harmonicminer

This is a truly remarkable story.  It has found its way into print in Guideposts magazine, in a lovely little book called “When God Winks” by SQuire Rushnell, and now on this gentleman’s blog.  It’s also a very personal story to me.

The Day Weary Willie Smiled

By Phil Bolsta

Emmett Kelly as Weary Willie

I loved Emmett Kelly as a kid. He was Weary Willie, the quintessential tramp clown, an integral part of my childhood. This touching and amazing story by his daughter, Stasia Kelly, of Atlanta, Georgia, appeared in the October 2006 issue of Guideposts. What are the odds of this story ending as it did?  Probably one in a trillion. And yet . . .

I sat on the plane, my purse in my lap, waiting to take off from Hartsfield International Airport in Atlanta for Florida to attend my father’s funeral. I had just spoken to Dad the day before. He’d sounded a little down, but I never guessed it would be the last time I heard his voice. “I’m tired, Stasia,” he said. I could hear that tiredness through the phone, could feel it the way so many people had felt the world-weariness in the most beloved character my father ever portrayed.

Emmett Kelly learns he’s a dad

I shifted in my seat—first-class because it was the only available spot on this leg of my trip home. The airline-reservations operator had promised to get me there in time for Dad’s funeral, so she honored my bereavement ticket and gave me an upgrade. I pulled the faded newspaper photo from my purse and glanced at it. The famous picture of my dad, Emmett Kelly. Or should I say of Weary Willie, the sad clown that he had immortalized. Dad was disciplined about Willie’s public persona. Once Dad put his makeup on, Weary Willie never broke character and never smiled, except once, back in 1955. That one time he smiled—beamed, really—a young photographer snapped his photo, and around the globe it went. The only time Willie smiled in public, the world smiled with him.

The plane was almost full and the seat next to me was still vacant. Good, I’d have the row to myself and my tears. I didn’t feel like explaining to some high-powered business type why I was so sad. I folded the picture and slipped it back inside my purse just as a well-dressed, middle-aged man strode down the aisle and took his seat next to me.

“Almost missed this flight,” he said with a sigh, as we taxied from the gate.

Odd as it might sound, in the clowning business Dad was a revolutionary. Clowns were happy figures …zany, wacky, unpredictable and relentlessly upbeat. But that’s not the kind of clown Dad was. He’d created Willie on his drawing board—a rumpled, sad-sack figure, beaten down by the world, Everyman on a lifelong losing streak. In those days, circus bosses were skeptical. Did people want a depressed clown? But they let him try it.

By the 1940s, the sad clown had become a hit and Dad had made it to the big time—Ringling Bros. circus. People cared about Willie and his struggles. They saw that no matter how hard he took it on the chin, Willie never gave up. He became the world’s most famous clown, probably the most recognizable clown ever. Maybe the reason Willie was so easy for people to love was that Dad brought a bit of himself to the character. Not that Dad was a sad sack, but he understood struggle. His early life on the road was tough and often lonely. Then in middle age he fell head over heels in love with a beautiful trapeze artist who eventually became his wife and my mom. They bought a little place in sunny Sarasota, Florida, for when the circus wasn’t traveling. It had a big backyard, a porch and a vegetable garden. For the first time, Weary Willie was a happy man—and happiest of all, I’m told, that day I was born. He and Mom named me Stasia.

Now, staring out the plane window, I tried to be grateful for that happiness Dad had found, and for the life he had led making others happy. How much more blessed could a daughter be than to have Emmett Kelly as her father? Even the airline-reservations operator who managed to get me this last-minute seat said some thing. “I remember Willie! Your dad made so many people smile.” Yet yearning and grief crushed out all my other feelings. I rested my head against the seat. Dear Lord, comfort me. Show me a sign Dad is content with you the way he was with Mom and our home and the backyard where he watched us kids play.

They say the food in first class is better. I wouldn’t know. I didn’t feel much like eating. I kept my tray up and stared into my lap. I just wanted to get home to Florida. I felt the plane slow and then one wing dipped as we started to descend. I couldn’t resist pulling that old newspaper clipping out of my purse and looking again at Dad beaming that incredible smile as he held a phone and heard the news that I’d been born. Immediately, I had to wipe away a tear.

I barely heard the man next to me say, “Excuse me.” He tapped my arm gently.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “Yes?”

“”That photo…”

“My dad, Emmett Kelly. He died today. But this is from the day I was born….”

“I know, Stasia. I know. I was there. I’ve never seen a man so happy. I just had to snap that picture.”

