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Our Daily Thread 7-10-14

Good Morning!

Today’s header photo is from Jo.

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On this day in 1776 the statue of King George III was pulled down in New York City.

In 778, in support of the American Revolution, Louis XVI declared war on England. 

In 1866 Edison P. Clark patented his indelible pencil. 

In 1929 the U.S. government began issuing paper money in the small size. 

In 1949 the first practical rectangular television was presented. The picture tube measured 12 by 16 and sold for $12. 

And in 1962 Fred Baldasare swam the English Channel underwater. It was 42 miles and took 18 hours. 

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Quote of the Day

“It is better that ten guilty escape than one innocent suffer.”

William Blackstone

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Today is Carl Orff’s birthday. From André Rieu

And it’s Arlo Guthrie’s too.

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Anyone have a QoD?

53 thoughts on “Our Daily Thread 7-10-14”

  2. Good morning, Chas.
    Good evening, Jo. What a darling bird!

    Chas, our tire is flat, flat, flat. Just glad it happened at the office. It was late so we drove hubby’s car home. We don’t have fancy tires that don’t go flat. We are stuck on the old ways of doing life.
    These tires are newish, too. Must have a nail in it.

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  3. Janice, that is strange. Most modern tires will seal around a nail. Likely something else happened to your tire. Unless it was slowly deflating and you hadn’t noticed it.
    But I still insist on a real spare. Not those little substitute tires some cars have now.

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  4. I’ll bet none of you remember the good 😦 ol’ days when tired did go flat. And you had an inner tube and a repair kit. You patched the tube and pumped up the tire. I never did that on a car. But I did do it on my bike.
    I don’t remember when self sealing tires came in, but it was after I started driving. They were imperfect at first, but you lost pressure slowly and prevented emergencies. I usually changed tires and had the tire fixed at a station.
    I have changed many-a-tire in my life, but not in the last 25 or so years.

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  5. The best improvement in the driving experience came when they put oil filters on cars. My fifty Chevy didn’t have an oil filter and I was supposed to change oil every 1000 miles. I didn’t, but I was supposed to.

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  6. Thanks, Aj. This is the little guy that sits on the wire outside my house every afternoon. I finally snuck outside quietly and captured his picture. I love his colors and believe he is a kingfisher.

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  8. Good Morning….I love your little kingfisher Jo! What a sweet blessing to wake up to see that little guy out your window.
    I remember the gas stations having a big barrel of water for the purpose of finding the hole in the inner tube of a tire and I watched my Dad fix tires many times. 🙂

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  9. Yes, Chas, it does seem strange. I drove to the office, late in the day, then picked up husband and we drove to Dollar General to get cards for son, then to P. O. and then to Chick-fil-A to get some dinner food at the drive thru. Car drove fine. No sign of a flat. Then in leaving the parking lot after 9:00 p.m. we saw the indicator light for tires. Husband said it would be too dark to tell if a tire was low on air. I said we could at least see if we had a flat. We did, and it was.

    Husband wanted me to drive back to office to leave car there, just through the parking lot which is about 10 spaces and around the corner 2 more spaces. Tire is totally flat and I may have damaged the rim. I have called for roadside service. Husband was going to change to the spare, but I think the lugs would not come off easily because of how the car is sitting on the hub. Husband was going to change the tire last night but it was late and I did not want to hang out in the parking lot dealing with it. We got home around 10:00 last night.

    I have called for roadside service. Think the guy has arrived now.

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  10. Guy has not arrived yet. I guess it seems a bit odd to me because as I was leaving the house yesterday there was an AAA truck sitting on the street directly across from our home. The guy was just sitting in the truck. I thought maybe the neighbors had a dead battery or something an the guy in the truck was doing paperwork. I have never seen one of those trucks on our street before. Probably just coincidental. We don’t use AAA service.

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  11. Carl Orff wrote the music for Carmina Burana, but the words are from an medieval manuscript. The manuscript is a collection of songs, written by goliards, as the university clerical students of medieval Europe were called. The songs are all about sex, drinking, gambling and irreverent satire on the church – it seems that university students haven’t changed in several hundred years.

