More pictures that weren’t selected.
This is a picture of June and Dean’s barn.
This is a picture of the Basilica in Dyersville. This picture was actually originally selected for entry, but I decided that I didn’t really like the way it looked when it was printed, so it was removed.
A picture of a flower with a little Photoshop thrown in.
A picture of a flower.
It is that time of year when we are nearing the Pufferbilly Days Photo Contest. I took a different tact for selecting pictures this year. I am pleased with the results.
I will get into the process at a later date. But first, I want to reveal the pictures that were nominated, but did not get selected for entry this year.
Below is the first picture that I did not enter.
This picture is of the Downtown First United Methodist Church in Des Moines. I took this picture after eating at a buffet with Russell, Baier and Andree. I took it from the top of a parking ramp across the street.
After we left the Field of Dreams on Sunday, we visited the St. Francis Xavier Basilica. It is one of only 53 Basilicas in the United States.
Spires
Spires
The Church
Altar
Stained Glass Window
Sanctuary
Spire
Willy
Jay
Dessert in Jesup
Traditional Road Trip Photo
The height of each spire is 212 feet.
The term Basilica is a Greek derivation from “Basileus” meaning a royal or kingly building. In the day of the pagan Roman Empire, most cities had a large building of special architectural design to accommodate large audiences for orators of the day. They were called basilicas. In her earlier centuries, the Catholic church conferred this title on churches of unusual architectural and spiritual significance. Their number is small. Some hold the title by a special Papal edict as is the case of the Dyersville Basilica.
The Basilica is often referred to as the Pope’s church for his use in the event he should ever visit the area. There are Major and Minor Basilicas. The Major Basilicas of which there exist only five, are all in Rome, the best known being St. Peter’s. The Basilica of St. Mary’s in Minneapolis was the first church in the United States to be raised to the rank of a Minor Basilica in 1926.
St. Francis Xavier was the twelfth church in the country so honored. It is unique in that it is one of three in a rural area; all the others are in metropolitan areas.
There are now 53 basilicas in the United States. St. Francis Xavier Basilica is one of the finest examples of the true medieval Gothic architecture. Its graceful and pleasing lines are reminiscent of some of the outstanding Gothic cathedrals in Europe.
-Basilica Pamphlet
It is time to answer the most common questions I have received about my trip to Kentucky:
What in Heaven would ever possess somebody to go to Kentucky, even for a visit?
Teresa’s significant other Ernie lives in Kuttawa, Kentucky. He is a good guy and I wanted to visit him on his own turf. However, the impetus for the trip was a PostSecret art display in Paducah. If you are asking yourself, “What is PostSecret?”, most likely you and I aren’t all that close.
Is the South as bad as it is portrayed by Hollywood and country music?
I never quite made it to the Deep South. I was always within safe driving distance of the Illinois border. In fact, Kentucky was a border state. They never joined the Confederate States of America. Kentucky tried to be all neutral during the Civil War and never really fronted for the Union either. That mostly makes Kentucky a big coward, but better yellow than a dirty Reb!
That being said, there are things that you hear in Kentucky that are pretty bad:
With all of that being said, by far and away the worst town that we voyaged through during our time down there was Cairo, Illinois. In fact, Cairo might be the new crappiest town I have ever been in. It certainly gives the towns of Beaver, Fort Dodge and Newton a run for their money.
I do have to give the people of Illinois some credit. Right next to Cairo was a town called Future City. By the looks of the disrepair that has fallen on Future City, the founders are banking on the future to be similar to the futures predicted by movies like Mad Max or Planet of the Apes.
What is a Gravity Pull Hill?
A Gravity Pull Hill is a hill where if you park you car and put it in neutral, some unseen force will push your uphill. We did park Ernie’s car at the base of the hill. After a few moments we were pulled uphill.
Now there are a couple of urban legends surrounded this particular hill. One is that this hill is the site of a spot where a man strapped his cheatin’ wife to the back of his wagon and drug her to her death. Her ghost pulls your car up the hill.
