be a printing press or a computer keyboard) is still FREE; and I am not sure I want to trade off some abuses for a so-called guarded or censored “press” because just who is capable of knowing what is best for all of us (except of course, GOD, and He has already done more than His part in providing man a few truths of His own plus a Word picture in the form of Jesus Christ). So, while you (and I) sort through the particles that make life worth the living, please accept the following (unoriginal with The Wordwright) truths to ruminate and maybe even find a place to apply them to your daily lives.
A FEW TRUTHS
1. No one can ruin your day without YOUR permission.
2. Most people will be about as happy as they decide to be.
3. Others can stop you temporarily, but only you can do it permanently.
4. Whatever you are willing to put up with, is exactly what you will have.
5. Success stops when you do.
6. When your ship comes in. ... make sure you are willing to unload it.
7. You will never "have it all together."
8. Life is a journey ... not a destination. Enjoy the trip!
9. The biggest lie on the planet: "When I get what I want I will be happy."
10. The best way to escape your problem is to solve it.
11. I've learned that ultimately 'takers' lose and 'givers' win.
12. Life's precious moments don't have value, unless they are shared.
13. If you don't start, it's certain you won't arrive.
14. We often fear the thing we want the most.
15. Everyone hears what you say. Friends listen to what you have to say. Best
friends listen to what you don't say!
16. Yesterday was the deadline for all complaints.
17. Look for opportunities...not guarantees.
18. Life is what's coming....not what was.
19. Success is getting up one more time.
20. Now is the most interesting time of all.
21. When things go wrong.....don't go with them.
22. Sometimes the majority only means that all the fools are on the same side.
23. God can mend all broken hearts. You just have to give Him all the pieces.
24. A person who asks a question might be a fool for five minutes, but a person
who doesn't ask,is a fool forever.
25. A best friend is like a four-leaf clover ... hard to find, and lucky to have.
26. A friend is someone who reaches for your hand but touches your heart.
27. A coincidence is when God performs a miracle, and decides to remain
anonymous.
28. I don't have to attend every argument I'm invited to.
29. Your worst days are never so bad that you are beyond the reach of God's
grace ...and your best days are never so good that you are beyond the need of God's grace.
30. Our eyes are placed in front because it is more important to look ahead than to look back.
THERE YOU GO – I trust you will not disparage this list because it is obviously a bit of “copied” material but for the most part, I have found very little “under the Sun” that is new anyway, just in case you haven't noticed. Credit for such wisdom is gratefully given to the unknown authors of these assorted axioms.
THE WORDWRIGHT
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