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Contemporary criticism of Billy Sunday

His sympathetic 1917 biographer, William T. Ellis wrote "One of the most significant tributes to the Evangelist Sunday is the storm of criticism which rages about his head." He noted that "many ministers have publicly attacked Sunday.". Contemporary criticism of Billy Sunday centered around his use of language; his militant pugnacity and emphasis on hell; the questionable permanence of his claimed conversions; and his commercialism and salesmanship.

From the outset, however, it should be noted that few critics questioned his sincerity or integrity. A 1916 writer commented that

When people who have read Billy Sunday say he is irreverent, or frivolous, or that he is a poseur, or that (as some people seem to think) he is a mere financial adventurer or speculator in sermons, the most common reply one hears from people who have heard him is, "I thought so, too, until I went and listened to him and watched him."

Politics

The left and the labor movement disliked Sunday's connections with the plutocracy, notably John D. Rockefeller, and felt Sunday was an apologist for the rich. As Carl Sandburg put it, "You tell poor people they don’t need any more money on pay day and even if it’s fierce to be out of a job, Jesus’ll fix that up all right, all right."

In his 1917 New York campaign, Sunday indeed preached a sermon calling Job "the Vanderbilt, the Rockefeller, and the Carnegie of his day" and saying that despite being rich, "Job did the right thing by God." He added that "some of the best Christians I have known were rich."

In addition to Rockefeller, Sunday's supporters included such businessmen as John Wanamaker, Henry Clay Frick, J. Odgen Armour, S. S. Kresge, and John M. Studebaker.

Language

With regard to his use of language, Sunday has been described variously as folksy, salty, coarse, irreverent, "George Ade's rival in slang,", "master of slang and argot."

Contemporary sources suggest issues going beyond slang and colloquialism. Unitarian minister Joel H. Metcalf spoke of "the coarse jokes, the super-slang, the bawd characterizations, the ribald Billingsgate." Universalist minister Frederick William Betts wrote:

Many of the things said and done bordered upon things prohibited in decent society. The sermon on amusements was preached three times, to mixed audience of men and women, boys and girls. If the sermons to women had been preached to married women, if the sermons to men had been preached to mature men, if the sermon on amusements had been preached to grown folks, there might have been an excuse for them, and perhaps good from them. But an experienced newspaper reported told me that the sermon on amusements was "the rawest thing ever put over in Syracuse." I can not, must not, quote from this sermon...

...[a friend] says that Mr. Sunday's sermon on the sex question was raw and disgusting. He also heard the famous sermons on amusements and booze. [He] says that all in all they were the ugliest, nastiest, most disgusting addresses he ever listened to from a religious platform or a preacher of religion. He saw people carried out who had fainted under that awful definition of sensuality and depravity.

Militant pugnacity, emphasis on Hell

Sunday was criticized by the liberal clergy of the day, particularly Universalists and Unitarians. Left-leaning minister Leon Milton Birkhead called Sunday's theology "a mediaeval belief that Christianity somehow is a fire-escape from a future hell." But even a generally admiring observer noted that

Sunday preaches the old, old doctrine of damnation. In spite of his conviction that the truly religious man should take his religion joyfully, he gets his results by inspiring fear and gloom in the hearts of sinners. The fear of death, with torment beyond it—intensified by examples of the frightful deathbeds of those who have carelessly or obdurately put off salvation until it is too late—it is with this mighty menace that he drives sinners into the fold.

In a poem—originally appearing under the title "To A Contemporary Bunkshooter," but posthumously published under his original title, "To Billy Sunday"—Carl Sandburg attacked Sunday's pugnacity with equal pugnacity:

You come along squirting words at us, shaking your fist and calling us all dam fools so fierce the froth slobbers over your lips… always blabbing we’re all going to hell straight off and you know all about it.... Go ahead and bust all the chairs you want to. Smash a whole wagon load of furniture at every performance. Turn sixty somersaults and stand on your nutty head. If it wasn’t for the way you scare the women and kids I’d feel sorry for you and pass the hat. I like to watch a good four-flusher work, but not when he starts people puking and calling for the doctors.