Another legend is that a man and his daughter had car troubles at this spot. When they got out the car, they were ran over by a truck. It is their ghosts that are pushing your car up the hill.
Another legend states that if you cover your trunk with baby powder, when you get to the top of the hill you will find 6 hand prints on the trunk of the car.
The true scientific explanation for a gravity hill is that it is an optical illusion. Although the hill looks like it goes uphill, it actually goes downhill. Next time I’m in Kentucky I will see if science is telling the truth.
What is the story behind the Abraham Lincoln bust that you busted up?
The guy who lived in the house next to Ernie’s passed away recently. Ernie and his sister bought the house for 1500 dollars. They also bought the lot next to it for 200 dollars. Strapped to the front porch of the house was a bust of Abraham Lincoln. I was intrigued by this bust as soon as I saw it.
I couldn’t tell who it was from Teresa’s car. I figured since we were down South, it was most likely a bust of Jefferson Davis or Lee or Stonewall Jackson. When we got there I didn’t know that Ernie owned this house. I thought that somebody lived there and just didn’t keep care of their yard. I didn’t want to go trespassing just to get a better looking.
I had visions of some dude without teeth coming out with a shotgun telling me to “Get off my land!”
Later I found out that Ernie owned this house and said that I could have the bust if I wanted it. On Sunday I made my way through the yard and up the porch to claim my prize. I was surprised to find out that the bust was actually of Abraham Lincoln.
As I began to work the bust free from the nail that held it down, Abe’s head broke off in my hand.
I was aghast. One thought raced across my mind. “I’m one of them now.”
How was the PostSecret display?
It was phenomenal. I had seen the majority of the secrets displayed in the books or on the website, but it is a whole different experience to actually see the real cards. I loved it enough, that I’m considering going up to Minneapolis to see the display again when it moves there in a couple of months.
Was Lambert’s really worth a 90 minute wait?
You better believe it. It was worth the 90 minute wait plus the 90 minute drive to get there. If you are ever in Sikeston, Missouri do yourself the huge favor and go there and eat. The service was phenomenal. The food was exquisite. The portions were incredible. The fresh hot throwed rolls were perhaps the second best restaurant rolls I’ve ever had in my life. The sorghum was awesome. I also came to the conclusion that I could live of fried okra until my heart gave out from having a diet consisting entirely of fried food.
I loved it so much that I even bought a shirt.
So you went to a Southern Baptist church service, how was that?
I would go back, if not for the music, for the gay bashing. Seriously, I could have done without the gay bashing, but the music was incredible. In fact, I would go so far as to say it was the second best praise band this guy has ever heard.
It was also long. We arrived at the service at about 11:15. The service started at about 11:30. We ducked out at about 2:30. The service was still going strong.
I’m not sure how many of my other friends would have enjoyed the service. The energy was good. However, it seemed like a lot of the service was entertainment. The praise band played for over an hour. There was an interpretive dance thrown in for good measure.
It was okay, but I don’t think I learned anything from going to the service. I learned a lot from a cultural perspective. I don’t think I learned anything about Christianity. The sermon was entertaining and it had lots of energy and it got you going, but I don’t think that there was a lesson in there that I could use to apply to my life and make myself a better Christian and therefore a better person. I don’t even think that there was anything in there to make me think. What is the old saying? “Full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.“
You went to the Abraham Lincoln Museum. Aren’t museums boring?
I have a rule I use when evaluating people. “People that bore easily are boring people.” That is on page 17 of my new book: The Wit and Witticism of Christopher D. Bennett.
If I failed to answer your question, hit me up with another question and I’ll drop some more knowledge on you.
Friday was day 1 of my odyssey to the South. I took a few pictures. Here are some of them.
Day 1 of the trip ended with a meal prepared by Ernie that included the largest potato I have ever seen (to the best of my knowledge, not grown near a nuclear power plant) and some tasty pork steak.
That night we loaded back up into the car and toured Ernie’s town of Kuttawa and the nearby town of Eddyville. We experienced a gravity pull hill and then drove around a maximum security prison.
