There’s a Fox News story about a monument to the Iraqi show-thrower, but the thing that caught my eye was the caption. Either Fox goofed or the shoe has apparently migrated to Nice, southern France – the home of some very small striking workers.
Jan 30 2009
French Workers Strike Over Bushes Shoes…or Something
Jan 29 2009
Where Were You 23 Years Ago?
Challenger Explosion
There are defining moments in a person’s life against which other things are measured. Those are different for each person and for each generation. 9-11 has become that moment for this generation, and if you ask, ‘Where were you when you heard about 9/11?’ virtually everyone could give you a clear answer.
Before that particularly evil day, the defining event for a generation was probably the Challenger disaster. I remember very clearly where I was on Jan 28, 1986 when I heard the news that the shuttle had blown up. I was a young lieutenant at a space-tracking radar station in Massachusetts and had just come off the midnight shift. I was barely asleep when my roommate burst into the room, yelling that the shuttle had just exploded. We flipped on the news and watched that clip over
and over again, struck dumb at the enormity of the tragedy.
The event devastated DoD and NASA space programs for years afterward. To this day I’m still amazed that Congress had the intestinal fortitude to allow those programs to restart.
Where were you on that day? Did it affect you?
Jan 24 2009
I grew up in central Illinois a few miles outside a little town called Hudson, population 612. So when I saw Michael Perry’s Population: 485, I knew where the guy was coming from.
Maybe it’s a farmboy thing, but the land is huge thing in my life. It’s been 30+ years since I lived there, and the longer I’m away, the more it grows in me. My spousal unit and my kids can’t understand it because we now live in thriving suburbia. They’ve never lived on the land.
Perry puts it like this:
Twelve years I lived away from here, and what I missed-what I craved-was the lay of the land. A familiar corner, a particular hill, certain patches of trees. Somewhere along the line, my soul imprinted on topography. I returned, and the land felt right. The land takes you back. All you have to do is show up.
I know the smell of growing corn, corn at harvest, cornfields after the harvest. When I went home last fall, so much had changed – the ‘family farm’ is a thing of the past, windmill fields were everywhere – but I was at home on the land and in many ways it was if I had never left.
I feel for those who will never know that connectedness to God’s earth.
Jan 22 2009
Words I Don’t Want in My Obituary
KingDavid has an interesting post about a scary word. I won’t share it, but it reminds me of several words and phrases that I would prefer not to see in my obituary. These include but aren’t limited to:
- charred remains
- dental records
- eviscerated
- partially clad body
- decomposed
- gnawed by animals
Any others?
Jan 12 2009
Things You Don’t Want to See at the Pump
Look close. Anything wrong here?
(HT: Navy Safety Center)
Jan 12 2009
Decline and Fall of Western Civilization – Part 107,548,049
What is virtue worth?
Student auctions off virginity for offers of more than £2.5 million
A student who is auctioning her virginity to pay for a masters degree in Family and Marriage therapy has seen bidding hit £2.5million ($3.7m). Natalie Dylan, 22, claims her offer of a one-night stand has persuaded 10,000 men to bid for sex with her.
Last September, when her auction came to light, she had received bids up to £162,000 ($243,000) but since then interest in her has rocketed. The student who has a degree in Women’s Studies insisted she was not demeaning herself.
Miss Dylan, from San Diego, California, USA, said she was persuaded to offer herself to the highest bidder after her sister Avia, 23, paid for her own degree after working as a prostitute for three weeks.
Miss Dylan said she did not think it was particularly significant to be willing to sell your virginity and insisted that she was happy to undergo medical tests for any doubters.
She added: “It’s shocking that men will pay so much for someone’s virginity, which isn’t even prized so highly anymore. I know that a lot of people will condemn me for this because it’s so taboo but I really don’t have a problem with that.”
What is virtue worth? What has real value in a woman? How about Proverbs 31:10, 30-31?
“A wife of noble character who can find? She is worth far more than rubies. Charm is deceptive, and beauty is fleeting; but a woman who fears the LORD is to be praised. Give her the reward she has earned, and let her works bring her praise at the city gate.”
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Jan 09 2009
Broiled Sea Kittens: You Can’t Make This Stuff Up
Mmmm, that's some good river kitten!
PETA has long been the domain of the “intellectually challenged”, but this is so weird it defies logic. PETA’s latest campaign? Save the Sea Kittens. What are sea kittens, you ask? We normal people call them what they are – fish. This is from their own ‘sea kitten’ web page:
[We're] going to start by retiring the old name for good. When your name can also be used as a verb that means driving a hook through your head, it’s time for a serious image makeover. And who could possibly want to put a hook through a sea kitten?
Some sea kittens tend well-kept gardens. They encourage the growth of tasty algae and weed out the types that they don’t like. It is particularly tragic when people eat these sea kittens, as their precious little gardens become wild and overgrown in their absence.
They can call them sea kittens or water puppies or whatever they want, but fish are still fish, and I like mine broiled in butter with a little lemon. Or with rice and seaweed as sushi. My real concern, as a resident of the great state of Colorado, is what they’re going to call non-oceanic sea kittens – river kittens? Lake kittens? And how do you distinguish between species? Rainbow river kittens? Walleye kittens?
(HT: Pursuing Holiness)
Jan 04 2009
Thought for the Day
You can fool some of the people all of the time – and those are the ones you need to concentrate on.
Jan 04 2009
Poking Tigers With a Stick
For the record, I think it’s a bad thing to do. Periodically there’s a bit in the news about some guy (usually drunk) who hops the fence at the zoo to taunt the bears or who think it’s cool to mess with the chained up doberman. In either case the results are the same – the drunk gets his face handed to him on a bloody claw.
Could it be that Hamas is learning that lesson? Aggie at Bloodthirsty Liberal links to a Ha’aretz piece that suggests Israel is playing the part of the doberman:
Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni on Sunday rejected an offer by a Russian envoy to contact Hamas via Russia in order to reach a cease-fire with the Palestinian militant group in Gaza.
“We are serious in our intention to harm Hamas and we have no intention to [legitimize them] and pass messages on to them. We have nothing to discuss with Hamas,” Livni told Alexander Saltanov, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev’s special envoy to the Middle East.
The things that amazes me is not the ferocity of Israel’s attack into Gaza, but that Israel has shown such restraint up to this point. Hamas lobs missiles into the cities of southern Israel and the world is stunned that Israel gets mad?
