Lift Up Your Hearts!

I don't deny that the world might end today; it's going to end sometime.  I knew one guy who would occasionally look up at an impressive looking sky and say, "That would be a good cloud for the Lord to return on!"  But he knew better than to predict a specific day.  What floors me is the number of people who scorn those who have listened to other "end of the world" predictions in the past, yet seriously think it might end today.  Oh, the power of rumor in the Internet Age!  Children have been calling NASA to ask the best way to euthanize their pets so they don't have to suffer through the end!  Where are these kids' parents, and what Kool-Aid have they been feeding their children?

Figuring the best way to counter nonsense is often to ignore it, that's what I'd planned to do, until my nephew came up with the best take on the situation, which he posted yesterday:

The end of the world is tomorrow.  I got my drivers permit today.  Does anyone else see a connection here?

I've written about Biscoff Spread, aka Speculoos à Tartiner before.  Thanks to a tip from my sister-in-law, yesterday I made Biscoff fudge.  I tried the recipe from this site almost verbatim the first time, using the creamy version of the spread and substituting butter for margarine.  The second time I tried the crunchy, and used half the vanilla called for.  Both results were very good, but I prefer the smooth Speculoos and the smaller amount of vanilla.  I'd love to research other fudge recipes to use as a base, but that's a future project.  The recipe from the bakerella.com site, with my alterations, follows:

Biscoff Fudge

1 1/2 cups sugar
6 Tablespoons butter
1/3 cup evaporated milk
1/4 tsp vanilla (or 1/8 tsp Penzey's double-strength vanilla, which is what I used)
1/2 cup Biscoff spread (creamy or crunchy)
3.5 oz. or half a jar of Marshmallow Creme

1. Combine sugar, butter, and evaporated milk in a medium pot.
2. Bring to full rolling boil, stirring constantly.
3. Reduce heat to medium and continue boiling for 4 minutes, stirring constantly to prevent scorching.  (Actually, with my stove I started at Medium and came to a full rolling boil from there.)
4. Remove from heat and stir in Biscoff spread until melted.
5. Add marshmallow creme and vanilla. Use a mixer to beat in the pot until well blended.
6. Pour into greased 8 X 8 pan.
7. Let cool and cut into small squares.

This makes a delicious fudge.  It's a bit drier than I prefer (not as smooth and creamy as most fudges), but that might be solved with some tweaking of the cooking time.  It's also very sweet, so make the pieces quite small when you cut it.

Last year, my Christmas Eve post included the following comment.  It seems appropriate to offer a reprise today.

Nine Christmases ago, while the world was singing blithely of joyous birth, we were mourning the death of our first grandchild, whose last breath came but two days after his first.  The haunting Coventry Carol spoke to me then as none other.  This reminder that the First Christmas was not a facile Peace on Earth and Joy to the World, and that the first Christian martyrs were Jewish children, is for all who mourn this Christmas, especially those who have suffered the loss of a child.

I've set my alarm to remind me to pay attention at 12:12:12 today; otherwise it's sure to slide past unnoticed.  I'm sure if I'd check Facebook someone would remind me, but....

Porter says this BBC story is a good summary of what he saw when visiting the Boeing plant on his visit to Seattle.  Enjoy!  Pretty WOW, I think.

Sorry about the extraneous "-->".  It's in the BBC's code, and I'm not taking the time to mess with it. Sorry, too, about the ad at the beginning; that also is theirs  If you happen to get the Air New Zealand one, though, it's pretty cool itself.

While I'm gathering mental energy for a response to Stephan's thought-provoking comment below, here's an easy post for your holiday enjoyment.  You don't have to know much music theory to enjoy it, but some basic knowledge helps.  (H/T Ruth from the WWMB!)

That does it; I'm inspired:  Joseph's next PowerPoint collection will include intervals.

The Holiday Season.

It's a descriptive name, covering an increasingly wide expanse of holidays that began simply as Christmas and now includes all possible holidays of any faith (religious or secular) from Hallowe'en to New Year's Day—as long as they can be contorted to include a ritual of spending lots of money.

But it's an awkward moniker, and offensive to Christians, who are understandably miffed at having the Christmas (literally, "Christ's mass") season (technically, December 25 - January 5, unless you're Orthodox) steamrollered by beliefs, attitudes, and practices that are decidedly un-Christian in nature.  Thus the season of "peace on earth, goodwill towards men" and "tidings of comfort and joy"—taken completely out of context, of course—is also beset with the annual (and impossible) admonition to "keep Christ in (secular) Christmas," along with fighting over whether "Happy Holidays" is an acceptable greeting, and where and how Nativity scenes may be displayed.

