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Our Daily Thread 5-27-14

Good Morning!

On this day in 1668 three colonists were expelled from Massachusetts for being Baptists.

In 1813 Americans captured Fort George, Canada. 

In 1907 the Bubonic Plague broke out in San Francisco.

In 1937 the Golden Gate Bridge was opened to pedestrian traffic.

And in 1969 construction of Walt Disney World began in Florida. 

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Quote of the Day

“The strokes of the pen need deliberation as much as the sword needs swiftness.”

Julia Ward Howe

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She gets the quote, and the first song, since she wrote it. Performed by Johnny, the Carters, and the Statlers. 🙂

Now I can’t let that teaser at the end go without hearing it all.

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Anyone have a QoD?

63 thoughts on “Our Daily Thread 5-27-14”

  6. Nice to begin the day with a sweet tweet treat as in the header photo.

    Bosley is on a tear this morning. Up the stairs, down the stairs, running as fast as she can, leaping up on furniture and up to the window and back down and around again. The storm brought a bit of coolness to our environment that has energized her.

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  9. QoD? What is the most recent course of study you have taken? This could be a formal type class or informal as in a Bible or book studu with a group or as an individual.

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  10. Morning all. Love the Battle Hymn of the Republic. I will have to go sing it as I can’t listen.
    Course of study. hmmm…. I did a study of the book of Revelation. One of the elders of my church wrote a study guide and led it. He intends to publish it and we got to benefit first. I thoroughly enjoyed the study.

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  11. I enrolled in the Christian Writers Guild email course, Apprentice. It was a good experience which included a mentor. I still have much to learn. I hope at some point to take another class through CWG.

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  12. Interesting pictures, Tychicus. (From yesterday)
    I understand the McArthur photo was staged. McArthur had already landed and someone wanted to take a picture. So, they went back and made a photo op for publicity and posterity. Also, on Iwo, they had raised a small flag and some officer wasn’t satisfied and wanted a bigger flag raised. Both pictures have become famous. There’s a link there that tells about Rosenthan taking the picture. He says it wasn’t staged, he just caught the second raising. Elvera’s brother was in the third wave to land at Iwo Jima. The B-29 you see is the reason they took Iwo Jima. (1) Japanese at Iwo were alerting the mainland when they detected a flight headed there, and (2) the number of airmen who were saved was more than the men lost in the battle. Each B-29 carried about 12 men.

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  13. Just so you know….

    13 Southern Sayings that the Rest of America Won’t Understand

    Language discrepancies naturally arise in different geographic regions, like the raging “pop” vs. “soda” debate. But the South undoubtedly takes the cake.

    Conversations south of the Mason-Dixon line will befuddle anyone not born there.

    We chose 13 of the most ridiculous Southern sayings — and tried to explain them.

    Cotton
    Cotton
    1. “We’re living in high cotton.”

    Cotton has long been a key crop to the South’s economy, so every harvest farmers pray for tall bushes loaded with white fluffy balls in their fields. Tall cotton bushes are easier to pick and yield higher returns. If you’re living “in high cotton,” it means you’re feeling particularly successful or wealthy.

    2. “She was madder than a wet hen.”

    Hens sometimes enter a phase of “broodiness” — they’ll stop at nothing to incubate their eggs and get agitated when farmers try to collect them. Farmers used to dunk hens in cold water to “break” their broodiness.

    You don’t want to be around a hormonal hen after she’s had an ice bath.

    3. “He could eat corn through a picket fence.”

    This describes someone with an unfortunate set of buck teeth. They tend to stick up and outward, like a horse’s teeth. Imagine a horse eating a carrot, and you’ll get the picture.

    4. “You can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear.”

    A pig’s ear may look soft, pink, and shiny, but you’re not fooling anyone by calling it your new Marc Jacobs bag. A Southerner might say this about her redneck cousin who likes to decorate his house with deer antlers.

    5. “You look rode hard and put up wet.”