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  12. Very nice roadside service guy. Retired from school system and going into nonprofit ministry. Felt like a divine appointment 🙂 . Making lemonade out of a lemon of a flat tire. May even generate some new business for our office. God is good when it involves flat tires.

    It is only some tires that are self sealing around a nail according to the road service guy. We have a nail in the tire (without the self sealing type tire). No permanent damage to the rim except for a little scratching. That happened from the pothole in our parking lot.

    A local news channel in Atlanta has a famous helper named Pothole Harry. He gets action from local transportation depts. on potholes that have been otherwise neglected when reported. Too bad this is private property, and I can’t call on Pothole Harry to take care of our neglected pothole. We are also blessed with health dept. grade reports on local food establishments on the news. Does your news offer any specially highlighted local reports such as these? QoftheDay?

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  13. Yep, I believe that is some sort of kingfisher. I’ve never managed to photograph a kingfisher, and have only seen them three times, but they are lovely birds. (This morning I got a photo of a young bluebird! That was a fun catch.)

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  14. Last time I bought tires I bought ‘insurance’ on them (normally I’d skip that, not sure why I decided to pay extra for it). Worked out well, though, as I got a nail in the side (which can’t be fixed) and they replaced it with a new tire for free. Although then I had to buy ‘insurance’ on the new tire, too. 🙄 But these tires have now lasted me quite a while, I’ve been pretty good about getting them rotated regularly.

    And the Jeep has a tire indicator inside that lets you know when one of them is a bit low. Nice feature.

    I wouldn’t be without AAA, they’re worth the annual price in gold — and then some.

    Sadly we’ve had a couple ocean drowning deaths here lately, there’s an area off the rocky cliffs where there are caves and jetties and the water churns through there with dangerous rip tides. For some reason it’s become a popular place for teens to go this summer (thanks to social media), some of them go to do cannonball jumps into the roiling water from the rocks above. One person died over the weekend (and there were helicopter rescues of several others) and another boy presumably died yesterday, they still hadn’t found his body after he’d been missing for several hours in the water.

    One bystander bravely dove in several days ago to save an unconscious teen who had become caught in the tides surging in and out.

    Got to respect the ocean. I never remember swimming in any area that dangerous, but I did get stuck in some riptides out beyond the waves at the beach one day when I was a teenager and it is scary. The ocean is so powerful; beautiful, but potentially so dangerous.

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  15. I grew up on those same beaches, but never out in that area, and got caught fairly often in the rip tide.

    My mother, the PE teacher, taught us to swim with them and I’ve lived to tell the tale. Those lessons, though, are handy in life. Not that I’ve ever been in quicksand, yet, but knowing the key is to float on the sand is reassuring.

    We learned about body surfing and not to ever turn your back on the ocean or trust the sea.

    The ancient Jews also didn’t trust the sea and viewed it as chaos–always moving, always changing.

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  16. Love the drama of Carminative Burana, just never really heard or understood the words before, Roscuro! I always think of his classic Orff instruments–too much time with the junior choir!

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  18. Yep, swim with them and sideways (which goes against our instinct to swim straight toward shore).

    This is the area (during calmer seas) that’s causing so much danger lately:

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  21. I’ve learned the best way to deal with riptides…

    DON”T GO IN THE WATER!!!!!!!

    Problem solved. 🙂

    And as if riptides aren’t bad enough, haven’t you people ever seen Jaws? 😯

    Going in the ocean, minus a large boat or submarine, breaks one of AJ’s Rules To Live By, which is always be at the top of the food chain, and avoid going places where you are not, unless you are well armed and hunting/fishing for something.

    Again, sharks and stuff can’t eat you if you……

    DON”T GO IN THE WATER!!!!!!!

    Just get a pool. If you need to surf, they have water parks for that. 🙂

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  24. Donna,

    It’s all fun and games, ’til someone gets hurt. Then it’s a YouTube sensation with 6 million views.

    People are just stupid sometimes, and they rarely ever think of the people who they put in danger having to come save them when their stupidity goes wrong.

