Foney Fridays: Bakin’ Snits
Kids' Bigger Buns Leading to Baked Goods Ban
CALIFORNIA, US - The State of California has mandated that bake sales no longer be allowed in schools. The new ruling results from new state nutrition guidelines that strictly limit the fat, sugar and total calories of any food sold on campus during school days - even before and after school.
Of course, not everyone is happy about this turn of events. "You can have my cupcakes when you pry them from my cold, dead hands," said Sue E. Trolls, founder of the National Baked Goods Association. The NBGA plans to appeal to the State Supreme Court.
Of course, banning bake sales and adding these new guidelines may allow childhood obesity rates to be controlled without recourse to such trivial matters as exercise.
Source: O.Handwasher
BTW, I didn't make this up. Well, okay, I took the factual ball and ran with it.
Theology Thursday: Prophetable Passages
I was going to do a post about something in Jude, but I realized the passage I had in mind is just totally not about what I thought it was. This is part of the problem of just thinking about what I've read through the week (you might even say meditating, but I'm not sure I'd say that), but not writing down anything but "something in Jude" in my placeholder post.
So how about this? I've been reading through the Prophets for several months, so how's about I share a few favorite passages, and maybe slip in a trivia question or two?
I'm going to skip Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel and focus on some of the others.
I love that in the middle of Lamentations, we get this passage:
his mercies never come to an end;
23 they are new every morning;
great is your faithfulness.
And now my favorite verse in Daniel:
Okay, so I don't have the opportunity to defile myself with royal delicacies or wine, but every man has ample opportunity to defile himself in one way or another. Like Daniel, I want to be a man who resolves not to do it.
Trivia: Daniel is not included in among the Prophets in the Hebrew Bible. Nor is he included in the Book of Twelve (what we'd call the Minor Prophets). Instead, he's in the group called The Writings (along with Psalms and Proverbs as well as Esther and Ezra/Nehemiah). The books of Samuel and Kings are included in the Prophets, however. I guess Elijah and Elisha carried the day.
Trivia Question: What were Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego's Hebrew names? (answer to be revealed in comments; beat me to it if you can - and no cheating!)
I love this passage in Hosea. It speaks of how God feels about Israel's refusal to repent and avoid judgment:
and I summoned my son out of Egypt.
2 But the more I summoned them,
the farther they departed from me.
They sacrificed to the Baal idols
and burned incense to images.
3 Yet it was I who led Ephraim,
I took them by the arm;
but they did not acknowledge
that I had healed them.
4 I led them with leather cords,
with leather ropes;
I lifted the yoke from their neck,
and gently fed them.
5 They will return to Egypt!
Assyria will rule over them
because they refuse to repent!
And again in Joel, we see God's willingness to forgive (but requires genuine heart-rending instead of garment-tearing):
“return to me with all your heart –
with fasting, weeping, and mourning.
Tear your hearts,
not just your garments!”
13 Return to the Lord your God,
for he is merciful and compassionate,
slow to anger and boundless in loyal love – often relenting from calamitous punishment.
The more I read the Old Testament, the more of these beautiful passages I find. Almost as if God planned it that way...and I'm thankful for that.
Happy Thanksgiving!
Too Funny Tuesdays: Flight of the Turkey
Seeing that it's close to Thanksgiving and all, I figured I should go with a Turkey-themed Funny. Turns out Jennie-O had just the recipe for me.
(video embedded)
MMM: Ender in Exile, Ambidextrous Ineptitude, 300
Mini-book-review! I had some award gift cards (Amazon) from work, so I decided to pre-order Ender in Exile, the new direct sequel to Ender's Game, which is one of my favorite books. It wasn't strictly necessary, but some of the blanks it fills in are nice to have. Mr. Card even managed to work in some of his short fiction in Ender's Universe into the book. Which leads to my main gripe with the book.
Why, exactly was "A Young Man With Prospects" included? For the record, I'd already read the story in the book-compilation of the Intergalactic Medicine Show. In that story, he introduces a mother and daughter who figure prominently in Ender in Exile, so I understand why he'd want to include it. Still, it seemed a bit much to me. The story was self-contained and didn't really work as a chapter in a larger work. Besides, it would've been cool to find the characters in the new novel and remember them from my previous reading. I'd have even wanted to go back and read the story again. Or, if I hadn't read it, it would've been a delightful surprise when I finally did.
Bottom line, the rest of the book introduced and fleshed out the characters such that it was unnecessary to introduce them the way they were introduced.
Beyond that, I loved the book. It nicely ties in the Shadow series with the Speaker series, which is awesome. I understand that, due to a couple of inconsistencies between the "original" works and Exile, OSC is going to issue a new version of Ender's Game with the inconsistencies corrected. Which means I'll need to buy a new copy. Bummer (hopefully he releases it in hardcover!).