    No, this isn’t Southern sexual innuendo. The phrase refers to a key step in horse grooming — when a horse runs fast, it works up a sweat, especially under the saddle. A good rider knows to walk the horse around so it can dry off before going back to the stable. A horse will look sick and tired if you forget this step, much like a person who misses sleep or drinks too much.

    6. “He’s as drunk as Cooter Brown.”

    Cooter Brown is an infamous character in Southern lore. Legend tells that he lived on the Mason-Dixon line — the border between the North and South — during the Civil War. To avoid the draft on either side, Cooter decided to stay drunk throughout the entire war, making him ineligible for battle.

    Inebriated Southerners have measured their drunkenness by him ever since.

    7. “She’s as happy as a dead pig in the sunshine.”

    When a pig dies, presumably in a sty outside, the sun dries out its skin. This effect pulls the pig’s lips back to reveal a toothy “grin,” making it look happy even though it’s dead. This phrase describes a person who’s blissfully ignorant of reality.

    8. “She’s got more nerve than Carter’s got Liver Pills.”

    Carters Products started as a pill-peddling company in the latter part of the 19th century. Specifically, Carters repped its “Little Liver Pills” so hard a Southern saying spawned from the omnipresent advertisements.

    Alas, the Federal Trade Commission forced the drug-group to drop the “liver” portion of the ad, claiming it was deceptive. Carter’s “Little Liver Pills” became Carter’s “Little Pills” in 1951, but the South doesn’t really pay attention to history. The phrase stuck.

    9. “I’m finer than frog hair split four ways.”

    Southerners mostly use this phrase to answer, “How are you?” Even those below the Mason-Dixon know frogs don’t have hair, and the irony means to highlight just how dandy you feel.

    The phrase reportedly originated in C. Davis’ “Diary of 1865.”

    10. “He thinks the sun comes up just to hear him crow.”

    On farms (not just in the South) roosters usually crow when the sun rises. Their vociferous habit wakes up the house, signaling time to work.

    An extremely cocky rooster might think the sun rises simply because he crows. Similarly, an extremely cocky man might think the same when he speaks — and also that everyone should listen to him.

    11. “That’s about as useful as tits on a bull.”

    Only female dairy cows produce milk. Male cows are called bulls. And even if you could “milk anything with nipples,” bulls tend to be rather ornery. Good luck with that.

    12. “That thing is all catawampus.”

    Catawampus adj: askew, awry, cater-cornered.

    Lexicographers don’t really know how it evolved, though. They speculate it’s a colloquial perversion of “cater-corner.” Variations include: catawampous, cattywampus, catty wonkus. The South isn’t really big on details.

    13. “He’s got enough money to burn a wet mule.”

    In 1929, then-Governor of Louisiana Huey Long, nicknamed “The Kingfish,” tried to enact a five-cent tax on each barrel of refined oil to fund welfare programs. Naturally, Standard Oil threw a hissy fit and tried to impeach him on some fairly erroneous charges (including attending a drunken party with a stripper).

    But Long, a good ole’ boy, fought back. He reportedly said the company had offered legislators as much as $25,000 for their votes to kick him out of office — what he called “enough money to burn a wet mule.”

    We Northerners may not know what that means, but at least we know where it comes from.

    Bonus: Bless Your Heart

    Almost everyone knows Southern women drop this phrase constantly. But it might not mean what you think it means.

    In reality, the phrase has little to do with religion and more to do with a passive-aggressive way to call you an idiot. Depending on your inflection, saying “bless your heart” can sting worse than any insult.

    Content courtesy of Business Insider. Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/southern-sayings-2013-10#ixzz32B0drLM6

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  14. My birthday is January 6th and I seldom let anyone forget it…what with it coming 12 days after Christmas!
    One of the channels is broadcasting World War I history. A soldier almost shot a young Adolf Hitler, but chose not to. How would that have changed the course of history? It is the small things that sometimes make the biggest difference. A young Patton first loaded a gun on a car in the war with Mexico. I simple idea at the time and was later used to win WWI. Churchill was a failure during the early part of the war, but is now known as one of the greatest Prime Ministers Great Britain has ever had. “Failure isn’t final, and Success isn’t permanent”.