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  26. Donna, that actually looks like great fun . . . but count me in the “not a risk-taker” camp. I’ve never skied or participated in any of those dangerous sports, so you wouldn’t catch me jumping off such a cliff unless I knew that it was in near perfect safety. (The pool down the street from my childhood home had a high dive, and I jumped off it several times and felt very brave for doing so, but walking to the edge was always frightening. I’m a bit afraid of heights, enough that it took every bit of courage I had, but limited enough that I could force myself to do it for the exhilaration of the actual jump.)

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  27. Yeah, anytime you have rocks and waves … I wouldn’t have ever done something like that, even as a teen. Our cop reporter is out at the cove now with the family of the boy who vanished there yesterday, not sure if they’ve found him yet or not. 😦 😦 He was 19 years old.

    And the great white population has recently gone up in our area, moms now come here frequently to give birth to their baby sharks, although the adults tend not to stay near our beaches. Even so, that 5th of July swimmer who got bit by even a 7-10- foot juvenile shark (causing the beach to be closed for several hours) had some pretty nasty bite marks.

    AJ’s probably right about never being in a situation where you’re at the bottom of the food chain.

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  28. 30 rescues, 2 deaths in three days. 😦

    Terry Yamamoto of the Los Angeles County Fire Department ‘s Lifeguard Section said social media and the cove’s setting made it irresistible to young swimmers.

    “They walk down this trail and they see kids jumping off the rocks and say, ‘This is great fun, I’m going to do that,’ “ Yamamoto said in an interview with KCAL 9.

    http://www.dailybreeze.com/general-news/20140710/rancho-palos-verdes-search-continues-today-for-swimmer-19-missing-near-abalone-cove

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  30. Sadly a forty year old father recently drowned at the same beach my daughter goes to with her family. It is actually on a wide river. I never heard what exactly happened. The water has been very high and fast this summer. It has rained almost everyday. So many dangers around us. We just don’t think about most of them or we would go crazy.

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  31. AJ, I sent you a baby bluebird (or a teenage bluebird anyway, not yet old enough to shave). Did I send you heron photo(s) when I sent you the peacock?

    Nancy, links to my bird books sent.

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  32. Yes Cheryl, I got them.

    And I must say, you sent me some excellent pics. I’ll get some up on Saturday. 🙂

    I believe you did, but it might be mixed in with mine (I save them by name alphabetically), I’ll check.

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  33. If anyone is interested in the the literacy program that I co-administrate in The Gambia here is a video that was filmed right after I left. So I’m not in it; my co-worker Deb is and some of my employees.

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  34. Interesting Breakpoint post today (“is Homemaking the Church’s New Idol?”):

    “Are we inadvertently turning homemaking into one of the Church’s idols? After all, our society is rife with challenges and hurdles presented by changes in the traditional family, not to mention by moral vagrancy, immodesty, violence, separation, and, I would argue, a growing lack for the sanctity of monogamy. Divorce rates are higher than ever and the sanctity of marriage seems plagued by many forces. It seems natural that we would glorify the traditional home and hearth. …

    “But at what point do we set it above the plan God may have for our young women? And are we too busy promoting the model of constructive happy homemaker that we are failing to prepare women for the disappointments that may arise should that eventual home and husband evade their path? … ”

    http://www.breakpoint.org/features-columns/articles/entry/12/25646

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  36. Saw the first couple minutes, looks good — a little too long for me at work, but will click in on it later.

    Meanwhile, here’s the official, just-released trailer for “Unbroken”:

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  37. Wonderful links today!
    Scary cliff jumping!
    Valuable life skills being taught through ABWE in The Gambia (thanks Ajisuuan)
    So true on the Breakpoint article. I see some of that difference within my own church family in the adult female population. Some seem to flounder around never quite living up to potential because the domestic dreams did not meet expectations. This happens with married and unmarried women, myself included.

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  38. I just finished reading “Unbroken.” It would have been “too much” if I hadn’t known the end of the story, that he found peace through Christ. (Now, his conversion story is told briefly, without anything at all about his life as a Christian other than that his nightmares ceased and so forth. I’m not sure the gospel itself, including Christ’s name, is even mentioned, though I could be wrong.) Powerful, scary story, about the perseverance of one man (several, actually) and the evil of many men. War really is an ugly thing.