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One of the downsides to being randomly ambidextrous is the discovery of ambidextrous ineptitude. In my case, this discovery went this way: I was installing some Gorilla Racks in my garage (you know, line up the little rivets and pound the cross braces in with a rubber mallet), when I managed to pound the webbing of my left thumb and forefinger into submission. It hurt quite a bit, but the pain faded quickly and then I found it hilarious. Not so hilarious was when, several frustrated minutes later, I decided I needed to knock out the shelf supports I had just spent several minutes cursing and swearing attempting to install. So, I swung my rubber mallet upward in a gentle murderous arc, but managed to miss the metal with the rubber end of the mallet. Instead, I sandwiched my right thumb between the handle of the mallet and the metal of the shelf brace.
Like I said, I didn't find that one hilarious. In fact, it woke me up at 2am, throbbing. I had to do the heat-up-a-needle-and-poke-it-through-my-thumbnail thing to relieve the pressure. And that's just plain fun!
Even after evacuating the pressure, my thumb still looks suitably messed up, so at least I can show it off at work (and make Eric queasy, which is awesome).
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With my last snarky Foney Fridays post, I'm now at 300 posts. It's really somewhat arbitrary, given that for a good long while, I had a Livejournal for American Idol recaps and snarky satire, and my heasley.net bBlog blog for Bible Blogs (that's a cluster of the word "blog"!). When I migrated everything over to my new heasley.net WordPress blog, I deleted some of the LJ stuff, otherwise I'd have passed 300 some time ago. (I just noticed I've posted 136 times since I switched to the WordPress interface in April. Whoa.)
Still, 300 is cool.
And now, of course, I'm at 301 and I lost the whole cool round number thing...
Foney Fridays: Time’s for wastin’
Dear Employees,
I've been hearing a bit of griping about my mandatory monthly lunchtime departmental meetings. I'd just like to give some perspective on the whole thing.
Now, I recognize that in lieu of the meeting, I could send out a short email to all concerned. But you have to realize there are larger issues here. Where else would we get a forum for the sycophants to ask meaningless, babbling questions? As a manager, my main job is to justify my own existence. Those questions are a big part of that.
And yes, I could attempt to schedule the meeting at an alternate time, but then how would you ever know how much more important my time is than yours? Should I really be expected to alter my schedule just to accommodate you people? Why should I require you to spend five minutes reading an email when I can take up a full hour of your time in person?
I hope this helps. Don't feel you're missing out on work here. In fact, you're just getting a little glimpse of the real work I do each and every day, for which the company pays me more than it pays you.
All employees are valuable in their own way. Some of us are just more valuable.
Regards,
Hugh Irkfermeigh, one of your boss's bosses
Theology Thursday Lite: Syllogical
In college, two of my favorite classes were Philosophy and Ethics. In one of them (I can't recall which, and it was the same prof), we learned about Logic. One of the familiar devices of logic is the syllogism. A syllogism is a construction that draws a conclusion based on two premises. For instance:
- All spiders have eight legs.
- Tarantulas are spiders.
- Therefore, Tarantulas have eight legs.
Go figure that I (arachnophobe that I am) would use a spider example.
Why did I even bring this up? Because of a common use of a passage from 1 John in defense of a ridiculous syllogism. First, the passage:
And now, the bizarre syllogism (variously attributed to teachers and professors, or just lazy atheists):
- God is love.
- I love you.
- Therefore, I am God.
If you ever encounter this kind of verbal diarrhea, try this on them.
- Dogs are mammals.
- You are a mammal.
- Therefore, you are a dog.
No, my logic doesn't follow, any more than the fictional professor's does. For his logic to follow, the second premise would have to be "I am love" (and even then, how is love quantified?). It goes to show that you can still be pretty stupid regardless of your education (maybe I should've used "irregardless" for irony).
In any case, John leaves himself open to this kind of reductionism in several places, variously describing God as "love," "light," and "spirit." What if we took the last one and tried to misuse it?
1. God is spirit.
2. Satan is spirit.
3. Therefore, Satan is God.
Yeah (again, doesn't really follow). Might it be that John wasn't trying to reduce what God is, but rather to explain him in grand terms? We know something of love, but John tells us that what we experience is only a reflection of True Love. We understand something of light, but our light is only a reflection of his True Light.
Of course, we can't expect those who don't respect Scripture to deal with it honestly.
In closing, I billed this as Theology Thursday Lite. Was it Lite, or is my Lite-meter way off?
Too Funny Tuesdays: Turning the Other Cheek
This one takes me back a bit. We took quite a few road trips in Texas during college, and Ray Stevens was our constant companion. So, I give you The Streak!!!
At LeTourneau, we married students put on a lip sync of The Streak. Good stuff.