    NOW I have to work. Have a great day.

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  15. Cute song sparrow.

    I finally got halfway decent photos of a male hummingbird yesterday. Not “great” ones yet.

    But I’m excited that we have a mockingbird hanging around our yard. They are easily one of my favorite birds, and I’ve missed them since I’ve lived here. When I’d lived here about a year, I thought, “I sure haven’t seen many mockingbirds in Indiana.” A few weeks later I realized I hadn’t seen one all season, and didn’t remember for sure that I’d ever seen one in Indiana, and I know for sure I haven’t seen one since, not until about a week ago. I heard it sing before I saw it, and I said, “If we had mockingbirds around here, I’d say that’s a mockingbird, cuz I don’t know any other bird that sings like that.” (They’ll sing one phrase a few times and then switch to another, and go through several songs. Other birds–the cardinal, for instance–actually have more than one song, but on any one song session, they just sing the same one a few times. Mockingbirds will sing a cardinal song, then switch to a robin, then some other bird, all within a minute.) Later that day I saw him, and I was really pleased to do so.

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  16. I remember most of those saying, Kim. Only we just said, “Drunk as a Cooter” Didn’t know about Cooter Brown. In South Carolina, there was a small turtle we called a “cooter”.
    I have never heard # 7&9.

    I don’t hear any of them much anymore.

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  18. Today the seven year old in glasses became the four year old in glasses. Hard to imagine the four year old in glasses. Even harder to imagine the four year old before glasses.

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  19. That is what I get for thinking ahead of my fingers. He turns eight today, not four. Eight comes after seven. I wonder why he has problems counting, with such a fine teacher and all.

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  23. Yes, thanks for explaining, Mumsee!

    My birthday is June 10, but I lied about it on Facebook–telling them it was June 1. I see no reason why they should know EVERYTHING about me. But over the weekend, I got several happy brithdays, so I don’t know what’s going on. We ARE celebrating the birthday 6 weeks in our family, (all birthdays being divisible by 5 in May and June–5 of us).

    Our daughter went back to UCSB yesterday and reported Isla Vista is a sad place where students are furious with the media–“tell us about the dead NOT the shooter,” signs were up all over town. This is the ninth week of the quarter, finals in two weeks. No school today for mourning and so students can meet with counselors as need be. It’s uncomfortable to realize the shooter lived blocks away from my daughter for the last couple years.

    I checked a book out of the library several years ago called The Psychopath in Your Neighborhood–drawn by the title. MY neighborhood?

    The author argued psychopathy–people who have no empathy and few emotions–are 1 in 20 people in the US today. You can look around your own neighborhoods and do the math.

    I’ve been thinking about praying about this, because it hits so close to home. What would I do if one of my children had had problems like this kid?

    When you think of Columbine and Sandy Hook and now this situation, you see desperate, we;;-off parents trying to connect with and help their sons. And yet this.

    I don’t know what I would have done. I know I wouldn’t have bought the kid a fancy expensive car and given him enough money to purchase semi-automatic weapons, at least I don’t think I would, but what? He was seen by a psychiatrist for years. His mother turned him into the police when she got scared.

    California has the most strict gun laws on the books, yet this happened.

    When my father was such a trial, we begged the doctor to pull his driver’s license but the doctor refused–he’ll be too upset.

    We tried everything, arguing that it was morally unethical for us to not allow our children to ride with Dad, while other innocents out there were potentially victims of his driving. Finally, I told the doctor, “are you willing to assume liability for him? I am not.” And we finally got the letter we needed.

    It seems to me, I should be able to report my child is under psychiatric care and I’m afraid of him, therefore put him on a list that won’t allow him to purchase a weapon. Is that so liberty-violating a thing? Of course the Sandy Hook mother was trying to connect with her child through guns, sigh. What to do?

    Well, right now, I need to prepare to teach Bible study. Ciao.

