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!
Pacemaker!
Daniel Mascarenhas, a cardiologist in Easton, Pennsylvania, had a bright idea.
One of my patients had a pacemaker, and she died. I was a little upset. They put in a pacemaker, two days later she was dead, and they buried her with the pacemaker.”
Of course, being a cardiologist, he is probably used to sick patients, and dying ones. So that wasn’t what upset our good doc. It was what continued to live—that matchbox-sized, 50-gram device in his patient’s chest that
Record!
A few months ago, Nimeron Mike applied to be a city police officer in Stebbins, Alaska (pop. 646). He didn’t really expect to get the job.
You see, the guy was a registered sex offender and had served six years behind bars in Alaska jails and prisons. For assault, domestic violence, car theft, drunken driving, and so on and so forth.
Confessed Mike, 43:
My record, I thought I had no chance of being a cop,”
I’d agree and I’m sure you would, too. But he and you and I
Forget?
Nobel Prize winning poet, Pablo Neruda (1904–1973) wrote:
“Es tan corto el amor,
y tan largo el olvido.”
(“Love is so short,
and forgetfulness is so long.”)
Poema 20
César Hidalgo is a Chilean-born physicist and author, teaching at MIT, the director of the Collective Learning group at MIT Media Lab. He’s also one of premier data miners of the world’s collective history, having helped develop a dataset that ranks historical figures by popularity. The top two?
Slow!
Allstate Insurance Company does an annual survey of America’s 200 largest cities and the average rating of their drivers from best (#1) to worst (#200).
#200? Baltimore, MD. Eight of the ten bottom-ranked cities are on the East Coast.
Ye olde city of Dallas, TX? #178. Worse than New York, NY, at #107!
But I’m proud to say that four of the top ten cities are in ye olde state of Texas; Brownsville (#1), Laredo (#6), Midland (#7), and McAllen (#9).
So, if you’re planning
Asteroid!
You want to be a billionaire?
NASA has identified a nearby asteroid, Psyche-16, that is apparently worth $700 quintillion (= $700,000,000,000,000,000,000). This means that every man, woman, and child of the 7.7 billion (= 7,700,000,000) that currently live on this planet could, conceivably, get $90.1 billion (= $90,909,090,909.09) each.
What with a number of world powers who would like to get their hands on this jackpot, it will be another Gold Rush. Even tiny Luxembourg
Bees!
A strange thing happened in a clinic in Taiwan a few months ago.
A 28-year-old patient, Ms. He, had been uprooting weeds around her relatives’ graves, as part of the annual Qingming Tomb-Sweeping Festival (which has been observed by the Chinese for over 2,500 years), when folks clean up loved one’s tombs and make ritual offerings of traditional foods and burn joss sticks. That was in early April this year.
Engaged in her act of devotion to her ancestors, Ms. He felt
Sumo!
Last month I had the blessed opportunity to visit ye olde country of Japan for three weeks!
To eat sushi, drink sake, visit students, and see sumo.
“What?” you ask. “See sumo?”
Yes, sumo, 相撲 (sumou, which literally means “to strike another”).
If you come to this country, you see baseball to experience a slice of America. If you go to Japan, it’s sumo (though the baseball craze is also quite prevalent in that land).
When I realized I’d be in Tokyo during
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. 