It was a good first day.
Looks like I’ve fallen a might behind.
I’m in the process of helping Jesse put together a slideshow of pictures from Honduras. He has told me many a tale from his mission trip, but my favorite will always be about how he earned the credentials to be a first ballot hall-of-famer in the Chicken Killer Hall of Fame. I think I find that story so funny because we had chickens when I was a small, but undeniably cool child.
This picture reminds me so much of the movie Born into Brothels. If you haven’t seen that movie yet, run to your local video store and pick it up. I could also arrange to loan out my copy, but I would have to be very trusting of that person. It is one of the most powerful movies ever made.
Jesse hopes to go on a mission to Africa next year.
I managed to make it through this Sunday’s Sermon/Interview. I don’t think that I embarrassed myself too much and I think at least a few people were touched or were able to relate to my message.
I don’t want to re-hash the experience, but I would like to thank Jesse, Jay, Shannon, Jason, Carrie and Nader for coming to support me. I also would like to thank Lowell for being there. My family was incredibly supportive as well.
I do want to share a video that Andrea found on the internet and played during the sermon of the song No One Else Knows by Building 429. A song that is very important to me.
Of course if you subscribe to this blog via e-mail or RSS Feed, you will actually have to go to the website to see the article.
Also, even though the video credits Casting Crowns with this song, I assure you that it is Building 429’s song.
I understand that most people will be donating stuff to help out Iowans, but say you don’t like Iowans all that much, I have an alternative for you. That alternative starts with a geography lesson.
Jesse is going to Honduras to do some mission work through his church, but rather than trying to explain such things I’ll just repost his e-mail because he can explain things better than me.
Greetings!
I am very excited to be leading a missions expedition to Honduras with myself and 8 college students! Honduras is one of the 5 poorest countries in the Western Hemisphere with an annual household income averaging US$3,300 per year. While each person’s goals are only known by themselves, our mission is to try and improve (or put in place a means for improving) the lives of as many people as we can in 7 short days. We will be living in a small village south of Comayagua which is home to nearly 350 orphaned children. There are no electric utilities or plumbing in this community and water must be collected daily. Our group will be digging wells, assisting in the orphanage, and carrying in much needed supplies to our new family. Our team is only bringing enough clothes and other supplies that will fit into our carry-on luggage, and we will be bringing 2 other suitcases filled with as many items as we can that this community desperately needs.
I am asking each of you if you might have any of the items listed below that you would be willing to donate. I am leaving one week from Monday (June 30th) and if you would bring the items here, I would be happy to make sure that they are taken down with us.
Bibles
Tennis Shoes – ages 4-16
Girl’s Sandals – ages 4-16
Twin Sheet Sets – twin bottom sheet, top sheet and pillow case
Towel Sets – shower towel and wash cloth
Large Pans
Mixer or Blender
Juice Processor
Notebooks
Pens
Plastic to cover mattresses
Toothpaste
Soap
Shower soap
Body lotion
Vitamins
Antibiotics
Anti fungal
Flu medicine
Other medicines
Shampoo
Conditioner
Silverware
Plastic Cups
Plates
Disposable DiapersAs always, your thoughts and prayers as we make this journey are appreciated greatly. Thank you all for your consideration.
Jesse L. Howard
Now you don’t know where here is, but I can collect any donations that you would like to make and get it to Jesse.
With all due respect to Dante and his circles of Hell, the only definition of Hell that I have ever been able to get behind is “separation from God”.
Now that I have that figured out, I should work on a better definition for Heaven. While it is certainly true that we can’t know what Heaven is like, it is my belief that we get glimpses of Heaven while we are on Earth.
I recently had one of those glimpses.
A piece of this rhubarb pie is a glimpse of heaven. I wish you could experience it for yourself, but you’ll have to get your own.
I’ve been thinking on a topic lately and I’ve come to the conclusion that I just need to write about it and then be done with it. I’ve been thinking about junk in art. Not refuse or garbage, but the male productive organ or the penis. I will refer to the penis as junk for the rest of this entry to prevent some people from giggling while they read this treatise.