MMM: Booktracking, 15 years
This is the time of the year where I generally stop putting in Hold Requests for new books at the library. Why? Because there are usually several books I've started but not finished that I try to double-back and finish before the end of the year. I've got one that's been dangling for two years or so, and I think it'll continue to dangle into next year.
In any case, I feel like I should backtrack a bit...I call it Booktracking. At least now I do, because I so enjoy making up new words. So I'm going to attempt to finish the five or six books I've started but not finished this year.
And then I had to go and by the new Ender book, plus three others (The Impossible Faith, The Nature of the Atonement: Four Views, and Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue. Oh well...maybe I'll be able to resist them until next year. Yeah.
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My sister and brother-in-law and their kids are here. And I just had a birthday (I'm now over 21 again). This was the first time since 1993 I'd had a family member around on my birthday. Yeah. 15 years. Now if they'd only move down, we wouldn't have this problem!
Foney Fridays: Calling in Blind; I Can’t See Coming in Today
EMPLOYEE COMMUNICATIONS
Dear Employee,
At Corporate, we're concerned that many employees are taking advantage of the company's lax policies regarding personal time off (PTO). It seems that at the merest hint of a bug "going around," half the office is empty. To that end, we've decided to rename PTO to PAOFITO, which translates to "Pretending and/or Feeling Ill Time Off." We feel this better captures the spirit of what you people are doing.
Please remember to put a PAOFITO appointment on your Outlook calendar when you're pretending to be and/or feeling ill. Planning ahead makes for easier coverage of your critical tasks. Don't worry, the company will go on just fine without you.
As always, employees are encouraged to maintain their health and take as few sick days as possible. Of course, employees who do manage to stay well will not be compensated in any way. But the company thanks them.
Source: O.Handwasher
Theology Thursday: Ezekiel’s Temple
One of the most formidable and intimidating features of the Old Testament is the mind-numbing detail it gives about stuff that's either planned to be built or actually being built. For reference, read the description of the Tabernacle design and construction in Exodus, or the design and construction of the Temple in 1 Kings. I've always felt that the narratives would have been well served with a little engineer-speak in the construction part. It would simply have read (in Exodus), "And Bezalel and Oholiab built the tabernacle to spec."
I know it's possible to get something out of these narratives, but at this point I'm still coming up empty. So, when I read Ezekiel 40-48, it's tempting to just assume no inspiration will arise during my reading. Thus far, that assumption has not proved to be incorrect.
So why would I do a post about Ezekiel's vision of a future Temple, detailed and dull as it is? Well, because it gives rise to some interesting interpretations.
See, Ezekiel has a very detailed walk-through of this temple, describing it in excruciatingly fine detail. And then? Well, nothing, really. If you look at the details of this temple, it's not hard to determine (with a little research) that it was never built.
Thus, some assume the Ezekiel was predicting a New Temple to Be Built in the End Times!!!!!!!! (fanfare)
I'm sure all my readers will be shocked to learn that I don't hold to the Future Third Temple idea. Why? Well, there are several reasons:
- Ezekiel wrote this during the Babylonian Captivity. What was the state of Solomon's Temple at this time? Destroyed. In other words, there was no Temple. So Ezekiel was shown a design for a new one.
- Ezekiel was instructed to only show the plans to the Israelites if they met certain pre-conditions (more on that in a bit).
- Upon their return to Jerusalem, the exiles did, in fact, build a Temple. More properly, they rebuilt Solomon's Temple.
In other words, if they had the plans for the Temple, why didn't they build it when they returned from Exile? Might the answer be that they didn't meet the conditions for getting those plans? And what were the conditions?
Interesting, isn't it? God instructs Ezekiel to describe the Temple to the people and observe their response. If we can assume Ezekiel obeyed God and described it to them, can't we also assume that if they met the conditions, they would totally have built the Temple that God personally designed for them?
Now, it's possible that the fact that we have written copies of Ezekiel indicates the people did get the plans, but it still leaves open the question (doesn't beg the question, see here) of why they didn't use it.
Maybe the Temple will be rebuilt in the End Times. In fact, I imagine it'll happen eventually, because there are many people who are looking for it to happen and actively trying to make it happen. I just don't think it's predicted, any more than the establishment of Modern Israel in 1948 was. But that's a whole other can of worms...
Yes, I do harp on End Times stuff quite a bit, and I don't think End Times (eschatology) is really a very important subject. However, interpreting the Bible correctly is a concern of mine, and I'm worried that many simply take what they get from the pulpit (or Seminary) and never even know there are other ways of interpreting some passages. And that's a shame.
I'm not saying my interpretations are all correct (I'm certain I'm between 1 and 100% wrong). It's just that I hold many positions different from those I held when I was younger. I would never have changed those positions unless I heard (or read) something that I had to wrestle with. I'm just paying it forward. So, wrestle with this and lob me a comment if you've got anything to add.