Impermanent "conversions"

Sunday counted everyone who answered his call to "hit the sawdust trail" as a convert. By his own reckoning, he brought over a million people to Christ. But the permanence of Sunday's "conversions" were often questioned. Following the famous 1917 revival in New York, the Federal Council of Churches found that only 200 of the 68,000 were permanent converts. In 1921, a commentator wrote:

In spite of the thousands that have hit the sawdust trail, however, it is difficult to believe that more than a tiny proportion of his auditors are religiously affected by him. Very few give any signs of seriousness or "conversion." The great majority of those who hit the trail are merely people who want to shake his hand.... His audiences are curious to see him and hear him. He is a remarkable public entertainer, and much that he says has keen humor and verbal art and horse sense. But ... he leaves an impression of being at once violent and incommunicative, a salesman for Christianity but not a guide or friend.

To call people to the altar, Sunday used not only the carrot of his celebrity handshake, but the stick of scorn. The Encyclopedia of Evangelism says that Billy Sunday would "invite—more often, taunt—his auditors to 'hit the sawdust trail.'" Betts noted that "if you do not 'hit the trail,' then watch out for the fireworks, for they are sure to follow. And if you are sensitive, you would better go home at this point. For in a moment will come the concentrated scorn and sarcasm of that shout, 'Well, go to hell if you want to.'"

Sunday's reply to such criticisms was "They tell me a revival is only temporary; so is a bath, but it does you good."

Literary caricatures

Sinclair Lewis' novel Babbitt includes a character named Mike Monday, "the distinguished evangelist, the best-known Protestant pontiff in America.... As a prize-fighter he gained nothing but his crooked nose, his celebrated vocabulary, and his stage-presence. The service of the Lord had been more profitable." In his novel, a visit by Monday is opposed by "certain Episcopalian and Congregationalist ministers," whom Monday calls "a bunch of gospel-pushers with dish-water instead of blood, a gang of squealers that need more dust on the knees of their pants and more hair on their skinny old chests." Later, Lewis was to write Elmer Gantry, a novel about an evangelical preacher with resemblances to Sunday. (Sunday in turn referred to Lewis as "Satan's cohort.")

C. E. S. Wood in Heavenly Discourse depicts Billy Sunday as going to Heaven, addressing St. Michael and God as "Hello, Mike. Howdy, Pardner," and offering to conduct a revival there: "I can pack heaven so tight the fleas will squeal, and all I want is the gate-receipts for the last performance." Sunday is shocked to find that

Carl Sandburg's attack on Sunday has already been noted.

Frederick William Betts (1916). Billy Sunday, the Man and Method. Murray Press. Page images at Google Books

Extended use of "entoptic"

The word "entoptic" usually refers to these physical effects, originating within the eye and retina; but it is also used to refer to visual effects arising higher in the nervous system. In particular, archeologists J. D. Lewis-Williams and T. A. Dowson, in a much-cited 1988 paper The Signs of All Times, used the word to refer to patterns, arising within the central nervous system, that are perceived under altered states of consciousness including the aura of migraine, trance states, and drug-induced states.

http://www.wynja.com/arch/entoptic.html

History of ebooks

As of 2005 ebooks are not a significant vehicle for dissemination of literary work. The meaning of the word ebook, prospects for its future, and interpretation of its history are still subject to debate.

