RaMbLeS
Welcome to RaMbLeS, a collection of weekly musings on life and Scripture. It all began in 2005 on Google’s blogspot as the aBeLOG (a name now recycled), a semi-autobiographical devotional that attempted to keep well-wishers abreast of my activities as I relocated to Scotland for a few years. Since my return, I’ve continued my RaMbLeS, and here’s its most recent incarnation on Homiletix, as random reflections usually based on current news articles and travel experiences and whatever else takes my fancy!
Stealing?
America has a shoplifting epidemic.
Stores lose more than $13 billion worth of goods in shoplifting in the United States each year.
The 2022 Retail Security Survey found that 8 out of 10 retailers self-reported increased incidents of “violence and aggression” across 2022. In total, thirty-two states have passed legislation addressing organized retail crime. Close to half of retailers say that their loss prevention budgets were increased in 2022.
One might think organized
Deciding!
Decision making? It might all be a mirage, they say—researchers from Johns Hopkins University and The Ohio State University, in “The Illusion of Information Adequacy,” published in the Public Library of Science: ONE, the other day.
Information is required, of course, to come to a decision—any decision. But how much information does one need? Apparently, there is a psychological reason why some people aren’t just wrong in an argument— no, they’re confidently
Standing!
The cure for all your health problems stemming from sitting in front of screen all day at the office? Standing desks, they said.
Not any longer.
Yes, folks who sit all day need to move around. But standing desks, apparently, are not the compensation for inactivity. Or so declared researchers from the Universities of Sydney, and Perth, and from Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, in “Device-Measured Stationary Behaviour and Cardiovascular and Orthostatic Circulatory Disease
Goodbyes?
How long should a goodbye last? Is there any rule on this?
Now there is. In the airport at Dunedin, at the bottom of New Zealand’s South Island.
So how long is too long to hug? Anything over 180 seconds, saith the authorities.
The airport’s chief executive, Dan De Bono, declared that three minutes was ample time to activate the happy hormones generated by a good hug.
He added:
To prove the point, I timed myself earlier that day, going the full quota in front of an audience
Sweetness!
Oops!
Minute Maid Zero Sugar Lemonade was the culprit. Note: “Zero Sugar.”
Well, it wasn’t “Zero Sugar.” It had loads of sugar. Because those cans contained the regular lemonade formula. Full sugar! Sweet! 150 calories and 40g of sugar in each 12oz. can while the Zero Sugar version was supposed to have only 5 calories and 0 sugars.
13,152 cases, each with 12 cartons of 12 cans of 12 ounces of lemonade. That’s a lot of lemonade. (And a lot of sugar.)
Ye olde company,
Evildoers?
DailyMail.com, with J. L. Partners, ran a poll recently about Americans’ opinion about Adolf Hitler.
This evildoer (1889–1945), dictator of Nazi Germany, was one of the worst ones ever. He conducted a reign of terror that killed over six million Jews in the Holocaust and millions of other victims considered by the villain as unworthy of living under the Third Reich. Some historians have put the murder toll at a total of 20 million, not to mention the close-to-50 million
Lethality!
James Bond has more lives than a cat. So it is claimed in “No Time to Die: An In-depth Analysis of James Bond’s Exposure to Infectious Agents,” published in Travel Medicine and Infectious Disease, by scientists from Radboud University Medical Center, Nijmegen, the Netherlands, and from London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, London, UK.
These enterprising researchers (for want of anything better to do, apparently), studied heath risks in all James Bond films
Abe Kuruvilla is the Carl E. Bates Professor of Christian Preaching at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary (Louisville, KY), and a dermatologist in private practice. His passion is to explore, explain, and exemplify preaching.