My father, Frank Beatty, was the photographer who took that now-famous picture – the only one ever taken of Weary Willie smiling.  And what an amazing moment for him to meet Kelly’s daughter that day on the plane.  My dad went on to become very good friends with Stasia Kelly, he was even the photographer at her wedding.  God does indeed often work in mysterious ways.

A scientist who makes his living in SETI, searching for alien societies who might be communicating with us, says that It’s too late to worry that the aliens will find us

STEPHEN HAWKING is worried about aliens. The famous physicist recently suggested that we should be wary of contact with extraterrestrials, citing what happened to Native Americans when Europeans landed on their shores. Since any species that could visit us would be far beyond our own technological level, meeting them could be bad news.

Hawking was extrapolating the possible consequences of my day job: a small but durable exercise known as SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence.

Although we have yet to detect an alien ping, improvements in technology have encouraged us to think that, if transmitting extraterrestrials are out there, we might soon find them. That would be revolutionary. But some people, Hawking included, sense a catastrophe.

Consider what happens if we succeed. Should we respond? Any broadcast could blow Earth’s cover, inviting the possibility of attack by a society advanced enough to pick up our signals.

On the face of it, that sounds like a scenario straight out of cheap science fiction. But even if the odds of calamity are small, why gamble?

For three years, this issue has been exercising a group of SETI scientists in the International Academy of Astronautics. The crux of the dispute was an initiative by a few members to proscribe any broadcasts to aliens, whether or not we receive a signal first.

In truth, banning broadcasts would be impractical – and manifestly too late. We have been inadvertently betraying our presence for 60 years with our television, radio and radar transmissions. The earliest episodes of I Love Lucy have washed over 6000 or so star systems, and are reaching new audiences at the rate of one solar system a day. If there are sentient beings out there, the signals will reach them.

Detecting this leakage radiation won’t be that difficult. Its intensity decreases with the square of the distance, but even if the nearest aliens were 1000 light years away, they would still be able to detect it as long as their antenna technology was a century or two ahead of ours.

This makes it specious to suggest that we should ban deliberate messages on the grounds that they would be more powerful than our leaked signals. Only a society close to our level of development would be able to pick up an intentional broadcast while failing to notice TV and radar. And a society at our level is no threat.

The flip side is that for any alien society that could be dangerous, a deliberate message makes no difference. Such a society could use its own star as a gravitational lens, and even see the glow from our street lamps. Hawking’s warning is irrelevant.

Such considerations motivated the SETI group at the International Academy of Astronautics to reject a proscription of transmissions to the sky. It was the right decision. The extraterrestrials may be out there, and we might learn much by discovering them, but it is paranoia of a rare sort that would shutter the Earth out of fear that they might discover us.

Not everyone agrees.

Then there’s this, from a scientist who has written science fiction about nice aliens who “uplift” less than sentient species into full sophont status.  Maybe one of them would try to “uplift” humanity…

I’m not deeply worried that ET wants to come to Earth and eat us or something.  But if ET is out there, and can get here, and wants to get here, I really doubt that it would be out of a sense of altruism.  What if ET is at the same moral level as the Aztecs?  Maybe they believe in sacrificing low-level cultures (that would be us) to appease the Dark Energy God.

I mean, they could always just send a nice note, if all they want is to be pen pals.  And everyone knows it isn’t a good idea to meet in person with people you just met on Facebook….  let alone give them your home address.

No, it’s not a new competitor for the iPhone.

A few of my musician friends are attempting to invent a conceptually new musical instrument we will call the Shacklephone.  It will have keys, strings, a brass mouth-piece, frets, a slide, a bassoon mouthpiece, valves, a bell, a resonating body, and a sustain pedal, not to mention a MIDI interface, balanced audio input/output, AES/EBU digital audio interface, wordclock i/o, SMPTE timecode i/o, 64GB of RAM and a satellite transmission capability.  There will be Bb Tenor Shacklephones, Eb Alto and Eb Contrabass Shacklephones, and, of course, C Melody Shacklephones.  It will be the only musical instrument that is all things to all musicians.  There will even be drum and Shacklephone corps, using anti-gravity-equipped marching Shacklephones.  The special F Gospel Shacklephone will automatically scoop all notes.

Who needs physical modeling synthesis when you’ve simply included something of all the instruments?  Much like the music of Scriabin was supposed to have done, but didn’t, the Shacklephone will usher in the new age of enlightenment and agape love among all humanity.  The very age of Aquarius, with a dose of galactic alignment thrown in for good measure.

Professional design assistance is needed.  Anyone who would like to submit artist renderings of the proposed instrument could share in the royalties from the (doubtless) extensive sales anticipated for it.