• 1938: H. G. Wells publishes World Brain, a collection of essays and speeches about a dream for a "Permanent World Encyclopedia." Although the technology envisioned is microfilm, the relevance to eBooks is that Wells was nevertheless talking about the low-cost dissemination of words to be read on screens. "There is no practical obstacle whatever now to the creation of an efficient index to all human knowledge, ideas and achievements, to the creation, that is, of a comlete planetary memory for all mankind. And not simply an index; the direct reproduction of the thing itself can be summoned to any properly prepared spot. A microfilm... can be sent anywhere and thrown enlarged upon the screen so that the student may study it in every detail." It is possible that some of the ideas he mentions should be credited to people at Kodak's Recordak division.
• July, 1945, Vannevar Bush publishes As We May Think in the Atlantic Monthly. "The world has arrived at an age of cheap complex devices of great reliability; and something is bound to come of it." Like Wells, taking microfilm as a model, he observed that "The Encyclopaedia Britannica could be reduced to the volume of a matchbox... The material ... would cost a nickel, and it could be mailed anywhere for a cent... The entire material of the Britannica in reduced microfilm form would go on a sheet eight and one-half by eleven inches. Once it is available, with the photographic reproduction methods of the future, duplicates in large quantities could probably be turned out for a cent apiece beyond the cost of materials." He envisioned a personal desk-sized machine, which he called a "memex," with "dry photography" capability for pages laid face-down on the surface of the desk. It would have enough storage for a user to store 5,000 pages a day for hundreds of years. The particular relevance to ebooks lies in the sentence: "Most of the memex contents are purchased on microfilm ready for insertion. Books of all sorts, pictures, current periodicals, newspapers, are thus obtained and dropped into place."
• 1965, INTREX conference
• 1971, Michael Hart types the Declaration of Independence into a networked computer at the University of Illinois and sends it to everyone on the local network. His motivation was to create value through the cost-free electronic propagation of a human readable, general-interest text. Hart maintains this was the beginning of Project Gutenberg and has claimed this as "the first eBook."
• 1974, Ted Nelson publishes Dream Machines, famous for its vision of hypertext.
• 1989, Project Gutenberg releases its tenth title and its first truly "book-length" etext, the King James version of the Bible.
• 1991, Project Gutenberg releases Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll, the eleventh PG title and the first book-length piece of fiction.
• 1994, Project Gutenberg releases its hundredth title.
• 1997 (approximate) Entrepreneurs begin planning for production of dedicated eBook devices.
• 1998, the "Rocket eBook" is released in versions badged by Nuvomedia and Franklin. Originally list-priced at $300. (Gemstar's later REB 1100 was a slightly-updated version of the same device).
• 1998, the Softbook is released. (Gemstar's later REB 1200 was a slightly-updated version of the same device).
• 1999, During the Christmas season Barnes and Noble briefly offers the Rocket eBook over the counter in its brick-and-mortar stores, as well as online.
• 1999, September 1st, Microsoft announces release of Microsoft Reader, eBook software for the PC and PocketPC. Contrary to initial announcements, no version capable of reading DRM-protected books is ever offered for PocketPC.
• 2001, Dmitri Sklyarov is arrested by the FBI and briefly jailed for violation of the DMCA. Sklyarov was an employee of ElcomSoft, a Russian company which marketed a program capable of circumventing the DRM system in the Adobe eBook reader software. Adobe eventually drops the lawsuit.

So Little Time

So Little Time is a 1943 novel by John P. Marquand. It is little known today, although when published it reached #1 on the New York Times Bestseller List on September 13, 1943, was a Book-of-the-Month Club selection, and went through eighteen hardbound printings.

The protagonist, Jeff Wilson, is a middle-aged writer who has achieved financial success and security as a script doctor, a rewriter of others' scripts. He has a wife and adult children and has an apartment in New York City and a house in the country. He frequently takes the train to the West Coast to work on movie scripts in Hollywood. He was an aviator in the First World War. This period, when everyone knew that they "did not have much time" has left a permanent stamp on him. The story follows his life during the year leading up to Pearl Harbor, interspersed with flashbacks to his past life.

Like many of Marquand's protagonists, Wilson has foregone the true love of his youth to marry prudently within his station. He lives more or less happily with his wife Madge, but yearns for the lost Louella Barnes. In his last meeting with Louella she makes advances which he is too inexperienced to recognize. She bid genial farewell saying "Good-by, and come back soon, now that you've found your way." The First World War intervenes, he fails to maintain the relationship, and she marries someone else. Wilson never does "find his way" back. Indeed, Wilson appears to have lost his way in life. He views the world with dissatisfaction and ironic distance:

There was one good thing about middle age. There might be new worries, but a lot of old ones were gone. There were a lot of thing which you finally knew you could not do, so that it was logical to give up trying to do them. Jeffrey knew that he would never read all the books in the library, fore example—that it was impossible, simply because of the cold mathematics of time.... Thre was a pack trip, for instance, which had always waned to take in the Rockies. He could think about it still, but he would never have the time.