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  24. Well, “Bless my heart, ” my ignorance is showing because I was unfamiliar with many of the Southern phrases. Is it because I grew up near the city and only country folks know the real talk?

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  28. I just called in sick, will take (at least) another day as in as I’m coughing and coughing and coughing — to the point that I think I’ve pulled some muscles across my mid-section, it’s literally painful to cough anymore. 😦 😦

    I recently ordered (and am reading) a small book called “Knowable Word” which outlines a personal Bible study method that’s both natural and yet different in some ways for me.

    The mass shootings are so distressing and people often try to suggest there’s an easy one-size-fits-all answer (mostly by way of more gun control laws). It does seem to me that the parents of this kid tried to intervene as much as they could ? It’s so hard to know which of these guys is really going to go off the deep end. But it does seem that he shouldn’t have been able to purchase that many guns based on his background of treatment? I don’t know, I still think he would have found a way (and acquired the guns) regardless.

    As for the media covering him out of proportion to those killed — he is the central piece of the news story, unfortunately. We’re all curious about how this could happen and taking a close look at him and his history is part of what journalists can be expected to legitimately do. But I do understand how that must feel to those who have been so personally affected by it all. 😦

    Interesting moments yesterday with regard to my neighbors who recently lost the dad/husband so unexpectedly. There’s one son who’s had issues, has been under psychiatric care (and has had a drug history I believe but now is on a psychiatric drug) — he was over there yesterday and was yelling at one point, I didn’t catch what he was saying (and didn’t pay a lot of attention, I think I mentioned emotions are running very raw over there lately and arguments tend to erupt here and there).

    But a little while later in the afternoon I was reading in my bedroom with my window open (as always) when LAPD pulled up to talk to him out in the street & away from the house. I guess someone in the family called them.

    He was being very polite to the officers, just insisted he was upset, didn’t mean whatever it was he’d said, that he’d just lost his dad and it came out in the heat of the moment.

    Interesting because one of the officers told him if they ‘cleared’ him after talking to him — and then he did something either to himself or someone else — that it would be on their shoulders and it would ultimately come back to haunt them (I’m guessing Santa Barbara wasn’t too far from their minds).

    So the rest of the conversation centered around cajoling him to come in with them, place himself under voluntary observation with his own doctor for a couple days. He finally agreed and they got him into the squad car and took him away.

    I suspect police get these calls all the time and most amount to nothing. But …

    In the Santa Barbara shooter’s case, police apparently would have not had any legal cause to search his apartment when they checked in on him at his parents’ request. Without giving police a lot more authority in those cases (and I don’t think any of us really want that to happen), it’s just hard to know who’s going to explode later and who isn’t (and most probably don’t).

    Maybe more training is in order, I don’t know.

    Spiritually, I still think all these shootings point to the downward spiral of our culture as a whole. They’re among so many symptoms of our country’s spiritual lostness.

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  29. Hey, question for y’all.

    I just ordered a book I made of my bird photos, along with mini-essays about several things (50 species of birds, and several subjects like flying, courtship, etc.). I’m listing it so that other people can buy it too. It’s a 240-page book, and I put a lot of work into it. It has several hundred photos plus several pages of text.

    The problem is, print on demand is expensive, especially when it comes to color printing. So with a 30% coupon, including shipping, cost close to $90. I can’t really imagine anyone being willing to pay that much for a book when they can get a book by a professional photographer for a lot less money. So unless I had rich relatives who really wanted a book I created, it just isn’t likely to sell.

    But . . .

    for $10 I can create an e-book version of the book for i-pad, and then keep most of the profits. So the question is, those of you who have i-pads or who buy books, would you be likely to be interested in buying a book of mostly photos in that format? Or do e-books just make much more sense if they are text-based? In other words, does it make sense for me to pay for the conversion, or would I be wasting $10? (I’m not asking “Do you want to buy my bird book?” I’m asking does the i-pad format lend itself to such a book, and would people be likely to be interested?) Also, what would be a reasonable price for such a book? Price it cheap ($10)? Price it “reasonable” ($18-20)? Or price it for $30 or so to reflect that it’s a “limited edition” type of book? I’m inclined to think $15-20, and I suppose I should see how other people on the site have priced theirs . . . but honestly I just have no idea. But the more important question is does it make sense to do such a book, if you only know “that part” of the question.