Therefore I'm going to put forth a modest proposal:

• That Christians should freely accept that we are strangers in a strange land, and following God's instructions to the Jewish exiles in Babylon, "seek the peace and prosperity" of our country without expecting lip service to our faith from those who don't even remember, let alone follow it.  If I choose not to patronize an institution, it will be for a better reason than that an over-worked sales clerk wished me "Happy Holidays."
• That the secular world should freely acknowledge that Christmas belongs to Christians, and choose a name for the Holiday Season that more accurately reflects the meaning, purpose, and deity of this time of year in a decidedly secular and materialistic society.^*  Acknowledging both the Ancient Roman holiday of mid-to-late December, the name of which is now synonymous with excess, self-indulgence, and licentiousness, and the patron-demon of hyper-consumption, I propose that this new American holidy be called,

Mammonalia

I know better than to think that I'm the first to coin this word, but a Google search pulls up surprisingly few references, so I can safely say, you read it here first.

For Heather, Janet, and all who are great mothers but sometimes feel intimidated by how far they are from meeting their own standards.  Today's Family Circus says it all.

Just for fun, check out these video clips from the Duggar family's visit to Japan.  These are from YouTube, so hopefully they won't be blocked for the only two regular readers who are likely to understand them.  Perhapse Joseph might catch some numbers.  :)  It would be great katakana/hiragana practice if things didn't move so fast.  Nonetheless, they're fun to watch even if you don't understand Japanese.

The interview.

And newspapers wonder why subscription rates are down!  The news is bad enough without adding insult to injury.

The Orlando Sentinel had the nerve to run Grandpa, Meet Facebook, an article by Tribune author Jenniffer Weigel.  (The link is not to the Sentinel because they've adopted the annoying habit of charging for online story access.)

The author begins by telling us that it's "scary" that her mother wants to learn to use Facebook.  Then she quotes Mary Madden, from the Pew Internet Center.

"This is a pretty unique moment in time where grandkids and grandparents can be interacting at the same time, and more seniors are getting a taste of this and seeing the benefits," Madden said.

Whatever this generation may be good at, it's not history.  For most of human time grandkids and grandparents have been interacting just fine; it's recent times that have separated them.

Here's another insult:

But the learning curve for the older crowd to master a site like Facebook can be steep, according to Abby Stokes, author of the book "Is This Thing On? A Computer Handbook for Late Bloomers, Technophobes and the Kicking & Screaming" (Workman).

"I refer to anybody over the age of 40 as a digital immigrant," Stokes said. "You can learn anything but you learn it at a slower pace."

Excuse me?  We were busy inventing the Digital Age before you were born, you young whippersnapper!  It's not technology that keeps me from mastering smart phones and iPad-equivalents.  It's money, plain and simple.  We were brought up to be more careful with our money than to pour it into the latest electronic gadgets.^*  Give me one of those devices (and a subscription, which is the worst of the cost) and I'll gladly take on the supposed challenge.

I don't read a lot of post-election analysis any more than I paid attention to most of the pre-election rhetoric.  But every once in a while a gem comes my way, and when that happens I want to share it.

Today's hopeful commentary comes from a Canadian professor, John Stackhouse.  The whole post is short, but here's the heart of it.

[I]n his article “Why I Am Not a Pacifist” (collected in “The Weight of Glory” and Other Essays), [C. S.] Lewis says some hopeful words about pretty large matters to encourage us in the wake of the American election, with its global implications, and in anticipation of…well, the rest of today, and every day following:

I think the best results are obtained by people who work quietly away at limited objectives, such as the abolition of the slave trade, or prison reform, or factory acts, or tuberculosis [Lewis is not thinking small, here!], not by those who think they can achieve universal justice, or health, or peace. I think the art of life consists in tackling each immediate evil as well as we can. To avert or postpone one particular war by wise policy, or to render one particular campaign shorter by strength and skill or less terrible by mercy to the conquered and the civilians is more useful than all the proposals for universal peace that have ever been made; just as the dentist who can stop one toothache has deserved better of humanity than all the men who think they have some scheme for producing a perfectly healthy race.

I have had a dentist stop a particularly violent toothache: an abscess that kept me up all night in quite acute pain. He is now a Friend for Life. He has not eradicated toothache; he can’t even prevent the next one from happening to me, despite his best efforts (and those of his relentlessly cheerful and insistent dental hygienist). But he did his job when I needed him to do it, and while Humanity was not benefited, I in particular surely was. And that certainly means a lot to me.

So: most of us can’t work wholesale, but retail. And even those who do work wholesale are wise to take Lewis’s words to heart, as the rest of us ought to, also. Work away at “what your hand finds to do” in the providence of God, and you’ll make an actual difference.

I didn't stay up till after 11 to hear the story, but I caught the teaser on the local evening news:

Children are getting hurt because their parents are texting at the playground instead of keeping their eyes on the kids.

At the playground.

Told in a shocked voice calculated to make you think of texting while a child swings as the latest form of heinous child endangerment.

