Fort Gordon, an Army base in Augusta, Georgia, upgraded its land-mobile radios. Since then, nearly 500 residents have complained that their garage doors won’t open.
The Facebook Exodus Among the Young
Interesting Pew study about why teens are losing interest in Facebook.
- Too many adults are using Facebook.
- They’re annoyed when people post inane details about their lives.
- They are drained by all the “drama” on the site.
- It’s too stressful managing their reputation on Facebook.
- Other sites, like Twitter and Instagram, have fewer social expectations.
- Facebook has become an exhausting extension of their everyday lives.
If Companies Had Realistic Slogans
I found this on Reddit.
Best Buy: See it in person before you buy it on Amazon.
Carnival Cruise: What are the chances something will happen this time?
Costco: When you’re not sure what you want, but you know you want a LOT of it.
Radio Shack: Would you like some batteries with that? Pretty please?
Internet Explorer: Your number one browser for downloading other browsers
Google: You know we’re just a step away from creating Skynet.
1 800 Flowers: the cheapest way to say you remembered your anniversary an hour ago.
Trojan: Tuition is very expensive.
Barnes & Noble: We don’t have it, but we can order it. But so can you, and cheaper.
Gamestop: We’ll give you 6 bucks for that 60 dollar game you bought yesterday
Fiji: It costs a lot to make a square bottle.
Denny’s: Because its 2 am, you’re drunk, and you need pancakes.
Adobe: An update is available
Motel 6: We will leave the lights on for you because we are in a dangerous neighborhood!
Dasani: Italian for “Coke just sold you water”
Walmart: Home of 53 registers, with only 3 open!
Facebook: We know more about you than you do
Blockbuster: Remember us?
Applebee’s: For when you’re too lazy to prepare your own frozen food
White Castle: It’s Food…Technically.
Comcast: Rewarding loyal customers with ever-increasing rates since 1963.
Alternative Bible History
Pastor Matt preached on Abraham today, and said something that got me musing.
If Abraham hadn’t packed up and left for a distant land, everything after that would have been different. God would have found somebody else to become the Father of Many Nations, and Jesus would still have come, but all the surrounding elements might have been very different.
So I started thinking. Is there any reason to think God was committed to that piece of real estate on the east shore of the Mediterranean as his Promised Land–a place which had no prior significance in the Bible?
What if God’s next choice after Abraham was someone in, say, ancient Persia, and he sent him to southern India as the Promised Land? Or he chose a person actually living in what would become Israel, and sent him to Greece or the Ukraine?
And what if Abraham WAS the second (or third) choice, after persons who had decided to stay put instead of stepping out in faith?
Just wondering.
Celebrity Trash
A guilty pleasure of mine is reading celebrity junk news in “People” and “Us” magazines. But I subscribe to neither. For that, I rely on visits to the doctor, dentist, and hairdresser. So I was severely disappointed this morning when I had a doctor’s appointment, and the waiting room had nothing but medical, travel, and women’s magazines. I may need to change doctors.
When Editors have had Enough
Suddenly in a grumpy mood, Steve the Editor wants to remind everyone (despite knowing he will once again be ignored):
1. Do NOT type two spaces between sentences. That has never, EVER, been appropriate anywhere except on typewriters with monospaced fonts. So just quit it. Now.
2. An elipsis within a sentence has 3 periods…not 4. Put the fourth at the end of the sentence.
3. Don’t underline text, especially in email or on the web. Underlining indicates a hyperlink, which people can click to go someplace else. On a typewriter, to emphasize something you had two options: underline, and all-caps. But now you have other options: bold, italics, larger font size. If it’s a book title or something else that would be underlined on a typewriter, use italics.
4. Don’t put apostrophe’s in plural’s. I mean, just stop it, okay? You’re embarrassing yourself.
There are plenty of other literary transgressions, children, for which I could castigate you. But I’ll stop here.
I Could Have Waited to Learn This
Seriously, CNN, does this merit a CNN Alert? Was it important that I learn this RIGHT AWAY?
Paris Jackson, the 15-year-old daughter of Michael Jackson, was rushed to a hospital early this morning, sources close to the Jackson family told CNN. “She’s going to be OK,” said one source, who was at the hospital. The sources said it was unclear why she was hospitalized.
The story is totally vague. We don’t know why she was hospitalized or where. Only that she is “okay,” which is not exactly a technical medical term. And yet, amidst this factlessness, CNN felt it necessary to alert the world lest someone else beat them to the punch.
Matters of Injustice Should Matter to Christians
One of my great disappointments with President Obama regards the prisoners at Guantanamo. I don’t care that he hasn’t closed Guantanamo. Republicans have blocked him from doing that, killing all alternatives to housing those prisoners. The prison is necessary for now.
But of the 166 persons still imprisoned there, half have been cleared for release. Some have been kept there for 13 years, with no charges brought against them and no prosecution planned. Obama COULD take action to release them–he’s not totally powerless. Yet he does nothing.
It’s a case of American injustice. And injustice always bothers me deeply, especially since the Bible speaks so frequently against injustice.
Over the years, I’ve read many stories of injustice. For some reason they capture my attention, stabbing my soul.