As war approaches, he is haunted by his memories of World War I and the knowledge of what it was like to live life believing that "he did not have much time." He is disturbed by life continuing as usual, people going about their business when it is obvious to him that, again, there may not be much time.

One ongoing thread concerns his concern over his twenty-one-year-old son, Jim and his girlfriend Sally Sales. Jim enters the military, which Jeff reluctantly accepts as Jim's decision. He snipes with his wife over Sally. Madge, and his old war buddy Minot, disapprove of her social standing. She is "a little common," she does not know how to dress ("Those dreadful little shoes and the bag that matched... Her mother might have taught her—it shows where she came from.") She is "just an ordinary little girl from Montclair." "Not Montclair," says Jeff; "Scarsdale." "All right," says Madge, "Scarsdale." Minot insists that "Jim can't know what he wants. We have to break it up." Jeff does not agree, and encourages Jim and Sally to seize the day. "If you kids want to get married, you'd better get married. It may not work but—you haven't got much time."

In a generally favorable review, Joseph Warren Beach ("The Marquand World," NYT Aug 22, 1943,BR1) comments that the novel "is interesting as one of the first of American novels to make something of the present war. Just what Mr. Marquand does make of it is none to clear. Is he lampooning the vicious stupidity of 'business as usual,' or is he saying that war is life's essence, that even the luckiest of us have so little time to settle our accounts with ourselves?"

Stroboscopic effect

AHD4: stro·bo·scope NOUN: Any of various instruments used to observe moving objects by making them appear stationary, especially with pulsed illumination or mechanical devices that intermittently interrupt observation.

"this led to the spinning slits of the Phenakistoscope invented by Plateau, and the simultaneous independent invention, in 1833, by the Austrian Simon Stampfer of an almost identical device which he named the Stroboscope..." "...Simon Von Stampfer invents the stroboscope, (a phenakistiscope in reverse) which casts regular flashes of light on moving objects - making their motions appear jerky and abrupt...." "....Professor Simon Ritter von Stampfer of the Vienna Polytechnical Institute..."

The pages relating to Television particularly the PAL page does not mention the phonemenon described below. Can anyone help for a name for it plus establish whether it occurs becasue of conversion from film to PAL or from NTSC to PAL or some completely diferent route or reason?: When a fast moving vehcle is shown, particularly a horse drawn wagon or chariot with distinctive spokes, a strobe effect sometimes occurs that makes the wheel appear to move slowly backwards due to the rate at which the film is capturing the picture. Dainamo 10:34, 30 Oct 2004 (UTC)

It's not specifically a conversion issue, although frame-rate conversions sometimes produce more complicated versions of the same issue. It is sometimes called the "stroboscopic effect;" lately it has been called "aliasing;" and it not infrequently is called the "wagon-wheel effect." It has long been noticed in motion pictures. It probably deserves an article if it's not covered already, and stroboscope doesn't cover it, and stroboscopic effect doesn't exist.

It occurs because when a) the view of a moving object is represented by a series of short samples rather than a continuous view, and b) the moving object is engaging in repetitive or cyclic motion at rate that is close to the sampling rate.

For example, consider the stroboscope as used in mechanical analysis. This is a "strobe light" that is fired at an adjustable, variable rate. Let's say you are looking at a moving part that rotates at 60 revolutions per second. Now lets say that instead of illuminating it with a continuous flash, you illuminate it with a series of very short flashes of light 60 times per second. Each light catches the object at the same position in its rotation. Since at 60 flashes per second the persistence of vision smooths out the visual experience, it appears as if the object is standing still. If you illuminate it at 59 flashes per second, each flash will catch it at a slightly different part of its rotation and it will seem to be rotating slowly; it will take 59 flashes = one second before the flash catches it at the starting point again, and the object will look as if it is rotating once a second. If you illuminate it at 61 flashes per second, each flash catches it a little earlier in its rotation and the object look as if it is rotating backwards.

In the case of a television or movie camera, action is captured as a series of brief snapshots and stroboscope effects can occur.

