Hopeful today? You can forget about it for tomorrow. This article shows how everything from the Alps melting to crocodiles relations, from diarrhoea to collapsing gingerbread houses, is due to global warming (heard on Limbaugh’s show).
All posts by Phil
You Could Take a Walk
The Hollywood Writers strike continues (for those who care) and FanLib.com has some silly suggestions for making it without your favorite show. Learn to swing a light-saber or build a Star Trek-type phaser. Read a tie-in novel or visit Scranton, Pennsylvania. Do not attempt your own CSI-style investigation or see if you can get your featured on a show of Stupid Criminals, but you could volunteer at a food bank or take some of your decent stuff to a trift store.
Buying Entertainment for the Children
From the Barna Group: “A new Barna Group study shows that most Christian parents will purchase [CDs, movies, games] for their children despite their misgivings about the content of those products. The result will be stress for many well-intentioned but morally uncertain parents, and inappropriate exposure for millions of morally vulnerable children.”
Thanksgiving Day Live Blog
Happy Thanksgiving.
Yesterday, I thought I might live blog my early Thanksgiving morning, which isn’t the right use of the term “live blog” because no one was awake, I had nothing to do, and I doubt you were here wondering when the lit news is coming. The coffee wasn’t even made. I could update you on what’s coming over an antique radio I have behind me. It’s a Japanese made Viscount “Stereo Solid State” with volume control for both left and right speakers and something called “MPX” on the AM/FM switch which seems to enhance the sound for FM radio. I didn’t catch the name of the composer whose music is playing now, but it’s a work about war and peace in Switzerland.
Ah, Copeland’s Rodeo is on the radio now—Classical 90.5 out of Collegedale, TN. Rodeo makes you think of beef, doesn’t it?
Did you see the story reporting the claims of a Floridian historian who says the first American Thanksgiving was in St. Augustine. Spanish Explorer Pedro Menendez de Aviles landed in St. Augustine on September 8, 1565. He claimed “Florida for the Spanish crown and participat[ed] in a special Mass of Thanksgiving given by Father Francisco Lopez de Mendoza Grajales. After being declared governor of the new land, Menendez invited the Timucua natives to join the Spanish in a Thanksgiving feast.”
Susan Brandenburg reports, “A flurry of national attention followed the reporter’s article about Gannon’s book, with a number of irate New Englanders dubbing Gannon ‘the grinch who stole Thanksgiving.’ In fact, Gannon poured literary salt in their wounds by remarking, with a chuckle in his voice, “’In the year 1621, when the Pilgrims were having their first Thanksgiving, St. Augustine was up for urban renewal.’”
I don’t see why this should ruffle anyone’s feathers, but then I don’t understand why so many will argue for their dog in a fight when they have no personal investment and winning an argument will mean nothing at the end of the day. That’s why I don’t favor one sport team over another.
Anyway Lars said yesterday, we have much to be thankful for. Today, I’m thankful for the rain that fell yesterday evening. The southeast needs a lot of it, and I see rain south of us in middle and south Georgia. That’s a blessing. Perhaps the Lord will not take us through a very dry valley into next summer, but even if he does, I know he will leave us. He will not leave his people, that is, because He works all things together for the good of those who love him, who are called according to his purpose—those whom he foreknew and predestined to be conformed to his image. All things, like droughts and freakish jellyfish attacks on Irish salmon farms.
That’s a huge thing to give thanks for. Bryan Chapell preached a great sermon on prayer which touches on this idea (MP3 link).
What else might an American Christian thank the Lord for today? Good coffee comes to mind, but I’ve drunken all I brewed this morning. Other things? Good roads, stable houses, reliable heating and air conditioning, reliable transportation in various forms. Plenty of food of all kinds. Computers and networks for writing and talking to each other regardless the distances. These are blessings from the Lord of heaven and earth. Because people in our have respected the Lord’s commands, generally speaking, we expect people to keep their commitments, to do a job properly, to deal with us honestly. I know we have become more cynical of these things, and buyer beware is still a good principle, but I wonder if our justifiable cynicism comes to us as our countrymen drift toward a secular mindset and liberal doctrines.
Maybe if we “undertake for the Glory of God, and Advancement of the Christian Faith, and the Honour of our King and Country” our lives in this country, as the Mayflower pilgrims did, we would see more hope for the future of this life as well as hope in the life to come.
I think I’m hearing the foreshadowing toll of the dinner bell. I must go.
Thanksgiving Links
Thomas J. Craughwell writes, “If Only the Pilgrims Had Been Italian.”