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  30. Cheryl, I don’t have an ipad. I could probably get it on my Smartphone, but it might not be a large enough photo for it to have the hoped for effect. I think it is best to go with inexpensive books and try to market for increased quantity of sales to make your profit. In general people have less money to spend these days. Keep it affordable. Since it is a first for you, expect a loss for the educational cost of gaining experience. Next time you will know more how to increase sales and covdr the loss on the firzt book. Marketing advice I see says to build an email list, give a freebie at youf sits that gives value to the customer and proves the quality of youf work and lets people know what to expect from you. I think it is a plug-in you need at your website to capture emails and you need to verify people really want to be on your list. You have credibility with us, but you need more customers from the big population of birdwatchers who don’t know you. IMHO

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  31. Donna, I am just a little ol’ dumb as a stump Southerner from Alibammy, but even I can see that no one thing causes these shootings and I know you are going to hate this, but the MEDIA at least holds some of the responsibility. They send these whack jobs out in a blaze of glory. Finally the Nobody is the subject of everyone’s conversation. Of course the whack job wasn’t thinking clearly enough to realize he wouldn’t be around to enjoy all the attention.
    The Movie Industry deserves at least a portion of the responsibility.
    Video Games deserve a HUGE portion of the responsibility because the goal is to shoot as many people as you can. Game Over, Reboot, Start Again. These kids are so desensitized to what they are doing because a lot of them do it over and over on a video game.
    PEOPLE deserve the rest of the responsibility. We have given the mentally ill more and more rights. In my state we can’t involuntarily lock up our nut jobs we have to take them over the state line for a 72 hour lock up.
    Sure, not everyone can handle the responsibility of a gun and shouldn’t be allowed access to one. I grew up around guns and had no doubt that as much as my father loved me, he would have beat the hide off of me if he had every caught me with one of his guns without his permission. I hunted and fished with him. He shot something it DIED. He caught a fish it DIED.
    A gun is an inanimate object. Just sitting on a shelf it can’t kill anyone. It takes a HUMAN to pull the trigger.
    IF I were a conspiracy theorist I would almost swear the government was someone pulling the strings to cause all these shootings, but I am not so I have to place the responsibility on the people who deserved it —HUMANS. Our society is so full of “cancer”. We are so depraved that we will find a way to kill each other if we have to use a toothpick to do it.

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  32. The media can’t win in this — it simply is news (because it is so horrible) and part of that new is answering the question of ‘why’ something has happened.

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  33. A lot of these incidents now also take on a life of their own with social media (which isn’t ‘the media’ in the professional sense at all).

    Now these guys provide their own media after the fact, if you will, via you tube etc.i suspect that’s what you’re seeing as ‘glorifying’ him. But don’t blame the legitimate media for simply covering what is a major news story.

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  35. Youtube had the courtesy to take it down–though not before both my daughter and daughter-in-law watched it. I chose not to.

    The one question I still have is how did he kill the three roommates without anyone doing anything? Police are keeping that information to their chests but the Bible study ladies this morning all assume the kid drugged them.

    A nurse: then it was premeditated.

    Yes.

    But adding to Kim’s observation, the father is an assistant director of The Hunger Games–a movie series about killing children. Does anything more need to be said?

    (Treading on thin ice here after confessing sin earlier about judging parents who I do believe were trying to take care of a sick kid. However, my child, in essence, was one of his targets and he would have killed her friend walking down the street that night. It focuses the anger and outrage a little more. And BTW, if his issue was not having sex, why didn’t he pay a prostitute?)

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  37. That’s ok, we’re used to it Kim 🙂

    I’m the first to criticize our industry about a host of things, but in covering these major crimes reporters mostly are doing what they should be doing, trying to uncover who did what and why.

