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Nathan Didlake is a pastor and police chaplain. Daily, he provides what many call “the ministry of presence” to his community. Other than his religious text (the Bible), here are the essentials he brings along.
About the bag
My bag is a cheapo AmazonBasics Laptop bag ($17). I purchased the 15.6in version to accommodate my macbook, mostly because it was cost effective. But here we are, five years later, it’s still rocking my daily carry.
What’s inside the bag
Psychological Triage & Critical Incident Quick Reference Cards ($11)
As a police chaplain, I get the privilege of entering into crisis scenes where people have just experienced some form of trauma. My job is more than to sit and be a comfort: it’s to stabilize the person during their distress by helping them feel an immediate sense of safety and by helping them understand that what they’re feeling is completely normal for people who have experienced stress on that level. Before entering a scene, I thumb through these cards to remind myself of the highlights.
Rode SmartLav+ Lavalier Condenser Microphone ($79)
Part of being a chaplain and a pastor is the privilege of speaking into lives during some of their greatest celebrations, transitions, and memorials. Many times, people want a token of the experience… in the form of some audio or video archive. I had consistently found that recording high-quality audio was next to impossible, so I found a way to do it myself… on the fly. This device plugs right into my phone and provides near-studio quality audio… which is a meaningful way for me to help a person further, when they are wishing to remember a wedding, funeral, or celebration.
64Audio In-Ear Monitors ($1300)
Leading people in religious services oftentimes includes needing to hear what you’re doing, especially if the room or field in which you’re leading seems to dissipate sound. So I purchased some 64 Audio In-Ear microphones to help with in-ear monitoring. The ones I have aren’t the exact ones they sell now, but these are the best in-ear monitors I’ve ever heard.
Fountain Pen ($63)
My wrists are (basically) pre-carpal tunnel, so I needed to find a way to jot down thoughts while putting as little strain on my wrists as possible. This fountain pen was custom made from a congregant who wanted to say thanks. It’s also the finest pen I’ve ever used. I highly recommend learning to use and maintain a fountain pen, if writing by hand is something you enjoy (or need to do) … all while caring for wrists that are sensitive to stress.
I like to clip items from the newspaper or magazines that are relevant to my clients and prospects. This tool makes that task simple — just grip between thumb and forefinger and trace the outline of the article you want to clip — you even leave the underlying pages intact!
Meanwhile, Congress is debating how many shiny new toys the Pentagon should get next year at taxpayers' expense.
On Tuesday, Senate Republicans announced a new $1.4 trillion discretionary spending plan for next year that would send $696 billion to the Pentagon—that's a $10 billion increase over the military's current budget. A bill passed by the House in July would spend $694 billion on the Pentagon next year, so the big question facing lawmakers during the upcoming lame-duck session is whether the military gets 96 new fighter jets or whether it has to settle for a mere 91.
No, really. One of the major disagreements between the House and Senate is over how many F-35s taxpayers will buy from Lockheed Martin next year, reports Defense News, a trade publication for the military-industrial complex. The Senate wants to get 96 of them, while the House has authorized purchasing five fewer—though it should be noted that the Pentagon only asked for 79 new planes.
Negotiations also loom over the number of new Virginia-class submarines—which cost about $5.5 billion apiece—to be built. The Navy asked for one, so naturally the House decided to budget for two. The Senate has included funding for just a single submarine, Defense News reports.
That's not sitting well with Rep. Joe Courtney (D–Conn.), whose district notably includes the submarine base in New London, Connecticut. In a statement on Tuesday, Courtney condemned the Senate's change to the submarine budget as "unworkable."
"The Navy needs more submarines," he said.
There may not be anything that better sums up the out-of-touch nature of congressional budget-making than a member of Congress demanding more submarines—submarines the Navy didn't even ask for—in the middle of an economic and public health crisis. Congress has authorized $3.8 trillion in emergency spending to fight COVID-19 since the pandemic hit in March—and, of course, lawmakers used that as an opportunity to hand more money to defense contractors, too.
