What You Can Learn From Archery

I may have mentioned from time to time that I am an archery coach. There are, in my humble opinion (maybe the only humble opinion I have), many benefits from taking up archery as a hobby/avocation/sport/etc.

So as to not leave you in the lurch should I convince you to explore archery, I wrote a book entitled “Shooting Arrows: Archery for Adult Beginners” available on Amazon.com for not much money (all of our books have “affordable” prices or so we think).

Many of the benefits one can harvest from archery is that in order to shoot well, you must focus upon what you are doing, which makes it the perfect sport for modern Americans, actually moderns anywhere. If you have had a difficult day at work or school or in a relationship and you pick up a bow and start shooting, you will not shoot well if thoughts about your crummy boss, or lousy teachers, or dishonest spouse intrude, so they must be shut out. All you need do is shoot and look for your arrows to “group.” Grouping is when arrows land in roughly the same place on your target boss. If you have thoughts distracting you right and left, your groups will be large. As you focus on what you are doing, your groups will get smaller. (Archery is process orienting, you see. and subconsciously just focusing on the goal, “hitting your mark” or “tight groups,” will cause you to focus on that process without special effort.)

Your desire to shoot well will flush out any extraneous thoughts you might have and it only takes 15-20 minutes. (Many people set up a short range shooting station in their garage or homes to be able to do this. The father of my best friend from childhood shot from the sidewalk, down his driveway, into his open garage. I still have an image of him doing that.)

Now, I can’t prove this but more than a few people have attested to it. All of the things you have shooed away from your thoughts, will come back to you, interestingly arranged in their order of importance, most important first. But they don’t come back all in a rush, they come back over minutes to hours of time. And if you were unsure of which things were more important, your subconscious mind will tell you what you really think.

There is no better way to reset your mental Rolodex than this.

Many parents of the children who have gone through our introductory programs have lauded archery for getting their kids away from their computers/phones/etc. and out into the sunshine and fresh air. There is that. Archery is a social sport which results in person-to-person interactions that can turn into friendships, also.

Archery is a reflective sport in that it can show you a great deal about yourself. For example, the parents of a couple of our long-time students decided to take up the sport. The mom, after being enticed into a particular mode of competition, became ferociously competitive. She had been a competitive skier in college (while younger I assume) and after leaving school had no outlet for her competitive nature. It came roaring back. And, as a middle-aged woman with teenaged sons, becoming a world champion has merits. In fact, after settling into the bow dictated by her competitive category and some serious mentoring and practicing, she was in Croatia representing the U.S. in the World Championships. She didn’t win, but after only 18 months of dedicated practice, that is amazing progress.

Most people are not that successful, but archery has competitive age categories all the way up the ladder. Categories vary between organizations, but for USA Archery (the Olympic folks), youths are separated by sex (Not gender!) and placed in age groups of approximately three years span. Adults then compete freely, but once you reach the age of 50, you can enter the Master’s realm, which separates competitors in ten year clusters, all the way up to 90-100 years of age. So every competitor has appropriate competition and opportunities to experience competitive success.

But winning medals and ribbons is not a main benefit of competition in the sport. More importantly, you find out a great deal about yourself. If when pressure mounts and you fumble because you are close to winning, you learn about yourself. If you become steely focused when you are close to winning, you learn about yourself. And, you have to learn to deal with complements. You have to learn a great deal and many of the lessons needed are about how you look at the world and, basically, who you think you are. It is hard to maintain an “I am a loser” mindset after winning an archery tournament, that a whole slew of people are jealous of you for.

The exercise isn’t vigorous (at 77, I consider this a plus) but the former Olympic Round involved four miles of walking, just to and from the target to score and collect arrows. Field tournaments can involve as much walking but also up and down hills, sometimes steep hills. And if you are pulling even a light-drawing bow, one say 30# to draw, to shoot 100 arrows, you are, in effect, lifting 3000 pounds of weight. All of these things you work up to. I usually start budding archery competitors indoors where a competitive round might involve as few as 30 arrows being shot.

Many archery clubs sponsor “Give It a Try Events” where people can drop by and “give it a go.” County fairs do too. Many Parks and Recreation departments also sponsor classes for beginners.

The great thing about archery is the equipment is fitted to the abilities of the archers. I have a training bow which has only 10 pounds of draw force. (This is the bow I start individual beginners on when coaching one on one.) There is a competitive division of archery for blind people (I know sounds like a bad idea, at least to those of us with cartoon minds) but it is a recognized Paralympic shooting category. And there are competitive categories for people with all kinds of other disabilities.

Not many other avocations give back so much as does archery.