    There’s no one cause for these things and no one cure. We’re it all that easy.

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  40. Janice, I didn’t really make the book to sell it; I made it for myself, and figured someday grandkids might like it. I also thought about getting some more copies for gifts . . . but it’s really just too expensive for that. I patterned it after a book I made about trees. The tree book took photos I’ve been taking of trees for 30 years and put them all in one place (well, not “all,” but the best of them) and also had mini-essays about roots, blossom, etc.

    But then the bird book took on a life of its own when I decided that each species for which I have more than a few photos should also get its own essay, and when I kept getting photos of yet another new species, and had to rearrange the book and write another essay. And there were certain photos I really wanted to get that I was watching for and waiting on (most of which I did get).

    It’s a self-published book, but self-published by someone with 25 years of writing and publishing experience, some of that doing some layout work, so it isn’t “amateurish.” And I’ve done quite a few photo books, though I haven’t even tried to sell most of them, and have had two books (books of text) published, as well as many smaller pieces. So I don’t really want to do the “I’m an amateur, please buy my book to make me feel better about myself” thing.

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  41. Tychicus, I believe tonight and Thursday will tell the tale. Mr. Ibaka has given God the credit for his miraculous healing so I feel confident his leaping ability will not be curtailed.

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  42. I am sorry, Cheryl, if I misunderstood your intentions. I think I am still trying to understand the full picture of your motivations. I guess with my business background I tend to naturally think toward marketing to make a profit whether it is concerning selling income tax prep, bookkeeping, or some other product or service. It sounded like you were interested in selling it from what you wrote. If not, then it becomes a generous gift from you to others. I am in no way discounting your work to amateur level. You are definitely pro! Are you asking if people would be willing to buy your book at cost so you can have a larger quantity produced for a lesser cost? I am just trying to understand with no offence intended whatsoever. I have great respe t for you, your writing and photography.

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  43. “Madder than a wet hen”, “Can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear” [they did though – i’s somewhere in the Smithsonian], and “Living high off the hog” are all expressions that I grew up hearing my relatives say – and I trace my ancestry back over 250 years to Ireland and England, with nary an American in the line 😉

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  44. Hello, everyone. Quite a variety of discussion topics here today!

    Janice’s QoD: The most recent course of study I’ve taken was a free online course entitled “Exploring Beethoven’s Piano Sonatas”, a course offered through Coursera and The Curtis Institute of Music, and presented by classical pianist Jonathan Biss. It was an interesting and timely course for me, as I had recently finished playing through all Beethoven’s piano sonatas, and the piano show I was preparing for (I played two movements of a Beethoven sonata) was about two weeks after the start of the course.

    I only watched the lecture videos (a total of five hours), and opted out of the assignments, quizzes, and online discussion forums, as I didn’t have time for all that. I still got a lot out of the course just watching the videos, though, and am glad I signed up.

    Tychicus’ link yesterday to the WWII pictures: Thank you for posting those. I think my dad will be interested to see them — his brother died in the war (though he did not see combat — a hurricane struck in the Caribbean not long after he’d shipped out of Norfolk, heading toward the Panama Canal. Though he survived the ship going down as a result of the hurricane, he died of exposure and exhaustion, as he languished for two days on a life boat on the open sea before rescue came — about six hours after his death). It was surreal to see the picture from September 13, 1944 at your link, as that was the month (and, I thought I heard, the exact day) my uncle died.

    Kim’s link on Southernisms: Our pastor’s wife just said “Bless your heart” to me on Saturday when, on learning what her age is, I told her she looked young. I don’t think she was insulting me… 😉

    And now, if I could put in a little word for my region of the country, today I checked out of the library a book called The New Midwestern Table: 200 Heartland Recipes. Mmmm. Really pretty book including not only delectable recipes and gorgeous food pictures, but beautiful rustic scenes depicting the rural Midwest. I love me my Midwest. 😉

    Speaking of that (sort of), I thought of Donna today when I was driving home. I was behind a vehicle with a California license plate that had a frame around it (not sure what you call those things) that said “Iowa Hawkeyes”. 😉 Maybe you’re not big into Iowa sports teams, but you do have some roots around there, right?