America already spends more on its military than the next 10 largest countries combined. If ever there was a time for Congress to set budgets based on actual policy priorities, it would be this year.
Maybe the Pentagon can get by with only a few dozen new fighter jets and—gasp—no new submarines for a single year while the country fights an expensive war against an adversary that can't be defeated with guns and bombs.
There are a few names anyone interested in Japanese woodblock printing today can’t help but hear sooner or later: Utagawa Hiroshige, Katsushika Hokusai, Kitagawa Utamaro, David Bull. That last, you may have guessed, is not the name of an 18th-century Japanese man. In fact, David Bull still walks among us today, especially if we happen to live in the old Asakusa section of Tokyo, where he keeps his woodblock-print studio Mokuhankan.
Born in England and raised in Canada, Bull discovered the world of ukiyo-e, those Japanese “pictures of the floating world,” in his late twenties. Just a few years after first trying his hand, without formal training, at making his own prints, he moved to the Japanese capital to dedicate himself to the form. Today, on his personal site and Youtube channel, he offers a wealth of English-language resources on the art and craft of the Japanese woodblock print.
In the video up top, he provides expert commentary on the making of one particular print by a young Mokuhankan printer named Natsuki Suga. The work is broken into ten stages, beginning with the application of the basic orange background color, moving on through the addition of sky blues and tea-field greens (not to mention shadows, shadows, and “more shadows”), all the way through to the final embossing of the title and artist’s name. The result, revealed at the end in a stage-by-stage time lapse, is a vivid and idyllic scene aesthetically balanced between ukiyo-e tradition and the present-day art styles.
In the video just above, you can see Bull himself provide commentary as he makes a woodblock print of his own — in real time, from start to finish, with no cuts. Originally shot as a live Twitch stream, it shows Bull’s entire process from blank block to completed print, which takes nearly three and a half hours. That may actually seem like a surprisingly short time in which to create a work of art, but then, Bull has been at this for nearly 40 years.
Bull’s experience also comes through in his ability to explain his techniques and tell stories about the Japanese woodblock’s artistic development as well as his own. What may seem like a video of interest only to ukiyo-e specialists has in fact racked up, as of this writing, more than 1.2 million views on Youtube alone. But then, it isn’t entirely unknown for a soft-spoken artist dedicated to a highly specific form to win a wide audience with his educational productions. “I’m completely certain that Bob Ross hasn’t died,” as one commenter puts it. “He just got a new haircut.”
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall, on Facebook, or on Instagram.
My friend Jessica remembers a night at Old College Inn, a bar on the University of Tennessee strip in Knoxville, when a Georgia fan visiting for the football game offered to buy her a beer.
“I already have a beer,” she told him. “But I could use some cheese bings.”
photo: Yelp
Old College Inn.
If you went to the University of Tennessee, particularly between the eighties and early aughts, you probably have a cheese bings story, too—or at least an Old College Inn story, a place so legendary we called it by initials, “OCI.” Inside the shotgun space as dark as a wood-paneled basement, diners would order steaks or metts and beans by day until students rolled in late-night for pitchers of beer and cheese bings—cubes of cheddar and pepper-jack cheese the size of dice, coated in breading, fried crisp, and served with mustard and marinara dipping sauces. After a few changes of hands and several decades (the Polo-green awning claimed an established date of 1939), OCI closed. Jersey retired. Cheese bings, though? Still playing.
Gus’s Good Times Deli, around the corner, added them to the sandwich shop menu a few years ago. But when I heard that cheese bings would be served at Saloon 16, Peyton Manning’s bar inside the newly opened Graduate Hotel, it felt like the comeback was complete. I went to UT during the Peyton Manning years, and I remember seeing him at OCI on more than one occasion.
“If you were at UT Knoxville in the nineties, OCI and cheese bings were a part of your weekly routine, right?” Manning says. “Going to class and practice for me, OCI is gonna fit somewhere along the way, or maybe a little later in the evening, and cheese bings is a natural calling.”
photo: Steve Freihon
Saloon 16 at the Graduate Knoxville.