When it comes to junk, I’m not all that different than most men. The only junk I’m really interested in is my own. However, through a series of events and a trip to Fort Dodge I’ve been a little more interested in junk in the world of art. To put more succinctly, why is the world so afraid of junk? To whittle it down a bit more, why is the world so afraid of gypsum junk?
I first came interested in the Cardiff Giant several years back while reading a US News and World Report on hoaxes. Although on the surface, the Cardiff Giant hoax was not as interesting as the Breatharianism Cult, but it had Central Iowa connections, so I was interested.
Near the end of the 19th Century a man (described as either an atheist or agnostic depending on the source) went to hear a preacher speak. The preacher relied heavily on a segment of Genesis that says that giants once walked the Earth.
This lead to a dispute between the preacher and the man about how literal one was to take the Bible. The preacher insisted that giants walked the Earth and that they were 12 feet tall. The 12 foot part the preacher said that he “just knew”.
The man left the revival meeting and got an idea. He went to Fort Dodge and bought a big block of gypsum for a barrel of beer. He then took the gypsum to the nearest railhead (Boone) and shipped it to Chicago. In Chicago he hired a man to sculpt a giant.
His exact orders were: “Make me a naked giant! Make him look like he died in agony.”
After the sculptors were done the man took the giant to his cousin’s farm in New York where they buried it. They waited almost a year and then the cousin ordered a new well to be dug right where they had buried the giant.
The well diggers found the giant and learned men and fools came from all over the country to have a look at the giant. There was a great debate at the time about whether or not the giant was a petrified man or an ancient statue. The man and his cousin began charging people to see the giant.
After the man and his cousin had made a tidy fortune on their con, the truth was discovered. People still came to see the giant though.
The original gypsum giant resides in a museum in Cooperstown, New York. Fort Dodge had a replica made and it is housed in the Fort Dodge museum. Since I don’t think I will be making it to New York at any time in the near future, Baier and I conspired to make a pilgrimage up to Fort Dodge to see their version. This trip came with the nice little ancillary benefit of annoying Russell who hates Fort Dodge despite the fact that he is a Dodger.
I knew that the Cardiff Giant was anatomically correct (to an impressive degree) because of some of the reading I had done on it in preparation for the trip. I did not expect that this one section of gypsum that made the Cardiff Giant a man would be somewhat controversial.
I for one don’t really desire to see junk. However, I don’t see anything wrong with including junk in art. It is the way that we are constructed. There is no reason to pretend that we are not.
However, about a week before the trip it came to my attention that not everybody wa comfortable with the junk of the Cardiff Giant just being left out there blowing in the wind, so to speak.
I was talking to Shannon about the trip one night. She told me that Living History Farms has their own version of the Cardiff Giant that they brought out for special occasions. She knew the guy that had sculpted their giant. Their giant was more “modest”.
The word modest has a few different definitions. Since I don’t have any problem with showing junk in art, I immediately glommed onto the definition of modest that relates to size. He was more modest meant to me that LHF had decided to reduce the giant’s endowment. I did not question her at the time.
The day of the big trip arrived.
Baier and I loaded up into the Rideshare van. We made a stop at the Whistle Stop Cafe for breakfast and then headed north towards the Cardiff Giant.
When we arrived at the Fort Dodge Museum we made a pact that the Cardiff Giant would be the last thing that we would see.
We ambled through the rest of the museum letting the anticipation build. After a couple of hours the Trainwreck that I had knocked down at the Whistle Stop came back on me and I visited the little boys room.
While I was enjoying the environs of the Fort Dodge Museum bathroom, Judas Baier broke our pact. When I began walking across the Fort’s courtyard he came strolling towards me from the corner of the fort that houses the Cardiff Giant exhibit. I cold feel that he had betrayed me.
“I couldn’t wait, I had to sneak a peek.”
“What? You jerk. We had a deal.”