    BTW, hope you get to feeling better soon, Donna.

    Cheryl, I don’t have an iPad, but I’ve ordered ebooks before and view them on my computer screen (or print out parts or whole books as applicable — several of the books are of an educational nature that we use in our homeschool, and if there are things to fill out, then printing out the work makes sense).

    Most of the ebooks we have contain much more text than pictures. A bird book with lots of pictures and relatively small amounts of text seems more like a “hold-in-your-hands”-type book, IMO. OTOH, I personally am much more likely to buy ebooks than physical books simply because they cost much less. I think long and hard before I’m willing to plunk down money to buy a hardback, or even a softcover book (even those I’ve read before — from the library — and know are quite good). Most books don’t make the cut, as our book-buying budget is very limited.

    Those are my two cents. 😉

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  45. I got my flooring – and it’s hardwood! Needless to say, I got it on sale – a clearance sale – so it was affordable. My dear father is installing it now.

    Yesterday, I spent a wonderful day with an aunt and uncle, just exploring. We visited waterfalls, that I had never heard of before, on four different rivers. They were hard to get to, with a lot of rough hiking (and driving), but they were well worth seeing.

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  48. 6 Arrows, that free course sounds very good. When we had season tickets to see the ASO when our son was younger we would often attend the free lectures before the symphony that they gave about the composers and other aspects of the evening’s performance. You would have enjoyed being there for it. A special memory, although I did not have the musical background to have the deep appreciation my husband and son had. I did gain some knowledge. We would let our son select a CD from the ASO store when we attended.

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  49. Karen O and anyone else who have friends or others you know who profess to be Christians but do not show fruits of repentance or evidence of being born again, this gospel tract I just heard of today may be of interest.

    http://www.proclaimingthegospel.org/site/cpage.asp?sec_id=180014816&cpage_id=180064909#!/~/product/category=636671&id=36248183

    “This tract asks the question: “Are you sure this will not happen to you?” [Jesus saying in Matthew 7:23 “And then will I profess unto them, I never knew you: depart from me, ye that work iniquity.”.] It will encourage people to test themselves to see if they have genuine faith. (2 Corinthians 13:5).”

    I haven’t seen the whole tract, but a small sample of a couple of the tracts they offer is available at the link.

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  50. My father had a lot of sayings that he was known for, such as “daylight in the swamp”. It was interesting to me to attend a live performance of King Lear and find that he had been quoting Shakespeare! okay, not that quote, but lots of others. 🙂

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  51. Kim, she smiled a lovely smile and spoke in a genuinely sweet voice, so I think I’m okay… 😉

    Janice, I’ve heard recordings by the ASO, and really enjoy them. Hearing them live would be better yet! And those pre-concert lectures sound very interesting. It’s nice that there are major orchestras that do that. I think it’s a very enriching experience.

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  52. 6 arrows, great license plate frame for me! 🙂

    And on the tract, interesting that true believers are the one who genuinely will wrestle with those questions about themselves. Others (whether ‘Christian’ in profession ONLY or those who don’t believe) can usually easily dismiss them.

    Had a peaceful afternoon reading the Bonhoeffer bio, which I hadn’t picked up in a week or more, and then napping but had some rather odd dreams. All that cold medicine, I suppose. I’m still coughing and now am ‘draining’ profusely, so I suppose we’re entering the final stage of this thing.

    Meanwhile, had a frantic text from a city hall source that a new port director was announced. Aaak. Big story for us. But when I texted my editor he said they already had it on the web site and were working to expand it. So I went back to sleep. 🙂

    And it still hurts so bad to cough. 😦 😦

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  53. Janice, you didn’t offend me. I was indeed asking about selling the book. But I was clarifying (1) selling wasn’t my original “purpose” in making the book and (2) I’ve seen a lot of self-published books that are clearly created by amateurs, and I don’t think this is in that category.

