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!
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
Smiling!
Smile. Laugh. Your life depends on it. So said researchers from Yamagata University, Japan, in “Associations of Frequency of Laughter With Risk of All-Cause Mortality and Cardiovascular Disease Incidence in a General Population,” in the Journal of Epidemiology recently.
Researchers worked with 17,152 participants aged 40 or younger and tracked how often they laughed over several years and concluded that increasing the frequency of laughter will reduce the risk of cardiovascular
Hydraulics!
Deserts and water do not usually go together, but geologists and hydrologists from a consortium of universities in France think they do. At least in this instance, they claim, in “On the Possible Use of Hydraulic Force to Assist with Building the Step Pyramid of Saqqara,” published recently in Public Library of Science ONE.
Yup, water power could have helped Egyptians build the pyramids.
They discovered a complex system of dams and channels near the Step Pyramid (or
Terminal!
Rollercoasters are not for the fainthearted. Not for me, that’s for sure.
But now for the really stout-hearted who want to end it all (so are they in reality fainthearted?), there is the Euthanasia Coaster.
Actually, you can’t ride it yet. It is only conceptual, but there’s a scale model. Both conception and modeling were the products of Julijonas Urobnas, a doctoral candidate at the Royal College of Art in London (and former amusement park employee). Here’s his
Grail?
CNN recently reported on the Holy Grail—the cup that was supposed to have been used by the Lord Jesus at the Last Supper (“grail,” from the Old French graal/greal, “cup”). It first showed up in written history more than millennium after its actual use, in Perceval, the Story of the Grail, a romance written around 1190. But now it’s part of pop culture:
Dan Brown made millions off his interpretation of the Holy Grail in the “Da Vinci Code,” in which he posited
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. 