The reason it is seen so often in motion pictures of spoked wheels is this. The wheel of a vehicle doesn't turn at 24 revolutions per second unless the vehicle is going awfully fast. But if you have twelve-spoked wheel, if built precisely, every spoke looks the same as every other spoke and they are all perfectly spaced. So, it turns at only TWO revolutions per second, which is very reasonable, and you film at 24 frames a second, each frame will catch the spokes in the "same" position and the wheel seems to be standing still. Really, the spoke that's at the 12-o-clock position in each frame is a different spoke each time, but they all look the same. If the wheels is turning a little slower than 2 revolutions per second, the position of each spoke is a little further behind in each frame and the wheel seems to be turning backwards.

The reason it's called "aliasing" is that in electrical engineering, when a continuous audio signal is replaced by series of samples--say, a 24.1 Hz signaled is sampled at 24 samples per second--the result looks the same as if an 0.1 Hz signal were sampled at 24 samples per second, so 0.1 Hz is said to be an "alias" for 24.1 Hz. [[User:Dpbsmith|Dpbsmith (talk)]] 15:54, 30 Oct 2004 (UTC)

P. S. I just noticed that we have a damned good article on aliasing, but it doesn't explicitly relate aliasing to stroboscopy or the "wagon-wheel" effect. [[User:Dpbsmith|Dpbsmith (talk)]] 15:56, 30 Oct 2004 (UTC)

In the trade, it's called temporal aliasing. We probably need an article on that. -- Anon.

The sky is blue

"the blue sky is so commonplace that it is taken for granted" Schaefer, Vincent J. (1998). A Field Guide to the Atmosphere. Houghton Mifflin Field Guides. ISBN 0395976316. {{cite book}}: Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)

"It is now well established that the luminosity and blue colour on very clear days and at considerable altitudes above the sea-level can almost be accounted for by the scattering of light by the molecules of air, without postulating suspended particles of foreign matter." R. J. Strutt (Lord Rayleigh), Proceedings of the Royal Society of London. Series A, 94(662), June 01, 1918, pp. 453 - 459.

"Children must learn to follow directions for many reasons... Say, "Color the sky blue." Children then are ready to be given two instructions to follow, and they follow them in order: "Color the grass green and the sky blue." •Next they learn to follow three instructions..." Burmeister, Lou E. (1983). Foundations and Strategies for Teaching Children to Read. Addison-Wesley. ISBN 020110802X., p. 103

"Now we are going to color some of the picture together," I tell them... "What color do you think Mary's dress could be?" They decide on blue. I move around as they color the dress. Then we look at shoes and color Mary's shoes black, and finally we color the grass green. Later they will get the chance to finish the picture using whatever colors they want. Approaching coloring in this way seems to help the children who have little or no experience with coloring and prevents them from taking one crayon and making random marks over the paper.[1]

http://peacecorpsonline.org/messages/messages/467/2030193.html

http://www.amazon.com/gp/reader/1560976713/ref=sib_dp_srch_pop/002-1381968-2124846?v=search-inside&keywords=color+the+sky+blue&go.x=0&go.y=0&go=Go%21#

A field guide notes that "the blue sky is so commonplace that it is taken for granted". It is a deep, saturated blue after a rainstorm.

The poet Robert Service says "while the blue sky bends above/You've got nearly all that matters"

Songwriter Irving Berlin wrote of "Blue Skies smiling at me," airmen fly into the wild blue yonder.

But the sky is not always blue. In the Bible, Jesus says to the Pharisees "When it is evening, ye say, It will be fair weather: for the sky is red". At twilight, salmon reds, oranges, purples, white-yellows, and many shades of blue can be seen. And songwriter Oscar Hammerstein famously wrote of "when the sky is a bright canary yellow."

It took me less than ten minutes to turn up the Schaeffer and Minnaert sources and another fifteen to find the rest. If something is really a commonly known fact, it is just not that hard to source.

---

"For Little Ones." Boston Daily Globe 1872; Apr 19, 1896; pg. 34: "Blue being a girl's color, the sky-blue pique is not used for boys."

hotr

Jordan was the builder of the Villa Maria, a private girl's dormitory in Madison.

Conservapedia

The Conservapedia domain is registered to an Andrew Schlafly which matches that offices of attorney Andrew Schlafly, general counsel to the American Association of Physicians and Surgeons; the Conservapedia user whose username is aschlafly is a very active editor and administrator of the site.