Feed your mind; feed it!

Here’s Your Effing Evidence!

Atheists are often asked for what evidence we would accept to prove god(s) exist. Answers vary, but last night I was watching the movie Lucy for the umpty-umpth time and there is a scene near the end where Lucy is being introduced to a team of scientists as someone who has unlocked almost all of the powers of her brain through the accidental ingestion of an illegal drug, giving her extraordinary powers. One of the scientists is skeptical, of course he would be, and asks for a demonstration of her powers. She immediately reaches out and grasps his shoulder, then reads his mind, saying “Your six-year old daughter was killed in an automobile accident. The car was blue with leather interior, and a plastic bird hanging from the rear view mirror.” The scientist is staggered by the revelation.

Lucy then goes on to grow extra fingers and an extra hand in front of their eyes, plus a number of other things, including projecting images from her mind into theirs.

Now, that’s fucking evidence.

So, if a character in a sci-fi movie can demonstrate her “powers” at the drop of a hat, why can’t an all-powerful, all-knowing god?

Note—Please do not start on “But, Steve, that is a fictional movie!” because we will just end up in a “my fiction is better than yours” discussion.

Mistaken Identity (A Short Story)

Many moons ago I decided I wanted to try my hand at fiction, so I started by writing short-short stories and eventually short stories, and now the proverbial All-American Novel has sat unfinished for decades. Sometimes, the itch that cannot be scratched pops up and I get an idea I have to write, usually in the middle of the night (when my brain is running around the house buck naked). Here is one that popped into my head two nights ago. Enjoy! (Or not!)

Mistaken Identity
by Steve Ruis (4-15-23)

Mission Commander Ahern was not looking forward to this latest meeting with the leader of the aliens, at all. All kinds of things have been going well, he thought, and they seemed so much like us, maybe that included a good share of stubbornness. He let himself into the room designated for the meeting to find the Leader already present, as usual.

“Welcome, Mission Commander,” he said.

“And most welcome to you, Leader. I have been looking forward to this meeting in the hope we can create more mutual understanding. And I do apologize to you that I have not yet learned how to pronounce your name.”

“Please, Commander Ahern, do not fret over it,” was the reply with Ahern’s name perfectly pronounced.

“I guess, we should get right to it, as neither of us is all that well endowed with small talk. As I have commented frequently, things have been going well. We have trained our translator to help us understand your words, even though you do not seem to have as much trouble as do we. We have scanned your planet and your people from space and we find many remarkable things in which we are interested.”

“Yes, . . .”

“Your people are almost perfectly healthy. We see no disease, but also no hunger, no crime, no war, no unhappiness. As we have shared with you, we find those conditions desirable as we have all of those negative things. My own son has asthma, my wife, diabetes, and so on.”

The Leader waited patiently.

“So, we have asked to translate your sacred books into our language, so that we might share in the knowledge of how you created this ability to live in perfect harmony with this planet. We have noted that food is abundant but your population is stable at the current level whereas our understanding of biology leads us to think that all species expand to the limits of their food supply . . . and you have not.

“That is so . . .”

“You seem very generous in providing us with fresh food and clean water, but you deny us access to the knowledge you say comes from your gods?”

“That is correct.”

“So, I must ask why?”

“We do not consider you ready to possess such knowledge.”

“Ah, and how might we demonstrate that readiness?”

“Ah, that is the question, is it not. We are not at all sure . . . you can.”

“Leader, you apparently do not understand our need. Our planet’s ecosystem is on the verge of collapse. Our population has overburdened the entire planet. We are fighting over access to water and arable land. We need your knowledge, desperately.”

“Yes, we understand your plight.”

“And you still will not relent and provide access to your holy books and the wisdom of your gods.”

“Unfortunately that is so.”

“Well, Leader, I was afraid we had come to that point. I want to explain to you that we do not send starships out into the dark with no battle capacity. We cannot anticipate what dangers might pop up, so we prepare for all things. The two ships in orbit above this very place have enough energy and weaponry to deliver it to turn this planet to a cinder, including your hunter-gatherer culture and all its people. We need your holy books and we are prepared to take them by force.”

“Ah, I believe this is the determining evidence that you are not ready for the knowledge we possess.”

“So, you force our hand and make us use force?”

“Rather it is you, Mission Commander who is forcing our hand. If you would contact one of those ships in orbit.”

“Now?”

“Yes, now.”

Ahern activated his communicator and established contact. “Ask them to observe their sister ship, please.” Ahern, puzzled, mumbled into his communicator. The Leader raised his hand and touched an amulet on this chest.

“Sir, the Acorn just lost all power. I can’t even raise her communications.”

