What's Tony Thinking

New Show, New Book, False Prophets

I put up a new show of my paintings today at the Javasti (Wedgewood) Cafe. So, if you are a Seattle-based reader, drop by. It is up until July 15.

Javasti Cafe is located on 35th NE, a main drag, just north of 86th, on the west side of the street. Their speciality is crepes, both sweet and savory.

The show includes eight painting in acrylic as well as two smaller pieces in gouache. Piece at right is titled, “Three Firs.” It looks like a watercolor, but is actually acrylic.

Each piece is priced, but I also attached a note saying, “If one of the pieces speaks to you, but you can’t afford the asking price, contact me and we can work something out.” I like people to have my art if they like it, and besides our condo is small and storage space limited.

A new book recommendation, though the book isn’t really new as it was published in 2009, is The Blackhouse by Peter May. May sets his books in the islands of Scotland. For this one the setting is Lewis Island. He does a wonderful job of evoking the a harsh beauty of the islands. And in this one he alternates between a current murder investigation and remembrances of the childhood and youth of the detective who has been away from Lewis since he left to go to Uni in Glasgow.

Several years ago we visited the Isle of Skye, which is a neighbor to Lewis, so May’s work conjurs vivid pictures.  The Blackhouse is the first of his Lewis Island trilogy. May has another series set in China with a Beijing detective, Li Yan. Anyhow, good summer reading.

And false prophets . . . back in the day when I used to do a one Sunday a year that I called “Quiz the Preacher,” I always got a question about identifying true and false prophets, or sometimes more generically on determining whether or not something you thought might be God’s will was in fact that.

My buddy Jason Micheli devoted a recent Substack piece to the false prophets question, in the course of which he calls out on of the worst, “Pastor Julie Green,” who believes our most recent past President to be clearly God’s Anointed One.

Anyhow, it’s a good piece. Check it out if the question interests you.

And finally, there’s a new box on the Constant Contact site for the “AI Content Generator.” “Let us do the heavy lifting,” it says. Well, for now, I am sticking with whatever fragments of my own natural intelligence are still available. Should I resort to AI in the future I will give you fare warning. I have read some pretty decent AI generated content in recent months, but I enjoy writing too much to pass it off to a bot. I don’t know if there is a way for people to tell if the sermon they are hearing was generated by AI. Do you?