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!
Negative?
Say you spill all your morning coffee, and it splatters everywhere, clothes, papers, keyboard, monitor, … Later a colleague comes by your desk to say hello and to exchange pleasantries. Do you greet her cheerfully, or does your coffee-spill frustration prompt you to give a grouchy, testy reply to someone who had nothing to do with it?
Well, such negative thinking has consequences, according to researchers from the Universities of Miami, Wisconsin-Madison, and Reading
Stud!
A few extra pounds put on during the pandemic? No problem! Want a perfect beach body? Easy solution! Fitness regimen neglected? Fret not!
You can get your muscles online. Yup, online.
Well, it’s not the real thing …
Chinese online bazaars are now selling realistic muscle suits that can make you look ripped without moving a muscle, leaving the sofa, or making your way to the gym.
You can be an insta-stud!
Head to the website Taobao or AliExpress and you can buy a Smitizen
Pop!
Pimple popping is pretty popular.
It has been, even before Dr. Pimple Popper (aka Dr. Sandra Lee), a dermatologist, took it to YouTube, making pimple popping an exercise in medical voyeurism. This enterprising physician also signed on with TLC to have her own TV series, appropriately named Dr. Pimple Popper. The show marked 2018 Christmas with a special episode, “The 12 Pops of Christmas.”
But did you know that the average American woman herself pops a total of 65 pimples
Music!
Music is powerful. All of us have felt it and all of us know it. Especially that ecstatic sensation when we hear our favorite songs.
Apparently, there is an organic element to this feeling. So declares a team of researchers from the Université de Bourgogne Franche-Comté in “Cortical Patterns of Pleasurable Musical Chills Revealed by High-Density EEG” published recently in Frontiers in Neuroscience.
The scientists discovered specific electrical activity in the orbitofrontal
Nails!
A few decades ago, they found Caiaphas’s tomb. While workers creating a new water park on the outskirts of Jerusalem were digging, suddenly the ground gave way before them, unearthing a burial cave with a collection of 12 ossuaries— limestone urns used to store the bones of the dead. The coins found in the urns dated them to around 40 AD—2000 years old. One particular ossuary was an elaborate one, ornately decorated with an intricate pattern of rosettes. It obviously
Strength!
Popeye the Sailor is a cartoon character created by King Features in 1919. His strip continues to run today, reprints of earlier stories. Paramount Pictures took up the persona of this tough-talking pipe-smoking marine and created many shorts in the 30s to the 50s. Now owned by Warner Bros., you can still see them here and there. There was even a 1980 live-action film starring Robin Williams as Popeye.
Peanuts creator, Charles Schulz, declared:
I think Popeye was a perfect
Stowaway!
Themba Cabeka, 30, was tired of his life in South Africa—the poverty, depression, crime. And so was his buddy Carlito Vale. So they took an unusual step. As stowaways in a 747’s wheel well!
How they got into the secure area where planes are parked no one has figured out. But they did. And into the British Airways jumbo’s undercarriage they went. And stayed. For the entirety of the 11-hour flight from Johannesburg to London’s Heathrow. All 5,600 miles of it. At –60°C
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. 