When the Pilgrims arrived in Massachusetts in 1620, lobsters were so common all you had to do was stroll down to the nearest tidal pool and pluck them out by the bushel. But the Pilgrims wanted meat, not fish — not even fish as succulent as lobster. Very quickly familiarity bred contempt: The better class of colonists scorned the crustacean as suitable only for the poor. In his journal for the year 1622, William Bradford, governor of the Plymouth colony, recorded the landing of a boatload of new colonists from England. Their arrival was a thrilling event, yet Bradford confessed that he and his fellow Plymouth residents were humiliated that they had nothing better to offer the newcomers than lobster.
Also on The American Spectator, Jay D. Homnick riffs on Georgia’s prayer for rain. “Pray today, give thanks tomorrow. Remember also that prayer is not only a means to an end, as Maimonides explains, it must catalyze each of us into reflecting upon our priorities,” he writes.
“God said, I am tired of kings, / I suffer them no more;” Emerson has an interesting poem here, Boston Hymn.
Gaius writes about the Pilgrims early attempts to live communally. This appears to be within the first seven years of their landing in America. According to what I’m reading, the pilgrims’ voyage was funding by London investors who required they work for them for seven years doing whatever profitable work they could find. At the end of those years, the survivors would receive a small share of the profits, but everything belonged to “the common fund” or that of the investors. Even the clothes they wore were owned technically by the men in London. Perhaps that’s why the colony started with a communal attitude.
Now, a little holiday advice: If you start feeling like this little guy, throw out your inhibitions and do something different. Take that walk. Eat that brussel sprout. Whatever you don’t normally do, do it. (Cute warning alert)
Early Sesame Street a Bit Scary for Modern Viewers
Early Sesame Street is a bit scary for modern viewers, modern viewers being unrealistic wimps. Virginia Heffernan writes in the NY Times:
Back then — as on the very first episode, which aired on PBS Nov. 10, 1969 — a pretty, lonely girl like Sally might find herself befriended by an older male stranger who held her hand and took her home. Granted, Gordon just wanted Sally to meet his wife and have some milk and cookies, but . . . well, he could have wanted anything. As it was, he fed her milk and cookies. The milk looks dangerously whole. . . .
The old “Sesame Street” is not for the faint of heart . . .
She says the street was dirty. Oscar the Grouch could be depressing. No one was really all that chipper, except maybe Ernie who also seemed a bit slow on the uptake.
The harshness of existence was a given, and no one was proposing that numbers and letters would lead you “out” of your inner city to Elysian suburbs. Instead, “Sesame Street” suggested that learning might merely make our days more bearable, more interesting, funnier. It encouraged us, above all, to be nice to our neighbors and to cultivate the safer pleasures that take the edge off — taking baths, eating cookies, reading.
Write What You Know?
By his own admission, Michael Snyder doesn’t know anything and yet he writes.
A lady at the library turned to me out of the blue today and asked what I might recommend that she and her husband listen to on a long trip. I thought if I asked a few clarifying questions that I might be able to help her out. It didn’t work. She knew less than I did. That made me feel pretty good. I wondered if I could write about that encounter. Turns out I can’t.
He believes loving your characters is better than actually knowing something to write about. Read on.
Ad Lib
A critical point in Steve Allen’s career shines a new light on the current writers union strike. Allen began The Tonight Show in 1954 and originated the concept of modern TV talk shows. When Doris Day did not show up for an interview,
Allen was left to his own comic devices with twenty-five minutes of airtime on his hands, which he filled by interviewing people in the studio audience, lugging an old stand-up mike up and down the aisles. ‘The physical thing of carrying this big mike around the room helped to get laughs. I just horsed around, like with my pals. That opened up a lot of possibilities.’ He later wrote: ‘I don’t recollect what was said during the next twenty-five minutes, but I do know that I had never gotten such laughs before.’ … Allen had discovered his natural ability to play it as it lays, to talk without a prepared script or format. ‘For two years I had been slaving away at the typewriter … with only moderate success. Now I had learned that audiences would laugh much more readily at an ad-libbed quip, even though it might not be the pound-for-pound equivalent of a prepared joke.’
Where are comic talents like this today?
Holiday Book Sale
The Oxford University Press is having a Christmas sale. They got some Beowulf translations, a Jane Austin illustrated collection, anthologies, you know–the usual.
In other news, let me point out this discipleship series I stumbled across. You Matter More Than You Think, by Leslie Parrott, is a video-based studies series for women which may scratch where you itch.
Those Ungrateful Booksellers
Apparently, the subject of The Bookseller of Kabul doesn’t like the story as written, saying it has fabricated stories and recorded private conversations.