- The Holocaust–no greater example of injustice, and no end to the stories. I’ve read many books about the Holocaust.
- The treatment of American Indians in the Old West.
- The plight of white farmers under the tyranny of Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe.
- The cruelty of apartheid in South Africa.
- The three-strikes laws which send persons to life in prison for simple thefts.
- The internment of Japanese Americans during World War 2.
- The treatment of blacks in the South between the Civil War and the 1960s.
- McCarthyism.
- Media persons with an influential platform who engage in character assassination with little regard for truthfulness or telling the full story–Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, and others.
- A legal system which favors persons with money, and tends to screw over people people on society’s lower rungs.
- The persecution of Christians in the Soviet Union during the Cold War years. I read a bunch of books about that during the 1970s.
I don’t know why injustice captures my attention so strongly. I can’t claim to have been a victim of injustice, nor have I actually done anything to combat injustice (beyond raising my voice against it and increasing people’s awareness of it). I guess God gives different people different burdens. There are other causes which deserve outrage, but which don’t outrage me…at least not like injustice does.
But back to Guantanamo.
I’ve read numerous stories and reports regarding America’s imprisonment and torture of Muslims. I was heartened recently, in reading one particular story about a Mauritanian who has been imprisoned since 2003, has undergone torture at the hands of Americans (at the personal direction of Don Rumsfield), and has never been charged. He’s been cleared for release, no charges ever brought against him. Yet for 10 years, he has languished in this terrible prison. (His story was published, at length, in Slate.)
What heartened me is, at one point the military assigned an evangelical Christian to prosecute the guy, but upon learning about how this Mauritanian had been tortured, he refused to take the case. He cited biblical objections. I’ve read other stories of Americans in the military, CIA, and FBI who, either for religious or simply moral reasons, have done what they could to oppose the use of torture and false imprisonment–sometimes putting their own career at risk.
I work in a denomination dominated by Republicans and fans of FoxNews. But only once or twice have I heard another United Brethren object to the use of torture, rendition, or false imprisonment. I hear fellow Christians dismiss objections about Guantanamo simply because the prisoners are Muslims, and they hate Muslims or think all Muslims are terrorists. One fellow Christian even told me that, if asked by his country, he would readily take part in torturing prisoners. This complacency about injustice bothers me deeply. And it’s one reason I continue raising my voice in writing.
No Longer a Dream Pacifist
In my dreams, I’m never able to seriously hurt anybody. I don’t know why that is. I might be in a raging gun battle with Disney-themed demonic muskrats, but my bullets do no harm. I’ve certainly never killed anyone in a dream. This is sometimes a cause of aggravation, though I’ve never asked God to change this, sort of assuming that God wants it this way.
But last night, I most definitely killed a zombie.
He was a “fast” zombie (not the lumbering type), running full speed at me with a hatchet, and screaming. Yes, a zombie with a hatchet. Bet you haven’t seen that (yet) on “The Walking Dead.”
Dream Steve grabbed him and sliced off his head on a mailbox post (in the alternate universe of my dreams, mailbox posts apparently have razor-sharp edges). Even in my dream, I realized something new had just happened. I stood there looking at the severed head and thought, “Did I actually just do that?”
It seemed like a breakthrough of sorts. Or maybe it was a case of dreamstate backsliding away from pacifism. I’m not sure. We’ll have to see if it happens again.
Out of Control
At our garage sale today, this boy wanted to buy some of my old Matchbox cars. When his mom said no, he threw a grand mal temper tantrum–yelling and crying abusively. “I WANT MY CARS!!!” he screamed at her, along with other stuff, for at least ten minutes. Meanwhile, she gently tried to explain herself to him in a calm and quiet voice…which was totally futile. The kid needed…well, that’s not very PC today.
“I WANT MY CARS!!!”
The kid went berzerk. It went on, and on, and on. The whole neighborhood could hear the kid screaming stuff at his mom, and she just let him go. Apparently, the mom graduated from the Young Kids Respond to Reason School of Parenting.
So they’re standing beside their van, grandparents in front, probably terribly embarrassed by this huge temper tantrum, waiting for the kid to calm down and for everyone to climb in the van so they could drive away. Everyone around looking at each other with expressions that said, “Can you believe this? Why does she allow it?”
Finally, probably the only person there who didn’t have kids–ME–took action. I walked out to the van. “Hey,” I said, getting the boy’s attention. He stopped berating his mom and looked straight at me. “I’m NOT going to sell you my cars,” I told him in a firm voice.
A blank, bewildered expression spread across his face. And the temper tantrum immediately stopped. Just like that. Magic.
Was it a male voice? Or just a voice speaking to him with authority? (Mom and Pam said that if they, as women, had told the boy the same thing, it would have had no affect.)
And what was the back story with this mom and child? How did they get to that level of dysfunction? Was he one of these modern kids who, if his mom had touched him at all, would have cried, “That’s child abuse!” Was there a dad in the picture at all? Custody issues? Did the kid have some kind of medical or psychological condition? I have no idea. Hate to be too judgmental and simplistic about how to deal with a situation I know nothing about.
The whole thing was astounding and perplexing. And it reminded my parents that, because they had three boys with mild temperaments, they had it pretty easy.