The menu at Saloon 16, a play on Manning’s nickname “the Sheriff” and the number on his UT jersey, provides a map to his college years—a time-travel portal down memory lanes. Along with cheese bings, the bar offers Rooster sliders, a nod to the fried chicken sandwiches blanketed in American cheese sold at the deli at the nearby Shell gas station. Manning name-checks favorite establishments, from steakhouses to dive bars to sandwich shops like Gus’s, as well as professors and athletes. “We could be here all day and go down the menu,” he says, telling stories about its inspirations. “We’re just trying to bring up college memories and experiences. It was a great way to pay tribute to a lot of people who have had a big impact on me in my Tennessee journey.”
photo: Courtesy of the Graduate Knoxville
Bings and a burger at Saloon 16.
And sure enough, it’s not even so much about the food but the feelings they conjure, connecting us to our experiences—no matter the alma mater—to a time of freedom and fun with friends or the salve of comfort food for young heartbreaks and homesickness.
Chef Tandy Wilson, the James Beard Award–winning owner of City House in Nashville, also went to UT during the Manning era and got his start at restaurants in Knoxville. “I love cheese bings,” he texts. And then later he told me: “You know they come frozen from a bag, right? I can probably find them for you.” Yet another friend confirmed. On a night before cell phones, someone tracked her down by calling her at OCI. When she went back to the kitchen to take the call, there sat a bag of bings.
Knoxville restaurateur Martha Boggs worked at OCI from 1983 to 1993. She remembers cheese bings going on the menu in the mid-eighties after a food salesman suggested they add them due to the popularity of their mozzarella sticks. Around that time, stadium goalposts that had been torn down by fans after big UT wins began finding their way into the restaurant. For example, Boggs worked the night a group of students marched down the strip in the eighties with a goalpost hoisted on their shoulders after a big win. The manager greeted them out front. “Boys, I’ll give you all the beer and Jägermeister you can drink if you bring that in here,” she recalls him saying. By the time she left the job, she says three different goalposts lived in OCI.
And so maybe that’s the key to cheese bings—making new memories while surrounded by old ones. Location matters. Like the way a Fenway Frank hotdog tastes better at Red Sox stadium, maybe cheese bings need to happen in the presence of UT memorabilia. Manning’s Saloon 16, also with dark-paneled walls, has it in droves with deep cuts from his personal collection lining the space.
“When I got drafted by the Colts, my mom basically took all of my Tennessee stuff…about three trunks of recruiting letters, any kind of pictures from college with students, buddies, teammates…and said, ‘Hey Peyton, I’m doing a cleaning here, right? I’m getting this stuff out of my house. Where do you want it?’” he recalls. “I’m like, ‘I’m moving to Indianapolis, I’m trying to find an apartment to stay in. I’ve got to go play quarterback for the Colts, I don’t have room for it.’” He suggested she send it to the UT equipment room. “It has been sitting there doing nothing. Probably collecting cobwebs.”
photo: Courtesy of Saloon 16
A look inside Saloon 16.
Graduate Hotels CEO and founder Ben Weprin, also a UT alum, told Manning the collection felt like striking gold. They might also add photos of playbooks, notes, and scouting reports that turned up recently (after a long search) in former UT (now current Duke) coach David Cutcliffe’s attic.
To be sure, all of the details at Saloon 16 come straight from the Sheriff, including every song on the jukebox. You’ll find the Band and Tom Petty, but since it’s a saloon, Manning keeps it predominantly country—Johnny Cash to George Strait to Kenny Chesney. He suggests putting on one of those songs while eating a plate of cheese bings and drinking a Big Chevy’s Moonshine, a corn-from-a-jar cocktail in an orange Tennessee hue that he named for offensive lineman and teammate Jeff Smith.
“Big Chevy’s Moonshine, with OCI cheese bings and a little Eric Church,” he says. “That’s hard to beat.”
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