"Here stands baseball's perfect warrior. Here stands baseball's perfect knight." —Quote inscribed on the base of Stan Musial's statue at the St. Louis Busch Memorial stadium. The inscription is attributed to former baseball commissioner Ford Frick.

Good morning and welcome back to Monday where we will be observing October 12, 2015 until immediately after midnight today. Today is Columbus Day but it has fallen out of favor. I'm not sure if his remains have been disinterred yet so that his skeleton can be hung up for all to see but needless to say the historical revisionists are having a field day with him in trying to destroy any recollection of any positive contributions he made to the world. But, I didn't sign on to talk about that today. Baseball is in the air. The playoffs are underway and the World Series is coming. A high school senior named Connor Wright from St. Louis made the following mural using 5,890 Rubik's Cubes. That's right. He twisted them into the image. The mural is a tribute to the late Stan Musial, legendary St. Louis Cardinal, called Mr. Baseball and Stan the Man. Stan died in 2013 at the age of 92.

I wrote about this today because Stan Musial was the player I followed when I was a kid playing the game. He was the best ambassador the game ever had. Unfortunately, I was not able to get a Stan Musial glove. The small sporting goods store in a nearby town was able to get me an Al Kaline glove which was a very good substitute. Al Kaline was another legendary player with the Detroit Tigers. The photo depicts that same Wilson Kaline model as it looks today. I found it on EBAY. I think I paid nearly $20 for the new one I bought around 1960. That's the one I slept with. It helped break it in. It did. I know what I am talking about. I made the regional all star team. See there. Oh yeah, just in case you failed to notice, that's an amazing use of Rubik's Cubes. I think a 'Wow!' is warranted for that one.

I suppose tuning in each day to my blog is like that spinning wheel at the fair. Round and round it goes and where it will stop no one knows. I actually noticed that myself. Random. Discombobulated. Unorganized. Scatterbrained. Yep. It's that acronym again: WYSIWYG. (What you see is what you get.) If it does provide any therapeutic value at all it's probably less expensive than seeing a shrink. After doing nearly 2200 of them I am more than aware of what has to be a fair amount of repetitiveness. While I do try to fact check some of my stuff, my personal recollections and stories are pretty much beyond the reach of that type of review. Therefore, I appreciate those who take the time to read through them each day. It's pretty neat to have someone come up to me at Church and quote to me from one of my blogs. It sometimes takes me a second to catch it but I do know it is a compliment and I appreciate it. I also get notes occasionally from someone who has been made to laugh or they have been blessed in a special way from something I wrote about. How amazing is that? Sling some words onto the electronic page and they end up helping someone to have a better day. I don't know about you but that's pretty humbling stuff to me and it encourages me to keep on keeping on, repetitions and all. Thanks.

I noticed the last time I looked at the statistics from the blogging utility that two hits on my blog came from the Ukraine. That as we know is a war torn place where people get up everyday facing an uncertain future, thanks to Mr. Putin. The leadership of our nation has mostly practiced saber rattling in response to Russian aggression in the Baltics, Syria, and everywhere else. Mr. Putin must be hard of hearing because our saber rattling hasn't even caused him to pause for a second. My thought is that our response has been more of a faint saber tinkling but that's just me. At any rate, I don't know what the hits on my blog from the Ukraine were searching for when they landed on it but I do pray that perhaps they read something about the God who knows all about their troubles, our troubles, and the problems that permeate our world. God is able to work through means and ways that we could not even imagine. Even a verse quoted on a blog. Even a word of testimony about Him and His working from far far away. When I saw those 2 hits on the report it caused me to pause and say a prayer for the people in that region of the world who are suffering. We all can do that. Right? Enjoy the rest of your Columbus Day activities and Lord willing I will catch up with you again tomorrow on this same station. Until then, may God bless us one and all. Amen. .....More later.