I'm no fan of constant texting, but I doubt it's more distracting than what I did at the playground when our kids were young (preschool and early elementary age).  We'd walk together to the playground, they'd run off to explore all the cool equipment—including a merry-go-round and a tall, twisty slide, now gone for safety (read, "lawsuit") reasons—and I'd settle down on a bench with a book.  Trust me, the kids were a lot safer with my eyes glued to the page than with me watching.  You see, they were (and still are) the more adventuresome type.  Merely using the swings for their intended purpose was much too dull:  they preferred to shinny up the support posts, sit on the top bar and inch their way across, then slide down the support posts on the other side.  If a piece of equipment had a top, or an outside, or some other place not part of the designer's plan for children to be—that's where they were sure to climb.

They were (and are) good kids; if I'd asked them not to go there, they would have complied.  But I figured, why not let them explore?  Who says playground equipment must be used in only one way?  (Who says we must color between the lines, and all our trees be green and our skies blue?)  How do you learn physical competence except by stretching your boundaries?

The purpose of the book was to distract me.  Of course I took peeks at the kids now and then—mostly to revel in their competence and delight—but the book helped me to keep my fears in check and not communicate them to the happy explorers.  That was very important:  I knew even then that children are actually safer when adults aren't watching too closely.  On their own they are very intelligent when it comes to knowing which risks they can handle and which they can't.  (In the presence of other children, not so much, but that's more a reason to know your children's friends than to keep them in sight at all times.)

"Don't do that; it's not safe!"  "Watch out, you're going to fall!"  "Get down from there before you break your neck!"  Such talk makes some kids so fearful they lose their grips and their common sense, and actually do fall.  Other kids feel the need to prove their "manhood"—girls, too—and are driven to take foolish risks to show off.  Moreover, children who are accustomed to a tight leash can fail to develop a normal sense of risk:  "If I were doing anything dangerous, Mom would be yelling at me, so I'll just go on until she makes me stop."

We made it through our playground days with no broken bones.  Bruises, yes.  Scrapes, certainly.  How do you know you've had fun if you come out of an adventure with no battle scars?

But back to the news story.  While one of the anchors was building up the story with full drama and horror, another interjected, "But when we were young, our parents didn't watch our every move, and we survived."  I was encouraged that she had the wisdom and the courage to say so.

How did the world get so crazy when I wasn't looking?

This year's Vetrans Day tribute is to all the U.S. (and pre-U.S.) veterans among our direct ancestors.

Pequot War, 1634-1638:  Thomas Barnes, Jonathan Brewster, Thomas Bull

King Philip's War, 1675-1678:  John Curtiss, Isaac Davis, Isaac Johnson

Queen Anne's War (part of the War of the Spanish Succession), 1702-1713:  Giles Doud

French and Indian War (part of the Seven Years' War), 1754-1763:  Samuel Chapman, Moses Whitney

Revolutionary War, 1775-1983: Jonathan Burr, Erastus Chapman, Agur Curtiss, Nathaniel Fox, Nehemiah Gillett, Christopher Johnson, Stephen Kelsey, Seth Langdon, James Pennington, Oliver Scott, Joseph Scovil, Henry Shepard, Elihu Tinker, Benjamin Welles, Moses Whitney

Civil War, 1861-1865:  Phillip Barb, Anson Bradbury, Robert Bristol, David Rice, Nathan Smith

World War I, 1914-1918:  Howard Langdon, George Smith

World War II, 1939-1945:  Alice Porter (Wightman), Bill Wightman

(If you notice a significant lack of any veterans from the Korean conflict to the present, you might guess my age if you didn't already know it.)

I'm sure there were more whose names I don't know.  There must be someone from the War of 1812, but I haven't found him yet.  I'm sure they weren't all always completely honorable, because they were ordinary people.  They didn't even always fight on the same side.  But one thing, for certain, they all had in common:  They gave their bodies, their lives, their health, and their futures to stand "between their loved home and the war's desolation."  For that I thank and honor them, and those who still make that sacrifice today.

No, it's not serious, and it's not an invitation for some wild-eyed idiot to try to change the election results by violent means.  Reggie Jackson wants us to stop fighting and start working together for the good of the country.

Hall of Famer Reggie Jackson was elated with the re-election of President Obama on Tuesday, but if he had his way, Mitt Romney would be part of the administration, too.

"Just because President Obama is back in power is not as important as all of us pulling together, ''Jackson told USA TODAY Sports. "The best would be for Obama to be president and Romney to be vice-president. We need everyone to come together.

"I get so disappointed when I hear all of the negativity from Republicans against the Democrats and Democrats against Republicans. We need to come together as a nation. Black. White. Hispanics. Jewish. Native Americans.

"We need to have the resolve to work together. It's like when the Yankees have a great team, it helps baseball. When the Knicks and Lakers are great teams, it helps basketball. If the Republicans and Democrats can get together, it will make our country a strong, better place, for everyone.''

Amen and amen.

(Except maybe the part about the Yankees....)

On this day in 1989 the gates opened, and the German people themselves answered President Reagan's famous call.

Porter, who more than two decades before had crossed over to East Berlin (and back) at the terrifying Checkpoint Charlie, understands best the wonder and glory of the day, but our kids each have a souvenir piece of the Wall, thanks to friends who were living in Germany at the time.

Thanks be to God.