The first prototype is scheduled to be rolling out of the Shacklephone factory sometime in the year 2012, and will be delivered to Yo-Yo Ma, who is developing a method book for novice Shacklephonists.  Bono has requested one so that he can Shacklephonically pursue world peace.  Persistent rumors at the Huffington Post suggest that Bill Clinton, the first black president, plans to appear on late night TV playing the Bb Marching Shacklephone (we all know of his fondness for astroturf…  shoot, didn’t he have his pickup truck bed lined with it?) as he tries to help Hillary unseat Obama in the 2012 elections.  I don’t think it will help, but it will be fun to watch.  He was always good at playing the blues.

Because of the possibility of Shacklephonio-political implications, the factory’s location will remain undisclosed until the first production run is complete and delivery has been made.  This should help avoid the appearance of former ACORN workers now employed by the Office of Universal Care Health Enforcement (OUCHE) trying to shut the place down to protect Obama’s re-election prospects…  since, of course, when the new age dawns, no one will be voting for him.

Wait:  didn’t I hear something else about the year 2012?

Must remember.

The previous post in this series is here.

One of our finest Christian philosophers, J.P. Moreland, has clearly described the central problems with trying to explain human rationality with a purely naturalistic approach:

The recalcitrant nature of human persons for scientific naturalism has been widely noticed. Thus, Berkeley philosopher John Searle recently observed, “There is exactly one overriding question in contemporary philosophy….How do we fit in?….How can we square this self-conception of ourselves as mindful, meaning-creating, free, rational, etc., agents with a universe that consists entirely of mindless, meaningless, unfree, nonrational, brute physical particles?” For the scientific naturalist, the answer is “not very well.”

The difficulty for scientific naturalism in accounting for these commonsense features of human beings has not been noticed simply by notable atheists. In fact, the nature of human persons has lead some to embrace theism. In the seismic book recounting the shift to theism by famous atheist Anthony Flew—There is a God—Roy Abraham Varghese notes that

“the rationality that we unmistakably experience—ranging from the laws of nature to our capacity for rational thought—cannot be explained if it does not have an ultimate ground, which can be nothing less than an infinite mind.”

Read the whole thing, and if you find it at all interesting, you can easily find many books and articles by Moreland.

The anthropic principle (really, more of an observation) points out that the universe seems eerily fine-tuned for human beings to inhabit. But the flip side of the anthropic principle is that we are able to notice the fine-tuning, and create the anthropic principle to reflect our observations. As Robert M. Pirsig pointed out in “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” (if you haven’t read this, you’re deprived), science is not sufficient to explain the existence of science.

To put it another way, naturalism is not sufficient to explain its own existence as a conjecture about the nature of the universe.

Do you suppose Someone is trying to tell us something?

The next post in this series is here.

The first post in this series is here.

Thought experiment: imagine that over the next five years, paleontologists find dozens of new intermediate life forms between fish and amphibians. Also, they discover several intermediates between homo sapiens sapiens’ current presumed immediate ancestor (you pick it… the scientists don’t really agree on this) and us.

Would committed young Earth creationists, for whom the universe is no more than 6000-7000 years old, be persuaded that the case of evolution was proved?

Continue reading “The next great awakening, part 2: the limitations of evidence in creating or challenging faith”

I’m planning to do a few posts on the convergence of science and theism. This is the first. I’m thinking out loud a bit here, and hoping to get some input from other folks as we go. This one is just about the general background. I’ll give more specifics about things I think are important in upcoming posts.

I have the sense that what is happening now in the sciences will have as much impact on future theological developments as the invention of writing had on accuracy of cultural transmission of revelation (the preservation of scripture, what made the redactors able to do their work), or the printing press (the dissemination of scripture, which basically fired the Reformation).

We tend to think of science as having arrived at some advanced point, with just a few details remaining to be filled in. (This same conceit was common in the late 19th century.) What if we are barely at the beginning, with just a glimmer of where it can lead us?

And especially, what if we learn more and more that points to a Creator, and Design, in very powerful ways, something more than just an anthropic principle (not knocking it), something that is so clear that no rational person can really deny it, and would be embarrassed to be seen trying to? If you cannot imagine any possible fact or set of facts that would lead in that direction, you need to get out more…

Continue reading “The next great awakening? Part 1″

Jerry Pournelle (the wikipedia article linked here gives short shrift to Pournelle’s science and engineering background) has some thoughts on the dangers of trying to ban the teaching of Intelligent Design in the schools, and he starts with the background of public education and goes from there.

What is the purpose of public schools? One looks in vain for guidance in the Constitution of the US, or in the early constitutions of most states. Education didn’t become a right until well after the Civil War, and didn’t become a federal right until fairly recently.

Continue reading “Jerry Pournelle on education, Intelligent Design, etc.”