“All I can say is there must be a very happy stone lady out there somewhere.”
So it was true. The Cardiff Giant was a giant among men in all conceivable ways.
If I had immediately published this entry as soon as I returned from Fort Dodge I would have never even considered blurring out the junk of the Cardiff Giant. To me it is just art and it is just junk. It is natural. I blur it now because I know that the Cardiff Giant’s junk is a major threat. How or why? I don’t know.
However, as the days wore on the word “modest” began to dig at me. It was one thing to not make the giant anatomically correct. I began to wonder if what Shannon meant by modest was that they had simply deprived the Giant of his manhood and never gave the Giant at LHF any junk.
The Fort Dodge Museum had already committed this heinous crime by not making the Cardiff Giant in the Cardiff Giant gift set anatomically correct.
I don’t get it. If I pick up a knockoff of Michaelangelo’s David, they don’t get rid of his junk. What is so dangerous about the junk of the Cardiff Giant?
My imagination began to work at a feverish pitch. I decided that LHF was a museum and it is my belief that a museum pursues truth. Sometimes truth is a big gypsum junk. Maybe some people have a problem dealing with it, but that isn’t the problem of the museum. A museum has to sometimes be in your face with the truth, yes even if that truth is a big gypsum junk.
So I decided that when Shannon said modest she must have meant that they shrank his endowment. This set my mind racing as well. Why would you do such a thing? Who would do such a thing? Do you have to have a meeting to do such a thing? Or can the sculptor make a unilateral decision?
In my mind I see the sculptor looking at his block of gypsum. Then he looks at a blueprint with dimensions. Then he looks back at the block of gypsum. Then he stares harder at the dimensions of the Giant’s junk.
Then he scoffs to himself and says out loud: “I don’t think so buddy. 3 inches is more than enough.”
But what if it wasn’t the insecurity of the sculptor that lead to the Giant being robbed of his manhood. What if this was a committee meeting? I have sat through a ton of meetings lately. I have no problem imagining the leader of a meeting standing in front of a group.
“The next thing on the agenda is deciding on the girth of our Cardiff Giant replica’s junk.”
“Why are we discussing this, shouldn’t we just use the same dimensions as the original Cardiff Giant?”
“It has come to the committee’s attention that there are people out there that are not comfortable with the giant being so giant.”
“Isn’t that just their own immaturity. I mean it is just junk.”
“We are a family museum.”
“Then what is family friendly. 3 inches, 4, 5?”
Then a vote would have been taken on the matter and a few inches were lopped off.
I contacted Shannon to find out exactly what she meant by modest. As it turns out, modest to LHF means that the Giants is “covering his junk.” I have to confess, that possibility never once crossed my mind. I don’t like it any better than what I thought had happened, but at least nobody had looked at the Giant and willfully denied his his full endowment.
A few days later I was talking to Baier and filling him on the definition of the term modest. As it turns out, he was talking to his wife about the Cardiff Giant. When she was in High School they took a field trip to the Fort Dodge Museum. The corner that housed the Cardiff Giant was roped off. They were denied access.
Unbelievable.
What is the deal? It is just a statue. The Baiers hail from Audubon. That is a town that houses a 40 foot tall anatomically correct bull statue. A statue with junk isn’t new to them.
I finally had decided to come to peace with the world and its anti-Cardiff Giant junk crusade. Then one thing happened. While I was preparing for this blog I uploaded a full body picture of the Cardiff Giant to Photobucket. Photobucket is where I house all of the pictures I embed in blogs.
I had some busy days and nights and I posted some less ambitious entries in its stead. Then yesterday when I went to Photobucket to upload some images I saw a shocking thing. My full length picture of the Cardiff Giant had been deleted because it violated some part of the licensing agreement.
“This was the most unkindest cut of all.”
So now I blur the junk of the Cardiff Giant and I house the images on my own server. I am probably on some FBI watch list now. Great.
I worry now that we are heading towards that future world that was predicted by the prophetic film Zardoz. A world where junk is considered evil.