    I only found a few books on the site (of the ones I looked at) that had e-book versions, but they all were in the range of $7 each, which surprised me. One of them was selling her hardcover book for about $160, which was about 50% profit for her particular book, but she was willing to sell the e-book for $7. Huh? If you sell it for $20, the person gets it at 1/8 your hardcover price and you at least actually get some profit. Since books with text have the e-book at very little discount from the price of the book you hold in your hand, I can’t see that level of discrepancy. (Then again, the books that were selling for about $30 still had e-books around $7.) The bound book is nearly all profit for the publisher, not the writer/photographer, and the e-book is mostly profit for the person who created it. But still, if you give yourself a $30 profit on the bound book, why would you give a buyer the same content for only $5 if they buy the e-book? I was only putting in about a $3 profit for the print book (simply because the book is SO expensive it isn’t realistic to add much more), but this really seems like selling one’s work too cheaply. If I decide to sell it in the e-book version, I’ll probably go with about $10 . . . but I’m curious whether it would sell or whether I’d be wasting money to pay the $10 to get it put into that version.

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  54. Persimmon is a strange fruit. The green fruit looks appealing, but it turns your mouth outside out. The ripe fruit is usually on the ground and looks yukky. But it tasts good. I picked my persimmons off the ground, I didn’t trust the ones on the trees.
    I haven’t seen a persimmon tree in years.

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  55. Cheryl, that reminds me of one of those old math word problems I was always so bad at. 🙂 🙂 But I didn’t see the usual last line of “how fast was the train going?”

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  58. Here’s an interesting take on how his lifetime of ‘therapy’ (since he was 8 years old) may have helped feed the Santa Barbara shooter’s twisted thinking:

    http://reason.com/archives/2014/05/27/could-therapy-culture-help-explain-ellio

    ” … Many thinkers have attacked the therapy industry’s creation of a new and ravenous narcissism which demands constant flatter-feeding. In his classic 1979 book The Culture of Narcissism, the great Christopher Lasch said ‘the contemporary climate is therapeutic, not religious.’ He said therapy culture, the post-’60s obsession with self-reflection, had created a new ‘narcissistic personality’; it had given rise to individuals who ‘depend on others to validate [their] self-esteem” and who “cannot live without an admiring audience.’ The therapeutic individual views the world as a mirror, constantly expecting to see his own image in it, said Lasch, where the earlier, more robust individual saw the world as an ’empty wilderness to be shaped by his own design’.”

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  60. And this also is thought-provoking:

    http://www.breakpoint.org/tp-home/blog-archives/blog-archives/entry/4/25307

    “Elliot wanted the Good Life that has been officially sanctioned, marketed, and promoted by our culture. Think for a moment of all the TV shows which are centered around finding that perfect someone who will make the character/person feel good. All the songs which present being a desirable sexual partner as the most satisfying thing in life. All the films romanticizing or glorifying the thrill of the pursuit and attainment of love. All the institutions built around achieving this ideal. What happens when an entire culture tells you from birth that your worth as a human is largely dependent on your ability to attract and have sex with highly desirable people? . . .”

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  61. Breakpoint’s intro to the FB link above: The raging resentment that led a young man to kill six people and then commit suicide should tell us something: Our culture promotes a warped idea of “the Good Life” that can cause entitlement and narcissism.

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  62. oh, persimmons, they make the best cookies.
    Donna, wish I could bring you a care package. Get well, gal.
    Roscuro, love the idea of hardwood flooring. And the idea of getting a deal is even better. I think that the family room in my house with the worn out carpeting would be great with hardwood flooring and then an area rug.

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  63. Fort George is a nice 30 minute drive along the Niagara River from where I live. It’s in a very quaint little town called Niagara-On-The-Lake, which was at one point the capital of Ontario. We’ve been there often but only visited the fort once.

    The Niagara Frontier – area around Buffalo and Niagara Falls – has a rich War of 1812 history. I’m much more familiar with the US side, at Fort Niagara. They sometimes hold joint events with Fort George.

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