The Leader raised his hand, an open hand, and closed it abruptly.

“Oh god! Sir, the Acorn just . . . crumpled sir, like it was aluminum foil being wadded up!”

The Leader then threw the contents of his closed hand off to the side.

“Sir, the Acorn. It disappeared, sir!”

“Did you get it on scans, Lieutenant? Where did it go?”

“Checking, sir . . . it went into the star, sir. They are gone, they are all gone.”

Ahern stared at the Leader bewildered. “Did you do that?”

The leader nodded, “Check in with your Lieutenant again.” Ahern mumbled into his communicator, the Leader touched his amulet again and the Lieutenant’s voice was cut off. The Leader held up an open hand . . . “No,” cried Ahern. The hand closed and its contents flung aside. “No,” croaked Ahern.

“I believe you are suffering from a case of mistaken identity. Those ‘fucking gods,’ as you call them in your private conversations? Ces’t nous.”

The leader wiggled his fingers and the atoms making up Ahern’s body and the bodies of all of this aides suddenly lost their ability to adhere to other atoms and so became part of a fog which slowly dissipated so there was nothing left to tell they had been there.

A voice near the Leader was heard to say “You thought this would end this way, didn’t you?” The Leader answered the voice, saying “Well humans have a long history of using force when they cannot get what they want otherwise, which is how they got into their current state in the first place. They thought, probably still do, that they can control things. I wonder if they will live long enough to learn otherwise?”

“It is a shame they all had to die, though.”

“As they told us this was an all-volunteer mission and I suspect that an opportunity to kick the shit out of some abos was part of the allure, so I don’t regret what we did.”

“I wish you wouldn’t curse like that!”

“Or what? You are going to tell Dad?”

Both the Leader and the disembodied voice laughed at that, which seemed like a good place to end their conversation.

Where Do Retirees Go When They Retire?

I just skimmed a piece listing the five cities in the U.S. which are most often left by retirees. Number three on that list was Chicago. I found this interesting because when I retired I left the gorgeous foothills of the Sierra Nevada Mountains in California and moved to . . . Chicago.

Not only were there many advantages, but almost everything was cheaper in Chicago than it was in rural California (save wine, wine was more expensive, groceries was a bit of a push, if I remember rightly). Car insurance was cheaper! Housing was way cheaper! All manner of insurances were cheaper.

We still have a car but only use it for long trips. Everything we need to get to is within walking distance. And, a big city has delights you can’t necessarily get elsewhere: symphony orchestras, ballet companies, musical theatres, stage plays, sports teams (Chicago has NHL, NBA, MLS, two MLB teams, plus minor league teams), museums, huge parks, outdoor concerts, myriad styles of restaurant (in just our neighborhood: Ethiopian, Asian, Japanese, Chinese, Italian, Mexican (various), Tapas, and many more, most of which you will not see in smaller locales, etc.). Plus there are vast transportation systems (buses, trains, cabs, etc.) so if you do not want to drive your car, there are options. (We had none of those in rural California although we did have airport vans, even though the airport was 50+ miles away.)

Actually I had planned to live in an urban environment when I retired since I was a college student. And not just any city, I wanted to live in a grand city and in my mind there were only a few of those in the U.S. I had fanaticized living in downtown San Francisco (I grew up on the San Francisco peninsula and SF was the only major city I was at all familiar with at the time). But my partner had lived in Chicago for a number of years and loved it here, so we checked it out.

In the article the cities people were flocking to, away from cities like New York and Chicago, were in the Sun Belt, warm weather cities where things were cheaper (supposedly). Most of those I considered too hot and now are getting hotter. Granted we checked out cities in Texas which had really low housing costs, but then we would have been in Texas.

One of the things we noticed about Chicago is that it had a less than 100% occupancy rate for all housing segments and had had those for decades. Chicago overbuilt housing and then the city’s population shrank a tiny bit, which meant the housing costs in the city were competitive and would continue to be.

What about crime? I haven’t seen any. If you look, you can find some, but you have to look. Oh, a dead body washed up on our local beach, but to our disappointment it was some guy who fell out of his sailboat (we fanaticized a Mafia hit or government hit job, etc.). If you look at any other region in the U.S. with the same number of people living in it, the crime statistics for Chicago aren’t as bad as portrayed. The detractors tend to compare major cities like New York and Chicago with Springfield, Missouri or Tampa Bay, Florida and they aren’t even close to being comparable in population.

How about those brutal winters? Well, we joked when we were moving here with our California friends that “we were betting on Global Warming.” And in the decade plus we have been here, the winters have gone from brutal to . . . mild. Fascinatingly while the winters have gotten warmed, the summers have gotten cooler. All around better, if you ask me.