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  39. Thanks, AJ, now I can see the photo. Unfortunately, now I can’t remember who anyone is. I recognize Kim and that’s all I know. I guess I should go back and look at the other thread in which everyone was identified.

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  41. On loving to do crazy, scary, dangerous things.

    I don’t do any of the scary sports, either, but I understand a little better what it is that some people like about that kind of thing since having a son who lives for that kind of thrill. It’s not that people who do those things don’t have fear, and it’s not that they do it in spite of the fear. It’s the fear, and the rush of adrenaline that goes with it, that they crave. They do it because of the fear. At least that’s how it works for my son, and I suspect for lots of others.

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  42. It will be interesting to see how the conversion is handled in the film; I was told a while back that it was posing a bit of a dilemma for the director who had a goal of having the film be appealing young people … but I’m guessing Louie & family insisted it not be glossed over. Still, it is a big-screen production with all the bells and whistles, so we’ll have to wait and see.

    Spoke with one of his childhood friends today, apparently the funeral is invitation only at Hollywood Presbyterian (Louie’s home church of many years) and it’s all very top-secret as the gathering will include a number of Hollywood types. .

    But our local community is hoping to have a public gathering at some point soon as this is where he grew up (his family home is still here).

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  43. michelle, I don’t think they filmed anything on location in Torrance per se which I thought was odd. But the early scenes are probably fairly brief.

    I mean, how in the world do you fit that entire, remarkable story into a movie??

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  44. But the filmmakers did connect with the local historical society in researching the area’s styles, etc. from the 1930s before filming began.

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  45. Michelle (Anon.) – Most people can’t understand Carmina Burana. Even if you studied Latin in high school, the manuscript is written in the poor Latin of the Middle Ages, mixed with the Lingua Franca of Europe. Scholarly writing it is not.

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  46. I will have to plan a date with my daughters to see Unbroken in Dec or Jan. when I am home
    A rainy day here, so I will wait an hour for it to pass.

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  47. Oh, it was so good to see all the familiar faces and places again, Aji suun, and to hear Wolof again. I showed it to my parents and my mother said she felt like she had been there.

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  48. The Breakpoint article certainly resonated with me, Donna. I have come out of a homeschooling program that discouraged women working outside the home, insinuating that such women were akin to the Proverbs 7 harlot (“She is loud and stubborn and her feet abide not at home”); at the same time, young women were encouraged to commit not to marry for seven years, in order to serve God as stated in I Corinthians 7. Talk about mixed messages. I broke out of that mindset and was the first of my siblings to attend a post-secondary institution. Even if a woman does end up getting married, the skills she learns in pursuing training for a trade or profession will be useful. My mother became a teacher and taught public school for ten years before she retired to raise a family and teach her own children at home. As one of the teachers in that video Aji suun linked states, “If you teach the women, you teach the nation.”

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  49. I tend to think homemaking skills are undervalued, not overvalued, among most today. the vast majority of women under 30 whom I know have virtually no skills in that area. They can run a microwave and that is just about it. I think we need to somehow emphasize that even if you stay single for many years, or always, it still is helpful to know how to cook, do basic cleaning and basic mending, and host guests. Not that I’m an expert in any of that; I’m really not. But I think they are lost arts.

    But I think that far from marriage being overvalued within the church, it is “taken for granted” and not really encouraged. I really think that young men should receive more encouragement in this area. Drifting through your twenties with no direction isn’t a good life plan. And there are so many “marriageable” young women who will never marry simply because there aren’t enough marriage-minded young men.

    ATI and all of those groups do not have the right answer. But I don’t think it’s the right answer, either, to respond as though women are probably going to be single and just ignore the men who are still acting like boys. (Even the married men in their late twenties and early thirties are often still thinking and acting like boys. By the time you have a wife and a couple of children, you really shouldn’t be making job decisions based on what sounds the most “cool.”)

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  52. Sometimes I suppose it’s hard for Christian communities to find the balance. I can understand the reaction to the feminist push of several decades, but I’m not sure the answer is to return to calico dresses. It’s not an easy age for Christian women to navigate.

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