And, the absolute best thing about Chicago? You can get almost anything delivered. Zillions of great restaurants and most will deliver to your door. We get deliveries from Costco, Binny’s (a huge local liquor store), great pizza places, Mexican restaurants, Asian restaurants, and more and the delivery charges are almost always trivial. Compare the few dollars paid for a delivery with the traffic, gas costs, time required, etc. and it is clear which option is better (and I have been a DIY guy most of my life).

So, people are leaving Chicago when they retire, which is a good thing for many of us because (a) it makes room for more people like us and (b) it keeps prices down. Ka-ching!

Postscript I forgot to mention that the State of Illinois doesn’t tax legitimate pensions, so my income, almost all being from my teacher’s pension, incurs no state taxes, which is a plus that people talk about for other states.

Movie Wisdom

I was watching the movie “The Killer” because . . . because . . . I don’t know. I like Michael Fassbender as an actor. I like movies in which individuals have the power to act in improbable to impossible situations. I don’t know.

But at the start of the movie, the main protagonist (Fassbender) was of a philosophical mind and stated this: “From the beginning of history, the few have always exploited the many. This is the cornerstone of civilization, the blood in the mortar that binds all of the bricks.”

His point is that one should be of the few and not of the many, but of course, by the end of the ordeal, aka movie, he identifies as one of the many. Possible he was signifying his retirement from “the few.”

Wisdom out of the mind of a professional assassin.

What was also notable about this movie was that Fassbender’s character had literally dozens of identities available to him, already prepared (he was a stickler for preparation). Each of them has a passport, credit cards, driver’s licenses, etc. What was noteworthy were the names of the aliases. Here is a list:
Felix Unger
Archibald Bunker
Oscar Madison
Howard Cunningham
Reuben Kincaid
Sam Malone
George Jefferson, and
Robert Hartley.

Of course, the youngsters interacting with him didn’t recognize any of them as names of characters in sitcoms (“Enjoy your flight, Mr. Bunker,” etc.). The only one I didn’t recognize was Reuben Kincaid, who was the manager of the Partridge Family. I guess my memory isn’t so very bad as I could place each of those other characters into the shows they were in: Robert Hartley in the Bob Newhart Show, Felix Unger in the Odd Couple, etc.

I wonder how many in this movie’s target audience (youngish males, I assume) recognized these.

I don’t recommend this movie to you unless you are an aficionado of action-adventure movies and don’t blanche at the portrayal of brutal killings.

Stupid Things They Do In the Movies

My partner has taken to responding with “Okay, Boomer.” when I whine about stupidities I see on the TV. (She used to say “You aren’t their target audience” but Okay, Boomer has fewer syllables.)

So, just to prove I can be a whiny bitch at times allow me to share just a couple of things I find idiotic in movies.

Flashlights in Caves When exploring a dark place, a cave, deep parking garage with the lights out, etc. people often fling flashlight beams around. When someone wants to help a partner navigate, they shine the light in their faces! Of course, this is so the camera has a built-in excuse for why we can see that actor but in real life it would only blind the person so illuminated. If you want to help them navigate you shine the light on the path they are walking.

Handguns in Faces When someone is being threatened with a handgun, the threatener always seems to poke the gun in close to the threatened. Often the pistol is pushed against the person’s face or head. Cinematically, this highlights the threat and gives a shot of the threat and the threatened’s reaction all in one. But this is stupid. Guns are distance weapons. Their advantage is they can fuck you up before you can get close enough to your attacker to attack them. But every time, some stupid thug shoves a gun against a person’s body, then the person, being a martial arts expert, takes the gun away and uses it appropriately. (This was part of the opening scene in The Equalizer 3 which I saw last night. Too close? Too bad, oh, dead.)

I now open this space for you to share your movie pet peeves, or instead doing something else, something actually worthwhile by not doing that.

What Harm Can It Do?

Atheists are often criticized for “attacking” religion with the point being made that “it is harmless” or “what harm can it do?”

For a lesson in this please just do a simple search about the movie “Adipurush.” This is an Indian movie loosely based upon Hindu scriptures. A firestorm erupted around the release of the movie, in India, Nepal, and who knows where else.

The movie begins with a shocking disclaimer up front from the makers of the movie displaying word-class groveling, begging people to not be offended by the movie.

We will see whether any of the people behind this movie are killed for their work, it has happened before.

Please note that there are a great many interpretations of the story the movie is based upon, with none of them being “official,” but all of them being sacred. Still people are offended, including filing law suits going up to country’s supreme courts.

Oh, and as a taste of the flavor of the criticisms, one of the characters in the story has ten heads. In the movie these were displayed atop the character’s torso in two rows of five. The critic claimed that this was blasphemous because the ten heads are supposed to be in a left-to-right line (like the Radio City Hall Rockettes). Not only that but all ten heads had to have the same countenance. In the movie they were different! How dare they!

Apparently Hindus insist on their fantasies, at least as to how they are depicted. And atheists are accused of not having enough imagination to encompass the Christian gods. It seems as if too much imagination might be a problem.

WTF Hyundai?

I tend not to watch TV commercials, preferring to switch to a second program but sometimes they trick me into watching. So, I watched a commercial for the Hyundai Tucson automobile. It showed an attractive young woman navigating city streets in a shiny new model of their car. They highlighted a collision avoidance system and their navigation screen (who ever thought it was a good idea to distract drivers with a TV screen?), but otherwise, it was a car taking a sedate trip through some cityscape. But flashed on the screen was the “fine print” of “Professional driver on a closed course.”

WTF?

This “disclaimer” first started getting appended to car commercials in which they showed some driver tearing up the landscape, doing “donuts,” “burnouts,” and driving quite recklessly, e.g. racing other cars on city streets or driving on almost no roads in the mountains. The feeling was that impressionable teenagers were watching and they wanted to dissuade them from thinking “I can do that!”

But a sedate drive through city streets? Driving between the white lines painted on the road? Professional driver on a closed course, my ass.

Have the lawyers promoted CYA techniques to this extreme? Are the producers of the products that conflict averse?

Eighteen . . . Really?

The hype-fevered brains of the NBA media mavens came up with a media approach to this year’s NBA Playoffs. It was the number 18, because the league’s two most storied franchises, the Boston Celtics and the Los Angeles Lakers, had made it into this year’s playoffs. You see those two franchises have garnered 17 championships each over the years. No other franchise is even close (next is my Warriors with seven). So, the “theme” for this playoff season was “who will get to 18 first,” essentially.

What they didn’t do was tell the other teams of their focus. The Los Angeles Lakers were swept out of the playoffs, four games to nil, by the Denver Nuggets and, last night, the Miami Heat crushed the Celtics in game seven of their series to eliminate them from the playoffs.

The championship this year will go to either the Denver Nuggets, a team who never has won an NBA championship, or the Miami Heat, a lowly eighth seed, which barely made it into the playoffs, but then proceeded to eliminate both the #1 seed, and the #2 seed on their path. Now, there a couple of good storylines, no? Maybe the NBA’s media mavens should wait until things develop before wading into “the possibilities,” say if Boston and L.A. had both made it into the finals?

Hacks That Make You Hack

The Internet is chock-a-block full of various DIY hacks that are supposed to make your life easier. As a former magazine editor, however, I have a keen eye for when the photo accompanying the “hack” is out of line with the text. Here are a few examples.

The Potato Hack
Back when we had incandescent light bulbs, the thin glass used had a tendency to break and then only razor sharp shards of glass were protruding from the bulb base, so the question was how to get the broken bulb out. The hack offered was to use a bar of hand soap or a potato, which you could impale on the glass shards and then use as a handle to remove the broken bulb. But look at the photo offered to illustrate this hack:

The bulb they chose for their “photo shoot” is a compact fluorescent bulb which has a substantial ceramic base. Just grab the base and twist, idiot!

The Spray Cooking Oil Hack
If you have a squeaky hinge, one quick fix is spraying the hinge with WD-40. (Note—this is a quick fix but not a good one. It is best to tap the hinge pins up far enough to apply a suitable grease and then reseat them; this will last much longer than a “penetrating oil” will.) But If you just ran out of WD-40 and your party is scheduled to start in an hour, what is a DYI home owner to do? Just use a cooking spray as an alternative to WD-40. The cooking spray I use is a combination of Canola oil and a propellant, which would work, but look at the photo they used!

That is spray on butter! It will not (a) penetrate, (b) lubricate, and (c) come off of the wall paint without leaving an oily stain.

The Caulking Tip
Here is the text for this “hack.” “An experienced handyman once told us that you can use painter’s masking tape to get a crisp, clean line. Just make sure to remove the tape before the caulk dries fully.” But look at the “illustrative” photo:

For one they don’t show the use of the tape for caulking, but for painting, its primary use. The DIY painter is also making a bloody mess of things but I have to ask “since the base molding paint color seems identical to the wall color, why was masking even employed?” The idea is to keep one color of paint off of another or caulk off of a surface you don’t want it on.